9 Most Fan-Pleasing Moments In Television

You can’t have an article like this without discussing relationships between characters that would never have happened without fan involvement. The X-Files was one of the first television shows to benefit from an online following, who would pore over episodes, storylines and characters with a fine-toothed comb. As usual, the fans were split on many of the things they appreciated most about their show, but one thing almost all of them agreed on was that it was only a matter of time before FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder admitted that they were totally in love with each other, damn it.

However, that ‘almost all of them’ definitely doesn’t include series showrunner Chris Carter, who’s gone on record as saying that their partnership was never intended to become a romantic entanglement of any kind. He was interested in the fact that they were best friends, perfect partners, that Scully may even have been Mulder’s only friend.

Resisting that urge to get the two of them together until the very end could have been what kept the spark between the two alight… after all, it’s a storytelling truism (referred to as ‘the Moonlighting curse’) that once you answer the ‘will they, won’t they’ question, interest in the characters inevitably dies off. There’s a reason that romantic comedies tend to finish with the characters getting together… no one wants to see what happens afterwards…