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In the last episode of last season's X Files, we're shown a scene where Fox Mulder actually sees an alien which he presumes abducted his sister years ago.

It appears ever so briefly and disappears in guess what — a flash of bright white light and lots of rushing wind. How imaginative!

However, it disappears without a trace. Agent Dana Scully informs us that Fox is left with exactly what he had before: no evidence; and the episode ends with Mulder surveilling petty frauds.

This is what X-philes came to see. It doesn't make sense, and there's about a hundred unanswered questions.

We don't "know" and there was no Hollywood ending. We interact with the episode by creating our own hypotheses about what happens next.

Egad, what a concept: let the audience think instead of bashing them on the head and stuffing the plausible explana tion down their throats. The X Files trademark for the past five years. No answers.

Earlier in last season's final episode "they" break into the FBI and trash Mulder's office and destroy the X Files. Mulder suspects this group is a "shadow conspiracy" consisting of humans and aliens who want to take over the planet. The existence of this group is revealed in the X Files movie.

Good stuff, except in the movie and in this season's premiere (on Nov. 8) too many questions are close to getting pat answers. That spells bad news for X-philes.

Past science-fiction programs, including Star Trek and Babylon 5, have taken up the siren of SETI, the Search for Extra- Terrestrial Intelligence.

The basic questions dealt with by these shows as well as sci-fi films from the tongue-in-cheek Men in Black to the more serious Contact are: Where does the intelligence come from? How do they communicate with us? What do they look like? What do they want? How did they get here? Why did they come? When was first contact?

However, even on the limited budget of a program such as B5 the question of form is foremost in the minds of writers, directors and costume designers. What should we make them look like?

If the audience doesn't believe a species really exists inside an encounter suit, Kosh does not exist.

And as some of us just recently learned, We are all Kosh. Therefore, since we have to believe, we have to be "made" to believe - on a budget in most cases.

Additionally, Delenn has to have that bone, Londo the big hair and G'Kar his lizard-like semblance - or the show doesn't work.

In science fiction, if all the actors come out in jeans and t-shirts . . . well then, it's not science fiction.

Still, by and large most aliens look pretty human. Ever seen a talking alien without teeth?

Of course, most members of the Screen Actors Guild share one thing in common: they're human. So if the creatures can't be portrayed by humans somehow, your script is going to be a trashcan liner sooner than it's going to be a coaster on director David Eagle's coffee table (animatronics and special effects notwithstanding in most cases).

Hollywood's bout with portraying aliens has led to some interesting stereotypes.

The first such convention was poked fun of in Ghostbusters. Slime. Aliens uses the same stuff which the industry has dubbed Spielberg Jelly.

If your protagonist dips his finger in a puddle of Spielberg Jelly, you know your antagonist is a ferocious man-eating alien with no conscience.

The second practice commonly followed was introduced in Star Trek's episode about Thalosians. Big head, big eyes, no nose and round mouth.

Echoed in ET and dozens of sci-fi films since, including X Files. The alien species that has planted a virus in humans that gestates in 12 hours and becomes a man-eating monster with no conscience looks like a cross between the original E.T. and the alien encountered by Sigourney Weaver.

In the case of the X Files, this means one of two things: I) The alien is a product of Mulder's imagination sparked by his recent viewing of ET (which is unlikley because in the season premiere he states that he hasn't seen Men in Black, another film which features Spielberg Jelly; or 2) That's what aliens really look like and they're conditioning us to realize this through mass media so that when they come to overtake the planet we'll be used to their appearance and not so grossed out.

Imagine how much more difficult it would be to take over a planet if everybody was fainting all the time. You'd have to wake them up prior to ripping their guts out. It's obvious how much more time consuming this would be, especially multiplied by a couple billion or so.

(In case you were wondering, evisceration must be carried out on a live victim - ask any medieval torture technician.)

What aliens look like amounts to a dialectic debate with no logical conclusion.

However, with the X Files this is stock-in-trade. If a dozen people watch an X Files episode together they would all be left with questions at the end and nobody would have any answers.

X Files producers have been banking for the past five years on the show's ability to captivate an audience by leaving them in the dark.

Unfortunately, with the alien with the big eyes and no nose garnering more and more camera time, the show seems to be departing from its text of departing from the text. We're getting dangerously close to the Hollywood ending we sought refuge from in the X Files.

Consider: what would Close Encounters be without Richard Dreyfus walking into the alien craft? What would the Aliens films be without extensive shots of the alien?

Not a hell of a lot.

To be blunt, when we see the alien basking in the bottom of a tank of superheated water in a nuclear reactor we're not left with any about, about SETI, about Mulder, about anything.

Showing the alien tearing scientists and nuclear reactor technidans into a mass of bloody guts tears the guts out of the X Files, and leaves the audience with a bloody body lying lifeless on the couch.

And that's not really what we came to see.

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