The truth is not out there. It's as simple as that. Chris Carter is approaching the day of reckoning when the loyal viewers of his (admittedly sometimes excellent) TV series "The X-Files" begin to realise that there is no coherent explanation for what's going on, and that Carter wouldn't be able to provide one even if we did want to know it. Instead, he gives little explanations that explain certain things, but don't explain others; what we are told tends to cover what we've just seen, but the older, forgotten unsolved mysteries pile up so high that Carter can never tie it all together. He's making it up as he goes along, and that becomes increasingly obvious in Fight the Future, the series' big screen counterpart.

It's not that I don't like Mulder and Scully. I do. David Duchovny has a great way with one liners, and Gillian Anderson is one of the few really intelligent women on television. And their show has come up with some great material over the years: certainly it often seemed good enough to belong in the cinema. But Carter (the series' creator and the film's scriptwriter) long ago started to use his veil of mystery as an excuse for lazy plotting. There's a scene in this film in which Mulder and Scully escape because some helicopters disappear: this is never explained, and frankly I do not believe it ever will be. ("The X-Files", series fifteen: Mulder - "So that's it Scully. The real explanation. I can finally end my search." Scully - "But wait, Mulder... what about those helicopters?"). This is by no means the biggest plothole, it's just an innocent one that I don't feel to bad about giving away. (Though ask yourself: if the disease still has not been released, where did the rest of the bees go? And isn't that the worst possible way to dispose of those bodies?)