Carter had a plan all along, even if there was no guarantee of life for The X-Files beyond the season 10.
“You have to play a long game, but at the same time, when you do these cliffhangers, you suggest that it could also be the end of something,” Carter tells Den of Geek. “So basically we do what we've always done. We're imagining that these characters have a life lived out in real time. With the show as it ages they age too, and that they certainly could have a life beyond any particular season.”
“When I wrote the season finale, I prudently imagined what the answer would be to the questions we set up,” he says. “So coming back, I really just got to do what I had anticipated and wanted to do. But as is always the case with the show and the mythology episodes, there is a reset.”
In the first-look X-Files Season 11 images we see Mulder comforting Scully, who lies in a hospital bed.
“The audience has traditionally gone with it, which is to go with a kind of tonal shift for the show,” he says. “So we're anticipating that they'll go with us as they did for nine years and in the tenth season in 2016.”
On Darin Morgan’s episode, Carter says it's “so idiosyncratic and so smart” and “pokes fun at the show as he renders it in a loving way as well.”
Darin’s brother, X-Files producer and writer Glen Morgan tells Den of Geek that one of his episodes is a throwback.
“I looked at it like The X-Files does North by Northwest,” Morgan says. He’s referencing Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller, in which a New York advertising executive is mistaken for a government agent by foreign spies, and is pursued across the country. “It’s not a monster-of-the-week, it’s more like a Mulder and Scully on the run type thing.”
Many fans will have high expectations for Carter to create a satisfying explanation for the mythology questions that remain unanswered.
“We could easily just do sequels of popular episodes that played before,” he says. “I hope that [season 11] does what we did last time, which is that we're not resting on our laurels, that we are doing original material, that we are taking chances and risks.”