Are you paranoid enough?

It seems appropriate that “The X-Files” will soon be returning to our TV screens, even if only for a limited engagement.

If you believe your eyes, recently released production photos showing Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) back in action confirm the six-episode “miniseries event,” scheduled to air in January, is really happening. Before you know it, Mulder and Scully will be back to chasing ghosts and unraveling conspiracies.

When “The X-Files’ ” original run limped to an end in 2002, the war on terror was just beginning. The idea that the government might have surveillance programs capable of spying on the phone calls and emails of every American seemed like just another of Mulder’s wild conspiracy theories.

That was before WikiLeaks, before Chelsea Manning and, most importantly, before Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked documents detailing the NSA’s sweeping domestic surveillance agenda.

Reading journalist Glenn Greenwald’s account of the Snowden revelations, contained in Greenwald’s book “No Place to Hide,” is almost like getting caught up in an “X-Files” plot, only without the extraterrestrials. That there are no hints of extraterrestrial encounters in Snowden’s treasure-trove of incriminating NSA documents is probably a good indication that if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, it has better things to do than visit us.

“The X-Files” returns to a landscape where large-scale wrongdoing and coverups by secretive government agencies are pretty much accepted as a given.

It is a landscape eerily similar to that of the 1970s, when revelations of government misconduct, especially by intelligence and law enforcement agencies, forged a golden age of Hollywood thrillers.

If you weren’t paranoid, you weren’t paying attention. This was the age of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. It was also when the public first learned of COINTELPRO, an unwieldy acronym for Counter Intelligence Program. Via COINTELPRO the FBI waged a sometimes illegal campaign against domestic political organizations it deemed subversive — organizations both on the left and on the right. The FBI’s tactics involved infiltration, surveillance and, most worryingly, disinformation.

COINTELPRO came to light only when the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office, took more than 1,000 classified documents and turned them over to the media. It was the Snowden leaks but with analog technology.

As far as Hollywood was concerned, this landscape was fertile ground for a decade of political thrillers, from “The Parallax View” to “Three Days of the Condor.”

Now the ripped-from-the-headlines conspiracy thrillers are in bloom again. They sprout even among superhero movies, where “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” deals in secret governments within secret governments and spy networks that can be turned on innocent people with the flip of a switch.

It’s no surprise that Sydney Pollack’s “Three Days of the Condor” is in the early stages of being dusted off and updated for the 21st century by Skydance Productions, which is looking to adapt the story for television. Nor is it a surprise that “The X-Files” isn’t alone in bringing back the combustible mix of conspiracies and the otherworldly.

Netflix is prepping a series based on the “Montauk Project,” which is half science fiction and half urban legend, and takes in everything from secret experiments and time travel to aliens from space and Nikola Tesla. It’s an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to paranormal conspiracies. And the strangest thing about it is it’s set to star Generation X “it girl” Winona Ryder.

A true conspiracy theorist might well wonder if the Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex is churning out truly outlandish conspiracies just to make a buck off the public’s renewed interest or to make people more skeptical of the real conspiracies.

Culture Shock 10.17.13: Gillian Anderson rises to the challenge of 'The Fall'

Americans may be forgiven for thinking Gillian Anderson has kept a low profile since "The X-Files." Actually, she's kept busy, living and working in the United Kingdom, and picking up, through osmosis, a British accent that at least is more convincing than Madonna's.

Her gripping new five-episode BBC television drama, however, should have audiences on both sides of the pond taking notice.

In series 1 of "The Fall" (Netflix instant, DVD), Anderson stars as Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson, a member of the London Metropolitan Police sent to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to get a result in a murder case the locals can't close. As both an outsider and a woman of authority in a male-dominated field, Gibson arrives to a situation primed for tension.

The tension only ratchets up when she begins to suspect there is more to the unsolved murder than just one unsolved murder. There is a serial killer at large, honing his skills, developing his technique and preparing to strike again.

Unfortunately, she's right, and the audience knows who the killer is even if Gibson doesn't.

Paul Spector (an unnerving Jamie Dornan of "Once Upon a Time") is a family man and a grief counselor. He works with couples who have lost children. He also stalks and kills woman, and he's getting better at it.

Female avengers pitted against male serial killers are nothing new. The metaphor of men who literally objectify women is too easy to pass up. "The Silence of the Lambs" perfected the genre, which is feminist while also a target of criticism from feminists. It just goes to show, you can tell a feminist story yet get zero credit if you don't tell the "right kind" of feminist story.

In "The Fall," the heroine isn't a rookie like Clarice Starling of "Silence," but a veteran who has dealt with serial killers before. The power dynamic is different. Gibson, whom Anderson plays with world-weary confidence, has power, and the men around her don't, or they don't have as much.

As a pattern emerges among the killer's victims — young, attractive, up-and-coming professionals — Gibson deduces a motive. The killer is targeting women who have some measure of power and success, or at least more of it than he does. It's garden variety misogyny.

So far, little of that strays beyond the standard feminist critique of society's gender roles, but what makes "The Fall" interesting is where its sexual politics do diverge from the politically correct.

Gibson is completely comfortable with her sexuality and with using it, on occasion, to get what she wants. She has what British sociologist Catherine Hakim calls "erotic capital," and she knows how to spend it.

The day she arrives in Belfast, she picks up a fellow officer for a one night stand. Later, when the secret gets out, she confronts another officer about the double standard. No one thinks twice about a one night stand when the man is the instigator, she says. Then when told her fling is married, she responds she didn't know that and, in any case, that's his business, not hers.

For Gibson, embracing her own sexuality gives her a "male" outlook on sexual relations. Men are subject to her female gaze, and all is fair game. So, is that feminism or not?

All of this, however, is subtext for Gibson's pursuit of Spector, who at heart is an arrested adolescent who fancies himself beyond good and evil. It's a delusion that stands in stark contrast to the bleak landscape of Belfast, a working-class wasteland still not far removed from decades of sectarian religious conflict. Everyone there has seen too much, and everyone there, newcomer Gibson included, is compromised.

This is no paradise of Eden. This is the world after the Fall.

Culture Shock 05.27.10: Did 'Lost' get lost along the way?

If you haven't seen the conclusion of "Lost" yet, come back later. There are spoilers ahead.

So, was that the ending "Lost's" creators had in mind from the start?

Probably not, because it seemed a lot like an ending cobbled together during the final season to make up for most viewers having already guessed the original ending.

If you had "they're stuck in purgatory" in your office pool, you're a winner.

Well, almost. It turns out the "sideways timeline" introduced in season 6 was purgatory, while the Island was pre-purgatory, or maybe semi-purgatory, but definitely not just plain old purgatory, since that's what everyone had already guessed. Whatever the Island was, it made me glad that, unlike many of my friends, I hadn't invested a lot of time and emotion on "Lost."

On the list of TV shows with polarizing finales, "Lost" is going to rank pretty high, along with the likes of "Battlestar Galactica" and "The Sopranos," both of which had controversial endings I'll happily defend, after enough drinks.

If ABC's remake of "Life on Mars" had lasted more than one season, people would be arguing about its final episode, too. But nobody much cared about "Life on Mars." That's the difference. Viewers and critics alike really cared about "Lost" and "Battlestar Galactica" and "The Sopranos." And now some of them say they've been betrayed.

A common complaint about TV dramas with complex mythologies and storylines is the writers are just making things up as they go. That's how most TV shows are made, but for mythology-rich shows like "Lost," making it up as you go is a cardinal sin.

The major offender here is "The X-Files." Chris Carter clearly had no idea where his show was going, so in the end it's a miracle that all of the various conspiracy plotlines fit together as well as they did. If you have a couple of hours and a flow chart, you can see how all the threads converge.

The problem with "The X-Files" isn't that Carter had no grand plan and definite endgame. It's that the show stayed on the air too long. Most shows run out of steam around season 5 — for example, "House," which has been a disappointment all year. "The X-Files" should have ended with season 7. Instead, it limped along for two more pointless, mostly David Duchovny-free, years.

That's one thing "Lost's" staff writers got right. They decided to end with season 6. Besides, any longer and they would have had to explain how Hurley is the only person in history to gain weight — without resorting to cannibalism — while stranded on an island.

If I'm right that the Island was originally meant to be purgatory, then "Lost's" problem isn't making it up as you go but sticking too close to the original plan while pretending you're not.

Sticking with the plan has its own hazards. J. Michael Straczynski mapped out "Babylon 5" before the first episode aired. He even built in "trap doors" so he could make changes on the fly if an actor decided to leave. But he couldn't account for everything. He rushed season 4 to tie up loose ends in case the show didn't get its planned fifth season.

And when "Babylon 5" did get a fifth season, it mostly marked time until reaching its predestined conclusion.

So, if there's a lesson here, it's that you can have a master plan or you can make it up as you go. The risks are the same. Just don't end your TV series with anything involving purgatory.