The X-Files.

Lately, and much to my own surprise, I have found myself making mental notes to set my VCR each week to tape two TV series which are not my usual sort of thing. I had written off The X-Files (Friday nights on Fox) and Dead at 21 (on MTV at various times during the week) as predictable, corny-to-trashy, generic airwave-filler when they began last season, and I'd forgotten about them.

But suddenly, I started hearing about them more and more, not from media critics but more interesting sources. First, some of my brighter students, and then, more intriguingly and insistently, growing numbers of the disembodied presences encountered in the cyberspace "meeting rooms" of the Internet, seemed increasingly obsessed with these shows. The "alt.tv.x-files" newsgroup, especially, which currently averages more than 100 "postings" a day about the Fox series, fairly teems with fascinating, even esoteric discourse on matters scientific, cultural, and political.

What did these people know that I was missing, I wondered? I determined to overcome my ingrained resistance to B-movie-type science fiction (for that is what both shows, in generic essence, are) and find out.

It wasn't easy. The plots are shades of the black-and-white 1950s, like The Twilight Zone or The Fugitive: government suppression of UFO sightings; experiments to implant extraterrestrial DNA in human subjects for military purposes; police files documenting unsolved cases in which suspects seem to have shape-shifting abilities or to have lived in other dimensions; swarms of killer insects embedded, centuries ago, in the trunks of redwoods; high-level plots to plant mysterious microchips in the brains of selected newborns for intelligence purposes. Not my cup of tea.

And then I thought again. Why not retrieve the pop culture of the 1950s, after all? It was a time, like ours, when social realism--especially on political and social issues--was very much out of fashion and subversive and otherwise unorthodox thoughts and theories were not likely to surface except in the metaphoric guise of sci-fi schlock fiction. Everywhere you looked in those days, "things" were coming at you "from outer space," mutant "creatures" were "eating" or otherwise destroying urban centers, "blobs" of unnatural substances were abducting or absorbing your loved ones. Of course, most cultural commentators of the day dismissed such stuff as brain-melting nonsense. Parents--mine certainly--tried to lure offspring away from it, and toward the more respectable, then ubiquitous, boxed sets of "Great Books" and encyclopedias, containing the eternal truths of established authority, which lined the walls of most suburban dens.

But looking back, it is clear that their efforts were futile. The grisly images did indeed find their way into our impressionable psyches, often permanently, and perhaps even fortuitously, for in retrospect, many of these schlocky tales of mystery and conspiracy held subtextual messages, or at least feelings, about the current political scene that were a lot healthier than what was being fed to us through the prescribed canonical texts. To be sure, some of the subtextual messages of many of these el cheapo oeuvres were predictably reactionary: The "invaders from outer space" or darker netherworlds were transparent symbols for the dread hordes of Godless Communism. But the more memorable of them were far more progressive.

Even The Fugitive--in its weekly saga of the perpetually "running man," dodging the evil, or merely stupid, authorities, as he worked against time to solve the murder he was falsely accused of--bore a subtly Kafkaesque warning about the dangers of an all-powerful system of law enforcement in which justice and freedom were sacrificed to blind order. In fact, in all these wonderfully trashy pulp fictions, there were seeds of political skepticism, of revolt against authority.

And so, I have come to see, do The X-Files and Dead at 21. Their fans, it seems, have zeroed in on the small sliver of airwave space upon which the winds of resistance are at least mildly blowing. For within their campy, over-the-top plot lines and dialogue, there is a clear voice crying "Question Authority." A voice, I might add, which is all the more cheering in light of the highly conservative content of the many other, more popular current shows that deal with similar subjects. And if baby boomers, used to having their messages of resistance packaged in tie-dye and psychedelia, don't quite get the message through the techie jargon, that is not to say that it is not there.

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE scrolls the logo at the end of the opening credits that "X-philes," as they call themselves, love to quote and inscribe, in bold print, on the computer screens of the initiated. And these words, zooming outward toward the heavens each Friday night, are signs that a story is about to unfold in which, somewhere or other, there is going to be a confidential file stamped GOVERNMENT DENIES KNOWLEDGE, and the heroes will risk their lives--and clearances--to discover the truth. The search invariably leads to high places within the military, scientific, and intelligence community--the Pentagon, the Watergate complex, the FBI, and CIA all figure graphically in the scary, pseudo-documentary X-Files. And the hint of them at least is suggested in Dead at 21--where the baddest of pale male bad guys plot to deprive us, and others, of freedom, justice, and life.

These two quiet little offerings can be seen as a kind of counterattack against another TV genre, far more popular at the moment. Every night before prime time (and lately, even during prime time sometimes) we are served up a creepy mix of "reality-based" tabloids where UFOs, unnatural beings performing unnatural deeds, and other "unexplained" phenomena are presented, but from a very different point of view. These syndicated offerings, with names like Unsolved Mysteries and Believe It or Not, feature "dramatic reenactments" based on "case files" of events so far beyond the pale of reason that they remain "unsolved" and "unexplained" by authorities. Typical of these shows--and increasingly, of many others like Hard Copy, Inside Edition, A Current Affair, and Rescue 911--are tales of loved ones who seemingly "disappear into thin air" on the eve of their wedding days, or housewives who insist they were visited by "angels" or pulled from the paths of speeding vehicles by unearthly beings haloed in strange light. A recent NBC Special, in fact, called Angles: The Mysterious Messengers, which ran for two hours in prime time, featured apparently normal people giving first-person accounts of such beings, the details of which involved such things as clouds that took on the flavor of banana pudding. And according to TV Guide's season-preview issue, we can expect quite a few more such bizarre "specials" in the future, as the networks scramble to keep audiences from bolting to the more exotic outposts of cable.

Most of these syndicated series conclude with interviews with the actual people involved, who swear to the truth of the "enactment" and update their efforts to explain the mysteries. Sometimes there are requests from the host/narrator--Unsolved Mysteries, the most popular of these shows, is hosted by Robert Stack, the original "T-Man" of the 1950s TV series--that viewers be on the lookout for the mysteriously "disappeared" persons, followed by listings of official phone numbers and addresses to contact in case of sightings, "anywhere in the world" or, presumably, elsewhere.

But no matter how they end, the implications are more or less the same: The world is filled with events and phenomena beyond the scope of the average person to comprehend, but there are "officials" and "agencies" out there who are keeping track of them for us and making sure that they are properly documented and studied. Anxiety laced with reassurance are the staples of these shows. But "the truth" is never likely to surface. And the mysteries remain "unsolved" and "unexplained" as we slip nervously off to bed, after checking doors, windows, and pulse rates.

The X-Files and Dead at 21, while on the surface dealing with similar matters, couldn't be more different in tone and attitude. Here, too, we have strange, "unbelievable" occurrences that are hidden away from public view, in archives of government and scientific authority. But the similarities end there. For one thing, unlike the "reality-based" shows, they have no godlike voice-over narrator to explain and authorize the bizarre events for us. The point of view of the show is always that of the outsider who stands alone against the forces of law and order and military force. Where the reality shows idealize figures of authority, presenting them as noble and fatherly, these shows demonize such figures, presenting them as shadowy forces of evil and mendacity. Sergeant Friday meets Dr. Strangelove, you might say, as these two competing models of sci-fi convention do battle for hearts and minds.

Dead at 21 is the newer and, so far, less interesting of the two. It is a quite bald copy of the 1960s series The Fugitive, in which a falsely accused murder suspect searched week after week for the onearmed man who was the real villain. Like The Fugitive's hero, Richard Kimball, the stars of this show--teenagers Ed and Maria--are also wanted for murder. Like Kimball, they travel, week after week, to different cities in search of the man who supposedly holds the secret that will save their lives. But a murder rap sufficient to fuel a series in the early 1960s is the least of these 1990s, MTV-dreamed-up kids' problems. Ed, it seems, is one of a series of kids whose greedy parents allowed them to become the victims of a military/scientific/government plot to implant microchips in the brains of gifted newborns so as to monitor their--well, you get the picture. The details of this show are hardly as clearly or scientifically detailed as The X-Files. There is, in place of the careful theorizing of that show, a fast-paced, lively, and colorful political/scientific atmosphere created of video quick cuts, computer graphics, and rock music rhythms and refrains.

But the mood and point are nonetheless clear. The kids, week after week, run from the government agent who must capture and jail them before they find the man who can tell them how to remove the chip before Ed's twenty-first birthday, when it is programmed to kill him. And week after week, with the creepy bad guy one step behind them, they bump into a bunch of more or less stereotypical characters--the bad ones are usually white, male, older, and powerful; the good ones, young and into politically and socially progressive things like freeing animals used for experimentation and saving endangered species.

Dumb as it is, however, this show has an edge worth traveling along. It is--like the best of political conspiracy theory--rooted in a deep, emotionally powerful sense of skepticism and rebelliousness. The adult establishment is seen as vain, greedy, and shallow, or worse (Ed's mom has her kid microchipped for a measly $20,000 and her boyfriend nearly gets him captured for a ransom of not much more). And the kids they encounter are either uptight young Republican types or outsiders as cool and decent and determined to fight back against the goon squads as Ed and Maria.

Dead at 21 is far from subtle. But it is technologically, culturally, and stylistically hip and steeped in the best kind of youthful "bad attitude," patented long ago by James Dean.

For its part, X-Files is surprisingly compelling, intellectually and politically. Its heroes are FBI agents assigned to cases placed in "the X-Files" because they defy reason, science, and logic. For Mulder is (I gather from my cyberspace informants) an Oxford-trained psychologist. Dana Scully is a physician. Like Ed and Maria, they are partners not lovers, and their seriousness of purpose and tension-filled relationship is far more erotically intriguing than anything on the porn channels. (Not least of this show's charms, for its fans, is that it may well be the sexiest show on the air, despite--or because of--the fact that the lead couple's intimacy is almost wholly nonphysical.)

The stuff of this series runs wildly off the Richter scale of weird. The UFO and ET story lines are my favorite, because they fit most easily into a scientific and political mindset with which I am comfortable. But even the creepier story lines--shape-shifting mass murderers who squeeze through prison bars and expand to fill highway lanes like Plastic Man; evil spirits inhabiting the bodies of "normal" people or molting for centuries in tree trunks, to be released by greedy logging executives illegally destroying natural preserves--are explained in terms of plausible theories whose implications are then pushed, just a bit, beyond the pale, suggesting, subtly, that there is no end to the possible military and political schemes being secretly spawned in the seats of power.

Like Dead at 21, the thrust of this series is easier to feel than articulate. This is not, as I have said, a time for left-wing social realism on prime time. No network--not even the relatively daring MTV or Fox--would allow realistic treatments of the full facts behind the doings of folks like Ollie North or even Richard Nixon these days. And they certainly aren't likely to delve into the real scientific schemes and plans of the actual think tanks of Washington's military and intelligence circles. But in the absence of actual social realism, these shows are on to something, metaphorically, which is nonetheless politically powerful.

Germ warfare, nuclear weaponry, bizarre tests of chemical and psychological warfare, using human guinea pigs--all these things are and have long been quite real as, occasionally, we are reminded by investigative journalists. And if pop culture can more easily expand, elaborate upon, dramatize, and spin out the political implications of such knowledge and suspicion than The New York Times, that is reason enough to pay attention to its more interesting manifestations. These shows, unlike the more respectable media, are able to avoid the constraints of realism and the network legal watchdogs to mine a perhaps unconscious level of fear and distrust of official power that is refreshing.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this TV phenomenon is the online chat that it has engendered. The "alt.tv.x-filers" are a bright, highly educated, and inquisitive lot, filled with arcane knowledge of technical and scientific lore, which they love to spin out to each other in long "threads" of argument about the possibly real knowledge upon which X-Files, they are sure, must be based. Far from being passive, accepting of authority, and dependent upon official sources of truth and knowledge, these disembodies presences, whose ideas now fill my computer screen fairly often, are nothing if not skeptical, suspicious, and aggressive about seeking the truth. Their online addresses are often scientifically and academically impressive. And their knowledge and skill at making intriguing connections and spinning offbeat but plausible tales are impressive, too.

I do not intend to become a regular member of this online community of youthful (56 per cent of Internet regulars are between twenty and thirty), scientifically savvy skeptics. My own cultural and political obsessions are time-consuming enough. But I am glad to know that they are out there, browsing the net, watching these series, and speculating in imaginative, independent, and generally progressive veins about what they might mean.

Better dumb fantasies of political and scientific power abuses being confronted and tackled by folks who share my feelings about knowledge, power, and the Earth's resources, than Robert Stack's recycling of right-wing horror stories from the days of the Cold War and Mr. Potato Head.