Writing this near the end of Season 8, after “Alone”. I think that they’ve actually got it–I am seriously starting to sympathize with Dogett, and M & S seem like a retired couple. Doggett has this quintessential frailty about him — you see it earlier where he’s walking next to both his old friend at the CIA/army(?) and Mulder - he’s shorter than both, and he appears frail and the other two buff… almost like the other two could hurt him too easily. But, he’s an outsider in knowledge (can’t compare with Mulder, Oxford ed) and belief, and the fact that he both suffers and appears frail… I guess those are the two key elements in creating a new character to replace old beloved cult megaseries characters. Ah, actually there’s also the way Scully and the other characters treat him. In “Medusa”, Scully basically let him go off by himself almost treating him as a casualty - she would have totally risked her life and gone down the tunnels with the excavation team - and there’s his naive willingness to help, when she says she needs him to be her “hands and eyes,” he doesn’t question her further. Skinner’s take on Kersch wishing to thwart his advancement by assigning him to the X-Files doesn’t help either.

…

Season 9 started out weak even with the extra funding. It felt like a soap opera at times, and it really didn’t help that the new agents were not on the same par in education and experience as the former - but you do get to sympathize with them by the end of the series. Series finale was interesting alluding to the geomagnetic shift imminent on 12/22/2012 as Doomsday.The movie “I Want to Believe” was a total disappointment in that it alluded to no mythos at all! Whatever happened to the driving fount of governmental conspiracy that drove the series forward? Why resort to something as hackneyed as illegal organ transplantation, something that an earlier episode with Lucy Liu had already sufficiently summarized?!

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