The series finale of The X-Files was a major disappointment. I was shocked by how amateurish the script was, even more so because it was written by Chris Carter.

For starters, they wasted more than half of it on a synopsis of the previous nine years. I was afraid it was going to turn into a clip show, but fortunately it wasn't quite that bad.

The "cross-examination" of Mulder's witnesses was a joke. The prosecutor spent the entire time crowing over the fact that they could produce no evidence — but when mind-reading Gibson Praise appeared, he simply claimed without demonstration that he could read minds, and that one of the men sitting in judgement against Mulder was an alien. They didn't ask him to prove the veracity of his claims (by, say, having him tell them what they were thinking).

Likewise, this prosecutor was able to shoot down most of the witnesses with a single pithy statement, apparently rendering them unable to defend their testimony or explain why they had had (for example) a change of heart.

The writing for and about Deputy Director Kersh was utterly pathetic. The man who spent years trying to destroy Fox Mulder balks at ensuring a "guilty" verdict against him? After his entire history of betrayal, the "good guys" simply trusted him, uttering only a token "what's he doing here?" before accepting his help?

The ending was utterly anticlimactic; obviously, the entire episode was merely a setup for one or more movies. And for all the hype that the finale would tie up all the loose ends, there's still that alien hiding out in the Rolling Hills nuclear reactor. And Xena is also out there somewhere.

I was disappointed that John Doggett and Monica Reyes were as marginalized as they were. Sure, Mulder was one of the show's two central characters for the lion's share of its run, but John Doggett is just more interesting (and much more three-dimensional) as a character than Fox Mulder (and quite frankly, I think Robert Patrick is a better actor than Duchovny).

Oh well, there's always the movies.