Where does the show go from here, I wonder? Fox has renewed it for another season, although Carter reportedly may only act as a consultant. Duchovny is out, so how does the show continue the happy family circle glimpsed in the finale? Gillian Anderson's contract obligates her to appear in every episode, but what is the definition of "appear"? Here's a prediction: Doggett and Reyes take over and do the skeptic vs. believer partner thing. Scully has a couple of scenes in each episode, like Steven Hill on "Law & Order," where she advises Doggett and Reyes in between Mommy and Me classes and feedings. Mulder comes back for a big sweeps cliffhanger where the baby gets kidnapped. And since nobody understands what the hell is going on with the alien-invasion replacement conspiracy anymore, Doggett and Reyes concentrate on stand-alone cases involving paranormal phenomena and freakish beasties.

Now, I don't mind Doggett and Reyes; Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish are appealing actors who have grown more confident carrying the show. It's just that "The X-Files" is not "The X-Files" without Mulder and Scully. "The X-Files" is a shell of a once-meaningful show, a zombie that walks among us and can't die. It's Billy Miles.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (May 22, WB)

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(One last warning: Stop reading if you live in the U.K. or someplace else where the "Buffy" season finale has not yet aired.)

When you think back over this past season, you realize it had to end like this. Buffy had been obsessed with death, emotionally shut down, worried that slaying had made her hard, unlovable and incapable of love. She forced Spike to tell her how he killed two Slayers in his past; a Slayer is easy pickings when she develops a death wish, he told her. Death came home in the haunting February episode "The Body," in which her mother's sudden passing left Buffy unable to tap the depths of her grief. To try and shake the fog of gloom around his student, Buffy's mentor Giles took her on a vision quest to conjure the first Slayer, who told Buffy that, despite her fears to the contrary, she is "full of love." She also told her that death was her "gift."

Buffy would puzzle over that pronouncement for the rest of the season. She also labored to protect her "little sister" Dawn -- aka "The Key," pure energy made human -- from Glory, a glamour-girl hellgod cast out of her own dimension and bent on ritually bleeding the Key in order to bring about an Armageddon that would allow her to slip back home. This ritual could only be stopped by stopping the Key's blood -- killing the Key. After Glory snatched Dawn, Giles warned Buffy that she might have to kill Dawn with her own hands, to stop the apocalypse. But he knew, and we knew, that Buffy would never do it.

In the final episode, "The Gift," Buffy and her motley Scoobys mounted a valiant attack on Glory's minions in a race to free Dawn, but they were a moment too late; the bleeding had begun. Dawn wanted to jump from the towering scaffold where she'd been taken for the ritual, to stop her blood -- her heart -- and thus end the destruction. But Buffy got that scary-calm "I know what my destiny is" look on her face, and you thought, "Uh-oh." She had put the puzzle together: Death is her gift; Dawn was made in the image of Buffy, from her flesh and blood; Buffy could sacrifice herself to save her sister, and save the world. But it wouldn't come to this, would it?

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