The X-Files: Every Season 10 Episode Ranked Worst To Best

6. My Struggle II

The season finale has already found itself ripped to shreds across the Internet, with many rightfully lamenting its glaring faults. While seeing the Cigarette Smoking Man again in full - after two previous fleeting appearances in the season - was great as always, it came at the cost of wiping away years of the series' mythology. The black oil, the warring alien races, bounty hunters, and even the later seasons' supersoldiers seemed to be conveniently forgotten by every character as evidence there's bigger things at play to simply boil the final conflict down to the CSM's desire to purge the world. It was, unsurprisingly, convoluted, but not in an entertaining way, seemingly undermining years of investment in seeing how the original mythology would all come together, even going so far as to pay lip service to the infamous 2012 colonization date as an afterthought before sweeping it under the rug. On top of that, Agents Einstein and Miller were still being shoved down our throats, Mulder and Scully shared mere seconds of screentime together, Skinner briefly turned up to remind everyone how criminally-underused he had been all season, drinking games were born out of how many times the phrase "alien DNA" was said, and the character of Monica Reyes suffered a complete character assassination in order to shoehorn a familiar face into a cowardly role that would've been more fitting for an original series character like Marita Covarrubias. All in all, it was a disappointing end to a highly-anticipated season of television, one which any future episodes will have a lot of work to do in either course-correcting or making up for.