Chris Carter's 1993 paranormal investigation series The X-Files was one of the seminal media outings of its decade. Few have better captured post-Cold War America's paranoid suspicions about its own government. With no enemy to fight, and no wars on the near horizon, America since the 1990s has become wary of the systems that caused war and the formation of "enemies" in the first place. If we could live without them, why didn't the government scrap them earlier? Could the government be up to something sinister?

"The X-Files" manifested that paranoia through Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), two FBI agents assigned to investigate paranormal cases. They often encountered aliens, monsters, psychics, vampires and other unusual creatures. Unfortunately, every case usually involves a cover-up or lack of hard evidence. The show was a hit enough to run for nine full seasons before it was canceled in 2002. The X-Files had no place in the post-9/11 world. It was a product of its time.

That didn't stop Chris Carter from resurrecting the series for the tenth season in 2015 and then the eleventh in 2018. Of course, it was hoping to tap into the nostalgia of '90s Gen-Xers, but the resurrection only underscores how much The X-Files was a holdover from the previous decade. Most of the episodes didn't work, and the paranoia now felt naive.

But some of the more recent episodes have been fascinating. Case in point: the Season 11 episode "The Lost Art of Sweat of the Brow" (January 24, 2018). The episode was written and directed by longtime X-Files collaborator Darrin Morgan, and in 2018 interview with EWsaid he wanted this one to look and feel like an episode of The Twilight Zone. Not so much in the story as in the tone. He wanted his episode to feel unexpected.

In The Lost Art of Sweat, Mulder is contacted by a strange man named Reginald Murgatoid (Brian Huskey), who claims to know each other. He explains to Mulder and Scully that he was actually their partner for many years, but that their memory of him—indeed, everyone's memory of him—has been erased by a mysterious man named Dr. Tie (Stuart Margolin). Reginald explains that the Mandela Effect is the result of massive memory tampering, and causes Mulder and Scully to recall "untrue" things from their childhoods that they damn well definitely remember. In Mulder's case, it is an episode of "The Twilight Zone" that was never produced.

Darrin Morgan said that while writing the episode, he wanted to evoke the mystery he felt while watching Rod Serling's famous anthology series. Namely, he wanted to surprise people. After all, on The Twilight Zone, you never knew what premise you were going to get. Morgan said:

"What I loved about 'The Twilight Zone' as a kid was something that viewers watching today don't know: You had no idea what you were going to see. idea of ​​what the episode could be about It could be one of the greatest things you've ever seen will be."

"Sweat of the Forehead" certainly kept viewers a little off balance. And to make sure viewers knew what was being evoked, Morgan even included an opening sequence that dramatized, in black and white, a mock Twilight Zone episode.

Morgan said the Mandela Effect was great fodder for evoking The Twilight Zone and recalled several episodes where a Cassandra-like character is exposed to something strange or supernatural but can't convince anyone it's real. Many Twilight Zone episodes end with someone screaming the truth, sweating profusely. As he said:

"If you have a memory of a certain thing, a childhood memory that turns out not to be true, you start thinking, 'Well, what else do I remember that might not be true?' And if you continue down that path, you're out of your mind, maybe it was a very simple idea, and if you leave the snowball, you'll end up like one of these Twilight Zone characters. trying to convince everyone that the world has gone mad and you have a lot of sweat on your brow.'

Morgan went on to lament the state of modern television, saying that many shows have become heavily serialized ... to a fault. He felt that long narrative arcs took away from TV's ability to innovate on a weekly basis, flipping from horror to comedy to thrills at the whim of the writer. He prefers episodic television. "And I guess that was one of the appeals of writing for 'The X-Files,'" he said. “You can write (stories) that are very different from the previous ones. It might drive modern audiences a little crazy, but I enjoy watching shows like that, where you don't know what you're going to get."

The slogan of The X-Files has long been "The truth is out there," but "Sweat on the Forehead" offers the possibility that truth is subjective and the search for it futile. Dr. They later seem to point out that in the late 2010s, people choose what they want to believe anyway. It's a nice take on The X-Files ethos.