Normally I hate series reboots. You only have to look as far as the Knight Rider revamp before you seriously consider turning the television off and finding something to read. Something very, very long to read. I even hated the Battlestar Galactica reboot, and that’s considered to be one of the most successful reimaginings of a shitty sci-fi franchise ever. Star Trek was pretty good, but was there really enough wrong with the original series to warrant its complete invalidation with some “red matter singularity time travel” hand-waving?
Then again, rebooting is just about the only thing that keeps the comics industry (barely) rolling. When a series get too convoluted, dark, confusing, hard to follow, or just too damn embarrassing, they set the existing franchise on fire and rebuild it from Issue #1. Hey, it works, and it’s actually pretty exciting to discover a series and its characters all over again, and most readers appreciate when writers are willing to take a crappy storyline behind the wood shed and beat it to death with a shovel. You just have to hope that once the reboot is done, they don’t fuck it up worse than before (like they did with the Ultimates).
That’s why the X-Files is perfect for a reboot. I don’t think anyone was entirely happy with the way the series conspiracy unfolded. It was entirely too convoluted and yet completely predictable. It took too long to develop and was ineptly executed, and in the end, none of it made much sense, and one wonders why the aliens bothered collaborating with these shady, cigarette-smoking goons when they could have just kill-o-zapped the nation Independence Day-style.
I think my main problem with it was that the conspiracy was exactly what everyone predicted it would be: saucer men from Mars plotting a major invasion of the planet, with a shady cabal of shadow cabinets collaborating to conceal the truth from the public and position themselves so that they’re spared from the wrath of their new alien overlords. Yeah, there was a little more too it than that– something to do with a deadly virus, a sentient oil, and Big Brother secretly working against the aliens– but still, to me, it was paint-by-numbers. There weren’t any surprises. If you thought it was aliens in flying saucers and evil Men in Black suppressing the truth, you pretty much had it pegged from episode #1.
I’ve always believed that the true secrets behind the X-Files should be far more terrifying than some naked gray bug-eyed bastards who want to abduct cattle and implant shit in the nasal cavities of deranged morons nobody would ever believe. Any kind of alien life that’s been able to make the concept of interstellar space travel a routine, trivial thing has concerns far beyond anything a planet full of spastic monkeys might offer. They would no more negotiate with us than you would negotiate with an anthill in your driveway. They could wipe us out without even noticing they’d done it. If they noticed humanity at all, it would be only as irritants or playthings, and if they did decide to exterminate us, there would be no hope of some Macintosh-borne computer virus or sass-talking Fresh Princes saving us, no deadly allergy to water or susceptibility to the common cold. Aliens like that squeeze more interesting things into the bathroom mirror than humanity.
“Here we go,” you say, “you’re just going Lovecraftian on us, like that’s not predictable.” Well, maybe, but you say that like it’s a bad thing, when really, the concept of the X-Files is just about perfect for a modern-day Mythos investigation show. And in many ways, the central concepts of the Cthulhu Mythos do wonders for expanding the possibilities of the show’s breadth and depth. All of a sudden, you have an alien conspiracy stretching back beyond the dawn of man, with ancient civilizations who worshipped these entities as gods, wretched and glorious hallucinatory dreamscapes, lost continents, and tons of mad cultists and Illuminati, each with agendas eons in the making.
I’m not saying it’s Cthulhu, and I’m not asking to see Mulder and Scully in a running gunfight on the streets of Innsmouth with a pack of shoggoths hot on their heels.
Actually, that sounds pretty cool.
But anyway, I’m just suggesting a fundamental change in tone. Here’s the setup: Fox Mulder witnessed what he believed to be the alien abduction of his sister, and that trauma has put him on a crusade to uncover the truth that he believes is being concealed by the government. But that’s not what he saw. It’s what he wants to believe.
What he doesn’t know is that his parents are fanatical high sorcerers of a cult of some alien god (like Azathoth) who would routinely offer animal sacrifices and hold orgies and festivals of body mutilation in His honor. Both Fox and Samantha were brainwashed at a very young age to be blindly faithful worshipers and participants in these sick, depraved rites. On one night of special celestial significance, the parents chose Samantha as a virgin offering to be the unholy receptacle of one of their god’s insane, protean gibbering spawn.
None had actually seen an aspect of their god before that night, and they were not prepared for what they saw. The ultradimensional, tentacled horror that emerged from the summoning portal ravaged and devoured Samantha and half the cult in its slathering hunger before Fox’s parents broke the circle and expelled the thing, leaving them naked and terrified in a smoking charnel, ankle-deep in steaming blood and bones. Fox’s brain, unable to process the sickness he’d just witnessed, simply shut down and repressed the horrific events, rationalizing it into the most logical thing he could: a standard alien abduction scenario like you see all the time on TV. All he remembers is a shrieking, piercing nose (and yet, almost like music), his sister screaming, and a bright light. It’s left a hole in his memory that he’s trying desperately to fill, but doing so might very well either drive him to insanity, or worse, unearth the brainwashed fanatic that he used to be, the deranged personality that madness had shocked beneath the surface.
Mulder joined the FBI to investigate the paranormal, unaware of what his parents have been hiding from him. He thinks that the government is suppressing the truth to conceal some kind of hidden agenda, or some kind of shadow government working to achieve secret global domination. But really, the government is trying to maintain the status quo. They know the truth. They know that the Old Ones (or whatever they are) are here, are sleeping, and when they awaken, everything humanity knows will end. The date is preordained, and their fate is inevitable. The government is hiding the truth because knowing the truth would drive the world to anarchy and millennial madness. Society, knowing its days were truly numbered, would tear itself apart.
Mulder and Scully are doing a lot of good in the world, stopping cults and their summonings, rooting out supernatural horrors lurking in the shadows and gutters, but they’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. People like Mulder and the Lone Gunmen have spent their whole lives hounding the government, blaming some elaborate conspiracy for hiding alien and occult influence in everything from the design of the great pyramids in Giza, to El Chupacabra, to MK-ULTRA, to the assassination of JFK. Hell, the government encourages that kind of fanaticism. A mundane, human conspiracy is something people can understand, something people can universally hate or dismiss as paranoia. Better to believe in that than to know the actual truth.
So, yes, the government is lying, creating a fantasy and killing to protect it. But it’s the kind of fantasy the world needs. When Mulder finally realizes what’s going on, that he’s been chasing red herrings, is he really going to feel any better? If by some miracle his sister is still alive, once he gets the faintest clue as to what’s taken her, will he really want to find her? Will the truth really set him free? I doubt it. There’s a wing in Arkham full of people who eventually all reach the same point that Mulder will.
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AWESOME!
That…that…that…that…
That…would have actually kept me watching the X-files, GOD damn it!
Oh please let some hollywood producer or something be trolling the internet and happen upon this. The awsomeness that is the Spoonone could inject some life and intrest back into the baren Television landscape. Let us hope.
Well written as usual. The cult stuff amused me Just the absurdity of the proposed changes gave me a laugh. Good vocab there, too. I learned a new word from reading this (Protean).
I’ve got to say; a TV show based around Cthulhu Mythos would be badass. They don’t need to reboot the X-Files, just start one fresh with a couple of new detectives. David Duchovny annoys me anyway.
Noah, the funny thing about these “Why I shouldn’t …” posts is that you actually have some really great ideas. The problem is that you are confining yourself to things other people have already created. Limiting yourself to pre-existing characters and franchises. Why does this have to have anything to do with the X-Files, or Sliders or whatever else?
You ought to take stock of the ideas you’ve come up with over the years and try to form something brand new that is your own. *Your* story as it were. It could turn out better than you might think.
Dear Spoony,
People visit this site becuase they like your videos, not read novels. You have a certain chemistry and charm when you talk about things with video. It doesnt carry over when you write. While its well written, it usually bores me and I find it hard to finish it. Just do everything that you can on video format!
That was actually a pretty cool read. I’d watch it. Also, don’t listen to the whiners and just do your own thing, as you’ve pretty much always have been doing.
“Kill-o-zapped” though. No, really? “Kill-o-zapped”? Haha.
@Honost Abe:
Your disdain for reading/writing becomes clear when you misspell Honest in your name. However, go back through the comments on some of his recent videos. People actually ask for more text updates. So your presumption that everyone shares your tastes is empirically wrong–there’s evidence of it all over. Please don’t speak for the rest of us. Also, when you say “it usually bores me and I find it hard to finish it,” I have to wonder why you bother? Couldn’t you just, you know, not read these things that don’t interest you? You seem to imply he’s wasting your time when he does anything but post a video. Couldn’t you, you know, just NOT waste your time on it? What magic (or SCIENCE!) does Spoony use to compel you to read things you don’t like? Am I just being too logical? I don’t know…
@Spoony: Dude. This:
“All of a sudden, you have an alien conspiracy stretching back beyond the dawn of man, with ancient civilizations who worshipped these entities as gods, wretched and glorious hallucinatory dreamscapes, lost continents, and tons of mad cultists and Illuminati, each with agendas eons in the making.”
You remember writing that? Read through it again. That’s Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, dude. :P
Otherwise, I have to agree that your ideas are good ones. Would they work on TV? Who knows. Could they even BE televised in a serial manner, with the limited budget that that entails? I couldn’t say. But the concept is sound.
Simple, yet brilliant. Stuff like this is why I visit your site once a day to check for updates =).
Turns out Mulder is a vessel for the Ancient Ones. On Doomsday, the Ancient One hatches in Mulder’s body, and the planet descends to hell.
Watched Supernatural ever? While what you’re describing sounds rather different in plot and overall concept, the tone and ‘feel’ of this seem similar to Supernatural – particularly where it seems like the lead(s) has/have a rather torturous emotional time (Supernatural has basically ‘perfected’ the art of throwing crushing emotional and physical blows at it’s characters), and that there’s something ‘more’ going on behind the scenes (though in your X-Files Reboot case, it’s humans hiding it, rather than a demonic master plan). Sounds like, while a rather heavy and dark show at times, it would focus a bit more on light-hearted material than Supernatural tends to – except for when it (yours) delved into heavy background plot.
Interesting concept overall, though I have to admit I’ve never seen much of the X-Files – so I can’t compare it to the original. I was a bit too young for it most of the first time around, and I almost never see it in syndication – at least not with any consistency.
Meh, I dunno man. It sounds a hell of alot like A Shadow Over Innsmouth to me, especially the bit about Mulder’s sister, it sounds very much like the twist ending to Innsmouth.. I think that the X-Files could have benefited from a Cthulian touch (indescribable aliens, madness, weird frog things that like to mate with people, etc), and the idea of the aliens having been here for eons already and they’re just waiting for the stars to align just right to take back the Earth is quit good. What I don’t like is the idea of the Mulder’s being cultists, it just seems…I dunno, kind of too weird even for the X-Files. I think that the show would be great is it was influenced by Lovecraft’s work but still unique. I wouldn’t want to lose the conspiracy, no matter how stupid or convoluted or predictable it got it’s what the show was all about. It came around at the perfect time, when trust in the government was at an all time low because of things like Iran-Contra and other shady under hand dealings of the CIA, coupled with the rise of “New Age” and the surge in bullshit UFO sightings a show all about shadow governments of shadow governments, aliens and a government conspiracy was inevitable. The show is distinctly 90’s. To just ditch the idea that the government is dealing with the aliens in order to survive the coming invasion (which the show itself essentially did eventually) and replace it with a new conspiracy that the government is covering up the facts for our own good, it just doesn’t seem to fit, it’s just not quite cynical enough for me. But like I said, a Cthulian style would have done X-Files some good.
well, it sounds like a pretty nice idea, but please not for X-files, k? ^^
I mean, yes, it really IS a good idea and I would watch a show like this anytime, but why X-files? Okay, yes, I grew up with this show and used to record it secretly, to watch it, when my parents weren’t around (back then I was about 10 and my parents would have never allowed me to watch X-files XD ) so I kinda grew into the whole thing and just can’t imagine Mulder and Scully fighting ancient gods.
Aliens you can trie to shoot, but ancient god-like-beeings? I’m afraid that’s were Mulder and Scully would have to face a problem ^^”
So, let X-files rest in peace and make a own show out of it, I’m sure people would love it! (and compared to some other shows it would have at least some potencial… damn, the main character could even refer to X-files and Mulders theories! That would be really awsome! )
(P.S.: sorry for my poor English, I really tried hard, I hope you can understand what I’m trying to say ^^ )
“Any kind of alien life that’s been able to make the concept of interstellar space travel a routine, trivial thing has concerns far beyond anything a planet full of spastic monkeys might offer.”
It’s coz the humans are writing the stories and we’re arrogant enough to believe there’s something special about us. You see it in science fiction all the time, ‘he’s learned the lessons of humanity well,’ and all that feel-good crap.
As for the X-Files, I pretty much tuned out of it once it got to heavy on the government conspiracy bullshit. It was awesome back in the beginning when they were investigating the weird shit that goes on and just teasing you that something bugger was out there, but when it got more and more into it I got bored. I read somewhere recently where someone said about the X-Files: “Monster show? Cool! Government conspiracy? Change the channel.” It was so true.
Sounds a little too deep and depressing for an X Files episode. Very deep and intriguing, but something so dark, futile, and fatalistic, and rife with religious undertones, is better suited to an episode of Millenium. Ooo! Crossover, maybe? It worked once; why couldn’t it work again?
I had the feeling, in the first episodes of The X Files, that the series was going towards the Lovecraft stories. I started to think that after the fourth or fifth episode not related to green little men from Mars. What I think happened was that FOX stuck their dicks into the franchise (like what they have done with everyfuckingthing since, well, ever) and screwed it by dumbing it up. I guess they thought people is too stupid to understand a more tangled plot.
LOVE IT! Every bit of it!
You know, back in the day we did just that in roleplaying. What I was gamemastering was esentially a crossover of Call of Cthulhu and X-Files (which was what I had in mind anyway, since X-Files was so popular back then). The group consisted of:
- Two FBI special agents dedicated to the paranormal
- The “Professor” who was a scholar in the paranormal
- The Ex-Soldier who just had an encounter with the paranormal
The Ex-Soldier also was the central character of the first adventure. The special agents had to visit him and investigate, but after not making any progress had to contact the Professor to help them out in discovering the ravaging truth.
Unfortunately, the whole idea died in less than a year. This was due to two main reasons:
1. The group was used to being nearly omni-potent. This attitude came from the even more conventional type of fantasy roleplaying we did before for several years. After a while, the group’s characters became so mighty, they now just could’nt accept nearly being wiped from the face of the earth by the first boss (in case of the first X-Files/Cthulhu adventure a Servitor of the Outer Gods).
2. The pace was slower and much less action-oriented than in fantasy roleplaying.
Which brings me to the question if this is “The Age of Ass-Kicking”?
The whole idea of lovecraftian horror evolves around the impotence of humankind to deal with those more serious mythos threats. Sure you could have the protagonist kick some Deep One’s ass, but make it one-to-one and they had to run. Bringing up something even more serious like a Shoggoth, there could only be running and maybe killing off three quarters of the protagonists to keep up the seriousness of such a threat.
Now, if you come up whith the mythos expansion introduced by August Derleth, there would be a chance, because there are still the forces of good, that might take on mythos monsters if worshipped properly.
But even then, would this be what adiences like to see? If this is “The Age of Ass-Kicking” as mentioned before, I really don’t think so. Audiences are used to things like Stargate SG-1, where a group of already high leveled characters face some demi-gods, level up even more, gear up to insanity and finally beat the crap out of these things. OK, there are those Asgard guys whou could be considered the forces of good, but it’s more like they were lucky to find the SG-1 team who could use their advanced technology in a proper way. To what it all sums up is that SG-1 kicks ass. I like that and audiences like that.
You know, in this time and age, drama is OK, but most audiences still favor some “good” ending CAUSED BY THE PROTAGONISTS (or at least you might think so).
In conclusion, I fear that idea of X-Files/Mythos crossover sounds nice, but does’nt fit this age. See, in your well-hated Battlestar Galactica remake, the ending left many people unsatisfied, because they just could’nt accept the whole “God’s plan” thing. Now, if you brought up your idea in the early 1990’s, there would have been a chance, because this was in fact “The Age of Darkness” (you know this when you’ve lived back then). What it all comes down to:
If people feel good, they like to watch dark stuff. If not, they like to watch superheroes. And who feels good today, with this whole commercial crisis going on?
But… I’d still LOVE to watch the X-Files/Mythos Crossover reboot! So let’s start producing!
You’ve got some interesting ideas there, and it would be great to see tales of Lovecraftian mythos done right on tv/in the movies for a change. However, if I was to do show with Mythos elements in it, I would base it more on The Call of Cthulhu RPG. Set it in 1920′ s of -30’s, with group of investigators solving the cases very much like the do in the game. All this would be done in the vein of Film Noir of course. You know, lots of dark shadows, smokey alleys and creepy sound effects. As for the monsters, the best way to go would be not to show too much. Let the audience know these things are out there, but never reveal them in their full glory. Very much like in the original Lovecraft stories. Nobody would probably watch it, but this would be my take on it, If I was to do such a show….
“People visit this site becuase they like your videos, not read novels. You have a certain chemistry and charm when you talk about things with video. It doesnt carry over when you write. While its well written, it usually bores me and I find it hard to finish it. Just do everything that you can on video format!”
While I agree that he’s a fun person to watch on video (he apparently put a lot of points into his Charisma score :D), I don’t think his text updates are boring at all, but rather fun to read. The Spoony One is still behind the keyboard and it shines through in his reviews and these screenplays, he still has the same sense of humor and it manages to keep -me- interested, anyway. And if what was said is true and indeed I am not the only one who wants more text updates then something tells me you shouldn’t be speaking for the people who come to this site. ;)
Like it’s been said, Noah does this for free, this is his website and he can upload any damn thing he wants to. He could rant about the damn weather for all I care, it’d still be entertaining and I’d still keep coming back, and considering he’s providing this entertainment for free I’m not going to complain. If I don’t like it I don’t have to watch it (or read it!).
It would have to be on a pay channel. There’s no way a network would let this stay on television for very long. It would be neutered pretty damn fast.
As a huge fan of the x-files, I can see where you are coming from. I dont know if this is the way the serie should have gone (your scenario) but yeah, after season 7, there was very few good x-files episode and it was a dying serie. Was cool to see Robert Patrick in the x-files and couple guest stars like Burt Reynolds though. The ending of the serie wasnt really creative, the build up of the previous seasons was huge, its sad it ended this way. Still X-files is probably one or actually my favorite tv serie. (even if they was a share amount of not so great episodes)
I like your rewritten scenario. The possibilities could be almost endless considering how vague and strange is the Lovecraft mythos. If I remember well though, parts of your scenario have actually been explored in the serie. Maybe you already know about this, but there was actually couple of episodes that dealt with the occult like children being sacrificed to a secret cult using black magic, school teachers summoning demons, or like a weird amish comunity that came from space I think. There was also episodes that brought serious doubts about mulders sister actually being abducted by aliens or men in black.
I really don’t want to be nitpicky ^^ but since this is the spoony experiment I have to ask these questions just for the sake of my own sanity…
Would the FBI hire a cultist like Mulder? If they want to keep it a secret, why help him finding clues?
It’s a neat idea, but, you know, maybe you want to consider that the FBI might actually know their people.
(sorry if my grammar is bad. I did my best.)
Nobody knows that Mulder or his family were members of the cult. It’s not like they advertised on Craigslist.
The idea sounds cool. I always loved the first X-files, you know – one episode , one mystery kinda like twilight zone.
Then when it became more of a continious series i just lost interest becouse as you sad there really wasn’t that much of a mystery and everybody knew that the goverment is bad andspacemen are plotting against us etc.
@ Honest Abe: Think of the bright side: It’s quicker for Spoony to think up the idea and just type it out rather than going through the whole process of recording and editing a video.
danm, well what happens after the old ones hatch, after the apocalypses? some Bruce Camble-ish demon fighting, i’m mean you cant simply kill off all the characters like THAT their has to be an AFTER THE ECLIPSE season, (lol mulders sister reshaped as some demon bride hell overlord lol)
Your idea has pretty much already been done, at least in a RPG format. The Delta green books to the Call of cthulhu RPG is basically a mix between the conspiracies of the X-files series and the horrors from the Cthulhu mythos. You should really check it out.
Anyway, I would totally watch your reboot of The X-files if it ever gets done^-^ I love the X-files and the Cthulhu mythos.
I wasn’t overly impressed with your other pitches in this series, but I gotta admit I love your ideas with this one!
wow that sounds awesome, they should make that
Why did you hate Battlestar Galactica? It’s easily one of the best, if not THE best, sci-fi series ever.
@32: Read his thoughts on that one in the movie reviews section. He has his points but i really don’t think Galactica should even be watched as sci-fi. Anyone can see that it is 85% drama and 15% sci-fi. I liked BG reboot but if it is sci-fi i want, i watch B5 or Cube or something like that, not star-wars, stargate or galactica.
Anyway… Spoony, this x-files story was fun to imagine (and read), but i think i would still stick to Chris Carters vision ;) And i agree about the ending being too predictable. Good Stuff. btw i’m sure you could write a better script for FFVII Advent Children, no matter what you say :P
I would absolutely love to see a TV series based on the Cthulhu mythos. Even an ‘Outer Limits’ style thing where the stories are completely independant would be excellent.
I doubt it’d get great ratings though. The thing about Lovecraft’s stories is a lot of the suspense and horror is more about what ISNT seen, which probably wouldn’t translate very well to the screen. Then again, Reanimator was excellent.
“Why did you hate Battlestar Galactica?.” -> jefferus
Yea, I’m wondering this too. I thought Battlestar was a grate show, religious references not withstanding.
Also, about this show, if the end of the world is very near then why is the government trying to hide the truth about it? I mean why do they even bother if it’s so late? Ok, so society would rip itself apart, but it’s going to do that soon anyway. There was a time when I was interested in Lovecraft’s work but after a while I realized that they all ended the same way. Also, the idea that something is so inherently terrifying that it will cause anyone who sees it to go completely insane brakes my suspension of disbelieve. Kind of like how in the first episode of Eureka some guy discovered a way to make something travel faster than the speed of light and suddenly the universe started unraveling.
hm..sort of sound like angel to me, ancent evil and cults…btw after that “necronomicon” movie no one should ever put the mythos on the screen again. half the stuff you read in lovecrafts novels looks cool on paper but if you imagine Duchovny doing it…. roll for god damn SAN!
As much as I’d love to see a show about Lovecraftean horrors, there’s always the danger of becoming too attached to the protagonists and letting them save the day against all odds. Brian Lumley’s Titus Crow books had this problem. Instead of crazy, world-ending terrors, Cthulhu and friends play Bond villains to Titus Crow and his stuffy heroism.
If a hypothetical show like this actually went all the way with it and ended on that inevitable, depressing note, it’d be wonderful. But I’d be afraid they’d just cheapen it and defeat the Old Ones somehow.
Then there’s the problem of special effects in relation to the monsters. People will want to see them, and if they’re shown, they’ll be disappointing. And that’s assuming the CGI and puppetry used to create them is even halfway competent in the first place.
Sounds like a great idea. This is in fact why you should write screenplays. I can just imagine the storyline unfolding – first a few scattered hints of the lurking evil in ancient texts and the ravings of lunatics, building up to an expedition to the lost city behind the Mountains of Madness, where the full, hideous truth is at last revealed. Then the main characters battle to preserve their sanity and start to attempt to prepare for the return of the Elder Gods, which soon arrives and destroys most of humanity. The story would end with the heroes on the run, just trying to survive another day in a world without a future.
And yeah, the great X-Files episodes were of the Monster-of-the-Week variety. When the conspiracy episodes started to take over, I gradually stopped watching.
I think I like this Cthulhu Mythos concept. I already thought up an episode where Mulder and Scully find the ruins of a Yithian city but also find some Flying Polyps still lurking.
Yeah, I was always a little disappointed how the X-Files left behind the colorful supernatural elements of the earlier episodes to focus more or less entirely on the aliens. Still, while your concept is solid, I think there’d better be a beam of hope in there somewhere if you were going to sell it. I know, that’s anathema to Lovecraft’s whole motif, but if there’s an everpresent sense of doom then the whole exercise seems kind of pointless. At least in an episodic format. People won’t tune in week after week if they know what the ending will be. Although I guess that’s what they do for The Tudors and The Clone Wars. Still, might be nice to have a gold star in there somewhere just to keep us guessing.
Like maybe… I don’t know, at the height of the Apocalypse Mulder and Scully manage to find their way to an alien world with a handful of survivors where they can at least try to start again, and the coda sees the Elder Gods arriving and going into hibernation on that world too, indicating a cyclical process of survival and preordained destruction? Fuck it, this is why I shouldn’t write screenplays.
Wow, now -that- is a interesting take on X-Files. Like you said, sometimes it’s pretty ludicrous that a highly advanced alien species would really waste so much time on us. After all, humans are creating these stories, and we always frame everything, from aliens to the devil to other monsters, to revolve around us or our world. The entire reason why the Cthulu mythos is scary (at least to me) is that idea that, no, it’s not about us, these gods are a product of a heartless universe where we’re not even a speck in an Elder God’s eye.
It’d be the most delicious gut-punch ever for Mulder to hear, “No, Mulder, this didn’t happen because some creatures we don’t even know or understand are out to get us – we don’t even freaking register on their radar. Your sister might have just been a novel toy for a few seconds or even a small snack, but not something as -important- as a sacrifice.”
I’m not sure about Mulder’s parents being cultists, though – that seems too much of a cliche to me. I really do like the idea of Mulder’s sister being taken and Mulder coming up with the ‘alien abduction’ idea to prevent himself from going utterly mad, though (lest he end up like Jack from Dark Corners of the Earth). Which means that as Mulder slowly gets closer to the truth, he’s closer to the revelation that will most likely drive him utterly nutters.
As for the ’sorcerer worshippers and sacrifices’ thing … hmm. Sure, the idea that this horrifying madness has been slowly bleeding out in all facets human society – and even nature itself – over the millenias is certainly cool, but if you’re not careful it can fall into the ’secret society worshipping the greatest evil’ thing that everyone’s seen heaps of times already. It might be more interesting if they’re mistakingly worshipping the creature’s shedded skin or toenail rather than anything -remotely- close to its real face.
Also, again, you need to explain why the Lovecraftian horror is there on Earth or is going to destroy Earth without making it about Humans Are Special thing again. Why are they on Earth and not on any other planet? And how can you make a story about a horror that humans cannot stop without making the series depressing and pointless?
Anyhoo, I’d like to see where you’re going with this. :)
Hooooly crap that turned out to be TL;DR. Sorry, just wrote an episode review and didn’t mean to be that wordy. *eyedart*
Well, to be honest I really haven’t cared all that much for your other script ideas (mostly, I think, because I prefer your videos). But I have to say that you are on to something here. I don’t know about some of the details you’ve laid out, but X-Files would indeed be -perfect- for a Mythos setting.
@ Blunderbuss } Humans are special doesn’t enter into it. Earth has been used by all sorts of different entities for different reasons, the fact that we are there and will die when the Great Old Ones awaken is incidental (to them at least).
I have to admit that I did like your idea for the redoing of the X-Files. However the idea of using the occult and the Cthulhu Mythos as the basis of the new conspiracy… Well, it’s already being done by a very good writer named Charles Stross. He does it with a lot of humor. There’s a collection of the books available through The Science Fiction Book Club called ‘On Her Majesty’s Occult Service’. Here’s the cover blurb.
Bob Howard was just your typical English hacker – geeky, overweight, fond of UNIX jokes – until he accidentally re-discovered the darkest secret of computational mathematics and nearly summoned an Elder God to obliterate Wolverhampton. Luckily, Her Majesty’s Government has an agency to deal with such problems, and clueless noobs like Bob get immediate, and unavoidable, job offers. Unluckily, the Laundry is chronically underfunded, so secret even the government barely knows it exists, and wracked by vicious turf battles fought with the most soul-blasting methods. (It’s hard to get your job done when HR is trying to reduce headcount with sacrificial knives.)
In ‘The Atrocity Archive’, Bob, seconded to field-work with no training, tangles with a Nazi death-cult with access to parallel dimensions.
In ‘The Jennifer Morgue’, a billionaire businessman, obsessed with a certain series of spy novels and movies, has concocted a fiendish scheme to raise a cyclopean entity from the ocean floor, and only Bob – in an ill-fitting tuxedo and a gimmicked econobox car – can stop him.
I’d suggest checking them out, they’re a bit dense but good reading. And before anyone says anything, the first book was written in 2001 so it’s not a rip off of anything you might be seeing recently on TV.
You had me at the mention of Cthulhu and prime-time drama. It’s about time the Mythos got some mainstream screen presence (although one Cult of the Elder Star is pretty much the same as another).
Brilliant writing spoony .. i’m an Avid fan of the mythos and an Rpg player in generel
would actually be cool if they relaunched the series with a story line like this
i had never even heard of MK-ULTRA.
it’s pretty messed up.
A few questions about this idea:
1. You wrote that the end of humanity is preordained. Does the government know this date? Is it happening soon? I mean changes in the Sun are going to end life on Earth, people today just don’t worry about it because it is an event set in the distant future.
2. Even if people were told “the truth”, what would make them believe it? Do the “Old Ones” have the ability to make their presence on Earth obviously known? Christians and Muslims both believe and preach about a rather violent end to the world, but that never caused anarchy. What makes this end of days scenario so credible that knowledge of it would cause the downfall of scoiety?
3. What is the motivation of the government in keeping “everything’s fine” fantasy going if they are just as screwed as everyone else when the world ends? Why do they give a damn if the world tears itself apart?
I’d watch that.
if this were actually able to get up and running i be tit would end up like firefly.
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