IDW’s Seasons 10 and 11, despite initially being canonical, ended up being an interesting “what if” story when Chris Carter changed his mind and wrote a new story for TV. The one-shot comic “X-Files: Deviations” (March) is an alternate-universe story right from the get-go. In the spirit of Marvel’s “What If?” and Dark Horse’s “Star Wars Infinities” titles, the “Deviations” series tells “what if” stories in the worlds of “X-Files,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Ghostbusters,” “Transformers” and “G.I. Joe.”
Any time a comic company launches a gimmicky concept, be wary (see also 2014’s “X-Files: Conspiracy”). That advice rings prescient with “X-Files: Deviations,” subtitled “Time and Being.” The premise is that instead of Samantha Mulder getting abducted by aliens, Fox Mulder gets abducted. OK, fair enough. But rather than seeing over the course of 24 pages the drastic ways the world changes, writer Amy Chu – seemingly not engaged with this premise at all – imagines that Samantha takes the exact same path to becoming an X-Files agent.
The final-panel twist, such as it is, is that Fox Mulder is in league with the Cigarette-Smoking Man, who seemed to have raised Fox as a son. He indulges Fox by letting him visit the now-abandoned house he grew up in, but chastises him for nearly being spotted by Sam and Scully, who are also at the house as part of Sam’s obsession with her brother’s disappearance. Since Fox isn’t revealed until the final panel, a reader gets no insight into how Mulder turns out different having been raised by the CSM.
The CSM looking over Fox is somewhat similar to the real story, wherein the Syndicate grew some Samantha clones. The CSM tried to pass off a Samantha clone (Megan Leitch, whose likeness is used in “Deviations”) as Mulder’s sister. Possibly, in the real timeline, the Syndicate would’ve looked after Samantha after the aliens were done with her, but she was abducted (by a human this time) and murdered while still a child, as we found out in Season 7’s “Closure.”
OK, so in what ways is the Sam-Scully partnership different? Well, at one point the two female agents are nearly run off the road by a young man inquiring if they’re up for a threesome. That’s different from what Fox and Dana would encounter. But that’s about it. It’s almost stunning how much this comic fails to deviate from the original narrative.
The only reason to pick up “Deviations,” then, is for the mild visual kick of seeing Samantha play out the beats of the classic “No one down here but the FBI’s most unwanted” scene, complete with pencils stuck in the office ceiling. (See, I told you it was the EXACT same path.)
If this were merely Issue 1 of an “X-Files: Deviations” miniseries, I’d say it’s off to a decent start, although I’d hope more inspiration would strike in later issues. But it was only ever intended to be one issue, so I would’ve liked a lot more deviation from the familiar story.
