Actually, I'm darned proud that I disliked "Star Trek" from the very first episode broadcast on TV in the sixties. Yeah, I know, that makes me an idiot. But I have to tell ya, I feel more than vindicated decades later when I see a scene where Spock or whomever can conduct a conversation with the ship's computer -- while inserting a cassette tape into an archaic unit that simply wouldn't exist in that super high-tech era of the future. Tapes on The Enterprise? Please!
Well, I'm not going into a diatribe about all of that, my real intent is just to mention the new movie, "The X-Files: I Want to Believe." Hate that title, just hate it like roaches in my teeth. When that hideous word, believe, is thrown into a movie title, you're just asking for trouble. Sure as the sun's gonna rise and give everybody skin cancer tomorrow, the UFO debunkers will swarm from under the baseboards and associate religious "beliefs" and "The Faithful" with "believing in" UFOs when they talk of this movie, just based on the title.
There's a huge difference between believing in UFOs and believing in the evidence, and I'll choose the latter every time. Look, you can believe in Santa Claus, you can believably embrace the Easter Bunny and you can have intimate believing relations with the Tooth Fairy, but don't ever ask or answer that extraordinarily dumb question that conveniently pops up every time somebody finishes off a cup of something out of a backwoods still: "Duh, hey Jed, you believe in them UFOs?" Arghh! Talk about fingernails scratching bloodily across a blackboard!
So, Mr. Chris Carter and the rest of your lot -- what's the matter with you, that you had to put "I Want to Believe" in the title? Isn't it bad enough that you and your writers spent years borrowing from real UFO history and then twisted everything so far into the realm of fiction that most of your wide-eyed viewers nowadays probably don't know the difference between UFO fact and fiction, conspiracy and congeniality?
Okay, maybe I'm just bitter because I never got over the broadcast era of "Johnny Jupiter" and "Reject, the Robot." That window opening and closing by itself (who remembers that window? Nobody. . .) really drove me wild. Back then, you didn't want to believe, you had to believe.
