I watch X-Files late at night recently. There are marathons of it, three times a week. I can’t shake out of my head the idea that if they don’t go ahead with two more movies, these guys are losing a terribly big opportunity (Duchovny doesn’t get any younger you know). I mean, the X-Files forum on IMDb still produces more comments than most current series do. It is still a very popular cult show.

A possible scenario could very well be about the rebel aliens finding and approaching the hidden Scully & Mulder couple somewhere in the Central America (working as a veterinarian and a private security officer respectively). Because Mulder still has alien DNA in his body (from the end of the 7th season) he could be very useful to the rebellion in order to study the Super Soldiers and find a way to exterminate them (Earth’s occupation would be a major strategic failure in their war against the black oil). Maybe Scully’s now 7 year old son could play a role too.

Humans don’t have the technology to shake off the upcoming alien occupation, but the rebels might just cut it with the help of the ex-agents and some friends in the FBI and ultimately the government (maybe Gore could portray the US president ). During that time we learn more about the more broad story of the black oil and the races it has infected and the history and role of the rebellion. I envision a finish for the series where the black-oil-infected aliens will be defeated regarding their plans for Earth (for now) and they won’t be returning (for now), although a full scale war will continue to exist outside our solar system. During the final battles either Dogget or Skinner or Mulder himself dies (hey, without a major death you can’t “feel” the battle, which is more a strategical battle rather than full blown war). The final battle of the second movie should be against the usual shape shifting alien (portrayed by Thompson) and the final battle scene of the third movie in the trilogy should be against the now-SuperSoldier Billy Miles. X-Files started with Billy, it should end with him too.

Alternatively, both Scully and Mulder could die and their son will be adopted by Dogget, who has already lost a son at that age. During the 2 new movies, Dogget becomes an alien believer too, while he is already with Monica at that time (hence bringing a closure to their characters too).

When everything is over, life at FBI goes back to normal, and the fact that there were ever a danger for an alien occupation is staying hidden from the public. In fact, the public never learns about the aliens or how close they came into becoming slaves or get exterminated. The only conspiracy that goes on is the hiding of that truth, with the surviving members of the main cast agreeing to this as an acceptable solution (and hence somewhat endorsing the conspiracy).

Maybe a fitting end scene would be Scully walking down the DC streets and some guys making fun of the National Enquirer front page about an alien war. Scully smiles as she watches them, but she has a sad look at her face. The end.

This is the proof that the main “Lost” storyline goes extremely slow in this last season. A 45 minute episode perfectly encapsulated in a 3:45 minute recap video! Damn it, nothing really happens anymore on “Lost”! The first season was da bomb, but then it went downhill. And the ratings are showing exactly that. The return of “Lost” in the 10 PM timeslot yielded one of the worst ratings the show ever had. Hopefully, the show will do well-enough to end it in 5 seasons as the producers are hoping for.

In the meantime, “24″ is getting old. For the third straight week “24″ lost the first place in the 9 PM timeslot ratings to “Heroes”! It seems no one was expecting this new show, “Heroes”, to perform so well. Now FOX is considering putting “24″ on the 8 PM timeslot, or we might see the once very popular show slipping dangerously. And FOX would not want this to happen, given that they paid Sutherland 30 million dollars for the last 3 seasons already!

Update: Apparently, the “Lost” producers have given up a major easter egg: it might be that the whole story has to do with black holes and time warp. It might be another dimension that the island exists on. This would explain why they left Michael to go off with the boat (he has nowhere to go really), why Desmond could not escape the island even if he had a faster boat, and why boats or planes from different places of the world have crashed there in weird places. Additionally, the hatches might indeed be “saving the world” by using machines that bring balance to the black hole so that it doesn’t “eat” our whole planet. During the implosion of the hatch a temporary instability was created, that’s why we saw the two guys in Antartica getting a reading out of this instability. Initially, employees of Dharma could get in and out of this parallel universe, but as Mr Friendly said, since the “sky turned purple” they lost contact with the outside world.

I think it all comes to place now.

I remembered the days when I was a young teenager today. Back then, there was only a single music store in my little town, selling LPs and cassettes. However, no one I knew had a vinyl player in my town in the late ’80s. The guy was living off selling cassettes mostly, cassettes that he had recorded himself from the LPs he couldn’t sell. Yes, he had some authentic cassettes in store to sell too, but these cost 2,000 to 3,000 drachmas at the time, while an unofficial, recorded cassette would cost about 500 drachmas. The choice was clear for all of us as who simply could not afford the official prices at the time “for something as useless as entertainment” (my mom, TM). Eventually, his business went under in the early ’90s, the guy could not make a serious buck, not even by pirating — and he had no other commercial competition in the area.

I bet that if there was a machine that would be able to replicate hardware (just like on Star Trek), people would just trade “programs” that allow them to replicate expensive furniture or high-fashion clothes, food or even simple machines.

My point is that if something can be replicated in one way or another, it will be. Piracy is not restricted to software/songs/ebooks and other non-materialistic goods. People just don’t want to spend money to acquire things, they prefer the freebies. But the market would collapse if everything was “free”.

You see, what is the incentive to spend years to become a scientist or an anti-viral biologist if your stomach is always full and your house full of useless replicated things? There simply isn’t any. People would stop working, would stop learning, would stop worrying about ends meet. The creation of the “market place” is what kickstarted our civilization 6,000 years ago and the demise of it will be the death of our civilization.

The Star Trek universe where “there is no money anymore” and everything is replicateable, simply does not work. Just like communism, it looks good on paper, but it doesn’t work in practice. People are more lazy and uninterested to learn universe’s mysteries than Picard is. YMMV, of course, but there are many rich kids today who simply “do nothing” with their lives. The same would happen with the population at large if they had everything in their plate instantaneously.

This does not mean that RIAA/MPAA/Oil-Tycoons don’t have enough money to spare some piracy (or sponsored official free copies) for the poor people. As everything in life, it’s all about balance. I think the solution here are more broad fair use laws (including less restrictive DRM, no encryption & regions encoding) and possibly also putting a cap on how much these corporations can abuse the system and the citizens.