X-Files Season 12?

I had this really awesome dream, nightmare that would be the perfect X-files spin-off without Mulder and Scully or just a 12th season of the X-files. It touched on all the relevant X-files themes, trust of the government and bad business, bad corporations, and the other usual fare.

It’s basically about William as a young adult, who was raised in a foster care environment and is in the process as a recent college grad of becoming a new FBI agent. And this first episode is what sets it off. He doesn’t know anything about his parents or grandparents, so in that way most of what has happened previously is now strictly a part of the mythology.

Mulder and Scully are either waiting to meet someone or running some kind of surveillance, undercover operation in a Starbucks type Cafe in Northern Virginia, near the Swamp. The plot is not about them or the cafe though, other than incidentally.

It’s basically one of those giant town malls with multiple apartment complexes, business offices, major retailers, all centralized around consumer capitalism. Part of this picture is a lab, doing very serious testing on some kind of lizard. The lab interns are young and so diverse ethnically they look to have been selected that way. We see this contrast because there’s a field trip to the local school, where much fewer of the youth are anything but Northern Virginia, suburban whitish. In the front of the lab the children are petting lizards and looking at a kind of zoo environment, set up for public relations of the pharmaceutical company. In the back and on higher levels is a serious lab environment where we see the lizard cells are being tested with COVID and all kinds of other highly dangerous microbes. Lab protocol is somewhat… lazy and possibly even corrupt. The theme of young interns and children on a field trip, in a lethally dangerous, corrupt lab pharmaceutical environment this close to D.C. is totally 2022.

Mulder and Scully just happen to be right down the street.

So there’s a problem at the lab and some of the lizards that were being tested with LSD and other hallucinogenic compounds were accidentally returned to the zoo environment where the children are now handling them. This is a ‘minor’ problem as deemed by the lab authorities. Until the aerated gas version of these compounds being tested on the lizards is revealed to have been ‘accidentally’ smashed in a public lab area. At this point it has to be presumed the entire complex has been contaminated with a massively hallucinogenic gas aerosol, including among the children. But we also see that the buildings ventilation systems have released the aerosol into the surrounding neighborhood, including federal government offices and buildings with high security clearance military associations, etc. Also, innumerable children and families out shopping or going about their daily business. Also, Mulder and Scully, having coffee and small talk, while gathering intel. The building goes on lockdown and personnel from the pharmaceutical company are called in to squelch the problem. Because of the proximity to the federal government offices they are also bound to alert certain government authorities, who either decide on the spot or have already planned to keep this out of the media and off the public record.

At this point we realize that one of the children is “William”. Children looking out the windows of the lab see all kinds of mayhem and violence, until the shudders are drawn. We then see that some samples from the lab are separated and against advice of the interns are taken by the ‘agents’ who do not identify themselves to the interns. The interns are then gassed along with the children.

The media is reporting that a venomous lizard has escaped from the town mall zoo resulting in panic and hysteria among the children present there at the time. Figures that may or may not be Mulder and Scully appear to stand up, while still chatting and begin leaving the cafe. As the interns and lab staff and children are wheeled away on stretchers to waiting ambulances, still seeing images of violence and mayhem, William believes he sees Scully being approached by an assailant and shot close range in front of Mulder. William begins to panic until given a tranquilizer shot and placed in the ambulance.

The next day, a large, ostentatious children’s birthday party is being held at a pizza fun park type of place within a stone’s throw of the lab building, almost as if a cover up for what happened there just hours previously. Lights inside the lab building are shut off and a lone large black vehicle drives away.

This incident, approximately twelve years later is the most formative influence on William’s decision to join the FBI. Later, Mulder and Scully are briefly mentioned by those in attendance at William’s interview, conspiracy ‘insiders’, setting up a new generation of the X-files. They mention the retirement over a decade ago, of certain special agents, but that they, like the truth, are still out there.

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