Why The X Files?

- The show was divided into two types of episodes:
1. The "mythology" episodes which consisted of a serialized, ongoing conspiracy arc (this was ambitious by the standards of 1990s network television, which tended to prefer self-contained storytelling)
2. The "monster-of-the-week" type episodes, which were standalone stories that had nothing to do with the mythology arc.

- Events like the end of the Cold War, the Church Comittee hearings, the Iran-Contra affair, Ruby Ridge, Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing left the public with a general sense of distrust towards the government
- The X Files used this to their advantage, pushing the narrative that the government was hiding something, and that the truth is out there (omg she said the thing)

- The Roswell incident of 1947 had been a topic discussed by conspiracy theorists for decades, and interest spiked again in 1994, when the Air Force declassified documents about Project Mogul satisfying basically nobody
- The following year, British filmmaker Ray Santilli released footage he claimed showed the autopsy of an extraterrestrial body recovered from the Roswell crash site

- Fans who advocated for a romantic relationship between Mulder and Scully became known as "Relationshippers", which was eventually abbreviated to "shippers," which subsequently escaped The X-Files entirely
- MSR fiction constituted a very large proportion of the tens of thousands of stories eventually archived in the Gossamer Project(1995)
- The Gillovny Files