by Marisa Guthrie, November 2000

The truth is, ``The X-Files'' needs David Duchovny. Last season, Duchovny's Agent Mulder was presumably abducted by aliens. Gillian Anderson's Agent Scully revealed that although she was thought to be infertile - the result of experiments performed on her by the government, or perhaps aliens - she is, in fact, pregnant.

In this season's opening episode, Sunday at 9 p.m. on WFXT-TV (Ch. 25), Scully and Assistant Director Skinner search for her missing partner. But first Scully meets and takes an immediate dislike to the man who will become her new partner, John Doggett, who heads the FBI task force searching for Mulder.

All this, just so that Duchovny can pursue a movie career.

When series creator Chris Carter wrote last season's cliffhanger finale, Duchovny was not signed for an eighth season. So Mulder had to be abducted by aliens.

Duchovny's eleventh-hour deal to return to the show this season calls for him to appear in about half of the season's episodes. And Duchovny does indeed appear in Sunday's opener, ``Within.'' He's aboard a spaceship, chained to a crude stone chair. Clamps grip his face, distorting it into a hallucinatory mask while mechanical drills slice into him. Like a modern day Prometheus, he's tortured for daring to uncover the truth about alien life forms.

Enter Robert Patrick as Agent John Doggett. The mercurial terminator in 1991's ``T2: Judgment Day,'' Patrick got a much-needed career boost when David Chase cast him in ``The Sopranos'' as a family man ruined by his gambling addiction.

Doggett is a refugee from the NYPD, and his ``Just the facts, ma'am'' MO belies a pugnacious streak that Scully quickly quells by throwing a glass of water in his face. Carter dreamed up Doggett to provide Scully with a foil and give the show balance and cohesion in the absence of Mulder. (Doggettis named for Jerry Doggett, Vin Scully's former co-announcer on the Dodgers baseball games, get it?) Imagine, a conspiracy theorists' cult hit rescued from cancellation by a degenerate gambler from ``The Sopranos.''

Carter has gone to great lengths to keep Doggett from turning into Scully and Scully into Mulder. He doesn't always succeed, especially when Scully says, ``They don't want the truth. You give them the truth and they'll hang you with it.''

And by next week, even Doggett begins to sound like Mulder. When his FBI superior tells him his report on the investigation into Mulder's disappearance reads like ``a piece of pot-boil science fiction,'' Doggett responds, ``You mean it reads like an X-file.''

Carter has given Doggett hints of being a man with a past. And Anderson has demonstrated that she is quite capable of heavy lifting. But the new partners can't match the hard-wrought chemistry between Mulder and Scully, at least not yet. If they ever do, Duchovny could lose the one movie gig that's a sure thing, ``The X-Files'' big-screen franchise.