Yeah, I'm not sure if I want to put the time into it; but if I'm going to watch more of the series, I'm going to have to go back and watch the first two episodes again cause I must have missed something.
Also, before I start, I'm going to apologize because I work in the industry and it has been insinuated once or twice before that it makes me a bit too critical.
First and foremost, aside from the returning cast members, almost every other major actor really felt like they were way too over the top. The sets were sloppy, especially Scully's hospital and Mulder's old office. Also, didn't someone tear it down or take the poster away in one of the old episodes or movies?
The opening exposition sequence has a stacks photographs, documents and IDs signed by Mulder and Scully, and then like a minute later they have the opening credits which have totally (totally) different signatures for them. Signatures so different that it stuck out to me, and I wasn't even paying attention to the signatures. You'd figure that maybe the prop department would have watched an old episode or two to match a recurring prop.
Sanjay and Gupta? Are you freaking kidding me.
The entire thing made me feel like I was watching a no budget, fan made show that somehow tricked Duchovny and Gillian Anderson into appearing in it.
I should have really gone back and watched the old episodes, I feel like a lot of the problems I was having with the story were because I was operating off of the story my memories had rewritten over the past years.
Fox has spent his entire life hunting UFOs. Hunting, asking questions, believing, finding things out, uncovering plots, having his belief challenged, discovering weapons, technologies, spaceships, and OTHER aliens, and even more coverups. Wasn't the entire reason he had gone into hiding because he figured too much stuff out and the Super Soldiers were looking to kill him? How did one afternoon of talking to a guy Mulder had already written off as a crackpot get him to totally give up on what he had spent the entirety of his life uncovering, and make him decide that it was all just a double secret government plot to fool people into believing in aliens?
It feels like they're abandoning the previous however many established seasons of the show to put a twist on things and have Fox and Scully swap roles, and then sloppily tie everything into 9/11 conspiracy theories.
The transition from not agents to agents confused me so much that I had to go back and watch the tail end of the first episode. I think that it would have been better to give them a little bit more runway to get them back into their old routines and explain why that happened. Hadn't Fox and Skinner's last conversation ended with them agreeing that something needed to happen, but that the system they had worked in was too flawed? And then they're back and they're going to get to the bottom of it all, and there are all those world ending, Machiavellian schemes and loose ends, and they...are investigating a random guy (graaaaah Sanjay Gupta!!!) who committed suicide?