Episode 602 || What Would Scully & Mulder Read?

Annie B. Jones (0:01)

Welcome to From the Front Porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South.

Not even knowledge takes all the strangeness from the world.

Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent.

I'm Annie Jones, owner of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia. And this week, we're continuing our occasional podcast series where I imagine what books I might hand sell to our favorite authors and fictional characters. This week, Dana Scully and Fox Mulder from The X-Files.

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A few months ago during one of our Patreon Porch Visits, podcast listener Courtney asked me what books I'd recommend to my beloved March sisters. I loved the question and the resulting thought exercise so much, I decided I needed to try my hand at selecting books for other fictional characters and authors I love. In January, I had some recommendations for Jane Austen, that officially now feels like a million years ago, and in April, I recommended titles for all four of the March sisters.

In August, I shared books I thought Rory Gilmore might enjoy reading, and this week, I'm turning my attention to Dana Scully and Fox Mulder from The X-Files.

Listen, I am not the X-Files' target audience. I do love a procedural, it's true, but I am not big on sci-fi, generally speaking. That's a generalization. Generally, I'm not big on sci-fi. I did grow up, I'm thinking through this. Is that true?

I mean, I grew up watching Star Wars, because I have a brother, and I liked the original trilogy of films. I like some Steven Spielberg stuff. I like, oh, you know, Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir. But generally, I'm not the world's biggest sci-fi fan. And I didn't watch The X-Files when it was on air. My best friend in college loved the show, and I remember her talking about it a lot, but she also loved Supernatural, and I tried and could not get in to Supernatural. So I never tried The X-Files until a few years ago. I don't really know what prompted it, but Jordan and I devoured every single episode, and now it's become one of our favorite comfort rewatches. It's like up there with Cheers and The Office. We just kind of get in rhythms of rewatching different seasons and series of television, and it is now probably in our top 10 series of all time, I would say.

If you are not familiar, the premise is simple. It's a relic of the 1990s when it debuted. Fox Mulder is a once promising, still brilliant FBI agent played by David Bukovny, who has lost the respect of his peers because of his obsession with odd phenomena, including extraterrestrial life. Dana Scully, played by Jillian Anderson, is a no-nonsense medical doctor turned FBI agent. She is sent by the powers that be at the FBI to report on Mulder and keep him in line. Together, they work their way through the X-Files, marginalized, unsolved cases, often involving paranormal phenomena.

The show has two kinds of episodes, monster episodes, which are my personal favorite, and myth episodes, which I'm slightly less interested in. Those episodes deal with bigger overarching issues of government conspiracy, but they are the through line that kept the show going across decades. The monster episodes are more like case of the week episodes, and they deal with, you know, weird, creepy, crawly criminal things, and I love those episodes. The X-Files ran for nine seasons, from 1993 to 2002, so quite a long time. Then in 2016, there was a reboot with 10 episodes that was actually pretty successful, received generally positive reviews, and then in 2018, there were 10 more.