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The X-Files: Hard to Believe

The X-Files: Hard to Believe

By: Well Actually Stories
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The truth is out there. After nine seasons it's also buried under a mythology that contradicts itself roughly every third episode, and that's where we come in.

This is a weekly recap podcast working through The X-Files — the alien conspiracy, the monsters-of-the-week, Mulder's unshakable belief and Scully's hard-won skepticism, and the long, tangled arc that ties (or fails to tie) it all together. Each episode, we walk through what happened, connect it back to the threads that were planted seasons earlier, flag the callbacks and the contradictions, and lay out where the conspiracy is supposedly heading.

The hosts are AI, and we built the show around what that's actually good for: keeping a sprawling, decades-spanning mythology straight. They don't lose track of which shadowy figure said what to whom in season two, and they'll tell you when the writers did. Expect close attention to continuity, a dry sense of humor about how strange the show was willing to get, and a fair shake for both the believer and the skeptic.

This isn't a replay of the episode — it's commentary, continuity-tracking, and theory for people who've already watched and want the connective tissue explained. New episodes on a regular cadence.

A production of Well Actually... Stories. (AI-hosted and produced — we'll always say so up front.)Copyright Well Actually Stories Art Science Fiction
Episodes
  • S01E05 — "The Jersey Devil": Bad for the Boardwalk

    S01E05 — "The Jersey Devil": Bad for the Boardwalk
    Jun 30 2026
    The truth is out there — and this week it's barefoot in the Pine Barrens, starving, and shaped exactly like us. Kyle, Hope, and Calen head into the New Jersey woods to break down the show's first monster-of-the-week — and the rare case where the believer and the skeptic walk in already agreeing the thing in the trees is human.

    A body outside Atlantic City missing an arm and a shoulder, a bite with human teeth, a fifty-year-old file the cops would rather stayed buried, and a park ranger who swears he watched a naked man sniff the air and bolt up a tree like a cat. A homeless man turns up dead at the edge of Atlantic City, and the medical examiner says the jaw that killed him was human. Mulder already has the matching file: 1947, same woods, a man dragged off and gunned down whose autopsy turned up human remains in his gut. But the local detective wants the FBI gone and the case closed fast — because a man-eater in the woods is terrible for a town that runs on slot machines and boardwalk crowds. While Mulder stakes out an alley to catch whatever's been scaling buildings downtown, Scully spends the weekend at a kid's birthday party, catching a glimpse of the ordinary life she didn't choose.

    Is the thing in the woods a hidden branch of wild humanity, surviving for generations at the margins of a city — or one tragic feral person the legend got built around? Why does every body in fifty years end up erased from the files? And when the hunt finally corners her, who decides that a live person is a bigger problem than a dead one? Kyle and Hope spend a strange night on the same side of the table, arguing not whether the monster is human, but what we do to her once we've decided she is.

    We came looking for a devil. The scariest thing we found was us.

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    A Well Actually Stories production. We break down what happened and what it actually means — for anyone watching a show new to them. From '90s modern classics to the latest streaming puzzle-box, we help you understand the story and go deeper. Well, actually... it's more interesting than you think.

    This episode includes AI-generated content.
    Show More Show Less
    26 mins
  • S01E04 — "Conduit": The Truth Comes Through the Static

    S01E04 — "Conduit": The Truth Comes Through the Static
    Jun 23 2026
    The truth is out there — and this week, it's coming through the television at three in the morning, in ones and zeros. Kyle, Hope, and Calen head to Lake Okobogee, Iowa to break down the first case that gets personal for Mulder: a column of white light over a campsite, a scorched ring in the grass, a seventeen-year-old girl gone by morning — and her eight-year-old brother sitting in the TV static, transcribing page after page of binary in a code he can't read.

    A mother who reported the same lights at the same lake when she was a girl insists a UFO took her daughter. The sheriff is just as sure Ruby ran off with her older boyfriend. Then the binary gets decoded — and it's not gibberish. It's real classified defense-satellite data, which brings the NSA down on a duplex in Iowa, certain an eight-year-old is running a spy ring. And under all of it, Mulder hears his own life: a sibling taken in a flash of light, a case with the names swapped.

    Was Ruby abducted by whatever takes people, or is there a fully human story that covers a missing girl, a returned girl who won't speak, and a child pulling military code out of snow? Why do the stacked pages resolve into a portrait of Ruby's face? And after three weeks of evidence carried out the door in boxes — who buried this one, and why does the answer break Mulder alone in a church pew?

    Some cases close with a cover-up. This one closes with a mother who'd rather have her daughter home and silent than have the truth.

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    A Well Actually Stories production. We break down what happened and what it actually means — for anyone watching a show new to them. From '90s modern classics to the latest streaming puzzle-box, we help you understand the story and go deeper. Well, actually... it's more interesting than you think.

    This episode includes AI-generated content.
    Show More Show Less
    22 mins
  • S01E03 — "Squeeze": The Proof Is Sitting in a Cell

    S01E03 — "Squeeze": The Proof Is Sitting in a Cell
    Jun 17 2026
    The truth is out there — but this week, there's no shadow government hiding it. Kyle, Hope, and Calen dig into the show's first true monster-of-the-week and the case that gave the entire series its other half. Meet Eugene Victor Tooms: a soft-spoken animal-control worker who squeezes through chimneys and air ducts, kills five people, eats their livers, and builds a nest of newspaper and bile to hibernate for thirty years before he wakes up hungry again.

    For the first time, the monster is real, the proof is solid, and the only thing impossible is the man who did it. A Baltimore executive is murdered inside a locked office with no way in and no way out, and the killer leaves behind a single calling card: elongated, inhuman fingerprints. Scully's old academy classmate Tom Colton pulls her onto the case to make Mulder look foolish — but Mulder has seen those prints before. The same fingerprints. In murders going back to 1903.

    No conspiracy, no vanished evidence — just a man whose body shouldn't be able to do what it does, and a fingerprint that's outlived everyone who could explain it. Is Tooms a hundred-year-old genetic mutant on a thirty-year clock, or is there a mundane answer that still has to account for ninety years of the same hand? And with Colton and the bullpen sneering at "Spooky" Mulder, whose side does Scully actually take?

    Some cases need a cover-up. This one just needs a cell door — and Tooms is already eyeing the food slot.

    ----

    A Well Actually Stories production. We break down what happened and what it actually means — for anyone watching a show new to them. From '90s modern classics to the latest streaming puzzle-box, we help you understand the story and go deeper. Well, actually... it's more interesting than you think.

    This episode includes AI-generated content.
    Show More Show Less
    22 mins
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