LEGO & THE X FILES, HOW THE TRUTH IS STILL OUT THERE

Today, The Grandma has received the first of the two The X-Files Lego sets she had ordered. She is very happy.

To celebrate it, she has invited Claire Fontaine to build some other The X-Files block figures she had been meaning to put together: Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, the Lone Gunmen (Melvin Frohike, John Fitzgerald Byers, and Richard 'Ringo' Langly), the Cigarette-Smoking Man, Eugene Tooms, the Grey Alien, and the Flukeman.

They have enjoyed a very entertaining morning reminiscing about the characters from one of the best TV series ever aired because thirty years have passed in moments, and The X-Files has become one of them.

There are television series that we watch, enjoy and eventually leave behind. And then there are those rare stories that somehow become part of us. The X-Files belongs to the second group.

More than thirty years after Fox Mulder and Dana Scully first entered that basement office at the FBI, the series remains instantly recognisable. A flashlight cutting through the darkness, an unexplained light in the sky, a poster hanging on a wall, two people walking into the unknown.

And three sentences:

The Truth Is Out There.

I Want to Believe.

Trust No One.

Perhaps the extraordinary longevity of The X-Files can be explained through those three ideas. Because underneath the aliens, monsters, conspiracies and paranormal phenomena, the series was always asking questions that had very little to do with extraterrestrial life. What can we know? Whom can we trust? And what happens when we desperately want something to be true?

The greatest idea behind The X-Files was not the paranormal. It was Mulder and Scully. Fox Mulder wants to believe. Dana Scully wants to understand. At first sight, they appear to represent two opposite ways of looking at reality. Mulder is intuition, possibility and belief. Scully is science, evidence and rationality. But the series gradually makes this distinction much more complicated.

Mulder is not simply a believer. He searches obsessively for evidence because belief alone is not enough for him. Scully, meanwhile, is not simply a sceptic. She is a scientist, but also a woman of faith. She demands proof from Mulder while accepting that some of the deepest questions of human existence cannot necessarily be answered in a laboratory. That contradiction makes them fascinating. Neither of them possesses the whole truth. And perhaps that is the first great philosophical lesson of The X-Files: truth may require us to look at the world through more than one pair of eyes.

Mulder needs Scully because belief without criticism can become credulity. Scully needs Mulder because scepticism without imagination can prevent us from seeing possibilities beyond what we already know. They do not cancel each other out. They complete each other.

Few television slogans have become as culturally recognisable as The Truth Is Out There. But it is a strangely unsettling sentence. It does not say that the truth will be found. It merely says that it exists. Throughout The X-Files, Mulder and Scully repeatedly approach the truth only to watch it disappear again. Evidence is destroyed. Witnesses vanish. Memories are unreliable. Governments conceal information. Powerful people manipulate events. Even when our protagonists discover something extraordinary, proving it to everyone else is another matter entirely.

The truth is always somewhere ahead of them. This gives The X-Files an almost existential quality. The search itself becomes more important than the possibility of reaching a final answer. Mulder continues because he must. Scully continues because, despite all her doubts, she eventually understands that the search matters. Perhaps this is why the series never needed to solve every mystery. A completely explained X-Files universe would almost contradict its own philosophy. Mystery is not simply something waiting to be solved. Mystery is part of being human.

And then there is the poster. A flying saucer suspended above a landscape beneath four words: I WANT TO BELIEVE. Not I believe. That difference is everything. Mulder's famous poster does not express certainty. It expresses desire. Wanting to believe means admitting that doubt exists. It is one of the most beautiful contradictions in the entire series. Mulder, supposedly the believer, surrounds himself with uncertainty. He wants evidence. He wants confirmation. He wants to discover that his intuition about the universe is justified.

In that sense, The X-Files is not really a celebration of belief. It is a celebration of questioning. To believe and to doubt are not necessarily opposites. Sometimes they are travelling companions.

If I Want to Believe represents hope, Trust No One represents its darker counterpart. The X-Files appeared in the 1990s, but its suspicion of institutions, official explanations and manufactured truths has allowed it to remain culturally relevant far beyond that decade. Yet the series contains an interesting paradox. It tells us to trust no one while simultaneously building one of television's most enduring relationships entirely around trust.

Mulder trusts Scully. Scully trusts Mulder. 

Again and again, the institutions surrounding them fail. Authorities lie. Evidence disappears. Informants deceive them. Allies become enemies and enemies occasionally tell the truth. But when almost everything else becomes uncertain, Mulder and Scully continue to have each other. Perhaps, then, the real message was never simply Trust No One. Perhaps it was: be careful about whom you trust, and understand how precious genuine trust becomes in a world filled with uncertainty.

Why did The X-Files become a cult series? A cult series cannot simply be manufactured. Popularity can be manufactured. Marketing can create a phenomenon. Audiences can make a programme successful. But cult status requires something else: people must continue carrying the story with them after the screen goes dark. The X-Files gave its audience a language.

The truth is out there.

I want to believe.

Trust no one.

It gave us symbols: the basement office, the UFO poster, flashlights, mysterious forests, black oil, government corridors and an unmarked cigarette held between the fingers of a shadowy man. It even gave us a letter.

X.

But above all, it invited viewers to participate. Every episode asked us to decide what we believed. Mulder sees something impossible. Scully searches for a rational explanation. And somewhere between them sits the viewer. That space between certainty and doubt is where The X-Files lives.

And this is where The Grandma's little LEGO figures enter the story. At first, LEGO and The X-Files might seem to belong to completely different worlds. One is a construction toy. The other is a television series filled with darkness, conspiracy and things that definitely do not belong underneath children's beds. Yet they share something important. Neither remained confined to its original purpose. 

LEGO stopped being merely a children's toy. For millions of adults, those little bricks became creativity, design, nostalgia, collecting and memory. The X-Files stopped being merely a television programme. It became imagery, quotations, mythology and a particular way of looking at the unknown. That is what cultural icons do. They escape from the object that originally contained them.

A LEGO brick is still a LEGO brick. A television episode is still a television episode.

But when something becomes part of our personal history, its meaning changes. We are no longer simply playing with it or watching it. We are remembering through it. 

Perhaps that is why building these little figures has been such a pleasure. They are not simply assembling pieces of plastic. They are rebuilding memories. Memories of watching Mulder and Scully walk through dark corridors with their flashlights. Of hearing Mark Snow's unmistakable theme. Of waiting for the opening titles and those famous words to appear on the screen. Memories of wondering whether Mulder was right. Memories of being convinced that Scully was right. And memories of discovering, eventually, that perhaps neither question mattered as much as I thought. Because the magic was in watching them search together.

There is something wonderfully appropriate about reconstructing a cult television series using another cultural icon such as LEGO. 

Brick after brick. Memory after memory. Mystery after mystery.

More than thirty years later, we have smartphones, artificial intelligence, telescopes capable of looking extraordinarily deep into the universe and access to more information than Mulder could ever have stored in his basement office. And yet the fundamental questions remain surprisingly familiar.

What is true? What do we believe? Whom do we trust?

Perhaps that is the ultimate reason why The X-Files became a cult series. The monsters belonged to the 1990s. The questions belong to everyone. And somewhere, on a tiny LEGO desk in a tiny LEGO basement office, I like to imagine there is still a tiny poster hanging on the wall. A UFO. A landscape. And four words that have never really left us: I WANT TO BELIEVE.

More information: Digital Spy

Time passes in moments... 

moments which, rushing past, 

define the path of a life.

Dana Scully