corianderstem said:
If I met Chris Carter, I'd demand an answer as to why he fucked up my favorite show so badly.
(But then I'd admit I'd see the new movie on opening night anyway.)
Well, there were a lot of factors, right? He never intended to do the show without Duchovny, but Fox had signed Gillian Anderson for more seasons, so he knew the show would potentially continue without him, so there was so much second-guessing. Season 8 ended rather well, but Fox kept pulling it back. He also intended Season 7 to be the ending.
In 1999 (end of Season 6, start of Season 7), Duchovny sued Fox over selling the rights to The X-Files below market value to its sister company FX, so there was a conflict of interest. Duchovny was upset about this because part of his contract was that he get part of the profits from that sale. The problem creatively was that he also named Chris Carter in the suit as being paid "hush money" by Fox. I think the rumors at the time was it really strained things, and resulted in Carter trying to make Duchovny happy.
Cinescape ran an article about Season 6 supposedly ending in a 3 part mythology that would see the return of the Bounty Hunter and Jeremiah Smith (both actors said they'd been hired to shoot that Spring); the resolution was to be at the start of Season 7, so it would have been a 4-part mythology story. My mouth was watering. EXCEPT, there were problems on the set of The X-Files with Duchovny's directorial debut; the actor playing the old FBI agent got sick; there may have been other problems related to Duchovny being new to directing. As a result, the end of Season 6 was lame.
They had to shoot another episode without Duchovny, so they quickly wrote one of those annoying Lone Gunmen episodes. Then the finale couldn't be this big thing. The Season 6 finale/Season 7 premiere story never featured the bounty hunter or Jeremiah Smith, and was far less exciting than what I think might have been. Instead Carter concedes to writing the third part of that mythology with Duchovny and it has a lot of those melodramatic themes Duchovny has in most of his stories, including his directorial debut on film, "House of D".
It's very likely Carter wanted to amend his friendship and constructed that failure of a mythology story to appease his friend. It worked but the show suffered.
A lot of this is my guess, but those two major mythology actors WERE cast and the ending of Season 6 WAS AFFECTED by delays on Duchovny's "The Unnatural", and it's very obvious to me that "Amor Fati" feels like a self-consciously overly poetic Duchovny story.
This hurt the show because Carter, I think, became increasingly exhausted, and the show's ideas really suffered over those 9 years, and the cracks started to show in Season 5 or 6, and even in Millennium's 3rd season to which Carter returned as an occasional writer.
However, I do think the lack of dramatic punch of the first film was due to the conservative nature of the story. It's really shocking when you compare the lackluster, overly-action-oriented film with the mythology episodes written around the same time in Season 4 and 5, which were the series' best. At the same time the film was written (Christmas vacation 1996), Season 4's Scully's cancer storyline was conceived and then resolved brilliantly in the beautiful Season 5 episode "Redux II" (my favorite of the series), and then you had the two parter "Patient X"/"The Red and the Black", which was much more powerful because of the increasing role of the syndicate and Krychek. I thought the movie would be at least as powerful as that 2-parter, but it was nothing close. It wasn't even as good as the action-oriented "Tunguska"/"Terma"
The film couldn't use Krychek or CSM at all or much because audiences got confused; an entire scene between Mulder and CSM was cut out, as a result. Great TV drama, especially The X-Files' mythology is so powerful because it's able to build over a period of years. The movie couldn't really rely on any of this rich history without doing rehashes of past subplots and appearing overly self-conscious, and confusing the newbie audience. Very sad.
They should have just done it on TV, as Carter had considered. The mythology really declined afterward, though "Two Fathers"/"One Son" and "Sein Und Zeit"/"Closure" rank among the series' best and are the effective end of the show!
Everything afterward is an afterthought. Doggett could be pretty great, though.
Hell yeah! I loved Doggett. I mean . . . . come on, to have to step into the shoes of David Duchovny on a show with such a rabid fan base. And to pull it off and get the fans to like him as well. He was awesome! 
