13 1/2 years ago, I was a high school senior. I had various and sundry extracurriculars, and even an unappreciated job in the service industry, but my one labor of love was my Sunday night schedule.

9PM – X-Files

10PM – alt.tv.x-files

12AM – X-Files rerun of the same episode

You’d be surprised how much more you get out of an episode after 2 hours of dissecting it, even if it was season 9.

In any case, the show ended, I left for college, and gradually I became more and more immune to the siren call of a TV show that had scripted my daydreams for years. I’d like to say it was because I was too busy broadening my horizons, but that would absolve my roommates of introducing me to Star Trek: TNG sophomore year.

Just a few short months ago, Fox announced that X-Files will be returning for a mini-series “event” in January 2016. I thought I could brush up on a few episodes just to get myself back up to speed.

In retrospect, that was naive.

… oops.

But if anything productive could come of this — and I use “productive” loosely — it’s the fact that this is not the same show I watched when I was 17. 31-year-old me understands this masterpiece of scifi TV differently, and dammit, what is the internet for if not to be a receptacle for this kind of esoterica.

Join me on this journey, from the teenage ‘shipper posting as “Jennifer *cha cha cha*” to a full-fledged adult management consultant, getting sucked down into the mytharc universe once again. Things look different from this side…