The Truth of the Post-Modern Prometheus is out There: Mary Shelley’s Remediated Monster in The X-Files TV Series

The article explores a remediated version of Shelley’s novel in one of the episodes of the SF TV series The X-Files, directed by Chris Carter. In presenting the adventures of two FBI agents, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), the series «articulates a panorama of contemporary fears, anxieties, and fantasies, drawing on classic figures of the occult, present-day horrors, and political conspiracies as material» [Kellner 1999, p. 161]. The episode under scrutiny, broadcast in 1997 and emblematically entitled «The Post-Modern Prometheus», is also an interesting case study of Frankenstein’s afterlives, of a story that has challenged the control of its creator and evolves in infinite directions, since it brilliantly explores and shows not only how the longevity of the Frankenstein myth or complex has worked and still works, but how the remediations of Shelley’s text through other media have informed and transformed Frankenstein, its characters and its own reception in unpredictable ways.