Well, finally! The X-Files is back, adding spooky class to Fox's duo of doom: the moody Millennium and the hell-fiery Brimstone. by Ken Tucker 

No one in television does "dark" like producer-writer Chris Carter, whose new seasons of The X-Files and Millennium must now share gloom and doominess with another blue-glow Fox show, Brimstone. ... 

The season premiere [of Millennium] was a dull workhorse that labored to unsort everything that had gone on during last season's enjoyable but often- incoherent flurry of mystico-apocalyptic boogie-woogie. But subsequent episodes have been better - the most consistently good run of Millenniums, in fact, ever. ... 

The LEAST awkward pair in current television - disgraced, transferred X-File agents Fox Mulder (DD) and Dana Scully (GA) - have survived this past summer's feature film expansion of their quest for alien bee pollen only to find themselves enmeshed in an even greater horror: backstabbing office politics. In the best joke of the opener (written by CC), M&S are even chastised for "some very questionable travel expenses." 

In the crackerjack sixth season premiere, the FBI's X-files division has been taken over by the anti-Mulder-and-Scully agent Spender (the gloriously stiff-necked Chris Owens) and the mysterious Fowley (the perenially pained-looking Mimi Rogers). The episode moves the series' ongoing conspiracy mishegoss along a satisfying bump or two, but finds fresh suspense in our heroes' career trajectories - why, they don't even report to Skinner (MP) anymore! 

True Files bliss is achieved, however, Nov. 22, as CC has written and directed a mindblower that he compares in a press release to The Wizard of Oz, but which I view as equal parts The Twilight Zone (time travel!) and Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (parallel subplots shift in real time, in single continuous takes - actually, a double-Rope trick!) All this, plus two full-on-the-lips smooches, but I'm not telling between whom. This episode, titled Triangle, tops CC's showcase effort last season, the Frankenstein trope The Post Modern Prometheus, for wit, daring, logic, and suspense. Be there or, like Mulder, be nowhere.