Regular-schedule blogging commences tomorrow. But while I was making personal resolutions, I thought of a couple of cultural ones I want to take care of, too.

1. Get over my anxiety about getting stuck on levels and finish playing Portal.

2. Film school: lots of Kurosawa. Lots of Truffaut.

3. Catch up on or finish: Sons of Anarchy, Mad Men, Cheers, The X-Files, Enlightened, Dexter, How I Met Your Mother, Misfits.

4. See John Lithgow in The Columnist and Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Death of a Salesman,” “Chinese Art in the Age of Revolution” and “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition” at the Metropolitan Museum, “Strange Interlude” at the Shakespeare Theater Company, “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980″ and “Zarina” at the Hammer Museum.

5. Read: a lot of Judge Dredd. Barchester Towers. Play It As It Lays. Joseph Lelyveld on Gandhi. Manning Marable on Malcolm X. Swamplandia.

What’s everyone else working on?

Now that I’m charging through the first season of The X-Files, I’m finding that I can’t help but compare that show’s FBI doctor who did her residency in forensic medicine, Special Agent Dana Scully, with everybody’s favorite federally-employed forensic anthropologist, Temperance Brennan. They’re both fascinating — and at the beginning of each show, single — female scientists who go by their last names and with partners who can be more spiritual than rational. And it’s interesting to see how each show handles a very smart woman who’s in conflict both with an institutionalized bureaucracy and a competing worldview. So, this far in my viewing, how do Scully and Bones stack up?

Style

Scully may be the only woman in the universe who can make a ’90s pantsuit look good. Perfectly coiffed and preternaturally composed (Gillian Anderson was just 24 when she got the role), if Scully’s hair goes up, as it does when she’s investigating a creepy Arctic emotion-manipulating tapeworm, or her clothes get mussed, as they do on her first case with Mulder, you know something serious is going down. Rocks pretty seriously ’90s lace on a date she’s set up on. Her apartment, at least what we’ve seen of it, tends towards minimalist and has an enormous bathroom. Brennan, by contrast, opts for jeans and blazers, accented with funky jewelry she picks up on her world travels. Lots of smokey eye makeup, too. And lab coats. Scully may have to deal with weird things, but Brennan has to handle grosser ones. Her apartment is similarly full of artifacts from her travels, one of which her father used to murder a corrupt FBI agent; tribal music; and a refrigerator that’s occasionally rigged to explode.

Partners

Man, is Fox Mulder annoying. A conspiracy theorist since the disappearance of his sister during their childhood, Mulder’s perpetually in trouble with authority, hectors Scully to question her assumptions when he isn’t turning on the charm — and frustratingly, is almost always right. The show, at least what I’ve seen of it so far, seems like it might be better if he was wrong sometimes. It’s more interesting if the road to the truth is genuinely hidden, and if it takes some work to find it. And if there’s some actual tension between Mulder’s gonzo tendency to sneak onto crash sites, commission computer viruses, and sleep in alleys, and Scully’s tendency towards straightforward investigation. But despite the fact that he’s kind of irritating, I get the early sexual tension. That scene in the pilot where Scully has Mulder check her for alien probes that turn out to be mosquito bites? Total sparks-flying moment.

Seeley Booth, by contrast, believes in something he can’t prove, one way or another: God. But this hunky FBI agent’s quarrel with his partner isn’t really about the existence of another world. It’s about whether she’s cutting herself off from certain experiences. Over the course of the show, as Brennan and Booth grow closer together, she becomes more open to the idea that everyone has their own way to grace, and he learns that the way she sees the world is miraculous even if it’s not divine. And he learns more respect for scientific inquiry, while she becomes more open about her empathy for victims. Also, they’re going to have what one assumes will be a pretty adorable kid. That’s not an alien implant.
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I’m working my way through the first season of The X-Files right now, and one of the things that strikes me most about the early episodes of the show is how much trouble it has figuring out how the cases are going to work, and whether they’re going to seem more like science, or like magic.

Take the first-season episode “Squeeze.” If Buffy the Vampire Slayer wasn’t four years in the future, I’d say the main creature is a straight steal from Buffy. He’s a humanoid who is really good at squeezing through small spaces, hibernates in Hellmouth-y conditions most of the time, and has emerged because (among other things), he really wants to eat Scully’s liver. He’s even got yellowish eyes, like Buffy’s vampires when they get with the crinkly faces and the biting. Other than his hibernation, there’s no real scientific design, or principal to be explored. He’s just profoundly unsettling and creepy. Of course, that’s always essentially going to be the case: this stuff isn’t real, so the faux-science is always going to have a tinge of magic to it.

But I think the show, at least what I’ve seen of it so far, is much better when it at least makes a gesture towards actual science — and actual thought experiments. Take the episode “Ice.” I don’t actually believe that worms from another age are going to mess with a bunch of chemicals in my head and cause me to go nuts on my coworkers. But the episode actually has an idea, namely, what happens to people working together in isolated, stressful conditions? What would it be like to have serious and inexplicable medical problems far away from anyone who could actually help you — which, as we know, can be a real problem? By making a gesture to actual science and actually plausible situation, the show is a lot scarier and more unsettling.

My ultimate boss, Center for American Progress President John Podesta, is a deeply devoted X-Files fan, so it’s the official ThinkProgress position that we’re pretty excited about the show ABC just bought from Iron Man director Jon Favreau, Star Trek writer Roberto Orci, actor Seth Green, and Michael Dougherty. Called Ex-Comm, it follows a newly-inaugurated president and his administration who get into office only to find out there’s a whole other set of issues they have to deal with than the ones they campaigned on: paranormal threats.

I like the idea of a counterpoint to the X-Files* vision of a shadow government, not least because it would be decently hard to hide a giant Defense Department warehouse and operations of that magnitude without making some Inspector General extremely suspicious and cranky, and you can’t just keep killing or converting those guys forever. Where X-Files was a show about government’s power to conceal and contain operations, Ex-Comm could be about the capacity of the government. The presidency is already a giant job, and the existence of aliens or other paranormal phenomena wouldn’t just add an extent foreign policy threat. It implicates scientific knowledge and research, diplomacy, cross-species ethics, cultural exchange, and, presumably, the economy. Managing all those implications while maintaining the public facade that everything is fine would be a huge strain, and a huge amount of work for both the president and multiple Cabinet departments. Seeing that argued out from multiple dimensions, rather than as the subject of a two-way antagonism, would be completely fascinating.

Also, I nominate a post-Breaking Bad Bryan Cranston to play a Podesta-like chief of staff.

*I should note that I watched The X-Files only very sporadically, though my cousin once wrote me the world’s awesomest pre-Wiki guide to the show.