review

In times of confusion you can often rely on a title for assistance. Last night's Peak Practice (ITV), for example, was called "Holding it Together", which usefully underlined the episode's basic theme - Dr Will Preston's battle to save his medical practice. The Brittas Empire (BBC1) returned with "Back with a Bang", a little unimaginative perhaps, but a fair account of an episode which concluded with a large explosion. And the subtitle for the last of the current series of The X-Files (BBC1) was equally helpful. It read " 'Aang 'hoote".

There's no question that the The X-Files is ahoote, a fact that even the makers seem slyly to concede. In the opening scene a hacker called Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman (identified by solemn documentary-style captions) was seen to be reading The 50 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, a neat joke about the appetites that feed on this eerily minimal thriller (It was the aliens that did it, the government what covered it up). Mulder's office, a clutter of paranormal detritus which testifies to his outsider status, includes a poster with a large picture of a UFO and the legend "I want to believe", a touchingly naked cry of need. There are almost certainly devoted viewers of the X-Files who believe that it is being used to leak unpalatable fact into the public domain in the guise of fiction - a cynical double-bluff intended to muddy the pool of truth.

Last night's cliffhanger (the tension, with sadistic delay, will only be relieved next autumn, though junkies can buy parts two and three on video) delivered the Holy Grail into Mulder's hands - the secret government UFO files which, at a stroke, prove both the cover-up and the covered- up. This breach of security triggered one of those jolly multilingual telephone-call sequences beloved of Sixties spy thrillers - in which grim Italians ring grave Japanese men who then phone sombre Germans, a chain of urgent subtitles which ends as a troubled American replaces the receiver and says "Gentlemen - that was the telephone call I never wanted to get".

Unfortunately, the files have been encoded in Navajo and Mulder is looping out on hallucinogenic drugs being fed into his water supply. If you begin with a mind like Mulder's I would have thought hallucinogens would be redundant - but in the story they render him dangerously irritable. Indeed, he takes such a dim view of the murder of his father that he very nearly shoots the agent who did it. Scully intervenes and also, resourceful woman, finds a Navajo code-talker called Albert.

As a Native American, Albert is naturally possessed of an immemorial wisdom and formal diction ("secrets are like this," he says, turning a proud profile to the camera, "they push their way up through the sands of deception so men can know them"). He also knows where the bodies are buried - a boxcar stuffed with desiccated small Greys, into which Mulder descends with characteristic imperturbability. Cue the arrival of a helicopter full of special-ops soldiers who apparently cremate both the remains and our hero. The absence of coherence or consistency in the narrative will, as in any good conspiracy, do nothing to deter the faithful (Mulder, for example, is finally tracked down through his mobile phone, although earlier he has casually arranged his evasions on the very first phones a malign conspiracy would have bugged). For those who like their plots to involve plotters, nothing else comes close.

"He's been rebuilt. He's not flat anymore," said one of the leisure centre staff, during the laborious explanatory sequence at the beginning of The Brittas Empire. Unfortunately, this isn't true - he's thinner than ever, squashed lifeless by the absurdity of his resurrection. The last series showed signs of exhaustion, with the writers finding it increasingly difficult to trump the previous week's mayhem - but now there is an unshiftable whiff of the grave about the project. Chris Barrie is a wonderful comic actor but here he's one of the walking dead.