There hasn't been a new episode of The X-Files since the Season 7 finale “Requiem,” way back in May of 2000. That’s 16 years without Mulder and Scully, unless you count The X-Files Season 8, The X-Files Season 9, and 2008’s X-Files movie, I Want To Believe. But other than alllllll that, it’s been nearly 16 years since flashlight beams, alien silhouettes, 90’s cellphones, and labyrinthine conspiracies have united to bring us one of the most definitive and distinctive thriller experiences the medium of television has ever concocted. The X-Files 2016 miniseries is finally here, but is its first episode, “My Struggle,” a TV revelation on par with extraterrestrial first contact, or just another chupacabra snipe hunt?

'The X-Files' 2016 Premiere Episode "My Struggle" Recap

The new X-Files opens with Mulder rattling off real-world arguments for the reality of alien visitation, citing a number of real-life incidents:

Kenneth Arnold - The pilot who spotted nine mysterious craft flying around Mt. Rainier in 1947, opening the modern UFO era.

Roswell - You remember this one, right? The Air Force claims a Project Mogul balloon designed to spy on the Soviets caused the most famous UFO crash.

Levelland - Over a dozen people saw strange lights in the sky and experienced odd electrical phenomenon. Regarded by the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book research as caused by ball lightning.

1967 Malstrom Air Force Base - According to several on-duty members of the military, UFO visitations coincided with mechanical failures at a nuclear missile silo.

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell - Did an astronaut “cite secret studies on extraterrestrial materials and bodies” as Mulder claims? Yes, though not based on any personal experiences.

President Gerald Ford - Did a US president “validate the UFO phenomenon in official government memoranda”? Yeah, but not while president.

Obama on UFO and Area 51 Disclosure - “The aliens won’t let it happen,” Obama told Jimmy Kimmel.

So right off the bat our new X-Files is placing itself in a real-world milieu, insisting that Mulder’s conspiracism is a natural extension of events in our own world. However, this being The X-Files, things quickly take a turn for the more alien and we are shown a 1940s alien crash from which our government took alien technology.

Back again in the modern day, Mulder and Scully no longer work for the FBI. Scully helps reattach ears to kids (it’s a long story), while Mulder sits around and delivers paranoid monologues to an imaginary camera. They are reunited by new character Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale), who’s an Alex Jones in a fictional, topsy-turvy world in desperate need of an Alex Jones. O’Malley—who ties in Second Amendment dumbassery, 9/11 Trutherism, and the Roswell crash into an alien-tinged riff on modern Internet conspiracies—promises big truths, and Mulder and Scully are thrown back into the fire together.

O’Malley reintroduces Mulder and Scully to Sveta (Annet Mahendru), an abductee who Mulder had previously interviewed for the X-Files. While Scully studies Sveta’s DNA in search of alien-human hybridity, Mulder and O’Malley go to check out powerful and indisputable evidence that, as per usual, Scully doesn’t get to see.

In “My Struggle,” this first episode in the 2016 X-Files miniseries, this indisputable evidence comes in the form of an “alien” craft. Tad brings Mulder to a secret test site, where alien technology (including “Element 150”) is applied to a manmade ship decked out with zero point energy drives and a cloaking device.

After getting a look at the manmade ship and speaking with Sveta, Mulder has a “new” theory that will drive the updated X-Files miniseries continuity. Mulder immediately swallows this new theory, abandoning nearly every vestige of little green men and extraterrestrial craft. Mulder is suddenly convinced that all of the abductions, the UFOs, the bright lights, and the High Weirdness was perpetrated by the government.

There are aliens sure, but the conspiracy is not theirs, instead belonging to “a venal conspiracy of men against humanity.”

If you watched the original X-Files this sounds suspiciously like what Scully has been saying for 23 years, but Mulder treats it like revelation, running around to tell Scully and Skinner. This is the weakest portion of this first new X-Files episode, since the plot requires Scully to act inexplicably hostile to a theory basically cribbed from her in the first place.

The premiere of the 2016 X-Files miniseries culminates with an immense and impressive summary of Mulder’s new theory. Not only does it explain the original alien visitations, but it also enfolds more true-life cases like the Aztec, NM UFO crash of 1948.

But things get really scary when O’Malley jumps in, essentially folding every bit of right-wing militia paranoia into the grand theory. This new X-Files conspiracy feels more real, but also more fundamentally a product of politicized fears, with O’Malley’s material essentially ripped straight from the 90s Ur-conspiracy bible, Behold a Pale Horse.

Of course, this being The X-Files, all the good evidence is quickly destroyed. The government discredits O’Malley, destroys the experimental craft, and kills Sveta (or did aliens do it?). We are left with The Smoking Man being informed that Skinner has reopened the X-Files.

New episodes of The X-Files 2016 miniseries continue tomorrow with “Founder’s Mutation.”