AMONG MY DRAWER FULL OF UNWRITTEN ESSAYS, to steal a concept from GKC, is a lovely item called "The Problem of Sequels, Part II."

One problem for any sequel-making enterprise, as I've discussed elsewhere, is a reluctance to do anything irrevocable. You don't want to kill off your main characters. It would be like doing away with that proverbial old goose and cutting yourself off from Golden Egg II, III, and their sibling Roman Numerals. On the other hand, with sequels there is also the possibility of revoking any "irrevocable" turn of events that occurred in the previous installment -- which is another problem of sequels.

It is, however, a third problem of sequels we'll talk about here. That is, how having too much of a good thing may not be so good.

For example, didn't you find that learning exactly how Indiana Jones acquired his famous fear of snakes in The Last Crusade to be just a little disappointing? Maybe a little dumb? Or didn't the additional details of the alien intelligence in 2010 deflate a little of the air from your awe of those aliens in 2001? Have you read a few too many Foundation and Dune books, wished the authors had perhaps left a few stones unturned? And what fool really wants to know why Rick went to Casablanca or just how Gatsby made all that money?

Loose lips sink ships. Who'd go to see a magician who felt the need to explain "how he did it" after every trick? There is a certain bliss to ignorance. Don't we say that somebody who reveals the ending of the book or movie "spoils" these -- to the point of making you think twice if you even want see/read them?

Of course, our distaste for having the end of a book or movie "spoiled" doesn't make us quit reading or watching before we get to the end. The unsolved mystery usually keeps us glued to our seats, or prevents us from putting the book down. I Love A Mystery was the name of an old radio show. What we really love is to see mysteries solved: which is what Doc, Jack and Reggie did each week by the end of the episode, you could count on it.

But when we do reach that resolution, the end of any mystery, don't we insist it be worth our while, that it abide by certain rules? In other words, it had better not turn out that the murderer was some character we've never seen or heard of until that moment. That would be "using smoke and mirrors" or cheating. Mystery writers understand they'd better have "planted" plenty of information about the perpetrator in the story long before the end for the reader to feel truly satisfied.

And perhaps too much satisfied for their own good. For who goes back and re-reads an Agatha Christie or even a Dorothy Sayers mystery again, unless it is because they've forgotten "whodunit"?

I say, Holmes. It seems as if we've stumbled onto a real mystery here. That is, why do some stories fail if they tell too much, and other stories fail if they don't tell enough? To be precise, why do we love mysteries? Not just the ones we can solve, but -- even moreso -- the ones we can never hope to completely "solve"?

And which kind of mystery is this one? Is it one we should try to solve? Or is it a mystery best left in the murky fog?

MYSTERY TALES USUALLY FEATURE A DETECTIVE, private or otherwise, amateur or pro, who finds clues -- "little things tell stolly," says Charlie Chan -- or notices things that aren't there -- as Sherlock Holmes fixed on the dog that didn't bark -- and mulls them over -- using "the little gray cells" like Inspector Poirot. The investigation climaxes in the denouement, where the detective reveals, in high drama, the solution to the mystery.

Sometimes, in such stories, the case involves what witnesses may deem agencies of the supernatural: curses, oracles, miracles, ghosts. Careful analysis usually turns up an explanation more ordinary. As in Scooby Doo, the paranormal explanation may be unmasked as a deliberate hoax. These stories satisfy only to the degree one's pleasure in finding the truth compensates for one's disappointment in the paranormal explanation being proven false.

For Unsolved Mysteries have always been the most compelling. Legends of Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, El Chupacabras ("the Bigfoot of the 90s"), the Shroud of Turin, UFO sightings, alien abductions. These are the bread and butter of the tabloid press, print and electronic. And as that scandal-monger Sigmund Freud observed, the more seriously such things are presented, the more "uncanny" -- the more intense the heebie-jeebies they provoke. Thus we account for the many authoritative hosts, the sober documentary style of the reporting, the language of rationalism.

Or the type-written numbers in the lower left hand corner of the screen that suggests these events come from "documented" files.

Indeed, writers of works which are more honestly labeled "fiction" also understand that the greater the skeptic who becomes converted by the paranormal doings he or she encounters, the greater the spine-tingle in the reader or viewer. Ergo, any tabloid prophet should have predicted that these two streams would eventually meet in supernatural tales investigated by Federal Agents, who combine the cool rationality of Joe Friday ("just the facts, ma'am") with higher education and sophisticated science. Like Agent Dale Cooper in that cockeyed-but-spooky TV series, Twin Peaks. The deadpan Cooper's search for who killed Laura Palmer led to ever-more bizarre clues and finally (warning, I'm gonna SPOIL the ending) a paranormal shapeshifting boogeyman.

Of course, even more celebrated than Agent Cooper are Agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, the FBI's ghostbusters in The X-Files. Moderating Twin Peaks' extreme tongue-in-cheek element, The X-Files presents dead-serious realism in the service of solving mysteries -- without ever fully solving them. The show has featured an ongoing series of paranormal crimes against a shifting backdrop of paranoia and conspiracy, something to do with UFOs and space aliens. In this way, the credibility of old-fashioned monsters is enhanced by their proximity to new-fashioned spooks. Those who still believe in vampires and werewolves may be few, but popular interest in UFOs and aliens is continues to explode. "We're in a major alien moment," says reports Newsweek writer Rick Marin, "even more intense than the 'Chariots of the Gods' mania of the 70s." People today are obsessed with alien invader or colonization or conspiracy movies and TV shows. "America is Hooked on the Paranormal", is the headline for an article by Marin, who can only shake his head and wonder "How did this far-out stuff get so mainstream?"

And that's biggest mystery for another sort of sleuth, the late Carl Sagan. Now, we've discussed Dr. Sagan in these pages recently before, and hopefully nobody will think he's going to show up every month -- especially since he passed away over a year ago. I'm sure he'll be replaced by a new exponent of popular scientism, but until he does, its just too easy to reach for a popular figure of almost a Scully-like skeptical stature.

Especially with regard to our present subject. The last book he published before his death was called The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995). Here, Sagan debunks just the sort of rampant paranormal X-File type fads we've been considering and offers a "Baloney Detector" to filter the pseudo from the science. Sagan also predicts that if people don't learn to tell good science from bad, we're all in for a new Dark Age.

It's just too tempting not to join Phillip Johnson in pointing out that the best place to start putting Carl Sagan's Baloney Detector to work might have been in his book itself. For Dr. Sagan never took his "candle in the dark" very far into examining the contradictions of his own assumptions. Even as he points out the dangers of scientific ignorance, he was never shy about turning that ignorance to his advantage. For example, Sagan divides the world into "science" (the empirically-provable) and "pseudo-science" (the empirically-unprovable). He doesn't recognize that morality, human meaning, dignity, and values would all then fall under the category of "pseudo-science", since none of these cannot be measured or weighed by scientific means. Meanwhile, Sagan was quick to employ "moral" arguments, dipped in the authority of "Science" to defend his preferences and views.

Be all that as it may, clues as to why science may not be enough for those attracted to "pseudo-science" can be found in the very subtitle of the book in question -- "Science as a Candle in the Dark" -- and between one or two lines within the covers of same.

"Seances occur only in darkened rooms," says the skeptical author, "where the ghostly visitors can be seen dimly at best. If we turn up the lights a little, so we have a chance to see what's going on, the spirits vanish. They're shy, we're told, and some of us believe it... What [the psychics and vendors of paranormal experience] need is darkness and gullibility."

Aha! A detail with cosmic implications: the proverbial jump of a dot on photographic plates that announces discovery of a new planet. Of course, Sagan was quite correct in pointing out the success of "pseudo-science" requires shadows, and that under too much light, the spirits flee. But the same charge might be made at anything that creates a sense of mystery, or wonder, or romance -- all of which require a careful combination of both light and shadow. (In passing, we recall Chesterton's point that the fact that spirits prefer darkness no more disproves their existence than the fact lovers prefer darkness disproves theirs.)

The main point here is that the magic of romance - or of poetry -- works not in stating directly, but indirectly, through suggestion, in the irresistible flickering of the ambiguous. Conjuring the mysterious requires distance, strategic obscurment, blurred focus -- not bright lights, full views, and a clinical dissection.

Indeed, even the makers of Alien Autopsy -- neither poets nor scientists -- understood this. Their sensational "documentary" featured "real" footage of a purported extraterrestrial. Of course, the camera never held still long enough to give the viewer a stable, unobscured clinical view of the subject: no real dissection. But what the bogus footage did manage to convey, was the deeply satisfying experience of the power of suggestion.

Possibility steals one's breath in a way actuality falls short. Idea is almost always better than execution. And hope springs eternal that what we've just barely glimpsed in the shadows, out the corner of our eye, we'll someday catch -- whatever it is.

"This X of ours...", believe it or not, is exactly how German theologian Rudolf Otto tried to define the undefinable, the shiver down the spine one feels in the presence of the uncanny. In his book The Idea of the Holy (1923), Otto named gave a generalized name to that "X" which is the source of all spine tingling. He called this mysterious object "the numinous". Being in the presence of the numinous produces that rush of creature-consciousness, that sense of our overwhelming nothingness as overshadowed by a "Wholly Other." The object of this encounter by definition defies definition; the numinous, said Otto, is that which remains stubbornly inexplicable.

It is, of course, the numinous, that puts the "X" in The X-Files.

WHEN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY-FOX LOGO spun dramatically into view at the start of the film The X-Files: Fight the Future, I was reminded that before Fox was a television network, or a character on a TV network show, it was, in fact, a motion picture studio.

The curious interplay between TV shows and films made from these has always been problematic, dependent on many factors stacked against the latter to prevent it from ever being as good as the former. Yet once the film got going, in many moments I felt like I was watching a better-than-average X-Files television show episode. The parity between movie and TV version was much closer than your average Star Trek movie is compared to its TV original. (Actually, I've never seen big screen adaptations of small screen successes really done right, except for the original Batman movie -- with Adam West, who remains the only real Batman for me.)

But while close in feel to the original series, Fight the Future still has a basic problem that prevents it from being a "real" film, i.e. a film we'll remember years from now and will make sense to people who never saw a single episode of the original series. It is not a complete work of art that stands alone, with a beginning, a middle a conclusion -- a resolution. They can't resolve or conclude: we're talking about the X-Files here. The film is just what it says: a fight, an ultimately losing battle, with the inevitable conclusion to the entire X-Files phenomena.

Of course, as with Trek films, they want us to feel like they've made their material "large" enough for a big screen, done something important, something irrevocable. And like Trek, they move toward two inarguably irrevocable plot developments, the death of a main character or a romance (and the implicit sexual relationship) between main characters previously "just friends."

In regard to the first method, again like the Trek movies, the filmmakers here have chosen the bully's or coward's method of doing the irrevocable: they kill a secondary character. (True, Trek has occasionally "killed" off main characters, but we know that doesn't always mean the event is irrevocable. The more characteristic Trek approach is to shoot an innocent bystander, such as a no-name "Red Shirt" on a landing party or even destroying the Enterprise -- which is itself now a never-ending series of sequels, not Roman Numerated but alphabetized.) And so one of the more-or-less regular X-Files characters meets his doom in a way that seems irrevocable. (But we thought Cigarette Man was dead, too; only time will tell. My advice: trust no one.)

When it comes to the X-Files, "irrevocable" can mean only one thing to the viewers, and so becomes a sort of unwritten contract with the producers of the show when they presume to make it a film. That is this: if the "truth" is out there, as they've been telling us all along, then they've got to give us a little bit of irrefutable evidence of that truth, an "irrevocable" clue we have never gotten on the television show. We do, by the way, get that bit of seemingly irrefutable evidence. I won't spell it out here and spoil it for you, but let's just say the temptation to use cool special effects has always made it a foregone conclusion as to which side of the Is/Isn't Anybody Out There? question The X-Files was ultimately going to come conclusively down on.

And here is where Chris Carter and his fellow X-meisters are taking the big risk. Here also is also where their "fight with the future" clearly becomes a losing battle. We'll get into that a bit more in moment (or should I say "To Be Continued...").

First, we need to touch briefly on a disturbing subtext in the movie version of the X-phenomenon. Fight the Future opens with a bang, as all action films must, in this case literal with the blowing up of a Federal Building. The obviously intended evocation is the Oklahoma City bombing, and the visuals cut so close to that scene as to make me feel uncomfortable -- like I was party to a terrible exploitation. My gut instinct is repulsion when filmmakers use real-life tragedies as props or garnish in their films (I'm thinking, for example, of how the abysmal Fatherland and some World War II movies make use of the Holocaust mainly to blacken the black hats of their villains.)

So the choice of that kind of explosion is in questionable taste to begin with. But now consider the X-Files context here: a conspiracy against the people involving the government, the UN, the FBI, and who-knows-what-or-who-else? Pretty much what the Oklahoma bombers believed in, and what motivated their actions. Only in the movie, the bombing is done by those involved in the government conspiracy -- which in some sick way seems to use the Oklahoma tragedy to give credence to the perpetrators of that very tragedy. It gets worse. Among the mythology of the right-wing militia types is the idea of "black helicopters" employed by mysterious "one-world" forces to work their mysterious, wicked ends. Well, and you guessed it, at one point in Fight the Future, the forces of the evil conspiracy employ a pair of black helicopters to chase down Scully and Mulder. So what exactly is Chris Carter thinking here? He seems to be making these allusions intentionally, but to what end? I'm almost ready to believe there is a dark conspiracy, but it seems to involve less the UN than the "military-entertainment-complex" to which I've heard Mulder refer cryptically (and does he refer otherwise?).

My gut reaction is to the militia allusions is, "Chris, you don't even want to go there." But part of me wants to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it's part of a masterplan we don't know about, but he does, one that will make sense in the end. Ultimately, it will all fit together, "it is all connected".

And that, of course, is just what Chris Carter would like us to think. And here we get to what I mean about the inevitable end of the X-Files' fight with the future. For the X-Files have always been involved in a fight with the future: they have a tiger by the tail, and sooner or later, they're going to have to let go. The actors are big stars now, and will be drawn to other opportunities. The show will inevitably end, and ascend to where all good TV shows go, the afterlife of syndication. Someday people scanning the channels for a late night movie will run into Fight the Future and puzzle over a ghost of TV past -- maybe even scratch their heads and wonder just what the fuss was about.

Let me compare Carter's situation to a similar one: that of the storyteller in The Arabian Nights. Here, a king, who has been betrayed in love, adopts the truly safe sex method of taking a new bride each night and killing her in the morning. After a few years of this, his nightly bride is Scheherazade -- who has a plan. She tells the king a bedtime story, a "tale of marvel to beguile the night," which leaves him wanting more. And so he lets her live another night to tell another story, and so on, for a thousand and one nights. On the last, Scheherazade brings out her children who have been sired by the king during these same nights (obviously there was more going on than bedtime stories) and she pleads to spare her life for their sake. And he does.

Chris Carter and company haven't strung us along for a thousand and one episodes, and it's doubtful they'll get the chance. Long before then will come the moment of reckoning -- or, rather the moment of that "truth" we've heard so much about. And the audience will demand blood if they're not satisfied in the end.

It's an almost X-Filean predicament. The X-Files movie would have been the ideal place to demonstrate a little ironic cognizance of this predicament. And the audience would surely sympathize with Carter's difficulty and applaud any honest acknowledgment. It's not like we don't know there's a problem. Instead, the film comes off with a good deal of fast-talking, more of the same, really, and by now we catch whiffs of "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" coming from Carter.

Again, this could be the bold words of a humbug, or part of a master plan. It's awful easy to believe Carter knows something that we don't. That he's got the "X" in a box. He keeps giving us glimpses, teasing us. But sooner or later, like all peep shows, the audience is going to be fed up with glimpses and demand the goods. They'll demand to know the "truth" about the "truth" that is out there, or in there in Carter's box. But we already know the truth. Chris Carter no more has got that "X" bottled up than we do. And no revelation he could give us could possibly match the infinity of our expectations or desires. Nothing he has could live up to the power of our spine-tingles.

For with too much light the spirits do vanish. The monsters are scary until we get a good look at them; then we're disappointed to realize those rubber masks couldn't possibly be the real Object of our spine shivers; they're not Other enough. The best any fan of the Numinous can hope for, it seems, is the merest suggestion of the Unfathomable; anything more than a suggestion, and the object is revealed to be much less than unfathomable.

And hopefully, our experiences encountering the Numinous on the X-Files will be enough to sustain us when Carter's box is inevitably exposed as empty of "X". Otherwise we'll be tempted to give up on that "Something" beyond the reach of the cold rationalism of Scully at her most skeptical, or Carl Sagan in his own confused debunking and turning on of all possible lights. In the end, the ball's in our court: we are the detective.

The real sequel to the X-Files is our own search for "X" or the end of it.