What Happened to The X-Files’ Long-Foretold Alien Invasion?

Over its nine original seasons, The X-Files centered around everything extraterrestrial. Whether they were incorporeal Martians (“Space”), erotic shapeshifting aliens (“Gender Bender”), or the possible alien Lord Kinbote (“Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”), the famed series’ central narrative always pointed to beings from the stars. The keystone of that alien exploration is its focus on the Greys, those infamous big-eyed grey aliens that fill so many real-life alien encounter reports. In fact, the entire original series run of The X-Files built up one singular overarching threat: the Greys’ takeover of Earth (alongside the government conspiracy in cahoots with it).

In the process, audiences learn of extraterrestrial viruses (“The Erlenmeyer Flask”), alien bounty hunters (“Colony”), faceless alien rebels (“Patient X”), and the role of extraterrestrial pathogens in alien reproduction (The X-Files: Fight The Future), all aimed at that singular apocalyptic event. Always teased and often postponed, the invasion had at least once been affected by external circumstances. In “Two Fathers,” the infamous Cigarette Smoking Man monologues:

“We had a perfect conspiracy with an alien race. Aliens who were coming to reclaim this planet and to destroy all human life. Our job was to secretly prepare the way for their invasion […] Plans that would have worked had not a rebel alien race come to destroy them.”

It’s part of an episode-long monologue to Agent Diana Fowley (Mimi Rogers) implying that the alien rebels’ resistance to the Greys’ plans at least impacted the alien colonization strategy, if not its timeline. As the series rolled along, its Season 9 finale (the end of the original run) finally gave audiences and the series’ protagonists alike the terrifying takeover’s date: 12/22/2012, an event the show claims was predicted as far back as the Mayans.

And then it didn’t happen.

The original 9-season run concluded teasing that seemingly inevitable civilization-ender, leaving the planetary takeover itself to our imagination. A subsequent movie and eventual 10th season arrived, largely proceeding as though said reveal never occurred. The actual invasion surely hadn’t. That strange hiccup wasn’t explained until the Season 11 opener, “My Struggle III.”

The explanation comes in a conversation between Mulder, Mr. Y (A.C. Peterson) and Erika Price (Barbara Hershey). The latter two are former members of the Syndicate, the series’ term for the shadow government colluding with aliens against Mulder, Scully, and humanity. Mr. Y explains that, “The aliens are not coming, Mr. Mulder, just so you understand. No interest in a warming planet with vanishing resources.”

In two measly lines, the planned alien invasion that had been literally promised at the end of the series’ initial run and supposedly predicted by the Mayans, was tossed out the metaphorical window. What happened?

From a plot standpoint it nearly makes sense: the Greys are posited as early inhabitants/rulers of Earth, so perhaps they would prefer to control it at a more habitable state. Still, the series reminds us (as in Season 10’s “My Struggle”) that the aliens have been returning to Earth at least since 1947, and were active enough in human affairs to confidently plan an entire global invasion, with vastly advanced technology and governmental power under their rhetorical belts. What would have been so different between the end of Season 9 and the beginning of Season 11 that the entire invasion, which has been actively planned and foretold for millennia, is called off instead of prevented?

Realistically, the cancellation of the alien invasion stems from real-world storytelling choices. Six years after that Season 9 date reveal, the second film, The X-Files: I Want To Believe, hit theaters. Series creator Chris Carter always wanted the second film to be a “stand alone” entry (via Collider), so it simply never addressed the ignored invasion date. When Season 10 released seven years later, its treatment of these themes hinged around Mulder being convinced that alien technology was real, but alien colonization was fake (“My Struggle”): It was the government that used alien tech in hopes of overtaking the world. It’s an echo of the series’ Season 5, which begins with Mulder stating he no longer believes in extraterrestrial life (a stance that differs slightly from Season 10’s similar narrative arc).

Mulder’s return to belief in the series’ central arc in Season 11 was a welcome one for most fans of the series, but cavalierly dropping the cancellation of this invasion — which had been massively built up over nine seasons and a movie — was a regrettable let down. That it was resolved in a pair of throwaway lines is evidence to the fact that, ultimately, resolving it was a likely afterthought, tossing aside the series’ most significant event in favor of easy but ultimately unsatisfactory plotting.