The X-Files

Is the LEGO The X-Files Worth Buying?

7.84/10. Worth buying. Fox Mulder's basement office and a UFO hovering over a forest clearing, together at 1,478 pieces and eight minifigures. The 90s throwback the fan-vote community actually voted for.

Comparing your options? See where it lands in our best LEGO Ideas sets ever, ranked.

At 1,478 pieces this is a comfortable weekend build rather than an all-day marathon, and it splits cleanly into two very different halves. The first is Fox Mulder's basement office at FBI headquarters, a boxy interior packed with the small-scale detailing that Ideas dioramas live or die by. The second is a forest clearing with a grey UFO hovering above it, and the two modules are designed to either stack into a single tower or sit side by side as separate scenes.

The office is where the build earns its keep. It is a patient exercise in furnishing a room brick by brick: the desk, the filing cabinets, the slide projector, the wall of clippings and case photos, and the famous "I Want to Believe" poster rendered as a printed tile. The detailing rewards a slow pace, because half the fun is realising what each little sub-assembly is meant to be as it comes together.

The UFO clearing is the change of gear the build needs. After all that interior fiddling you switch to landscaping and a smooth, saucer-shaped hull suspended over the trees on a clear support, catching a beam of light coming down into the forest. It is a simpler assembly than the office but a satisfying one, and the transparent element work that sells the hover is the sort of small engineering flourish that makes an Ideas set feel considered.

Livery, or rather the printed and detailed decoration, is dense throughout. The office in particular relies on a lot of small printed elements to read correctly, and getting them oriented and placed is where a builder should slow down. Budget somewhere around three to four hours across the two modules. It never drags, largely because the reference-spotting keeps pulling you forward.

Finished, this is one of the more conversation-starting Ideas displays of the year, precisely because it works on two levels. Stacked, it is a compact tower that tells the whole story of the show in one silhouette: earthbound investigation below, unexplained phenomenon above. Split apart, you get two distinct scenes that can be spaced across a shelf, which is genuinely useful flexibility for a set this size.

The office is the star. As an open-fronted diorama it photographs beautifully, with depth created by the layered clutter of a working investigator's desk and the wall behind it. The pencils embedded in the ceiling, a deep-cut reference for fans, are the kind of detail that makes people lean in when they spot it, and the "The Truth Is Out There" tile anchors the whole piece.

The UFO clearing brings the drama. The hovering saucer and the beam of light give the display a sense of motion that a static interior cannot, and it reads as unmistakably X-Files from across the room. Together the two modules cover the show's two moods, the procedural and the paranormal, which is exactly what you want a single box to do.

The eight minifigures are a big part of the display value. Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are the obvious headline pairing, but the supporting cast is where the set flexes its knowledge of the show: Assistant Director Walter Skinner, the shadowy informant Mr. X, the double-dealing Alex Krycek, plus the grey alien, the grotesque Flukeman and the antagonist Carl Busch. That is a deep bench for a licensed set, and it turns the diorama into a stage you can restage.

Just shy of 1,500 pieces for two dioramas and eight minifigures is a solid haul in the Ideas range, and the value story leans heavily on the figure count. Eight character minifigures in one box is generous, and several of them, the Flukeman and the grey alien especially, are the sort of set-specific figures that collectors will keep sealed with the model rather than raid for parts.

The parts mix is skewed toward small detail elements and printed tiles rather than large useful bricks, which is the nature of an interior diorama. The printed pieces, from the "I Want to Believe" poster to the case-file tiles, are set-specific and push the finish quality up, though as always with printing their wider reuse in your own creations is limited. The office furnishing elements, on the other hand, are gold for anyone building interior scenes of their own.

On the licence itself, this is a property with genuine, durable standing rather than a passing trend. The X-Files is one of the defining television shows of its era, and licensed Ideas sets tied to culturally significant properties tend to hold collector interest well once they retire. Our LEGO Investing 101 guide walks through why fan-vote Ideas sets with strong licences tend to age the way they do.

The X-Files premiered on Fox in September 1993, created by Chris Carter, and quickly grew from a modest genre show into one of the defining television phenomena of the decade. Its premise was simple and endlessly flexible: FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigate the Bureau's unexplained cases, the "X-Files," with Mulder the believer convinced of extraterrestrial and paranormal truth and Scully the sceptical scientist sent to keep him honest. That push and pull between faith and evidence became the engine of the entire series.

Across nine original seasons through to 2002, plus two feature films and a pair of revival seasons in 2016 and 2018, the show ran to more than two hundred episodes and split its storytelling between two modes. There were the sprawling "mythology" episodes about a government conspiracy and alien colonisation, and the self-contained "monster of the week" episodes that gave us grotesques like the contortionist killer and, memorably, the sewer-dwelling Flukeman recreated here in minifigure form.

Its cultural footprint was enormous. Taglines like "The Truth Is Out There" and "I Want to Believe" entered the language, the Mulder-and-Scully dynamic set a template that countless later shows borrowed, and the series collected a shelf of Emmy and Golden Globe awards along the way. This LEGO set arrived as the winning entry in the Ideas "Build Your Nostalgia" ninety-nineties throwback competition, which is a fitting route for it, because The X-Files is precisely the kind of show a generation is nostalgic for in exactly this way.

Fans of the show are the obvious core audience, and for them this is close to an automatic yes. The set is built on deep-cut references rather than surface branding, and the reward for having actually watched The X-Files is a build that keeps handing you little moments of recognition, from the pencils in the ceiling to the informant lurking in a parking garage in minifigure form.

It also suits the diorama-and-display collector who values scenes over vehicles or architecture. The open office in particular is a masterclass in small-scale interior detailing, and anyone who enjoys that side of the hobby will get a lot out of assembling it. The stack-or-split flexibility makes it adaptable to whatever shelf space you have.

Minifigure collectors have their own reason to look, too. Eight figures in one box, several of them exclusive and character-specific, is a strong return, and the supporting cast gives the set a play-and-pose value beyond the static display. As a nineties-nostalgia centrepiece, it is a confident pick.

The most natural shelf-mate is the Stranger Things Creel House (11370), another Ideas set built entirely on television nostalgia and eerie Americana. Sat together they make a small shrine to genre TV, one leaning nineties, one leaning eighties, both trading on that same uneasy sense that something is wrong in a very ordinary place.

For a broader sci-fi grouping, the Star Trek USS Enterprise (10356) pairs the terrestrial paranoia of The X-Files with the optimism of the final frontier, giving a display two very different visions of what is out there. It is a fun contrast to have side by side.

And if you want to keep the pairing inside the small-diorama world, the Snoopy's Doghouse (21368) from the same corner of the Ideas range shows just how much character LEGO can pack into a compact, reference-rich scene. Together they make the case that the theme's real strength is storytelling in brick.

The X-Files is one of the more assured licensed dioramas the Ideas theme has produced, precisely because it was clearly built by people who cared about the specifics. At 1,478 pieces it delivers two genuinely different builds, an office soaked in reference detail and a UFO clearing with real drama, and the eight-figure roster turns it from a static display into a scene you can restage.

It takes EARL APPROVED status comfortably on the strength of its display quality, its deep-cut fidelity to the show and the generosity of its minifigure count, held just shy of the top tier by a parts mix that is understandably narrow for an interior diorama. For anyone who spent the nineties wanting to believe, it is an easy recommendation.

Available now, and a set that earns its shelf space through storytelling rather than sheer scale. The truth, as ever, is out there, and now it fits rather neatly on a bookcase.

• Stranger Things Creel House Review - The other great TV-nostalgia diorama in the Ideas range
• Star Trek USS Enterprise Review - A sci-fi counterpoint for the same shelf
• Best LEGO Ideas Sets, Ranked - See where The X-Files lands against the fan-vote greats
• LEGO Investing 101 - Why fan-vote Ideas sets with strong licences tend to age well