Let’s talk for a moment about unexplained phenomena. In the more than three decades since The X Files premiered on television and became a cult hit that would, over time, grow into a major cultural sensation, how is it that just about everyone on the planet has taken to spelling the show’s name incorrectly? Not once, in over two hundred episodes on TV or two feature films, has the franchise ever had a hyphen in its title. Yet, almost universally, pretty much everybody except me spells it as “The X-Files.” Am I the only one to notice this? Perhaps we need creator Chris Carter to do another special episode that will explore the Mandela Effect behind this.

As I think of it, I’m pretty sure I’ve even seen Carter spell it with the hyphen. I’ll be honest, I used to myself, until the grammar pedant in me finally won out. [Cue reader complaints about grammatical errors in this article.]

For a very long time, I was a huge fan of The X Files. I still am for most of it. However, like most fans, I eventually felt ground down by the show’s artistic decline in later seasons. Still, I stuck with it to the bitter end, including both belated revival seasons. I hadn’t thought about it in a while, but felt in the mood to revisit the original 1993 pilot episode this week. Looking at it over thirty years later, I remain impressed by how well that first episode lays out the roadmap for everything the series would become, for both better and worse.

Title:	The X Files
Season:	1
Episode:	1.01 – Pilot
Release Date:	Sept. 10, 1993
Watched On:	Hulu (via Disney+) DVD
Also Available On:	Blu-ray Pluto TV Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

The X Files arrived on television in 1993 well-timed to pick up the mantle, or at least part of it, left behind by the cancellation of Twin Peaks. Specifically, the show dove deep into the “FBI agent investigating something supernatural” premise. (Twin Peaks was of course about much more than just that, but The X Files honed in and expanded that particular aspect.)

The pilot episode introduces us first to Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), a young agent only a couple years into her Bureau service when she’s unexpectedly assigned to assist Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) with a project that has obsessed him, “outside the Bureau mainstream.” The so-called X Files are a collection of unresolved cases filed away as unexplained or unexplainable and ignored by everyone except Mulder. Most of them involve events that would appear to be supernatural or paranormal. Scully’s real job, at first, is to report on Mulder and debunk his work so the Bureau can write him off as a loony.

Their first case together involves a string of mysterious deaths in northwestern Oregon (practically right next door to Twin Peaks!) that Mulder believes are related to alien abduction. Naturally, Scully is skeptical and believes a more rational explanation will come to light. By the end of their investigation, she isn’t so sure. This sets up a template for future episodes in which, the more she gets to know Mulder and experience these X Files for herself, the more Scully realizes that her devotion to scientific rigor cannot answer all the questions she encounters.

The case in this episode is basically textbook X Files. It has a lot of mystery, paranormal intrigue, spooky atmosphere, and at the end of it, nothing gets resolved conclusively. Writer/creator Chris Carter prefers to leave his stories open-ended and drag them out as long as he can.

This show is a vibe, as my kids would say, and that vibe is still very appealing. The characters of Mulder and Scully are well-defined from the start and immediately engaging. The ominous Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis) can also be seen lurking around FBI Headquarters without a proper introduction.

Watching it again reminds me how much I used to love The X Files, and really, still do. For all its ups and downs (many, many downs in later years), this series was truly on fire in its early run. Scanning through the episode list and remembering so many favorites, I’m almost tempted to jump back in whole hog. If I ever were to do that, I’d probably stop after Season 5 and the first movie. After that is when things started to go too far off the rails.

Video Streaming vs. DVD

After years of mostly best-of random episode compilations on VHS and Laserdisc (unless you were obsessive enough to import very expensive Japanese LD box sets), the first full-season collections of The X Files were released in the American market in 2000, at the height of the TV-on-DVD boom. Those DVD sets were quite impressive achievements for the time, and I bought five seasons of them that I still have in a box in my basement. I pulled out the first one for this.

To this day, those DVD box sets remain the only way to watch The X Files in the original 4:3 aspect ratio the show was shot and composed for, as well as originally broadcast. All subsequent high-definition transfers released on Blu-ray and streaming have been reframed at a wider 16:9 ratio, achieved through a combination of cropping a little picture off the top and bottom, adding a little to the sides (mostly the left side), and non-linear stretching.

I streamed the first episode this way from Hulu and found it mostly tolerable, though it looks a little cramped and awkward to my eye.

The following comparison provides a good example of what’s missing (look for Mulder’s left hand), what’s gained (more of Scully’s head and left shoulder), and what’s distorted (Scully’s body is subtly but noticeably stretched). Overall, I’m not a huge fan of it and find the original composition more comfortable and better balanced.

Sadly, the aspect ratio is the only thing I can recommend about the DVD, which otherwise looks pretty awful by modern expectations. The standard-definition picture is very soft and dim, and has really terrible MPEG-2 compression quality that regularly devolves into a blocky grid during scenes with complex picture detail and motion. Keep an eye on the swaying tree branches during any scene in the forest to see this at its worst. DVD would get better in later years, but even for standard-def quality, early discs like this have aged very badly.

The HD remaster is brighter, sharper, and holds together a lot better in almost every respect – other than aspect ratio. I’m sure most viewers will prefer it without hesitation and never give the aspect ratio any thought. I’m not all that happy with either of them, but will grudgingly accept the 16:9 HD and the lesser of two evils.

Hulu also streams the show in Dolby Digital 5.1, whereas the old DVD is only 2.0, but that’s less of an upgrade given that the show was originally mixed in stereo-surround. The 5.1 sounds quite similar to playing the 2.0 track through an upmixer. Dialogue is clear enough and the Mark Snow score has some subtle surround envelopment, but this isn’t an especially aggressive or dynamic mix. That’s fully appropriate for a show made for broadcast TV in 1993.