About 13 years after "The X-Files" went off the air, the series is back on Fox.
It reunites agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) for an adventure that promises to both honor the shows roots and redefine them.
"It's a re-entry into a series that hasn't been on the air for 13 years. I think you needed to get back into the characters' lives, their quest, where they are, where their relationship is and where their professional lives are," Carter said of the series return.
The show will have to do all that in just six episodes, which will consist of two "mythology" episodes, which are part of the show's through-line story, and four "one-off" episodes that could stand alone.
"The signature of the show was that we would do a mythology episode, then you could do a monster-of-the-week episode and go right back to the mythology episode and it worked," Carter said. "In this case, there are only six episodes so we had to do it in a shorter arc."
Although there's a lot of questions to be answered on "The X-Files," we do know something about what's coming up.
Here are six things we know about the upcoming "X-Files" return:
(Needless to say, there are spoilers for ahead.)
SEE ALSO: The new 'X-Files' will take on a notorious 9/11 conspiracy theory
More: The 20 most exciting TV shows of 2016
Joel McHale's character will help to place Mulder and Scully on a direct path to answers (and then more questions)
Joel McHale's character, a conservative web-series host named Tad O'Malley, will have great influence on Mulder and Scully. In fact, he will help them discover that they have been chasing the wrong enemy all these years.
"It takes a big right turn for the mythology of the show and it puts it into a contemporary context that you couldn’t have gotten to without the 12 to 13 years in between the time we went off the air and now," Carter told Business Insider after the TCA panel. "It’s of its time and obviously you couldn’t have done this in 2003."
The story relies heavily on conspiracy theories.
Chris Carter feels we're living in the scariest time of our lives and used that feeling to write this season.
“We’re living in a time where there’s a tremendous amount of distrust toward authority, the government, even the media,” he noted. “I’ve cherry-picked some of the things that are frightening to me and if even one of them comes true, it’ll be a very bad thing for America… It’s an interesting time to be shining lights into the darkness.”
The Lone Gunmen will be back (kind of).
The Lone Gunmen, which was the basis of a failed "X-Files" spinoff, will make a cameo 0n the upcoming season -- even though they died on the show's ninth season.
"The way that you see them return will explain itself. We don't just bring them back as live characters. They are back in a completely different way. They are actually back in a fantasy," Carter revealed.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider