Dean, belying his reputation for having a hot temper, gives a low-key reply: “I certainly see him as the son of God. I think whether I’m saved or not is not gonna be up to me.”

The bias Fineman’s question exuded is alarming. No doubt many Christian groups in America would like to ask Dean that question, and they’re entitled to. But Newsweek? To be sure, faith is a relevant campaign issue, as is the question of whether Dean or other Democrats can connect with Christian voters, particularly in the South. But Fineman didn’t merely ask if the Vermont doctor was religious; he phrased his question in a way to root out whether Dean subscribes to a particular kind of born-again Christianity. We’ve reached a new low when reporters are doing the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s work for him.

The interview continues with two more questions:

Fineman: “Do you have a favorite Bible passage or book or theologian?”

Dean: “I like the Book of Job.”

Fineman: “[Laughs.] Does it strike you more personally after this campaign?”

Dean: “I’m feeling a little more Job-like recently.”

So Dean, prompted by Fineman, concedes that the withering attacks upon his candidacy have made him feel more “Job-like.” Newsweek’s editors, instantly misquoting him, put the following headline on top of the article:

“Dean on the heat of battle, Osama bin Laden — and Jesus.” Then, printed in type that’s twice as large as the headline, the subhead: “‘I’m feeling like Job.’”

Readers who merely flip past the interview will see only “I’m feeling like Job,” which, taken by itself, could make Dean seem even more pompous and egocentric than Newsweek and other members of the mainstream media have already painted him to be.

Walters’ encounter with Blake — who is accused of killing his wife of less than a year on May 4, 2001, outside Vitello’s restaurant in Los Angeles — was, not surprisingly, a soapy spectacle that shed no real light upon the facts of the case. Blake appeared gaunt, though strangely tan. His hair is now completely white. Throughout the course of the interview, his face contorted into a variety of cartoonish expressions. (His eyes bulge from his deep and shaded sockets in an oddly fascinating way.)

He was at times piteous and thoroughly part of the spectacle, playing the role of reviled bogeyman and circus freak (crying out to Walters, “See, you think I’m a monster too!”). At other times he pulled back the screen in a knowing way on our culture and how it is feeding on him: “Jay Leno has got my blood running down his chin on television two or three nights a week and the people are laughing and enjoying it.”

Blake, the child actor who got started on “Little Rascals,” went on to star in the 1970s cop drama “Baretta” and ended up doing character roles, most notably in David Lynch’s 1997 “Lost Highway,” fiercely maintains his innocence.

I’d like to think I could watch a man talk and determine whether he is a murderer or capable of murder. But human beings are complex, people lie and the evidence on display during Blake’s interview was inconclusive. Sure, he rambled like a madman, cried, grew hostile, and sang a lullaby to his 2-year-old daughter, but what does that prove, other than what we’ve kind of known all along: That he’s a couple wrenches short of a toolbox?

Blake, whose lawyers have quit in protest more times than Anna Nicole Smith tried to give up painkillers, has a plausible theory for who murdered his late wife, Bonny Lee Bakley. He thinks that one of the lonely men she scammed during her lifelong career as a grifter may have seen her picture in a newspaper when her marriage to Blake was announced and, thirsting for revenge, traveled out to Los Angeles and stalked and killed her.

The problem is that two stuntmen who knew Blake from “Baretta” claim he approached them about murdering his wife. Of course the case is being run by the Los Angeles police, and it couldn’t be that hard for them to coerce a couple of witnesses in the name of justice, right? (Uh, just kidding, guys.)

No doubt Bonny Lee Bakley had a shady past. Police say she sent nude photos of herself to married men and scammed lonely hearts across the country using multiple aliases. By the time she met Blake, when she was in her 40s, she told him her goal was to become a celebrity or to marry one. (If only we’d found a reality TV series for her, this tragedy might have been averted!)

Why was he with this woman, anyway? She had “danger” stenciled across her forehead. The answer is depressing. Because, he claims, he was lonely, and she got pregnant. Blake became enamoured of the child that Bakley told him was his. Blake informed Walters that this child, Rose, who currently lives with Blake’s grown daughter (a professor of developmental psychology who says Blake is an unusual but good and caring father) was the only reason he was doing the interview: So that, years down the line, if Blake happens to die in jail, she will know that he was not the “bad man” the media has portrayed him to be.

On several occasions Blake turned toward the camera and spoke to his daughter. At one point, while tearfully relating how his unloving parents used to take away toys that had been gifted to him and hand them to his favored siblings, Blake told Rose that he swore “on your eyes that I’m telling you the truth.” If Rose does watch this interview years from now, it’s clear what she’ll be thinking: “Why don’t we swear on someone else’s eyes? That’s disgusting.”

Blake’s childhood, as he tells it, was harsh. He gravitated toward show business as a way to get the affection he never received from his cold and distant mother, whose attempts to terminate her pregnancy with him using a coat hanger were unsuccessful. She never touched him as a child, he says. His father was a “sadistic madman alcoholic” who locked Blake in a closet and forced him to eat on the floor.

When Blake met Bakley, he was in his late 60s. He had enough money to last him for the rest of his days, but he didn’t have much work and he had no “real life.” He would go to jazz clubs when he was feeling lonely and sometimes return home with an anonymous woman.

There is one thing certain about Robert Blake’s situation: He has raised the bar for the freaks and villains of future David Lynch movies. By contrast, Dennis Hopper, who made a memorable turn as an oxygen mask-huffing psycho in “Blue Velvet,” doesn’t make the cut. His ego is writing checks his body can’t cash.

Then there’s Blake. In his creepy and utterly disconcerting role in Lynch’s 1997 film “Lost Highway,” he turned his Mystery Man into one of Lynch’s most sinister characters, a guy who seems to be in two places at once, a sort of physical manifestation of the illness suffered by a messed up saxophonist who may or may not have killed his wife. And this was before we found out what a weirdo Blake is.

In a long and revealing 1997 interview with “Cinefantastique” magazine, Blake describes how he came up with his idea for the character, who appears as a “whole, weird fuckin’ Kabuki-lookin’ guy with ears (sticking out) and stuff”:

“I sort of knew what the Devil looked like; I knew what Fate looked like. I used to have this image of myself that would come to me sometimes. I’d go out to the desert and get involved in some strange, isolated kind of thing, and all of a sudden I would come to myself as this white, ghostly creature. I said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s my conscience talking to me.’”

The Mystery Man, who is basically evil incarnate, first appears to the protagonist, Fred (played by Bill Pullman), at a party. His face is painted a ghostly white, his lips are red, his eyes are dark with mascara, his hair is black and closely cropped. His eyebrows are plucked.

With an impish and malevolent smile playing across his face, the Mystery Man tells Fred that they met at his (Fred’s) house not long ago. When Fred does not remember, the Mystery Man prompts him by saying, “As a matter of fact, I’m there right now.”

Fred informs the stranger, “That’s fucking crazy, man.” So the Mystery Man hands Fred a cellphone and instructs him: “Call me. Dial your number. Go ahead.” And, of course, when Fred dials the number, the Mystery Man, while still standing there, answers the phone on the other end and proceeds to hold a dual conversation with a Fred who is (rightly) beginning to suspect that he’s losing his wits.

What’s the point, you ask?

It’s clear from his scene-stealing performance in “Lost Highway” and from his extensive commentary about his preparation for the role that Blake is in touch with some pretty dark forces. His whole résumé, in fact, and his reputation for being temperamental and difficult, speak to a man beset by a roiling unconscious. Does that mean he killed his wife? No. Does the fact that he’s an actor whose job is to look to dark places for inspiration and turn them into art mean that he’s innocent? No. What else can they do to Robert Blake? Give him a trial in which none of the jury members have seen this interview.

No, that didn’t really happen. But there were some cool moments. There was Edgar Nova, a sensitive young man with histrionic tendencies and an uncanny blind spot for the word “no.” Young Edgar — who by the look of it went off his meds about a week prior to his disastrous exhibition of off-key warbling at the Miami audition — informed judges Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson that he had dreamed of “American Idol” glory since “before I was born.”

“American Idol,” the reality television program in which young Americans audition in front of celebrity judges for a Draconian record contract and a chance to become the country’s next teen pop sensation, returned last night for a second season of humiliation and tone-deaf renditions of Mariah Carey tunes.

This year, the producers of the show tell us, there will be even more contestants willing to line up and camp out overnight for an opportunity to perform. And bad-guy judge Simon Cowell, the English bon mot manufacturer, will hold his tongue less and be even crueler to the participants who try his patience.

Of course, this year the contestants will have no one to blame but themselves when they receive their tongue lashings, since the show’s M.O. of ritual humiliation is out there for all to see.

That knowledge was no consolation to the viewer, however, watching the tears of young Cedric Hunt, a teenager who had traveled from Kansas to Austin, Texas, to try out. After he was excreted from the audition room back into the hall with a “just not good enough, dawg” from judge Randy Jackson, Cedric explained to cloying and annoying “Idol” host Ryan Seacrest that he was stranded in Austin without a ride home and feeling very much alone, since he had no friends or family with him.

Abdul tried to let Nathaniel, a gay black man with jeans cut to look like an evening gown and a thoroughgoing absence of melodic know-how, down easy. “Honey,” she started soothingly, “you sang off-key almost the entire song.” Her voice grew halting. “You don’t … hear that? You don’t hear that when you sing?” She turned to Cowell, becoming philosophical, as if Nathaniel had already sashayed out of the room. “I mean, because it’s interesting to me, at these auditions, I actually believe he doesn’t think that he sings … off-key.”

She’s on to something. The hallmark of the bad “Idol” performer tends to be an enormous chasm between the perception of his or her own talent and the reality so apparent to those unfortunate enough to listen. But there are those who have ability.

Heidi, 17, wowed the judges with her good looks and voice. “There’s an interesting thing going on over here at the moment,” Cowell observed, speaking about the American pop scene. “Who are the role models of tomorrow? Because, and I go back to Christina Aguilera, because she’s made the decision to appear as a complete slut as a role model. And you’re not [a slut],” he concluded, as Heidi pondered how best to appear gracious in return for such a glowing compliment.

Ultimately, no one would watch “American Idol” were it not for the insults the three judges dole out to the worst contestants. Not that the insults are even all that witty. Cowell’s best asset is his Britishness, without which his barbs would lose their potency. Still, he’s hardly an Oscar Wilde antihero. But if Algernon were on the panel? Now you’re talking comedy.

Cowell’s best line comes when a contestant whose wife is at the hospital delivering their child makes it to the next round (aka “Hollywood”) when Randy and Paula vote yes, overriding Simon’s negative assessment. “I’d call her ‘Lucky,’” Simon calls out, suggesting a name for the infant.

Despite the yin-yang of nasty put-downs and vapid hype, the show does serve one positive function: It dredges up freaks that otherwise would never come to the light of scientific inquiry. Much like neurologist Oliver Sacks, who toils at “the far borders of human experience” to bring us humanistic portraits of rare neurological and psychological cases, “American Idol” serves the world by showing us the breadth of our genetic diversity. And there are some strange mutations out there indeed.

In the end, one’s mind wanders back to that fledgling soul, Edgar Nova. O rara avis! Possessor of such an unspeakably poor, unwarranted Al Pacino impression! Whatever happened to him, one wonders, once his plot to score a second audition was foiled and he was escorted out of the building by security? We may never know, but one thing is clear: If you see him on the street, do not make eye contact, but hasten directly to the nearest safe haven and contact the police.

(The season premiere of “American Idol” continues Wednesday night at 8 p.m.)

But I’m too cruel to my comrade with the big glowing screen. Television is our friend. It is what we watch while pretending to listen to our loved ones. It is where the 30 percent of us who vote go to get information from trusted news professionals, until we remember that they’re a bunch of jabbering idiots and turn it off in disgust. Yes, truly was it written over and over on a haunted hotel’s walls by the patriarch of “The Simpsons”: “No TV and no beer make Homer go crazy.”

Television is so thoroughly ingrained in our daily lives it’s hard to get a handle on it in any objective way. The growth of TV has changed the way we think and perceive events. Many young writers’ styles are influenced by the medium, specifically the attention span and information processing habits it induces. At a recent literary event in San Francisco, Zadie Smith, author of the acclaimed novel “White Teeth,” joked that she instinctively incorporates ad breaks into her prose.

However, while TV certainly has a profound effect on our culture, let’s not get carried away. Upon winning the Emmy this fall for best supporting actor, John Spencer of “The West Wing” called series creator Aaron Sorkin “one of the great writers of all time.” So where would that put him, John? After Joyce and before Dostoevski?

Speaking of Dostoevski, did you see Jennifer Lopez reveal her engagement to “Sexiest Man Alive” Ben Affleck in an interview with Diane Sawyer on a November installment of ABC’s “Primetime Thursday”?

Unfortunately for America, Sawyer did not inquire into the scuttlebutt that J.Lo had a male assistant on the set of her recent music video, “Jenny From the Block,” squeeze her nipples so that television viewers would be able to see her aureolae more clearly through her mesh top while she grabbed her crotch.

We did learn this, however: J.Lo is no diva. She said so. And she seems to really, really like all this money she’s making.

One of the more interesting things in the land of television this holiday season was something that didn’t happen. Namely, gangsta-pimp rapper and XXX video producer Snoop Dogg’s appearance on the Muppets’ Christmas special. In the end NBC edited Snoop out of “It’s a Very Merry Muppets Christmas Movie.” Even though Snoop professes to have given up smoking dope. The marriage of children’s puppet shows and West Coast gangsta rap may be inevitable, but the world will have to wait at least another year.

In other end-of-year television news, Al Gore appeared on “Saturday Night Live,” an event that was designed to be the final phase of his mission to reinvent his image prior to declaring his intentions with respect to the 2004 presidential election. As it turned out, Gore had already decided not to run by the time the show went to air.

It’s too bad, because the new Al Gore was pretty appealing. He acquitted himself well on “SNL” (which so far has failed to plug the hole left by Will Ferrell’s departure). Gore was particularly effective as Willy Wonka’s brother Glenn, a fastidious accountant exasperated with Willy’s childish schemes: “I put up with a lot working here: Riding that insane psychedelic boat to my office every day! Having to step around piles and piles of Oompah Loompah dung!”

But we’re talking about the end of the year here. Let’s go back to the beginning.

The year of television 2002 began with the second thrilling Super Bowl in three years, in which the underdog New England Patriots kicked a field goal as time expired to defeat the St. Louis Rams. (In 2000 the Rams denied the Tennessee Titans a game-tying touchdown on the final play.)

That game also reminded us that television is the best medium for disseminating propaganda, as it served as the premiere for the Bush administration’s ad campaign claiming that anyone who purchases marijuana may be financing terrorists. I humbly submit that, rather than shifting blame for mass killing and a national security fiasco onto recreational pot smokers, the administration should maybe shut the fuck up and think about tracking down Osama bin Laden.

Disney/ABC/ESPN took over the National Basketball Association from NBC, which means we are finally rid of John Tesh’s aggravating theme song and gnatlike sideline reporter Jim Gray. Unfortunately, ABC has decided the hoops-watching public still needs to be poked with the long wooden stick of annoyance that is announcer Bill Walton.

Here’s what I’m concerned about heading into this year’s edition of the Masters golf tournament. And it’s not whether Augusta National Golf Club should admit women members. It’s whether these tournaments will hire crack teams of security guards to apprehend and savagely beat every cretin who bellows “Get in the hole!” every time a putt is struck.

In 2002 we bid adieu to “Ally McBeal” and agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully of “The X-Files.” Both these shows broke new ground before their creators ran them into it. (The ground.) I hadn’t seen “Ally” in eons when I witnessed a promo last year in which Ally gets caught bending down and sniffing the blue jeans-encased buttocks of a construction worker played by Jon Bon Jovi, because apparently she has a compulsion to smell men’s asses. I knew then I’d made the right decision.

While we’re talking about televised drama, “The Sopranos” just wrapped up a disappointing season of mostly boring episodes with a redeeming finale that contained a riveting portrayal of an exploding marriage. The acting remains superb. James Gandolfini eating pasta as Tony Soprano — head lowered like an ox, shoulders slouched — is as gloriously nuanced as Al Pacino dabbing his face with a towel as Michael Corleone. “The West Wing” is a well-written drama, featuring superb acting, that I never watch.

“Six Feet Under,” yet another feather in HBO’s cap, continues to raise the bar in the field of TV drama. “24″, the hit from last year that unfolds in “real time,” is into a second season. I’m not saying the plot is Byzantine, but this year Nina will turn out to be a quintuple agent.

When does the plug get pulled on “NYPD Blue”? And do its producers have some agenda about rescuing former child and teen actors? First it was Rick Schroder and now it’s Zach from “Saved by the Bell.”

A winner has yet to emerge in the war of spinoffs between “Law & Order” and “CSI,” the two highest-rated crime dramas on television. I don’t think they’ve gone far enough. America needs more. I predict the top three shows in the 2003 Nielsen ratings will look like this:

1) “Law & Order: A Very Special Victim’s Unit”
2) “CSI: Boise”
3) “Law & Order: Jury Duty”

In the world of comedy, the unfunny “Everybody Loves Raymond” continues to draw inexplicably huge ratings and rake in Emmy awards. People are still watching “Friends,” apparently. “Will and Grace” has its moments. “Andy Richter Controls the Universe” has won critical acclaim, though not ratings, for eschewing formula in favor of the inventive, wacky humor he helped establish on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.”

HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has emerged as the best comedy on television. Larry David, the creator of “Seinfeld,” stomps on every last shred of the predictable sentimentality one finds on network sitcoms. David, who plays himself, borrows aspects from the characters of both Jerry Seinfeld and Jerry’s pal George Costanza, who was originally based on Larry, according to legend. He’s as smoothly capable and in control as Jerry and as painfully antisocial as George.

Even when “Curb” isn’t funny, it gets your attention by being flat-out wrong. Witness this year’s “The Special Section,’ a subpar episode in terms of laughs, in which Larry’s sole reaction to the death of his mother is anger over having not been invited to the funeral. Thereafter he uses his mother’s death to get out of the most trivial social obligations. Then he hatches a scheme to dig up her body and move it to a better part of the cemetery. With humor that beyond the pale of mainstream morality, David risks alienating his audience if the jokes fall flat. He’s got cojones of steel, a condition largely absent in network comedy and one of the reasons for the show’s popularity.

Late-night talk shows in 2002 remained the place where Americans go to have the discomfiting and scary news of the day digested for them into harmless jokes. David Letterman, still self-hating, remains smarter and edgier but slightly less popular than the sugary Jay Leno, who gets along and goes along.

When Al Gore played Trent Lott on last week’s “Saturday Night Live,” it brought to mind a very creepy moment from the 2000 presidential race, when George W. Bush, appearing on Leno’s “Tonight,” donned a paper Al Gore mask while Leno wore Bush’s likeness. The message from Bush to America was clear: The gap between televised illusion — what you see — and reality is unbridgeable, there’s no real difference between the two candidates, so vote for me because I’m more likable than he is.

I wonder if Trent Lott called anyone a “nigra” while departing the TV studio in his limo after his apology and interview this week on Black Entertainment Television.

In the 12:30 a.m. time slot, the 6-foot-5 redhead on NBC (Conan O’Brien) is still funnier than the 6-foot-5 redhead on CBS (Craig Kilborn). O’Brien is the best comic mind on television, but his show airs too late for most people to see him.

In 2002 large numbers of confused human beings continued to line up to participate in reality television shows, where they immolate themselves for our distraction before they are jettisoned back to the fallow fields of untelevised reality.

“American Idol” was the big summer phenomenon. It was great at the beginning, during open casting calls in various U.S. cities, when the audience got to luxuriate in the absolutely horrible performances of the aspiring superstars. As the insane and tone-deaf were gradually weeded out — those in deep denial about their lack of talent; those who verbally abused judges Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson; those who stalked the show across the country — “AI” got less interesting until, by the end, when only eventual winner Kelly Clarkson and the guy who looks like Sideshow Bob were left, I had completely forgotten it had ever existed.

“The Bachelor,” that romantic reality train wreck par excellence, appeared on the scene in 2002 and is still going strong, as is “Survivor.”

The Fox television network has added a new and malicious twist to the reality dating genre for 2003 with a show called “Joe Millionaire,” in which 20 lovelorn women are flown to France in order to compete for the affection of a construction worker they have been told is a multimillionaire.

What happens when the truth is revealed? The major flaw in this premise, of course, is that by the end of the show, through potential endorsements, Joe the laborer will be worth considerably more than the $19,000 per annum he made coming in. And his worth will be enhanced by his newfound celebrity status, which will probably count for a lot in the eyes of a woman who is willing to risk public humiliation for a few minutes on TV.

In 2002 prudish commentators continued to get it wrong regarding “The Osbournes,” MTV’s reality show that follows the lives of heavy metal rocker Ozzy, his wife Sharon and kids Jack and Kelly. “The Osbournes,” which is in fact a funny and entertaining show, does not signify the end of Western civilization. No, that distinction goes to “ElimiDATE,” whose preening, libidinous contestants are seemingly as innumerable as the young starlets of cinema and television who are willing to grasp their bare breasts and pout at the camera on the covers of Maxim, Stuff and FHM. “ElimiDATE” makes me wonder whether we ought to just let al-Qaida win.

What initially made “The Osbournes” such a breath of fresh air was its inversion of the standard put-regular-people-on-TV formula. Here we see the normal lives of a stupendously abnormal family. And truth be told, Ozzy and Sharon — who is his manager; one shudders to think what would have befallen the hapless Ozzy without her — are decent, loving parents. Though his neurological pathways have been devastated by years of narcotic artillery fire, which results in much mumbling and doddering and confusion, the Oz communicates ably with his offspring, warning them not to do drugs and have unprotected sex. Hypocritical? Sure. But all parents are hypocrites; it’s part of the job.

And though Sharon is by all accounts a ruthless ass-kicker as a businesswoman, we don’t see her bring that world home into her interactions with her children. She’s goofy. She owns approximately 6,000 dogs that she talks to as if she were a crazy person. She appears to be her daughter’s best friend. Jack and Kelly, though spoiled, are both pretty well-adjusted kids. (Better adjusted, I dare say, than the Bush twins appear to be.)

And then there’s Anna Nicole Smith, whose “Osbournes” knockoff on the E! television network documents her struggle to negotiate the basic aspects of reality. What can one say about this former model, now addled, obese and manifestly substance-addicted? She’s just about hit bottom, it would seem, whatever money she still possesses being the only thing holding her above the abyss. How could it get worse in a second season? I guess she could wind up sucking dick for prescription painkillers.

In 2002, local, network and cable news programs continued to titillate and, in the words of Susan Sontag, “infantilize” the American public with gross misapplications of words like “terror” and “evil” and “news.” It seems the new television news paradigm consists of: 1) Fear. 2) Fear. 3) Mindless escape from the fear that’s just been promulgated.

And, as ever, “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” provided us with the antidote. “The Daily Show” remains one of the most important shows on television because it’s smarter than everything else and it doesn’t have ulterior motives. (For regular news broadcasts, those motives boil down to ratings and corporate ownership.)

To paraphrase Trent Lott: If more people watched “The Daily Show,” this country wouldn’t have all these problems. Here’s hoping that in 2003 we see the emergence of more television shows that pierce through the layers of lies and obfuscation and bring us the truth. Or at least something really, really funny.

Yes, “The X-Files,” that groundbreaking paranormal crime series, comes to a close on Sunday. Two years after David Duchovny left the show, with the ratings falling, creator Chris Carter and friends have decided to pull the plug at last.

The show returned from winter reruns with the promise that, in the final 11 episodes, the “X-Files” team would tie up some of the loose ends regarding this wayward series and the ineffable conspiracy plot, or “mythology,” that underlies it.

With 10 episodes down and only the two-hour finale to go, that promise has not only gone unfulfilled but is also starting to look like a downright hoax.

Like other “X-Files” fans of yore, perhaps, I was lured back to the show by the prospect that they were finally going to put a slug in the back of this lumbering giant’s head and, in the process, clear some things up and maybe do something interesting.

The hope was that Carter, Duchovny, Gillian Anderson and company would rise to the challenge and deliver a run of shows that would approximate the peaks of inventiveness, suspense and quirky humor that “The X-Files” reached during its heyday.

But that’s not how it has happened. The first 10 of the 11 episodes have done little to belie the perception that “The X-Files” has degenerated into soap opera: Emotions are conveyed by twitching lips, watery eyes and long glances pregnant with nothing.

Driven away by the show’s absurdities, I’ve watched only intermittently over the past two years, but research confirms that this is what has transpired:

Duchovny, moving on to a movie career, is written out of the show but agrees to make occasional appearances. Natch, his character, Agent Fox Mulder, is abducted by aliens. At about the same time, Scully becomes pregnant in what appears to be an immaculate conception (she was rendered infertile by alien experiments).

New characters come aboard, including:

Agent John Doggett (Robert Patrick, of “Terminator 2″ fame — an admittedly superb casting choice by Carter): The no-nonsense fugitive specialist who is tasked with finding the vanished Mulder.

Deputy Director Alvin Kersh: The latest antagonistic authority figure and the first black character on the show since the mysterious shadow player, “X.”

Agent Monica Reyes: An expert on satanic cults who teams with Doggett to form the new X-Files crew.

Assistant Director Brad Follmer: Another sinister higher-up, who was once romantically linked with Agent Reyes.

Doggett and Scully clash but learn to respect one another. Scully begins to learn freaky things about her unborn child and a possible link to government experiments involving human-alien hybrids, or Super Soldiers.

Mulder is found and brought back from the dead. Then, after Scully gives birth, Mulder disappears again. It is hinted that he may be the father of Scully’s child. Scully leaves the X-Files team to care for her son William but still plays an active role in investigations as a forensic pathologist.

But if you’ve missed the last two years, don’t worry. Here’s a brief summary that ought to get you back up to speed in a hurry:

Agent John Doggett (in a gravelly voice): “My job is to find Mulder. And I intend to do it. I may seem gruff and antagonistic now, but you’ll learn to like me because I’m a stand-up guy.”

Scully: “I’m going to have a baby! But how is that possible?”

Deputy Director Kersh: “I’m the new ominous black guy.”

Doggett: “Scully, you’re not trying to tell me Mulder was abducted by aliens, are you?”

Scully: “Yes, I am, Agent Doggett. But you can’t let these mysterious strangers hurt my unborn baby.”

Doggett: “Don’t worry. Just don’t try to sell me any more of this alien conspiracy hogwash, OK?”

Deputy Director Kersh: “I’m a mysterious, ominous presence.”

Agent Monica Reyes: “And I’m the peppy new female presence!”

Assistant Director Skinner: “Don’t forget about me! I’m as ambiguous as ever! Why am I always so painfully conflicted? What am I hiding?”

Doggett: “I think you’ve got something to hide, Skinner.”

Mulder: “Aaaaaggghhhhhhhhh! You’re stretching my face with hooks!”

Cigarette-Smoking Man: “Look at me! I’m smoking through my trachea! Oops, now I’m dead. Maybe.”

Scully: “Don’t touch my baby!!”

Doggett: “All right, already. Jeez. But if I hear one more thing about alien bounty hunters, I’m going to crap my pants.”

Alex Krycek: “Looks like I’m dead now. Well, it was a good run.”

Scully: “The word I’ve used most this season, besides “the”? Hmm. I’d have to go with “baby.”

Assistant Director Brad Follmer: “Hi! I’m Cary Elwes. You might remember me from my sinister turn as the bad-guy driver opposite Tom Cruise in “Days of Thunder”!

Mulder: “Can’t you aliens use some anesthetic?”

Doggett: “I’m skeptical of you, Kersh. But I’ve got no evidence.”

Kersh: “Well, I’m ominous for a reason, you know.”

Scully: “Baby.”

As I said, I haven’t watched every episode over the past couple of seasons, but that’s OK, because only about one-third of all the episodes deal with the actual conspiracy. The rest deal with your run-of-the-mill investigations of that vampire mom with jaws that unhinge who devours her son’s entire soccer team, and those exist as if in suspended animation.

As the series has worn on and the stakes for Mulder and Scully have grown higher, this discrepancy has become perhaps the most frustrating absurdity plaguing “The X-Files”: the lack of connection between the episodes that delve into the conspiracy that hangs like the sword of Damocles over humankind and those that deal with unrelated paranormal phenomena.

Aliens are taking over the planet, the fate of the human race hangs in the balance, fire and brimstone are raining from the sky, and yet the agents have the time to delve into picayune murder mysteries. Forces of incomprehensible magnitude are conspiring to destroy Mulder, Scully and their efforts to uncover the truth, yet they are in no apparent danger when they walk to the grocery store to get a roll of toilet paper.

Another annoying development has been the discontinuity in terms of the emotional relationships between the characters. In the 1998 “X-Files” movie “Fight the Future,” Scully and Mulder essentially go to hell and back. They almost consummate their affection for each other with a kiss. He saves her from a tank deep in an alien spacecraft buried in the ice of Antarctica just before the huge ship takes off, nearly killing them. But in the denouement, when they see each other again in Washington, D.C., they hold a terse conversation before Mulder, for no apparent reason, spins on his heel and walks away.

At its best, “The X-Files” provided the kind of action and suspense packed into 45 minutes that you normally found only at the movie theater. It was like watching a good thriller every Sunday night without having to schlep over to Blockbuster and stand under those horrible fluorescent lights.

“The X-Files” also delivered first-rate humor in offbeat episodes, like 1996′s “War of the Coprophages” and 1998′s “Bad Blood.” In the latter, a botched investigation of vampires in Texas leads Mulder and Scully to present entirely different versions of the same events in their report to a bemused A.D. Skinner. Luke Wilson played the local sheriff who, in Scully’s version, is a charming and capable officer who flirts with her and lavishes praise on her investigative insight. In Mulder’s eyes, he’s a bumbling, bucktoothed yokel.

In a two-part episode titled “Dreamland,” from 1998, a government-operated UFO outside the infamous Area 51 creates a ripple in the space-time fabric, causing Mulder to switch bodies with government official Morris Fletcher, played by Michael McKean. Only Mulder and Fletcher are aware of the identity change and, as Mulder desperately tries to figure out how to reverse the situation while dealing with Fletcher’s horribly fractured family life, Fletcher, liberated and with no intention of going back, settles fatuously into his new role as FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder, hitting on an increasingly flustered Scully and slapping her on the butt. McKean’s performance is the funniest thing I’ve seen him do outside “This Is Spinal Tap.”

In those episodes, the X-Files team showed a willingness to spoof itself, and Duchovny and Anderson were given the opportunity to step out of their characters and treat Mulder and Scully with refreshing irony. That was particularly effective in the case of Anderson, who displays a giggly, winning personality on late-night talk shows that stands in stark contrast to Scully’s ice-queen demeanor.

“The X-Files” has also, in its finer moments, been among TV’s most inventive shows. In a 1998 episode titled “Triangle,” distinguished by its outstanding camerawork, Mulder finds himself in 1939 aboard the Queen Anne, a British ocean liner taken over by Nazis as war begins in Europe. As Scully hustles around FBI headquarters, trying to figure out what’s happened to Mulder, the viewer follows her through corridors, into and out of offices, and up and down elevators via a single camera shot that lasts for several minutes.

Later, aboard the ship, Scully and the super-nerd Lone Gunmen trio race through the hallways searching for Mulder. Mulder, meanwhile, is running through the same hallways, only in 1939. Director Carter splits the screen in two, so that the viewer sees Mulder and Scully running toward each other on different halves of the screen and assumes they will collide where the hallways intersect. Instead, since they occupy the same space at different points in time, the agents run right past each other, switch screens and continue sprinting down the hall.

The thing about “The X-Files” is that, every time you pronounce it creatively dead, it comes back to life like the ghouls Mulder and Scully have been investigating these eight-odd years. Every time you think the show has fallen into irreparable, lazy self-parody, Chris Carter has a marijuana-induced epiphany, rolls off his chaise on some remote Hawaiian beach, and videophones in an idea that will shake new life into it.

But now, because he has avoided doing it over the past 10 episodes, Carter is out of time. And in the season finale, “The Truth,” he has to deliver answers to the riddles he has posed.

The audience Carter has toyed with for so long will on some level demand that there be logic underlying the mystery, that the show make sense. The frustrating yet compelling ambiguity that has been “The X-Files”‘ hallmark is poised to be its undoing.

In an essay about David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks,” another seminal television series that fell apart in the process of resolving itself, David Foster Wallace might have been describing Carter. Lynch, he wrote, “is way better at deepening and complicating mysteries than he is at wrapping them up.” Wallace continues:

The show had degenerated into tics and shticks and mannerisms and red herrings … Part of the reason I actually preferred “Twin Peaks”‘ second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on National TV).

I’m not sure fear could penetrate Carter’s cocoon of self-satisfaction. Is he at all concerned that he has shied away from providing the answers his audience craves? Over the course of “The X-Files”‘ stretch run, only three episodes — including the first two: “Provenance” and “Providence” — dealt seriously with the conspiracy. The rest were, at this stage in the game, irrelevant.

One episode, “Jump the Shark,” in which McKean reprises his role as the craven and venal Fletcher Morris, killed off the Lone Gunmen in a biological terrorism plot unrelated to the conspiracy. The fact that the episode was so named indicates that Carter and his co-conspirators still have a sense of humor, if not a keen sense of where and when to apply it.

“Jumping the Shark” refers, of course, to the moment in “Happy Days” when Fonzie jumped a shark tank in a motorcycle and the highly popular sitcom lost its last shred of dignity. The term now applies to the moment when any TV show or cultural phenomenon, having reached its zenith, resorts to ridiculous lengths to hold on to its audience and then proceeds unceremoniously downhill.

OK, so Carter et al. are aware of the criticisms leveled against them. But the problem is that the episode was characterized by some of the very same flaws (cheesy melodrama, deathly slow pacing, and a lack of coherence) that caused “The X-Files” to jump the shark in the first place. A mere wink at the audience does not credibility restore.

In “Provenance,” the first of the final 11 episodes, it seemed Carter was trying to stall for time. Thirty minutes and two commercial breaks came and went before anything happened. Finally, a guy who turns out to be a deep-cover FBI agent tries to kill little telekinetic William. Later, in the only interesting moment of the show, William causes a metal fragment of a spaceship that may contain the secrets to all of human history to explode from a bureau drawer and spin over his head.

In the next episode, “Providence,” William is abducted but apparently defeats his captors by making a buried spaceship roar to life and take off with the kidnappers either on top of it (ouch) or inside it. He’s a precocious little tyke, all right.

But after all the time devoted to Scully’s baby, Carter scuttled the entire thing in “William,” an episode directed by Duchovny. In it, Jeffrey Spender, Mulder’s old foil and half-brother, comes back to Washington horribly disfigured and injects William with a magic solution that “cures” him of his superpowers. Scully gives him up for adoption, and that’s that. As Agent Reyes says in the episode after “William” (“Release,” in which Doggett finally puts to rest the unsolved murder of his son): “In other words, we’re nowhere again.”

To make this hoax more pronounced, Carter gave the subtitle “Endgame” to the final four episodes, the first of which was “William.” The promos implied that with “Endgame” we’d be getting down to the nitty-gritty, but “Release” was unconnected with the conspiracy, and “Sunshine Days,” which the promos touted as the “most bizarre” episode ever (it wasn’t), dealt with a psychokinetic man obsessed with “The Brady Bunch.”

Which brings us to the finale. Mulder is back and on trial for his life. Where’s he been? What will be explained? Will Carter abandon his newfound roles of cheese merchant and staller for time?

There is at least one more “X-Files” feature film on the way. In this week’s TV Guide, however, Carter says the next film will be a stand-alone mystery, unrelated to the show’s overarching mythology.

Therefore, if Carter really has anything left to say about the mythology, now’s the time to do it. He doesn’t have to answer every last question in order to satisfy me, and indeed the audience shouldn’t demand that of him. But he must, at the very least, put out a blueprint for who’s involved in the conspiracy and what their roles are.

I mean, I went to college and whatnot. And I have no idea what the hell’s going on. There are aliens (including mellow gray aliens and ferocious, flesh-tearing aliens), there are alien bounty hunters, there are alien rebels, and there are Super Soldiers. Prove to us, Chris, that you know what you’re doing, that there’s actually a coherent plot that connects all this.

There is a conspiracy within the FBI. Sinister characters are threatening Kersh and Skinner. Who are these people and what is their agenda? Are we going to discover why Skinner always looks so thoroughly constipated? Perhaps it’s just an unresolved childhood issue.

I want Carter to prove me wrong and knock me out with “The Truth.” To do that, he’s got to deliver something on a much higher level than the final season has done so far. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but for all my skepticism I’ll still be glued to the sofa on Sunday night. If nine years of “The X-Files” have taught us anything, it’s that unlikely things — even impossible things — sometimes happen.