The episodic structure of the show continues to face off against its serial threads. It is a strange, almost surreal, combination of the necessity for endless repetition and forgetting - a key feature of character construction in episodic television - with the need for characters to change and have memory to build the show’s arch-mythological structure.
This strange combination is amplified beyond the confines of the diegesis (story-world) to the level of dramatic structure, since the show remains suspended in a realm of tragedy and comedy. On the one hand, tragedy underpins the show (the loss of Mulder’s sister, for example) and governs its direction toward the cruel and unjust fates and furies of life as Mulder and Scully continue on their quest, surviving near-death encounters, adapting and learning and changing as they go; on the other hand, comedy is equally present, returning us each week to the same endless cycles of spoof, parody and absurdity (contained deep within even the episodes played most straight or serious).
In other words, characters can both come back the same each week and yet also be developing along a path to some kind of resolution in the far off distance by which time it is expected things will have to come to an end and someone may have to die. Speaking back to this predicted finality is the incompleteness that marks the show - the indeterminateness of so many cases, the pursuit for truth that never ends, the possibility that no final truth can be known.
It is these characteristics that define X-Files as an enduring example of smart episodic television and an historical symbol of 90s romance and nihilism.
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