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Before 1993, television audiences had no idea who the Cigarette Smoking Man was or that "Fox" could be a first name. But over its nine-season run, The X-Files—following FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully—has built one of television's strongest fan bases and become a pop-culture icon.

In the last few seasons, the show has lost momentum. Star David Duchovny left to make movies. Long-running story lines have been tied up. And most of the show's mystery, like that surrounding the shadowy Cigarette Smoking Man, has evaporated. Last week, the show's creator Chris Carter announced that the series will end in May.

The decline of The X-Files, argued a Christian critic earlier this season, is especially bad news for believers. At one time, it was one of few programs on television asking compelling questions about the nature of belief.

Last week we looked at what Christian critics had to say about this season's new shows, but are there other mainstream shows worth a Christian's time?

Roberto Rivera, columnist for BreakPoint Online, recently wrote that "just as a wasteland isn't totally devoid of life—flowers will grow almost anywhere—mass culture isn't completely lacking in grace and insight."

Two of those flowers, he says, are Angel and Babylon 5. Meanwhile, Christian publications continue to write on The Simpsons.

BreakPoint Online columnist Alex Wainer wrote at the beginning of this season that The X-Files need to be closed. While once a powerful presence in pop-culture—and one with important thoughts for Christians—the Fox series now merely limps, Wainer says.

"The inspiration that made the show a hit has worn thin," he writes. "Networks flog a successful series past its useful life until it can be seen wandering zombie-like, stalking the fading specter of its old life. X-Files, please RIP."

The worst aspect of the program's decline, Wainer says, is that X-Files no longer asks the questions it used to. Carter's series made a name for itself by tackling what it meant to believe in something that couldn't be proven.

"It suggested that forces beyond our comprehension were at work in the world, that purely rational explanations wouldn't cut it, that we would have to look beyond science for understanding," Wainer writes. "The show truly captures the struggle between the modernist insistence on rational explanations and a postmodern openness to any new narratives that might reveal a truth beyond that which can be found in a laboratory. But rather than academic postmodernism's rejection of the possibility of knowing truth, the series' tagline avows that, though maddeningly elusive, 'the truth is out there,' if only we seek it with open minds."

The struggle of the believer with the skeptic was played out each week between Agents Mulder (Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson). He believes in the supernatural; she in science and logic.

Witnessing the mysterious childhood abduction of his sister fuels Mulder's belief and led him to investigate the FBI's "X-files," odd cases normally locked away in a basement.

Scully is the anti-Mulder: a trained doctor, lapsed Catholic, and modern skeptic assigned as Mulder's partner to debunk the work of the "X-files." Their ongoing dialogue led to frank discussion and character growth. In fact, over the years, Scully became a believer.

"While it is by no means an explicitly Christian program, it recognizes what some have argued is the essentially conservative or traditional nature of classic horror—that good and evil are real, that sin has horrific consequences, that absolutes must exist for morality to mean anything," Wainer wrote.

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January (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46