Also reviewed in this issue: three new episodes each of Buffy and Angel (all getting their UK premiere this month), three more episodes of Voyager and Stargate SG-1 each, our Pick of the Month Doctor Who book, plus more Who in audio, video and printed formats, the latest Trek and Buffy books, and a CD theme collection As Seen On TV...

Sometimes, The X-Files works like magic. It can have a buzz about it, a sense that some epic story of mythic proportions is being worked out before the eyes. But that’s just the problem – the story is still and will always be in the process of being worked out. The sole results of its conundrums are further conundrums. If there were answers to any of the questions – if the loyalty of the fans were to be rewarded – then The Sixth Extinction would have started to provide them. It doesn’t. At the start of the final season, we must face the fact that the series’ major plotline, the myth-arc or whatever Chris Carter refers to it as, is never going to move on. It is a record stuck in a groove, getting a little further each time before switching back and playing the same tune yet again.

The lack of imagination that The Sixth Extinction displays is staggering. It’s all blasts from the past, Navaho Indians and Deep Throat, Diane Fowley and the Cigarette-Smoking Man, human-alien hybrids and father-son revelations. I hate to say it, but it really is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It’s humourless and leaden. It’s sooo Nineties, man.

And if Carter hasn’t got the balls to work out his story properly, the least he could do, frankly, is distract us by making his leading man and woman get it on. Anyone else in the world ever but Mulder and Scully would have done so by now. They share a tender moment at the end of the second episode, clinging to each other as though they could rely on nothing else in the world – and they can’t! There’s no one else to trust, their families are half-destroyed, and global Armageddon (I do apologize, the ‘coming viral apocalypse’) is due any day.

If I were them, I’d have submitted to my hormones long ago. That they haven’t is simply no longer credible. There’s my ultimatum, Carter: I want to get me some satisfaction, or I want Mulder and Scully to get some. What’s it gonna be?