Threads of the Mythology
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[Mulder: They're here, aren't they?
Deep Throat: Mr. Mulder, they've been here for a long, long time.]
[CSM in the Pentagon basement. Max suspended in mid-air. Scully running. Bodies in fluid-filled tanks. Young Mulder calling after Samantha. Duane Barry being lifted into the air. Abducted Scully opening her eyes. Mulder bathed in light. Mulder on top of the ski-lift car. Scully's expanded abdomen and alien probe. Scully in a boat on a lake. The Alien Bounty Hunter. 'Mulder' throwing Scully. The submarine in the ice. Scully sitting by a hospital bed. Mulder punching Skinner, in the FBI hallway. Scully firing her gun and shooting Mulder. Mulder in a coma surrounded by dead people. CSM. An alien in the mine. Krycek running from the car just as it explodes.]
Threads of the Mythology
Abduction
Time Line
June 24, 1952 – Origins of the X-Files
While investigating a strange case of Xenotransplantation, FBI Agent Arthur Dales is informed that such odd cases are stored under 'X' where there is more room in the file drawer.
[Woman: I recognize one of these names. It's in an X-File.
Dales: An X-File?
Woman: Yes, unsolved cases, filed them under 'X'.
Dales: Why don't you file them under 'U' for unsolved?
Woman: That's what I did until I ran out of room. Plenty of room in the Xs.]
Chris Carter
Creator/Executive Producer
In the beginning, I didn't think of them, the episodes, as specifically as mythology episodes, because they were just stories we wanted to tell and they involved Mulder and his personal quest and ultimately Scully. And what happened is that through the telling of those stories, we saw that the most personal episodes became the mythology episodes, the ones that were about his life, ultimately became about the relationship between Mulder and Scully and she became very involved in his life and they were really, I think of them as the most romantic episodes in the show because it was where the characters really learned most about one another.
[Mulder and Scully and baby William.]
Frank Spotnitz
Executive Producer
Part of the reason the mythology unfolded the way it did was because we were afraid of the pretentiousness of a quote-unquote mythology and so things were always oblique, there were always lots of questions asked.
[Scully: Agent Mulder, I'm Dana Scully. I've been assigned to work with you.]
Frank Spotnitz:
Chris from the very beginning had an idea about what the end of the show was, where it was all going, but he was smart enough to be flexible about the path the mythology would take over the life of the series, so that if you had a new idea or something broke in the news or you found it in a magazine or newspaper, if an actor ended up being wonderful, the mythology could go in a different direction and still have that sort of floating destination out on the horizon. I realized just how wise that approach was as the series went on and on and on.
[Mulder: What am I on to?
Deep Throat: A dangerous path.]
Frank Spotnitz:
To a certain degree, it was a good thing that people couldn't quite understand the mythology. Because when you start talking about little green men and flying saucers, it can sound ridiculous very quickly, so the more shadowy, complex, intellectual, you know, high-minded these things seem, the more plausible they seem.
[Spaceship hovering over Mulder on the airfield.]
Kim Manners
Executive Producer/Director
It isn't a show for dummies. It was a thinking man's show. You had to sit down and give this some real thought. And you had to pay attention. If you didn't pay attention, you'd get lost. And I think that was part of the charm of the show.
[Mulder looking down on people in a crater.]
Frank Spotnitz:
The important thing for us was not relying on the audience remembering a past episode, or having seen a past episode, but rather in the beginning of a mythology episode re-stating in some way what we felt you needed to know to go forward.
[Scully: I'm a federal agent.
Man: Hold on. You're not going anywhere until we can see some ID.
Scully: There is no time for this. A man is dying.
Mulder has been put in a tank of water.
Mulder: (voice over) What happened to me out on the ice has justified every belief. If I should die now it would be with a certainty that my faith has been righteous. And if through death, larger mysteries are revealed I will have already learned the answer to the question that has driven me here. That there is intelligent life in the universe other than our own. That they are here among us.]
Time Line
November 27, 1973 – Samantha Disappears
Samantha Mulder is allegedly abducted. Her brother Fox begins his search for the truth about her disappearance.
[Samantha: Fox!
Samantha is floating in mid-air.
Mulder: Samantha! Samantha!]
Frank Spotnitz:
You know, one thing people don't often think about with the mythology episodes was that they were really our only chance to advance the emotional lives, and the personal lives of the characters of Mulder and Scully. And all the standalone episodes - they were essentially static, they were about the case, they were plot-driven. And these were the episodes when you met their parents, met their siblings, learned about their childhood. You know, they were the personal stories. And I think that's as much a part of their appeal as the big stuff about aliens and the spectacle of the production values.
[Mulder looking at Scully's headstone.]
Howard Gordon
Executive Producer
It was a little bit more of a soap opera or an opera, it had that quality of being part of a larger canvas. So in some ways it was permitted to ask more questions than it answered, whereas in a single standalone episode you really have to become cohesive and end it there.
[Leonard Betts emerging from his skin.]
Brett Dowler
Second Unit Director
Most people, if they tuned in on that Friday night and turned it on, and it was a monster movie, they'd go: 'oh, wow, cool, but I wish it was a mythology one though'. Because the mythology ones always went deeper with the audience, I believe. They did for me.
[Mulder sees Max suspended in mid-air.]
Joseph Patrick Finn
Producer
They liked to be scared by the monsters of the week but it was the mythology shows that actually hooked them.
[Scully: I said, put your hands against the wall.
Mulder: What's wrong?
Scully: Do it!
Mulder: Scully, it's me.
Scully: I don't know who you are.
Mulder: Ok, I'm going to take my left hand and reach into my pocket and get my ID, Ok? Just don't shoot me, I got shot once and I didn't much care ...
Scully: I said, keep your hands up.
'Mulder' turns and punches Scully.]
Joseph Patrick Finn:
The mythology shows took on a whole new kind of level of expectation from production point of view.
[Filming a scene in the basement office.]
Brett Dowler:
Generally they had a slightly larger scope in the writing and so they did take in bigger themes and thus they had to have bigger visuals involved in them.
[Submarine conning tower descending through the ice.]
John S. Bartley
Director of Photography
I used a different film stock for those. I used 5293 for those because there's generally a lot of smoke and it worked well with 93 or it worked well for me and that was a sort of darker stock.
[Bodies lying in tanks of fluid.]
Mark Snow
Composer
My choice for the mythology shows, musically, was to have the same sort of palette of sounds which would be more of a, perhaps a traditional, orchestral sound albeit done on electronics. So, whenever a mythology show came up I would just go back and pull up that particular palette, you know, using that as if it was a traditional symphony orchestra setup.
[Scully sitting in a boat. The rope tethering it to the shore snaps and the boat starts drifting away.]
Time Line
December 1991 – Agent Mulder Assigned to X-Files
Fox Mulder is assigned to the X-Files, a post he has desired since joining the FBI. His first order of business is opening a file on Samantha's disappearance.
[Mulder: I was twelve when it happened. My sister was eight. She just disappeared out of her bed one night. Just gone. Vanished. No note. No phone calls. No evidence of anything.]
Rob Bowman
Director/Producer
One of the advantages of Vancouver is that it's a very eclectic architectural environment. There is not a theme, a consistent theme, downtown. And within 20 or 30 minutes you can go from lush, lost forest, to farm.
[Filming a scene at night in a forest.]
Chris Carter:
The Vancouver mists and rain and fog and forests and the variety of neighborhoods, terrains, landscape that you can shoot – it was all wonderful for the show.
Sheila Larken
'Margaret Scully'
This is a shadowy land. I think X-Files was a shadowy show.
Rob Bowman:
Because of the fog or the overcast conditions at a lot of the time, rain, it maintained a bit of a Sherlock Holmes feel to it for me, right? And I think John definitely found the voice of the show very, very quickly and his way to do it.
John Bartley:
I loved doing dark working and pulling it off, particularly for television.
[Scully at night, walking across a road bridge.]
John Bartley:
You have to have something either to take the audience away, something bright in the background or something hidden away or not stay on the darkness for too long. It can't be too black. As somebody said, there's darkness and blackness, you can have darkness but you can't have blackness.
Time Line
March 7, 1992 – The X-Files Pilot
Agent Dana Scully is assigned to the X-Files project to work with and secretly debunk Agent Fox Mulder's investigations into unsolved cases.
[Scully: Actually, I'm looking forward to working with you. I've heard a lot about you.
Mulder: Oh, really? I was under the impression that you were sent to spy on me.]
Chris Carter:
Early on, everyone sort of took a part in helping to shape that mythology, but it all sprung from really the pilot episode and the episode right after it, which is called 'Deep Throat' which really sets up the idea that the aliens have been here and as the character of Deep Throat says, they've been here for a long, long time. That really, I think, is the sort of launching moment for the entire mythology, that the government knows something, they've known it quite a while and they've done a good job of keeping it a secret, and it's Mulder now whose quest is to unravel that secret, to expose that secret.
[Deep Throat: Mr. Mulder, why are those like yourself, who believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life on this earth, not dissuaded by all the evidence to the contrary.
Mulder: Because all the evidence to the contrary is not entirely dissuasive.
Deep Throat: Precisely.]
Chris Carter:
The whole idea of the show is really about this quest to find the truth about his sister and to possibly find his sister. So, the idea of a mythology is kind of built in to the show because Mulder's quest takes him far and wide and into the paranormal. So I really think of every episode as a mythology episode in a sense, but then there are these episodes that really become about that specific quest, which is the search for his sister, the episodes that involved specifically the truth about alien extraterrestrial life and the possibility that his sister was abducted by aliens.
Rob Bowman:
The quest for finding her, that she is out there, a lost child, I mean we could lose a child now and there is an amber alert and the whole nation knows when one child's missing. And it's a worrisome thing.
[Scully: You never found her?
Mulder: It tore the family apart, no-one would talk about it. There were no facts to confront, nothing to offer any hope.]
Howard Gordon:
Mulder's main motivation in season one was uncovering the secret about his missing sister and that was really, I think, what drove season one and certainly the entire mythology of the X-Files was the basis that was Samantha Mulder.
Time Line
July 7, 1994 – Little Green Men
Mulder heads to Puerto Rico hoping to find hard evidence of the existence of extraterrestrials after he learns that an abandoned radio telescope was the site of a recent UFO encounter.
[Inside the telescope station. The door is slowly opened, admitting a bright light into the room. Mulder pulls the trigger of his gun several times, but it doesn't fire. He checks the clip and when he looks up he sees an alien figure in the bright light.]
Chris Carter:
I had asked Morgan and Wong, Glen Morgan and James Wong, to write the first episode coming back in the second season and this is what they chose to do simply and that was just taking something that had been established which is the idea that Mulder's sister possibly was abducted and using it in an interesting way. Taking something like Arecibo, which was in that episode, and taking something that existed, something that was real, which is what made the best episodes really click, taking the literature, if you will, of the search for extra-terrestrials and wrapping it around, contextually around the Mulder and Scully story.
Time Line
August 7, 1994 – Duane Barry
Mulder and FBI Agent Alex Krycek are assigned to a hostage negotiation where the deranged hostage taker, ex-FBI Agent Duane Barry, tells Mulder he was kidnapped and tortured by aliens.
[Duane Barry is being pulled up into the air from his bed, while alien figures look on.]
Howard Gordon:
The abductions were often, in the first season in particular and then into the beginning of the second season, very intimated, very kind of off-camera. You'd see the result of an abduction, you'd see the footprint of an alien, and in fact we thought that was the secret of the show, that was what was wonderful about the show that for a very limited special effects budget we could actually scare people with what you didn't see rather than what you saw. And I think sometime in the middle of the second season the abductions and aliens became much more graphically rendered. You'd think you'd see the aliens on camera and as we got more money we could show it.
Time Line
August 7, 1994 – Ascension
Mulder tracks down Duane Barry who has kidnapped Scully and plans to rendezvous with an alien ship and hand her over instead of himself.
[Duane Barry breaks into Scully's apartment.]
Frank Spotnitz:
The mythology of the series didn't really blossom until an unexpected event late in the season one which was the pregnancy of Gillian Anderson, the real-life pregnancy of Gillian Anderson, which forced the X-Files to be serialized in a way I don't think it was ever intended to be serialized. Suddenly there had to be an arc of stories that dealt with the fact that Scully was going to be gone for who knew how many episodes.
Chris Carter:
There was talk of actually making her have an alien baby which would have been a terrible idea and so what we ultimately decided to do was to shoot around her pregnancy and her pregnant stomach. What we did is, we had Scully abducted during the two-parter of 'Duane Barry' and 'Ascension' and then she went off and had her baby and she came back.
Howard Gordon:
We knew we had a window where we had to write her out and fortunately this is a show about abduction so we abducted her.
Frank Spotnitz:
It was sort of a happy accident and there is a beautiful irony in all that because ultimately Gillian Anderson's real-life pregnancy leads to the story line about Scully not being able to have a baby and then miraculously by the end of the series having a child, and all of that is a piece, and it's a wonderful sort of blur of real life and fiction, because it was all, you know, one would not have happened without the other. If Gillian Anderson had not had Piper in season one of the X-Files, the show never would have evolved the way it did.
['Requiem'. Mulder steps into the bright light from the alien craft.]
Frank Spotnitz:
When it came time to write the season finale for season 7, Requiem, there was a very good chance it was the last season of the show. David Duchovny had announced he was done, but there was some pretty strong sentiment inside and outside the show that it was time to call it a day. So we very consciously went back to the pilot episode, to the characters of the pilot episode, Billy Miles and the Sheriff, and brought them back for that, you know, to come full circle from where we'd been. But we felt it was an appropriate ending to have Mulder abducted and that idea came very early on in the writing of the story.
[Space ship ascending.]
Time Line
Circa November 1994 – One Breath
When Scully mysteriously shows up at a hospital in a coma and her DNA exhibits signs of genetic tampering, Mulder is convinced the government is responsible for her condition.
[CSM is in his apartment watching television. He's alerted by a sound that indicates someone else is in the apartment. He starts to get up from his chair.
Mulder: Sit down!
CSM: How'd you find me?
Mulder: Shut up!]
Robert Goodwin
Executive Producer/Director
Prior to that, the Cigarette Smoking Man was kind of a dark figure who sort of lurked around in the shadows and didn't do much more than smoke cigarettes. I mean, he really didn't have much dialogue prior to that, you know, and to be truthful with you, I didn't know if Bill Davis... later I learned he was an incredible actor, he teaches acting, he has an acting school, but at that time I didn't know anything, all I knew was he was a guy they brought in to smoke cigarettes. So here we had this incredible scene where Mulder comes into his apartment, with a gun to his head and basically he's going to blow him away because he's sure he had to do, something to do with Scully's disappearance, and Bill was fantastic.
Kim Manners:
There were two characters in the Cigarette Smoking Man. There was the Cigarette Smoking Man played by the actor Bill Davis, and then there was the cigarette. And if you watch closely, again this I owe to Rob Bowman, he knew that that cigarette was its own character, and the lighter could also become a character. And you could tell a story just by a little smoke in the foreground. You didn't even have to see Bill yet, it was like the downbeat and Mark Snow would come in, you knew this was not going to be good because the cigarette smoke was there.
Helga Ungurait
Script Supervisor
He knew exactly when he did it. And he would do the first take and he would take a puff and he'd talk a bit, and then do the blowing out at a certain time. And the second take I would be keeping track of the puffs, when he puffed, so 'cut, print, move it on, Helga: print take two and four'. I would go up to him and say, 'so we're printing take two' and he'd go 'when did I first puff?' I would tell him the word and he would match himself perfectly.
Kim Manners:
He was the Darth Vader of the X-Files. Again, like all so many things on the X-Files, everything that was given birth, seemed to be given birth for, because it was an accident almost, and now suddenly this man who was nothing more than an extra leaning against a file cabinet became the lead villain in the show.
Time Line
Circa January 1995 – Colony
Abortion clinic doctors who look identical are being hunted by an alien bounty hunter. A woman claiming to be Samantha appears and asks for Mulder's help. An alien bounty hunter captures Scully.
[Woman reporter on TV: ... miraculously survived the extreme arctic temperatures. The man was airlifted to a military hospital in Alaska where he was listed in stable condition but while authorities have been trying to determine just who the pilot is, we have learned that he has apparently walked out of the hospital and is now listed as missing. Reporting from our ...]
Chris Carter:
By the, I'd say, the middle of season two when you get 'Colony' and 'End Game', it's the first time you really get episodes that are specifically written for, and dedicated to, this mythology, this quest. What happens in the middle of season two is the writing staff starts to change and certain people leave the show, and we are now at a point where I've got this mythology and I want to pump it up a little bit, and so I bring someone onto the show, named Frank Spotnitz.
Frank Spotnitz:
I had had an idea that ended up being central to that two-parter, as had David Duchovny, we kind of combined those ideas to make the two-parter.
Chris Carter:
What's nice about having a person like David Duchovny to work with is that he's smart and he's got good ideas. The idea for 'Colony' and 'End Game' came out of David Duchovny saying, 'wouldn't it be great if we had like an alien bounty hunter?'
[The alien bounty hunter is shot, and green blood oozes out of the bullet wounds.]
Frank Spotnitz:
I know that internally on the show, among the writing staff, there was a lot of, I wouldn't say resistance, but uncertainty about whether this was a wise direction to go in. Up to that point, the aliens had been very shadowy, ambiguous, you weren't really sure whether they existed at all. And here we have this Terminator-ish figure, Brian Thompson who played the Bounty Hunter, and he had this alien weapon, this alien stiletto, and it was very explicit that there was something going on.
Brian Thompson
'Bounty Hunter'
From my interpretation of the Bounty Hunter was that he was incredibly efficient. That he was the alien version of Mr. Duchovny. He was looking for aliens on the planet Earth and he was trying to do his job as efficiently as possible.
Frank Spotnitz:
David and Chris's thinking was that it was time to advance, to go forward, and to be bold about it and not shy away from, you know, this too belonged to the show, and obviously it seemed to have been the right decision.
Time Line
April 9, 1995 – Anasazi
Top secret Defense Department files on extraterrestrial life lead Mulder to the New Mexico desert where he discovers a buried railroad boxcar full of alien corpses.
[Mulder: Not what I ever expected.
Scully: What do you mean?
Mulder: I'm in a box car buried inside a quarry. There are bodies everywhere.
Scully: Bodies?
Mulder: Stacked floor to ceiling.
Scully: What happened to them?
Mulder: I don't know.]
Chris Carter:
I had taken a trip at the end of season one, I was very tired and my summer vacation, as it were, was to Sedona, Arizona. I would see a lot of literature about the Anasazi, which is an Indian culture that just completely disappeared, and that was a culture that had created images that looked like they were extraterrestrial images.
[CSM: Nothing vanishes without a trace. Burn it!]
Chris Carter:
But David was very instrumental in, I think, shaping the mythology. He was involved in the story for Anasazi as well, which is the end of season two, which was a big cliff-hanger for us because it looks like Mulder is dead, and it brought a lot of interest to the show - how can you do this, how can you kill the lead character, will you kill the lead character, you've killed such an important character at the end of season one, you're not going to do this to us again are you? So I think it heightened the interest in the show, and David was instrumental in coming up with that idea.
David Duchovny
'Agent Fox Mulder'
Realizing that I could write, you know, always thinking of myself as a writer and then putting my money where my mouth was and writing, and realizing that that's an alternative for me in my life, and it's something I want to pursue which is invaluable to me and such a great opportunity and a gift to have been able to do it on the show and then directing the same.
Chris Carter:
At the end of each episode, I was asked by the person who watched over us at the network if I could tie up each episode each week with a bow, in a sense, that I could explain the paranormal phenomena, that I could tell people that this was real and this was why it was real and it was just a crazy idea. And I kept saying: the interesting part about this for me was going to be telling stories where you left people wondering at the end, with the possibility that it could be real, but never ever stating that this is in fact the truth.
Time Line
Circa June 1995 – Paper Clip
Mulder and Scully's search for information about a secret government project dating back to World War II leads them to an underground facility containing files on hundreds of U.S. citizens.
[Scully: That's your sister's file.
Mulder: Yeah.
Scully: What are you looking for?
Mulder: I don't know.
He peels off the label.
Mulder: Have a look at this, Scully. This file was originally mine.
Scully: I don't understand.]
John Shiban
Executive Producer/Writer
In 'Paper Clip', we really begin to realize the extent of the government conspiracy, and the cataloguing of all of us. This is where Chris first introduced the idea of genetic material being taken through inoculations. What's great about that idea is that it touches on something that everybody's done, everybody's been forced to do since we were children, get inoculated for something or other, for smallpox in this case, and to turn that into something scary is brilliant, I think, because that really means you can't trust anyone.
Paul Rabwin
Producer
The first time you ever really saw a spaceship on the show, how do you do it? Do you want to do it in your face or do you want to be a little more coy about it? And this dark mass starts appearing behind the building and Mulder looks up and sees this dark mass, and suddenly the brightness of it is so overwhelming that you can't distinguish it that way - it's like, it was so dark you can't see it, and then suddenly it's so bright that you can't see it. And I thought that was absolutely brilliant, it was really the first time our mythology started to take on that kind of a science-fiction feel.
-----------------
[Mulder: I don't think this is ordinary diesel oil, Scully, I think it's a medium. A medium being used by some kind of alien creature that uses it to body-jump.]
[Max falling from the aircraft. Soldiers opening fire. Plane flying over car. X carrying Mulder over his should. Train exploding. Oil leaking from Krycek's face. Mulder being chased by men on horseback. Oil creeping up child's face. Mulder under wire mesh. Alien Bounty Hunter. Oil in someone's eye. Mulder leaping onto train. Man holding gun at Skinner. Krycek's arm being cut off. Oil well head exploding. Man standing in light from spacecraft. Max levitating from his seat towards hole in fuselage. Primitive man in cave. CSM lying shot on the floor, pulling towards him the photograph of young Mulder and Samantha. Alien bodies lying on gurneys. Krycek with oil in his eyes.]
Threads of the Mythology
Black Oil
Chris Carter:
I think season three, you can look at that and say almost across the board that it was a completely entertaining and quality season, and a lot of that had to do with how hard that Frank Spotnitz worked on the show, how hard Howard Gordon worked on the show, that we had Darin Morgan on the show and he added just a flavour to the show that showed the range of not just the kinds of stories you could tell but of the actors and how good they were. It was a show that was growing and at that point had kind of realized what it could be and even though it could become even more, I think at that point it had become a complete show. And that's why I think season three is for me the best season of all.
Time Line
August 1945 – Black Oil Strikes U.S. Sub
A B29 transporting a nuclear bomb and an escort squadron of P51 Mustangs crash in the ocean after an encounter with a UFO. A U.S. sub is dispatched to locate the planes.
[The submarine. A flashback to World War II.]
John Shiban:
The black oil was an alien creature that invaded your body through your eyes or your nose or your mouth, and would take over your self and control you, and then when it was done with you it would move on.
Howard Gordon:
The trick was always to find these graphic representations of possession, being possessed, being abducted, of being not who you are.
[Scientist drilling into the rock and getting splattered by the black oil.]
John Shiban:
Later in the series we discover that it's in primitive fossils, it's also found in meteorites that have been found on Earth.
Time Line
35,000 B.C. – Black Oil Strikes
During the last ice age, two human hunters are attacked by an alien and one is infected with the black oil virus.
[Primitive man in the cave, seeing the oil. The oil creeps up his body.]
David Gauthier
Effects Supervisor
The oil in the eyes, well obviously we couldn't do it for real so we had to come up with some kind of composite shot that – Mat Beck at the time was doing the visual effects – so that Mat could lay into people's, over people's eyes.
Mat Beck
Special Effects Supervisor
We put them digitally on the surface of the cornea and we actually move them in such a way that – you know the sense you get with floaters in your eye, how they kind of move this way and they stop and they kind of drift back the other way - we actually made the oil goop move that way, so when he or she blinked it would follow the blink and then keep going, you know, with a lag in it as if it's really a liquid, it's really a fluid.
David Gauthier:
We went through, oh, hundreds of tests trying to find the two types of fluids that we could put together and Mat could then overlay over people's eyes. And I remember us coming up with a black oil mixed in with acetone, I believe, that give it the best globular look and we got to float by the lens several hundred times until Mat thought that he had had enough of it (laughs) and then he took it away and lo and behold the next time I saw it, it was over the top of somebody's eyes on the show.
John Shiban:
As the mythology grew, the oil grew with it. The oil then, if it stays in you, it can gestate into the alien from the movie. And then the alien from the movie can then become a gray. The conspirators, the Elders, basically tried to develop a vaccine to stop it, some of them did, so did the Russians in 'Tunguska' and 'Terma', they were working on their own vaccine to try to stop this invasive oil. The faceless aliens - the reason why they made themselves faceless was to prevent this from getting in to their bodies, so the faceless aliens which are the bounty hunters basically, the idea being that this black oil is spreading around the universe subjugating races of aliens including us, including human beings, and eventually going to rule the universe.
Time Line
October 1995 – Piper Maru
When a French salvage ship sends a diving crew to recover a mysterious wreckage from World War II, the crew falls prey to a bizarre illness and Agents Mulder and Scully join the investigation.
[A diver finds the wreckage.]
Frank Spotnitz:
There was a two-parter called 'Piper Maru' and 'Apocrypha' which, I had gone to a convention in Minneapolis, an X-Files Convention, and a fan had asked about the effect that Scully's sister's death was having on her. And it occurred to me that we had not dealt with that. And so literally on the plane ride back I came up with almost the entire story by the time the plane landed in Los Angeles, which was probably the fastest anything ever happened for me on that show. That was sort of the demands of the characters, dealing with the emotional baggage that the character was carrying around.
Rob Maier
Construction Coordinator
A dive team is down looking for a specific P51 Mustang and they are scanning across the fuselage of the plane and then they read the serial number on the plane and then they go up to the cockpit and then the pilot jumps out and he's against the glass.
[The pilot bangs on the glass.]
Rob Maier:
And that was me. I asked Rob [Bowman]: 'hey, can I do that stunt, I think I could do that, it sounds really cool.' And he says, 'well, I don't know. We'll have to talk to Chris.' So, he talked to Chris and Chris said yeah, and they both came out to the [unintelligible] every day and said, 'You know, you're going to have to cut your hair.' Back then I had quite long hair, and I said, 'That's OK. I don't care. I'll do it.'
David Gauthier:
For me, that all sort of came together because I don't know how many hours we spent together, either agreeing, disagreeing, or blowing things up. As he built it, I would burn it down or blow it up, so we spent many hours together putting whatever Chris wanted together, so it was nice to see him on screen with the black oil in his eyes, it sort of completed the whole thing for me.
John Shiban:
My favourite black oil moment still, even after years of black oil, is in 'Piper Maru' when Krycek goes into the men's room at the airport, looks down, sees a pair of women's shoes and looks up and there's Mrs., I believe her name is Mrs. Gauthier, who has been taken over by the oil. The oil leaves her and goes into him, but it's just a great scene and Nick Lea was terrific in that.
Rob Bowman:
So Krycek walks out. It was written, 'as they walk out of frame' or something, and it was kind of hard because it just exists in the eyes, the oil, this little place where we've shown that it's visible. And I remember calling down to Chris or Frank and saying, 'I think I need to shoot this differently. What I'd like to do is, I'd like to have the last image of the episode be one that I think is good but I think will help see the oil, is have Krycek walk right, completely, into the lens and go to black.'
[Mulder: Feel better?
Krycek: Like a new man.]
Rob Bowman:
I think the next day they saw the dailies and dug it. But it was one of those where it seems like, when I watch the shot, well, of course, that's the only way you could do it, when it was instead on the set standing there scratching my chin thinking, 'What am I gonna do to make the end of the episode not suck.'
Time Line
November 1995 – Apocrypha
CSM takes Krycek into custody while he is being occupied by the black oil. The entity is allowed to return to its UFO in an abandoned missile silo. Krycek is left alive but sealed in the silo.
[Krycek throwing up the oil.]
Kim Manners:
There was this huge silo and we had poor Nick Lea on top on his knees and we had this rubber face on him and these tubes and all this oil draining out of his face and I thought, 'well, I've arrived, I mean, it can't get any tougher than this.' But it did. (laughs)
Toby Lindala
Special Effects Makeup
So he's got a strap on, a version of his own face on top of his own face, with all these tubes running in, the eyes were out of it, they were just kind of filling up with these walls of black oil ooze, and dripping down into this alien, kind of escaping.
Brett Dowler:
A couple of times the pressure would be too much and Krycek would go like this (bends forward), at the same time as the special effects guy pushing the plunger and the special effects guy would get a little bit nervous and the stuff would just come 'psshh' shooting out so fast that it was just like, everyone is laughing and going, 'this is not what Chris is gonna want.'
[Krycek banging on the silo door.]
Kim Manners:
And then we had the 10-13 on the door and that was my kind of first introduction to the little notes and secrets that Chris and Frank would build into the show.
Time Line
November 26, 1996 – Tunguska
Mulder and Krycek reach Tunguska and find a gulag. Mulder and several other involuntary experimental subjects are infected with the black oil.
[Krycek: What are we doing here, Mulder?
Mulder: June 30th 1908, Tunguska tribesmen, Russian fur traders, look up into the southeastern Siberian sky and see a fireball streaking to Earth. When it hit the atmosphere it created a series of cataclysmic explosions that are considered to be the largest single cosmic event in the history of civilization. Two thousand times the force of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
Krycek: What was it?
Mulder: It's been speculated that it was a piece of a comet, or an asteroid, even a piece of anti-matter.]
Frank Spotnitz:
'Tunguska' and 'Terma' really came about by once again trying to find a big, fun canvas on which to tell stories. And so we wanted to do a gulag story and so that led to the idea of the Russians were experimenting separately with us on a vaccine for the black oil, so it was sort of an arms race.
John Shiban:
It just seemed natural that there would have been an alien-invasion/find-the-cure race between us and the Soviet Union.
Frank Spotnitz:
We got to have Mulder in a gulag, we got to have the men on horseback and him and Krycek breaking in, so there was a lot of sort of action-adventury stuff that we were really looking forward to doing.
Rob Bowman:
One of the big sets that we made it look like it was in Russia, was the prison. The exterior prison. It's basically a Rangers Station in the middle of Stanley Park, which is just a couple of trees away from downtown Vancouver. We brought in, I think, 50 or 60 truckloads of dirt. You just create the atmosphere of being far away, and you put a title under there, it says 'Tunguska, Russia'. We are more making sure you don't give them reasons to disbelieve it than to believe it. You got the Russians, you got the horses, you got the prison, you got all the stuff, what's in the shot that could spoil it – remove those things.
[Inside the gulag – Mulder and others strapped down.]
Kim Manners:
He'd read these things, but it never really got to David that this was not going to be the most comfortable acting moment of your career until he got there. And then once he realised what was going to be involved, it was kind of walking on thin ice, I think they call it, it was tough.
[Krycek's arm gets cut off.]
John Shiban:
In X-Files fashion, we just start applying the idea for that individual mythology episode to the mythology itself, and what pieces can we take, and who would be involved. And that's why Krycek is perfect for that. Oh, Krycek has a Russian name, well, is that by accident or is that a happy accident and to be honest it was a happy accident.
[Krycek: (in Russian) I am only here, Comrade, to congratulate you on a fine job.]
John Shiban:
I always loved Krycek. He swims with the waters and sometimes he swims against them, and you can never quite trust him but you kind of like him.
[Krycek and Mulder meeting for the first time.]
Lynne Carrow
Casting
They really wanted to try to cast a local actor. We looked at a lot of actors from across Canada and there was an actor they really loved his look, Nicholas Lea.
Chris Carter:
No-one knew how important that character was going to be, so it really was a factor of Nick Lea's taking on the part, embodying the part and it being an interesting character in the end and a foil for Mulder and Scully and a person who was playing always both sides of the field.
Frank Spotnitz:
I don't think we ever intended for him to last as long as he lasted but we couldn't bear to part with him. So we kept finding ways to bring him back. And he really was the cat with nine lives because he should have died over and over again. He should have been blown up, he was infected with black oil, he had his arm cut off, but he kept coming back.
John Shiban:
You look back and you see how that character changed and grew and it's fascinating, and Nick did a wonderful job with it.
[Krycek shooting Mulder's father.]
John Shiban:
One of the pleasures, as a writer, of working on X-Files is we had quite a palette to work with and there were a lot of recurring characters who we were free to use as long as it didn't damage the ongoing story and the mythology.
[Mr X: You're a damn schoolboy, Mulder. You have no idea, no idea.
Mulder: OK. Then tell me. Tell me!
Mr X: I used to be you. I was where you are now. But you're not me, Mulder. I don't think you have the heart.]
Frank Spotnitz:
The storytelling function of the informant was critical to these mythology episodes. So the character X, played by Steven Williams was introduced. But there comes a point with a character like that where you feel like you've run your course, like that dynamic has, you've done as much with it as you can. And so, with great reluctance, we terminated X, and brought in a new informant. And very memorably he dies writing the initials of her job title in blood on the floor of Mulder's apartment building. He was replaced by Marita Covarubias and then eventually she too found her way out of the series.
[Marita: Mr Mulder. My name is Marita Covarubias. I'm the assistant to the Special Representative.]
Paul Rabwin:
With the supporting characters in the mythology, consistently played a great role in making the mythology cohesive.
Helga Ungurait:
It was neat with the Lone Gunmen because they were an important part of the story and they always helped Mulder and continue the plots along.
[Mulder and Scully in a bus.
Mulder: These guys are like an extreme government watchdog group. They publish a magazine called 'The Lone Gunman'. Some of their information is first-rate, covert actions, classified weapons. Some of the ideas are downright spooky.
Later, with the Lone Gunmen.
Byers: Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Russian Social Democrats – he's been put into power by the most heinous and evil force of the 20th century.
Mulder: Barney?
Scully grins, Langly laughs.
Byers: The CIA.
Langly: Is this your sceptical partner?
Frohike: She's hot.]
Tom Braidwood
'Melvin Frohike'
You know, we've always looked at ourselves and sort of described ourselves as an information conduit. We were the ones that were living out on the edge and knew how to get ahold of certain pieces of information or knew where to find them or knew how to go about finding them in order to facilitate either Mulder's and Scully's needs in their searches.
Michael McKean
'Morris Fletcher'
Those three were perfectly cast, and they were all very responsible, the three actors, Dean, Bruce and Tom, were very responsible about having an emotional life that fit their visual takes.
Tom Braidwood:
We were kind of a mouthpiece in the form of an explanation for the audience in terms of, well, if you didn't understand what was going on in the script at this point, here's what's happening. And then they'd go on to the rest of the show, you know, they'd get rid of us and go on to the rest of the show. We did that quite a bit. But on the whole we simply facilitated Mulder and Scully's needs. And brought, I guess, a certain sense of humour to the show which I think is something the fans kind of locked in on, they enjoyed that element of it.
[Byers: Good work sneaking out these charts.
Frohike: Tucked them in my pants.
Mulder: There's plenty of room down there.
Langly: You look down, Mulder. Tell you what, you're welcome to come over Saturday night. We're all hopping on the internet to nitpick the scientific inaccuracies of Earth 2.
Mulder: I'm doing my laundry.]
Time Line
February 23, 1997 – Tempus Fugit
Flight 549, carrying Max Fenig, crashes after an apparent encounter with a UFO. Mulder suspects that Max was abducted by aliens.
[On board the aircraft, as bright light shines through the windows and the aircraft is being shaken.]
David Gauthier:
We didn't want to go a full gimbal route, we wanted to really be able to create turbulence in its real form, and I know we've all been on certain flights that we don't want to remember, where we were clenching our teeth because the plane was doing all kinds of things we didn't think it was meant to do, so we thought of different ways and we ended up making a hydraulic unit that was essentially a teeter-totter and some sideways movement, but we did it rather rapidly and we were able to shake that thing, and we could have shaken it apart, and we had lots of power.
Kim Manners:
We shot the mid-air abduction, it took us four days. And we had handheld cameras in the cockpit, the operators had to have helmets on because the plane was so violently moving.
Helga Unguriat:
It was shaking so bad we couldn't keep focus on the monitor. "Cut! Cut! Cut! OK, I've got to get off this thing!" So we had to get off the plane to at least be able to look at the monitors without having it shake so much. And the camera guys were amazing because when they're handheld they're trying to hold on, meanwhile the plane's shaking and the actors are moving, and the focus pullers are going, "Oh, jeez, here we go." But it looked amazing.
David Gauthier:
Within two hours I had made 12 people violently ill, we had to exchange at least a dozen extras.
[Max is pulled out of the aircraft.]
Brett Dowler:
The biggest thing there, was the physical effect of pulling somebody out of the window. That was really quite tricky because getting the exact angle to make sure that when you yank this person out they're not going to be banging up against anything else, or the seat, as they were getting pulled out of their chair. So that was really carefully designed and I thought David Gauthier and Graham Murray, the way they worked together on coordinating that was brilliant.
Kim Manners:
I think that's one sequence that I'm proudest of. All the X-Files that I've directed, that sequence just worked out beautifully.
Rob Bowman:
Research on a crash site was difficult because it's so catastrophic what occurs and we met with an NTSB guy and he gave us all the details and Graham wanted it to feel like we had just accidentally photographed a crash site, he didn't want it to look like a movie set at all.
Shirley Inget
Set Decorator
I remember the tail section we found somewhere in South Carolina and we had to ship it in.
Rob Bowman:
There was luggage and dolls and clothes everywhere, I mean, it's an explosion. And for it not to be in the trees or everywhere would have been untrue. And it was also painting and burning this old abandoned field black. I remember being in the chopper flying over, shooting it, and we started back a couple of miles and came up on it, it looked like news footage.
Brett Dowler:
Probably one of my biggest single sets. Between construction, paint, greens, and set dec, we probably created a 30 to 40 acres set.
Shirley Inget:
There was an Air Canada pilot who came by to look because he had flown the Vancouver to Los Angeles route and he had flown over the top of it and he couldn't believe what he saw and he thought, "When did this happen and why don't I know about it?" So he came down that night to investigate, just to see what was up, so it was fun talking to him. He said it looked like a real plane crash.
Row Bowman:
That episode, having that aside, was the biggest episode I'd directed to date and again we're at an airport, we're under water, we've got tanks, and hangars with the rebuilt plane, and it was so fun at that time because we were just making movies that were running on television. You know, we had Mulder and Scully driving underneath a DC6. It took two nights, out at Abbotsfield airport – it was a record, I know this – we had 13 generators, 75 4K power lights that raked the runway, 4 Condors, 2 [...], we lit up 35 hundred feet of runway at night, and really had a DC6 come in and land. I mean, it was the most generators ever used on anything in Vancouver history, and we were making a TV show.
[Garrett: Look out your window, Agent Mulder. You see the lights? Now, imagine if one of those lights flickered off. You'd hardly notice, would you?]
John Shiban:
I like to try to put in, and we all do, little homages to things that inspired us. There's one in 'Max', I believe the character's name was Garrett who was sort of the bad guy that Mulder encounters on the airplane. I was asked to write a speech for him early on in the process and I just remembered 'The Third Man', and I remembered that great speech that Orson Welles has that Graham Greene wrote, or some say Orson Welles wrote it, where he's up in the Ferris wheel and he says, "Look at those dots down there, the people, but look at those dots and would you really cry if one or two of those dots just stop moving?" You know, it's a whole justification for the immorality of what he's doing. And it just hit me, oh, here's my chance to finally do that scene.
[Garrett: Is it worth sacrificing the future, the lives of millions, to keep a few lights on?]
John Shiban:
I was pleased to get that little nod to one of my personal inspirations.
Time Line
October 1997 – Gethsemane
Scully reports to a committee that Mulder was found dead in his apartment of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
[Detective: Thanks for coming down to do this.
He lifts up the sheet covering the body.
Detective: It him?]
Frank Spotnitz:
'Gethsemane' to me was a very important episode, not just because it had probably the best cliff-hanger of all, which was Mulder's apparent suicide, which incidentally we really tried to torture the audience because normally we would say 'To be continued' and we didn't do that, there was no 'To be continued', you just had to wonder, was it the end of the show? And some people at the network and studio were very concerned about that, that we were going to lose viewers who would think the show was over because Mulder had killed himself.
[In a briefing room, Scully reports that Mulder died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.]
John Shiban:
I think the moment itself is great, particularly because it's on Scully's face when we learn the news and she's hearing it with the FBI. And nobody can sell a moment like that better than Gillian. Even if in the back of your mind you're saying, 'no, you can't do that', you can't help but a little tear come to your eye.
Frank Spotnitz:
What I especially loved about that episode, aside from the production value of shooting in a frozen set for the cave where they were digging out this supposed alien corpse, was this idea about religion, because what became increasingly clear to Chris and me, in years of working on these mythology episodes, was that Mulder's quest for extra-terrestrial life was akin to trying to prove God existed. And there's this wonderful scene in that episode with him and Scully on the stairs, where he says, "Come on, if you could prove God exists, wouldn't you?" And she says, "No, I take it on faith." Which is so profound and correct, that is what religion is about, you must take it on faith, God is not going to prove it to you.
[Mulder: If someone could provide to you the existence of God, would it change you?
Scully: Only if it had been disproven.
Mulder: Then you accept the possibility that belief in God is a lie?
Scully: I don't think about it actually, and I don't think that it can be proven.
Mulder: But what if it could be? Wouldn't that knowledge be worth seeking? Or is it just easier to go on believing the lie.
Scully: I can't go with you, Mulder.]
Frank Spotnitz:
It's times like that when the mythology became exciting.
Time Line
October 1997 – Redux
Mulder is not dead. In fact, Scully is cooperating with him to entrap the Conspiracy source in the FBI.
[Mulder bursts into the apartment above him. The man who has been spying on him is trying to burn some documents.]
John Shiban:
I think the complexity of the following year, when we came back and did the two-parter, Redux I and II worked and what I think justified or allowed us to get away with that was that Scully was in on it, we didn't cheat Scully and so by not cheating Scully ultimately I think the audience forgives you for that because you get to see what happened, you get to see why she'd do what she did, why Mulder did what he did. I don't think it was a cheap shot is what I'm saying, I think it was a really sound thing to do and it made for a great moment.
Frank Spotnitz:
Redux and Redux II were very successful I think, especially Redux II, which has this lovely threesome of ideas. You know, is this medical treatment, is it religious faith, or is it the chip that the Cigarette Smoking Man produces, that ultimately leads to the remission of Scully's cancer. You don't know and I loved the competition that those three ideas had in that story.
Chris Carter:
It sort of takes the idea of the show and it just spins it in the most interesting way.
John Shiban:
We would always plot stories with one or two or three options for the audience to chew on.
[Mulder: Scully's cancer's gone into remission.]
John Shiban:
You never show the audience something was definitive in a situation like that which not only kept the mystery going, which ironically is how the real world is, you read the newspaper and it's subject to interpretation.
Frank Spotnitz:
That's also the episode that leads to Mulder's loss of faith for the entire season, which is something that, even though we kept playing it again and again in the mythology episodes, people could not accept that Mulder had really lost his faith in aliens, that the Smoking Man had shaken him, that's what we'd done in those two episodes with some success. That was probably the last season where we could simply do chapters with starting to attack the heart of what the mythology was about.
Time Line
May 2001 – Vienen
Mulder and Doggett are reluctantly thrown together to investigate several deaths aboard an oil rig and Mulder becomes convinced that the rig is really carrying the black oil alien.
[On the oil rig, the foreman's eyes begin to glow. A bright light begins to engulf him, while a worker lies on the floor, terrified.
In the basement office.
Mulder: These files include the same kind of radiation phenomena. Tissue destroyed by exposure –
Doggett: Black oil. Five years ago, you and Agent Scully investigated a case of a World War II plane salvaged from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean where a substance was brought to the surface which you described as a highly contagious virus of extra-terrestrial origin that has radioactive properties and can take over a man's body. And as part of an alien conspiracy to colonise the planet, if I'm not mistaken.
Mulder: And you'd love to help but you left your light sabre at home. How'd you get stuck down here, Agent Doggett? Kersh catch you peeing in his cornflakes?]
John Shiban:
What's great from a visual standpoint, with the black oil, it's a great effect, it's not that difficult to do and it allowed us to play the sort of classic body-snatcher's question mark of who do I trust. Have you been taken over or not, because you can't tell except in opportune moments when your eyes go black with this stuff in you. And then when it's done with you, you get a great scene were someone has to spit it out of all their orifices, which is always nice.
------------------------
[Samantha: The men you've been seeking are the progeny of two original visitors - clones who have been attempting to establish a colony here since the late 1940s.
Mulder: A colony?
Samantha: Loosely. The community by necessity is dispersed. There are clones identical to my parents living in virtually every part of the country.
Mulder: What are they trying to accomplish?
Samantha: It's their belief that our stewardship of the planet is being forsaken. That by default they'll someday become the natural heirs.]
[Men running in the hangar. Artifact flying through the air and burying itself in a bible. A spaceship over the burning city. A gray alien. Mulder floating up into a spaceship. The chess game. Skinner affected by nanobots. A man pulling the skin off his face. Small alien figures. Scully in the hospital bed. A line of fire across the ground. Mulder looking up into the bright light from the spaceship. CSM shooting Spender. Scully standing by the spaceship on the beach. Mulder kissing Diana Fowley. The syndicate gathered in the hangar. Mulder falling from the cliff top.]
Threads of the Mythology
Colonization
Time Line
October 13, 1973 – The Syndicate
State Department staff members learned that the aliens encountered at Roswell are planning to colonize earth in a process that will kill all humans.
Frank Spotnitz:
I think Chris always imagined that there was a syndicate, a secret society, a group of men literally in a smoke-filled room who had made a deal with the aliens, and that the deal sacrificed humanity for their own selfish purposes.
[CSM: We had agreed to cooperate with alien colonists by a majority vote taken by the group that your father and I worked for – the group that came together at the state department on a project dating back to 1947, to Roswell. The vote changed that, though, it changed everything. We no longer cleave to any government agency, we now operate privately on our own project. That was your father's objection - we would ally ourselves with the alien colonists.]
Frank Spotnitz:
Early seasons of the X-Files, all you saw of the aliens where the classic gray type aliens, and in Piper Maru and Aprocrypha in season 3 we introduced the black oil which was first seen as a sort of film that appeared over your eyes if the black oil had taken you over. And then we saw ultimately that it exited Krycek's body and went into a space ship. And what we finally revealed in the movie was that in fact the black oil was a virus that has been around since before Man was around. Alien in origin. That has taken over the universe and ultimately that's what colonization on Earth would be, it would be this black oil infecting all of us. And that's why the bees were being bred, to carry the black oil virus to sting people, to spread it that way.
[Mulder: Scully?
Scully: Yeah?
Mulder: Run!
The bees escape. Mulder and Scully run to escape from the dome.
Mulder: You get stung?
Scully: I don't think so.]
Time Line
Circa March 1988 – The Red and the Black
The burnings of abductees has been carried out by faceless alien rebels intent on thwarting the plans of the alien colonists. Krycek tells Mulder in the coming colonization there is one rule – "resist or serve".
[Krycek: I'm talking planned invasion. The colonization of this planet by an extraterrestrial race.
Mulder laughs.
Mulder: I thought you were serious.
Krycek: Kazakhstan. Skyland Mountain. The site in Pennsylvania. They're all alien lighthouses where the colonization will begin. But where now a battle's being waged. A struggle for heaven and earth. Where there is one law: fight or die. And one rule: resist or serve.
Mulder: Serve who?
Krycek: Not who. What.]
Frank Spotnitz:
I think by the time we got to Patient X and The Red and The Black, some people were finding it too hard to keep track of all these disparate elements. We introduced the faceless men on the bridge, these guys that walk around with these flamethrowers and start setting people on fire. What's confusing is that there's these bounty hunters who are also infected - the Brian Thompson character - who work for the black oil, if you will, but then there are also these faceless men who are bounty hunters who have sealed up their eyes, nose and mouth, and they were not infected so the same race of alien, if you will, as the bounty hunters but they have protected themselves from infection. And so they were working against the syndicate, they were working against anybody infected by the black oil, trying to stop the infection from going any further in the universe.
[Mulder meets Cassandra Spender.]
Kim Manners:
That was an amazing turning point for me in my career on the X-Files because I think it might have been one of the most important mythology shows that I directed. Veronica Cartwright, working with her was really a treat. I had known her since I was a child actor myself and now I had the privilege to direct her, and she did such a magnificent job.
[The bridge where the abductees were later to gather.]
Brett Dowler:
Chris was really exploring the other side of the mythology as everyone on the crew knew it at that time. I really remember a buzz going through the office when this script came out: 'oh my god, he's finally seen these people, he's going to show us these people, this is incredible'. And we're going - this? wow, can we do this? We've got a flying saucer over the top of a bridge? How are we going to do that?
Todd Pittson
Location Manager
It was a huge job. The pre-light on that thing was about a week to get it all lit, so you could actually see some background, because you're out there basically in the middle of nowhere.
Kim Manners:
Working on that bridge and bringing the helicopter in with this night light that they had to shine right into the lens. It was very, very difficult. And then the CGI people were going to turn it into a spaceship. But it was extremely cold, so cold that when Chris directed part two he built the bridge and the transmission house on a sound stage because it was just very, very cold.
Rob Maier:
And we built that bridge, an exact replica other than that it was one section shorter than the real bridge. But every other detail was the same, including the 50,000 rivet heads we put on each of the I beams. At a separate location, we were building a triangular-shaped UFO that was 60 feet in diameter and then had one of those super-cranes out there that lifted it up and in the meantime the greens guys had built probably about a quarter mile scar in the earth, again to simulate an impact zone, and then a huge mound that at one end was about 30 feet tall, and then we sat the UFO into the impact zone and then wrecked it.
[UFO crashing.]
Time Line
May 1998 – The End
Mulder and Scully meet Gibson Praise, a young boy capable of reading minds. Mulder believes Gibson is genetic proof of an alien-human connection.
[Gibson Praise: I know you're thinking about one of the girls you brought.
Mulder: Oh?
Gibson: And one of them's thinking about you.
Diana Fowley: Which one?
Gibson: He doesn't want me to say.
Mulder: This kid's going to need round-the-clock protection.]
Frank Spotnitz
So it was with heartbreak and fear (laughs) that we ended season 5 with an episode appropriately called 'The End' and said goodbye to the crew up there. That final episode was directed by R.W. Goodwin, Bob Goodwin, who had been an executive producer and had done such a fantastic job producing the show up there, hiring amazing talent behind the camera. We really went all out with that chess scene and invited everyone in Vancouver to come and fill the auditorium where it occurred, and it was a huge production event and really spectacular.
R.W. Godwin:
I think we ended up with 17,000 people and we had to turn away thousands more because we just had no more space.
Louisa Gradnitzer
Location Manager
When I showed up on set, I said, 'Chris come out and have a look. And I said, look at this.' And he looked out and we both looked up and seeing those thousands of people lining up. Basically, for me that was the most expensive one day location I've ever, ever used in my entire life.
Helga Ungurait:
We all felt like little rock stars, we felt we were the hockey players on the ice and all these people are coming in and watching what we're doing. And just the applause for Chris, the applause for the crew and the applause for the show. It was very heartfelt and you could see it in the crew and also in Chris's face that, wow, he had a great time here.
[Gibson: Checkmate.
A gun fires.]
R.W. Goodwin:
So they had me on a microphone and they had a camera on me so that the crowd could see me on the big TV set. So I'm directing 17,000 people. They were incredible. They would act the scene out. They watched in silence. Then, bam!, the gun goes off all of a sudden, they all take off. And I go, 'OK, cut! cut! cut! Everybody back to number one.' And, bam!, they all go right back to their first position.
Frank Spotnitz:
One of the ideas that Chris and I had discussed for years before we actually introduced Gibson Praise was that the reason so much paranormal phenomena occurs in the world of the X-Files is because in fact we are part alien. That there is something alien about human beings and that's why there is telekinesis and psychics and all these other things. So that led to the creation of the Gibson Praise character who was the missing link, whose incredible ability demonstrated that we are in fact related to aliens and so indirectly proves that alien life exists, and so therefore he must be destroyed, he must be killed, hence the assassination attempt at the chess match.
[Gibson Praise, the Well Manicured Man and the Cigarette Smoking Man.
Well Manicured Man: There's nothing to be afraid of.
Gibson: You're a liar. Just like him.]
Frank Spotnitz:
That was a casting coup, Geoff found that boy, Jeff Gulka, who just had this wonderful stillness and presence and soulfulness you just wouldn't expect in a little boy. And we just fell in love with him and couldn't bring him back enough because he was such a great character and brought so much to the role.
Kim Manners:
And there was something about Gibson Praise that kind of tore your heart out. Because there was this child who was kind of imprisoned by his own intelligence, and he knew that he was different and he knew that he was special, but he also knew that that was a terrible price to pay.
Chris Carter:
I don't think we found out that we were leaving Vancouver until I think late in that season. I had to go make an announcement to people who had worked so hard on the show for five years that we were leaving, we were pulling up stakes and leaving town. And it was really hard to do, it was a really emotional thing to do and a lot of these people had become my friends and everyone's friends and it wasn't fair in a way because they had helped put us on the map. And we helped put them on the map in a way too, showing you could do a quality show up in Vancouver.
Frank Spotnitz:
The X-Files originally was supposed to shoot in Los Angeles and the pilot actually began shooting in Los Angeles before they moved to Vancouver because it was set in the north-west. David Duchovny had unexpectedly found himself moving to Vancouver but he had been promised that it was a temporary arrangement, that he would not have to live there for the life of the series. So, in many ways, he had more than honored his promise by the end of season 5, when the show was a success, he had been there for five years, and he wanted to come home and he'd just been married, and it really was only fair and reasonable given the circumstances under which he had agreed to go there in the first place.
Time Line
August 1998 – The X Files: Fight the Future
Mulder and Scully discover more about the Syndicate's collaboration and of the Alien's colonization plans. Mulder travels to the Arctic in order to rescue Scully, who is held captive aboard an alien ship.
[Mulder and Scully fleeing from the collapsing ice.]
Frank Spotnitz:
Looking back on the show, those first five years, we had a lot of flexibility in the types of stories we drew in, and the things we moved into the mythology because they tended to be chapters. They weren't the big picture about what was going on but when the movie was released we felt an obligation, the expectations were going to be huge that things were going to be revealed in the movie. So there is a scene in the movie, where the Well Manicured Man is in the back of the limousine with Mulder and he really lays out the whole history of the aliens on earth in very explicit terms.
[WMM: Your aliens, Agent Mulder, the little green men, arrived here millions of years ago. Those that didn't leave have been lying dormant underground since the last ice age in the form of an evolved pathogen, waiting to be reconstituted by the alien race when it comes to colonize the planet. Using us as hosts.]
Rob Bowman:
This was an opportunity for us to go to look completely through the peephole and open up the entire field of view of what these guys are up to. Because that's what our movie requires. I think the show had always promised that it could, if given the opportunity, be huge and it would sit well on a movie screen. I wanted to make sure I fulfilled that promise and then some, and so it was about me educating my eye on where to place things in a horizontal frame specifically for the X-Files movie.
[WMM: You have precious little time. What I've given you - the alien colonists don't yet know exists. The vaccine you hold is the only defense against the virus. Its introduction into an alien environment may have the power to destroy the delicate plans we have so assiduously protected for the last 50 years.
Mulder: What do you mean, 'may have'?
WMM: Find Agent Scully. Only then will you realize the scope and grandeur of the project. Go! Go now!
He points a gun at Mulder who walks away. WMM gets back into the car which then explodes.]
Kim Manners:
When I saw the feature and they killed Neville [WMM] I was broken-hearted because the Well Manicured Man was one of my favorite characters.
[Mulder is pointing his gun at Cassandra.
Scully: Mulder, what are you doing?
Mulder: Stand away, Scully.
Scully: Mulder!]
Frank Spotnitz:
After that movie, if you look at the mythology episodes that followed, they tend to be much more about the heart of the conspiracy, the heart of what's going on, the heart of what's going to happen in the future. All those episodes after the movie were written with a certainty that we were heading toward the end, even if we didn't know exactly when the end was going to take place.
Chris Carter:
The scuttlebutt was that the X-Files was not going to be the same show because you couldn't come down to Los Angeles and create the same spooky atmosphere. It actually concerned me because you do have a lot of bright sunlight down in Los Angeles, you don't have the same moodiness. You have palm trees and you have a kind of happier place. Everything is a little more syrupy sunshine here. But I just took the opportunity to use things that we didn't have in Vancouver.
Frank Spotnitz:
As one of our editors said, once the show came to Los Angeles instead of being dark and wet it was dark and dry. We were still pretty much the same show only less rain.
Kim Manners:
It was quite an adjustment to come from Vancouver and then come to Los Angeles and try to keep the show as mysterious and dark and edgy because the sun is always out and it's always bright and cheery. You know, you want to cut to the bluebirds.
Rob Bowman:
We came down to Los Angeles and I felt solely responsible for redefining the look of the show because we don't have the mood, we don't have the Sherlock Holmes. I went Bill and I said, "I think what we should do is go for very, very deep blacks and very specific half-light. And the exterior - we'll just try to chase the sun, in the morning shoot east, and as the sun crawls overhead shoot a little tighter so you don't have front light and top light. And as the day comes to an end, shoot west. And we'll just always have a black object in part of the frame."
Chris Carter:
Bill helped make the show moody and atmospheric when sometimes we didn't have atmosphere or free atmosphere, but that was also Corey Kaplan as the production designer. It was Michael Watkins who hired these people onto the show so it was a stroke of good luck hiring the right producer in Los Angeles who hired the right people in Los Angeles to make the right decision and continue to make the show good even though we were shooting it in a different place.
Time Line
Circa February 1999 – Two Fathers
The Syndicate began in 1973, when a group of powerful men began collaborating with the alien colonists to create alien-human hybrids.
[CSM: We had a perfect conspiracy with an alien race. Aliens who were coming to reclaim this planet and to destroy all human life. Our job was to secretly prepare the way for their invasion. To create for them a slave race of human/alien hybrids.]
Frank Spotnitz:
We realized after the movie that we had explained a lot about aliens and the history of aliens but what we had not explained was the conspiracy and the history of the conspiracy. Why did Samantha Mulder get abducted? What did Cigarette Smoking Man have to do with it? What was the shameful secret that William Mulder, Mulder's father, was part of? And we felt the time had come to address all of those. So we devised this two part episode which came to be known as Two Fathers, One Son. And the inspiration more than anything else was The Godfather Part 2.
[Mulder: You sent them away, like they were things.
CSM: We sent them away, Agent Mulder, because it was the right thing to do.
Mulder: You sent them away to be tested on.
CSM: We sent them so they would come back to us. Don't you see? You can't think these choices were made lightly. They were the most painful decisions of our lives.]
Frank Spotnitz:
It was a really interesting episode because it did explain all the circumstances that led to members of the conspiracy giving up members of their own families. It was a 'Sophie's Choice' if you will, it was a bargain with the devil.
Rob Bowman:
The Elders are dying, not on the X-Files movie, but in this episode. Inside that hanger at Ellen's Airbase. Massive lighting. And thinking, I've got to exhibit fear and I've got to show terror, and I've got to do it in an hour-and-a-half. It was actually quite impersonal. It was more of a genocide or just a massacre. I just remember the pressure - I've got to get this right because I'm killing the Elders.
[Men run in the hangar where the Elders and the families are waiting. The face of the leader of the men changes to that of a faceless rebel alien.]
Frank Spotnitz:
There was this interesting vying for who would be the heir to the Cigarette Smoking Man. Spender was too weak. Krycek was too untrustworthy. And Mulder didn't want the job. And that's really why those titles emerge: Two Fathers, Bill Mulder and Cigarette Smoking man, and One Son.
Chris Carter:
By laying to waste the conspiracy, we were able to start afresh, clean slate, blank slate, and to build anew, using the same general core ideas, but in a new way.
Time Line
Early 1999 – S.R. 819
When Skinner is afflicted with a disfiguring disease that brings him to the brink of death, Scully and Mulder try to discover the cause.
[Doctor: He's coding on us.
He prepares the defibrillator. Another doctor has her hand on Skinner's chest but she doesn't move away when the doctor calls "clear".
Doctor: Clear! Dr Gabrera, clear. Dr Gabrera!
Dr. Gabrera: Let him go.]
John Shiban:
When I was working on the story for S.R. 819, the original pitch was that it's Mulder in DOA, basically. The DOA was the old film noir movie about a man who finds out he's going to die in 24 hours. And I thought Chris was very clever in that he said, "You know, the audience is in the middle of a season, the audience knows we're not going to kill David Duchovny's character, why don't you make it Skinner? And because we might get rid of Skinner." That helped, I think, Skinner's overall arc because now he got to be under the sway of Krycek and I think that deepened his character and it's one of those moments where a small decision can turn into something very cool and very big.
Time Line
Circa September 1999 – Biogenesis
Mulder and Scully locate a metal shard etched with Navajo writing containing passages from the Bible and a map of human DNA. Mulder believes the shard proves that the progenitors of humanity were aliens.
[Man looking a pieces of the shard when they suddenly fly out of his hands and across the room, embedding themselves in a Bible.]
John Shiban:
It was an effort, I think, to go backwards and explain the plan from the beginning. Let's take a step back now and show you something which is: here's an artifact that may or may not have started humanity, that started evolution. There is a legitimate scientific theory that life on earth may have come from another planet from a meteorite that landed, and that's kind of was where it started. And the idea that all religion and all culture and everything started with the aliens. It's sort of a way to go back to the beginning and say, OK, this is what we're dealing with and this is where we are today.
[Scully: Twenty-four panels. One for each human chromosome. A map of their makeup, maybe a map of our entire genetic makeup. A complete human genome. I mean, it's like, it's the most beautiful, intricate work of art.]
Frank Spotnitz:
We finally made the decision in season 7 to in fact answer all the important questions that the series had posed. In season 7 we finally, in 'Sein and Zeit' and 'Closure', we finally spell out the fate of Samantha Mulder, which was something nobody expected I think. We did that knowing that it was time to open a new chapter if the series was going to go on.
Time Line
Early 2000 – Requiem
Mulder and Scully return to Oregon where they find out that the Alien Bounty Hunter is rounding up abductees like Billy Miles and Teresa Hoese.
[Mulder steps into the light from the spaceship and joins the abductees.]
Frank Spotnitz:
When it came time to write the season finale for season 7, Requiem, there was a very good chance that it was the last season of the show. David Duchovny had announced he was done. There was some pretty strong sentiment inside and outside the show that it was time to call it a day. So we very consciously went back to the pilot episode, to the characters of the pilot episode, Billy Miles and the Sheriff, and brought them back for that, to come full circle from where we'd been. We felt it was an appropriate ending to have Mulder abducted and that idea came very early on in the writing of the story.
[The Bounty Hunter then joins the group. The light become brighter and the people are lifted up into the spaceship. Skinner shields his eyes from the glare until the spaceship flies away.]
----------------
[Mulder: Tell us about Billy Miles.
Krycek: There are others just like him. You can call them what you want, human replacements, alien replicants. They're virtually unstoppable.
Skinner: What do they want?
Krycek: They want to knock out any and all attempts by us to survive the final days – when they come back to retake the planet.]
[Spinning metal vertebrae. Doggett underwater. Arm through elevator door hitting Skinner. Bright light from spaceship in sky. Rohrer driving car, hitting someone. Doggett shooting Billy Miles. Supersoldier punching out car window, hitting driver. Shannon emerging from water. Jars of fetuses. Man being decapitated. Skinner shooting. Ship exploding as Scully, Doggett and Reyes run away on the dockside. Object spins and hovers over William in his crib. Alien craft closes as people look on. 'Mulder' in the desert. Rohrer is pulled toward the cliff-face as Doggett and Reyes jump out of the way. The missile explodes killing CSM.]
Threads of the Mythology
Super Soldiers
Time Line
Circa June 2000 – Without
The Bounty Hunter takes on other forms to try to capture Gibson. In a struggle, Scully kills the Bounty Hunter. In the end, Scully and Skinner cannot rescue Mulder who remains aboard the ship.
[Desert.
Doggett: Agent Mulder! Stay there!
Mulder walks calmly backwards. Doggett starts running towards him. Mulder walks back over the edge, and falls.]
Frank Spotnitz:
Ironically, the mythology was never more vigorous than it was in Season 8 because of the terms under which we had David Duchovny.
[Bounty Hunter approach Mulder in the torture chair.]
Frank Spotnitz:
It was not practical to bring back David for a stand-alone episode. He was a missing character, so we had to bring him back for the mythology.
John Shiban:
Chris always felt that at some point we do have to open up and come clean. We have to let the audience in on what's going on, so we can lead to a satisfying conclusion and I think that may be why there are more mythology shows in the addition of the super soldiers which was a new wrinkle.
[Spinning metal vertebrae.]
John Shiban:
It also allowed us to invest our new characters in the mythology as well because the rise of the super soldiers in 'Within' and 'Without' was almost a direct reaction to bringing on the Doggett character.
[Doggett and Scully – first meeting.]
John Shiban:
It's a new wrinkle in the mythology that still fits and works and makes sense yet gives him an opponent.
[Super soldier squeezing Doggett's head.]
John Shiban:
You don't want David Duchovny to leave and to burden Robert Patrick's character with having to just be the new Mulder, the new battles and having to deal with the old battles and deal with what Mulder did. You can't replace him, so the trick is to add to the mythology in a way that allows it go forward yet gives your new character something new to deal with.
Robert Patrick
'Agent John Doggett'
I figured that the best way to introduce the character was exactly the way they did it, in a mythology episode. And I think it was important for Chris and Frank and my director, Kim Manners, to really establish who this guy was, John Doggett, and what he was supposed to be doing.
Kim Manners:
First day of shooting we're doing the scene where Scully throws a cup of water at Robert's face. (laughs) We rehearsed it, and rehearsed it, and rehearsed it, and Chris called and said, 'Before you shoot, let me know, I want to come down, I want to make sure the scene's right.' And it was a very special moment for Chris, for all of us, and it came that time for Gillian to stand up and hit Robert with the cup of water, and she did, and walked away – I think I dollied in or something – and Robert felt 'aaah', he exhaled - 'OK, it's over, I'm here, I am now John Doggett'. It was something about that scene that just solidified that character for Bob. I'll never forget it.
[Behind the scenes: Robert, Mitch and Kim having fun.]
Kim Manners:
Suddenly there's this new energy. There's this new life. The crew was reinvigorated. I was reinvigorated. Everybody had this new energy from Robert Patrick.
[Doggett: If you were to find him out here, or the ship, or this alien bounty hunter, what would you do then?
Scully: I know what Agent Mulder would do. He'd do whatever it took.
Doggett: You mean lie. Like you've been lying to me. And flout orders like you've done every step of the way on this thing. Is that what it takes, Agent Scully?
Scully: Give a little, get a little, Agent Doggett.
Doggett: You knew where the kid was, you knew where the kid was and you wouldn't tell me. Why?
Scully: What kid? I don't see any kid.
Doggett: You're lying to me again! Assistant Director Skinner took him from here to the hospital.]
Time Line
May 2001 – Three Words
Howard Salt, a census worker, is killed trying to deliver information to the president about an Alien Invasion. A fully recovered Mulder enlists the help of the Lone Gunmen to decrypt Salt's hard drive. Doggett approaches Knowle Rohrer who gives him information that sets Mulder up for a trap.
[Rohrer: You need me more than you know.
Doggett: I don't need someone using me to get another man killed.
Rohrer: You think this is about Mulder. It's about the truth, John.
Doggett: What truth?
Rohrer: You've got it all right in front of you. It's all in the X-Files. I'm just one man trying to point you in the right direction.
Doggett walks away. Then we see the bump in Rohrer's neck.]
Frank Spotnitz:
The super soldiers was a lie, basically. It was a way to account for these aliens who were appearing. And explain them away in a terrestrial, somewhat believable, fashion. The idea was that the Defense Department was developing genetically modified human beings. So that was sort of the non-alien explanation. That's not the truth, though. In fact these were aliens.
Time Line
Circa February 2001 – This Is Not Happening
Agent Monica Reyes joins Scully and Doggett as they look into the reappearance of Teresa Hoese, a woman abducted at the same time as Mulder. Scully has a vision of a seemingly dead Mulder aboard the alien craft.
[Scully and Skinner meet Reyes for the first time.
Doggett: Agent Reyes.
She throws away her cigarette.
Doggett: Assistant Director Skinner, Agent Scully – Monica Reyes.
Reyes breathes out cigarette smoke.
Reyes: Hi.]
John Shiban:
It was a big challenge to deal with David Duchovny's departure in season 8, and in a way we sort of brought in both Doggett and Reyes to kind of get both sides of Mulder's personality. Of course, they're their own characters and the actors embodied them and actually brought things to them that were unexpected.
Annabeth Gish
'Agent Monica Reyes'
When I got the job, I took it upon myself to educate myself as much as I could just for my own information, even though the character of Monica wouldn't really know the mythology herself. So there was a part of me that tried to learn and tried not to learn too much so that I could keep Monica's perspective very clean and very fresh.
[Scully: You believe in extraterrestrials?
Reyes: Well, let's just say I don't not believe. As I said, I try to stay open.]
Harry V. Bring
Producer
It breathed fresh energy into the show and it allowed some new storylines, and get into their characters and where they came from. And they were both really real troupers, they came into it full force.
[Reyes, Doggett and Scully on the ship.]
John Shiban:
We had some fun with this new dynamic and with playing Scully has sort of a believer. I don't think she ever became Mulder but I think she realised over time that science can answer everything but science hasn't answered everything. And so she would become the expert in things paranormal with Reyes' help and Doggett got to be the realist.
Chris Carter:
And the mythology at a point, I think, had become somewhat complex and layered and a little bit maybe too difficult to continue to add more layers on to it. It made the show more interesting in certain ways and less interesting in other ways. I think for the long-time fans, they weren't used to seeing a Mulder-less show, so I think that they felt this show had changed in some way that they never forgave it, but I think that there were other people who loved these new characters and saw that we were telling interesting stories, just in a new way.
Time Line
Circa February 2001 – DeadAlive
After the 'dead' body of Billy Miles shows signs of life, he is put on life support. Later, Billy sheds his skin and emerges as a Super Soldier.
[Billy Miles on life support. He wakes up and pulls out his respirator tube.]
Frank Spotnitz:
It's the beginning of the phenomenon where you see the sort of molting aliens, where you see Billy Miles, found at sea and then he goes in the shower and the skin kind of sloughs off, and there he is Billy Miles, perfect again. Only he's not Billy Miles any more, he's an alien replica of Billy Miles.
Time Line
Circa February 2001 – DeadAlive
When Billy Miles shows signs of life, Skinner has Mulder's body exhumed and put on life support. In exchange for Mulder's cure, Krycek wants Skinner to make sure Scully's pregnancy doesn't come to term. Instead Skinner takes Mulder off life support, inadvertently halting the alien virus from transforming him.
[Skinner at Mulder's bedside. In the corridor, Doggett sees Scully.
Doggett: Where are you going?
Scully: Look, I don't have time to waste debating our differences, Agent Doggett. I strongly believe that Agent Mulder is infected with a virus.
Doggett: A virus?
Scully: A virus that seems to keep the body just alive enough to take it through a transformation.
Doggett: Into? Let me guess, an alien.
Scully: Agent Doggett, I don't have time to argue.
Doggett: I'm not arguing. And for what it's worth, that's what this guy that first found Mulder told me. This man that we put in prison, Absolom?
Scully: He told you this was a virus?
Doggett: No. He said the abductees were being returned and left for dead. That if he hadn't have found them and done his hocus-pocus, they would have been resurrected as aliens. It's all part of some big alien take-over of the world.
Scully: That's it.
Doggett: What's it?
Scully: How Billy Miles came back so perfectly. I stood there and watched his body go into seizure just moments before this happened. On the monitor there were two heart beats and I told the nurse that it was just a mechanical error.
Doggett: You think this kid has sloughed his skin and come back as an alien?
Scully: And it'll happen to Mulder if we don't stop it soon.
Doggett: Where are you going?
Scully: I need a surgical bay, a team of doctors. I have to keep Mulder's body stabilized in order to administer the vaccine.
Doggett: What vaccine?
Scully: The one I asked A.D. Skinner to get me.]
Frank Spotnitz:
I thought that was a very powerful episode that had a simple science fiction storyline and had a really good emotional dynamic between Scully, Doggett and Mulder. I think you really start to get the love triangle, that Doggett really did love Scully but Scully would never look at Doggett because obviously her heart belonged to Mulder. And Doggett, being too good a guy to fight that, having to respect that even though it was painful for him, clearly.
[Scully is sat by Mulder's bed, her head on his chest. She sees Doggett arrive at the doorway and just looks at him. Doggett quietly leaves, shutting the door.]
Time Line
Circa May 2001 – Existence
Scully and Reyes travel to a secret location in Georgia to birth Scully's baby. Billy Miles and other replicants locate Scully but, strangely, they allow her to give birth and they leave soon after.
[Scully in labor.
Reyes: Push, Dana. Keep breathing.
Scully: Please don't let them take it.
The baby is born.]
John Shiban:
Essence and Existence, I think, are an amazing two-parter. Not just because it's in Existence where my son, Jerry, gets to play Scully's baby, which was just a terrific capper on my X-Files career, and he did a damn good job, that little guy.
[Mulder holding William.
Scully: I don't understand, Mulder. They came to take him from us, but they didn't.
Mulder: I don't quite understand that either. Except that maybe he isn't what they thought he was. That doesn't make him any less of a miracle, though, does it.]
John Shiban:
That was a nice moment and it was on the last night of shooting for David and Gillian together until David came back for the very end. So it was a very emotional night for everybody. I mean, I was just beaming and proud and smiling. David and Gillian were enjoying that and then they had their last shot together, and I know that was very touching for them.
[Mulder and Scully kiss.]
Frank Spotnitz:
Once the baby was born, what do you do with it? And what kinds of jeopardy are acceptable to put an infant child in. We found interesting things to do, like having that artifact fly through in Scully's apartment and hover above the crib, which I think was a great creepy image. But it was hard to figure out opportunities to dramatize the existence of that baby.
Time Line
Circa May 2001 – Nothing Important Happened Today
Doggett assigns Reyes to the X-Files to help with his investigation of Kersh. Shannon McMahon tells Doggett about the Super Soldier program and how she was responsible for the deaths of two water reclamation workers.
[Shannon pulls Doggett down in the water.]
Frank Spotnitz:
By season 9, Scully had seen so much that a pretty far-out idea ended up being the real world possibility for what was going on, an alternate to the idea of there really being aliens. And that idea was that the government was creating a genetically altered army of super soldiers. And that was the direction the show was going in season 9 which ultimately ended up being our final season, and so that story line never kind of flowered as fully as it would have had there been a season 10, but that was the most convincing alternative we could think of to account for what Scully had seen.
[Doggett in bed. Shannon explains that she is a bio-engineered combat unit, that she has no weaknesses, doesn't sleep, can breathe under water, and that's how she saved his life.]
Frank Spotnitz:
It was Chris' idea to have that be the mislead, have that be the real world explanation for these incredible things that we were seeing. The idea of having aliens come in and replace us, I think we probably came up with together after season 7.
Time Line
Spring 2002 – William
Doggett thinks a man with a disfigured face is Mulder, but DNA tests prove him to be Jeffrey Spender. Spender gives William an injection that will nullify his alien DNA. Desperate to protect William, Scully decides she has to give him up for adoption.
[Scully to Reyes: I don't have a choice about what he is or was. But I do have a choice about the life my son will have. And should I choose that he never have to be afraid of anyone or anything. And can I ever even promise him that?
Reyes: But who can?
Later, a social worker takes William to his adoptive parents.]
Frank Spotnitz:
Our intention was to resolve the baby story line, exit Mulder and Scully from the series. We knew we had Gillian only through season 9, if there'd be a season 10 there would be no Mulder or Scully in the X Files, and then move into a period where aliens were not the central focus of the series. I think we all felt that the alien story line, the mythology, the conspiracy, had really gone on long enough and played itself out, and that there was another type of ongoing story line to play involving Doggett, the forces that killed his son, and Reyes.
Time Line
May 2002 – The Truth
Mulder infiltrates a secret military base and seemingly kills Knowle Rohrer. Mulder is captured and forced to stand trial for Rohrer's death. Acting as Mulder's defense attorney, Skinner calls Scully, Jeffrey, Marita, Gibson, Doggett and Reyes to testify on Mulder's behalf.
[Rohrer chasing Mulder in the military base. He catches Mulder and tries to push him over a safety rail. Mulder manages to get a purchase with his foot, and throws Rohrer over the rail. Rohrer falls onto some live electrical wires.]
Frank Spotnitz:
We realized pretty quickly, once Chris decided to end the show, that the season finale was going to have to be a trial. Throughout the life of the series we'd taken delight in asking more questions than we answered, but knowing that the show was coming to an end, we knew we finally had to take the time to just answer questions, to try and resolve as much as we could.
[Kersh: Let's bring in the defendant. This proceeding is called to order.]
John Shiban:
I knew in my gut, I think Frank knew in his gut, and Chris did too, that it's the only way for us to really bring back all of the elements we wanted to bring back. We really wanted it to be a class reunion.
Kim Manners:
I think it worked pretty well. The courtroom setting to explain from everybody's point of view what had just happened over the last nine years and, to be honest with you, I don't know that any one of us really knew what happened. I think Chris Carter is the only one, I think it's all locked in his head.
Frank Spotnitz:
We brought back everybody we could and answered every question we could. And the problem became, even at two hours we couldn't answer everything. There was more we had, there was more that was on the cutting-room floor.
John Shiban:
In everyone's mind it was the end, so everything from Corey Kaplan's amazing sets in the desert, to the set pieces, just finding a location for the opening teaser, everyone wanted it to be awesome and memorable, and I think it was.
Michelle Maclaren
Executive Producer
Chris had told us in January, he had told everybody well in advance that this was going to be the last season, so there was quite a build-up for the last half of the season to this final episode and we all knew that we were part of something really really big.
Harry S. Bring:
It was great to bring back the Smoking Man, and have his decrepit and dying of cancer, smoking through his neck, in a cave, this Indian woman – it was just so bizarre.
[Helicopter hovering outside the cave. The missile is fired and CSM is incinerated. More missiles are fired and the buildings are destroyed.]
Frank Spotnitz:
We wrapped everything up as perfectly as you could, given the strange, unpredictable twists and turns of the journey we'd taken over those nine years. Certainly there was no way Chris, when he wrote the pilot to the X Files, could have imagined the phenomenon it was going to become, that it would go nine years let alone five, I think he hoped for five at the most, that there were be a feature film, that there would be cast changes, that Mulder, who really was the driving force behind the series, would be gone for two and a half of those nine years. I don't know how I would have done any of it differently, given what we knew at the time. I think that at every step we really killed ourselves to make the best possible decision we could, knowing what we knew.
[Mulder discovering the chamber where the EBE had been kept.]
John Shiban:
It could have just stayed a monster show, it could have just been Mulder chasing vampires and ghosts for the rest of it, but the mythology was an attempt to cast these characters against the real world or an imagined version of the real world and I think that started to strike a chord with a lot of people. I don't think the vast majority of our audience obviously doesn't necessarily believe in alien invasion but they would sure like to speculate about it and that's where the fun comes in. In fact there was one scene that was supposed to end the show, President Bush receiving the news, which in retrospect for a lot of reasons was a good cut because it's really where you want to leave, you really want to leave with Mulder and Scully, and I'm glad we did.
Chris Carter:
I always saw the show as a search for God in a way or a search for godlessness. There was a story that I read in the New Republic during the beginning of the show, or the course of the first couple of years of the show, and it was right around the time that Schindler's List came out, and it was an article on memory and how important memory is to action and to not just history but to the future, and so I think that idea played through the course of the X Files, the idea that you cannot bury the truth, you don't bury someone – you wouldn't bury someone alive – is the way we put it, and that's really how memory played into the story that was the really the through-line for the X Files.
Howard Gordon:
In the course of a 24 episode season, you'd have 6 or 7 or 8 episodes that really told the story that promised more and more, that answered itself as it went along but then asked even more questions, and that kid of twisted back on itself. I mean, sometimes perhaps one time too many, but it turned out to be a story that captured a lot of people's imagination and that sustained for a remarkably long time.
[Kim Manners directing a scene from 'The Truth'.]
Kim Manners:
The fondest memories of the X Files was the family, and we were a family, not only the cast but the crew.
Michelle Maclaren:
It was the combination of a huge, gigantic show that changed television and the way television was made, and we were so fortunate to push the limits of what you're allowed to do in television, just from the magnitude of what we did with the visual effects, with the practical effects, the things we built, the stories we got to tell.
Annabeth Gish:
You bled for this, you sweat a lot making this show but that is what translated it into... It came into people's living rooms and was a high-quality show with this whole arc, this whole mythology.
Harry S. Bring:
It was the best crew I ever worked with, still is to this day.
Tom Braidwood:
X Files changed the way TV looked. It had a huge effect on TV then and TV since.
Paul Rabwin:
I don't know that a viewer can watch this series and really understand what it means to invest your life creatively into something this magnificent but it was a crowning achievement and I will never, never forget that.
Chris Carter:
From the first episode of the X-Files you see this poster with a spaceship on it and it says 'I want to believe' and that really is Mulder's mantra. He doesn't believe, he wants to believe, he wants to find reason to believe and that's kind of for me the basis of faith is that you continue... faith is a struggle, it's an effort and Mulder's faith was a struggle and effort, the faith to find the truth about his sister. So that poster, I think, really sumps up so much of what became the mythology, that search.
Frank Spotnitz:
I think that Mulder and Scully getting together at the end of season 9, ending in a rainy motel room, is the perfect ending to the series. The watchwords of the series were 'The truth is out there' and I had felt for many years that, corny as it sounds, the biggest truth in the universe is love, it's this sort of non-physical truth. It's the bond that Mulder and Scully formed. And yet, because their partnership was based on this quest for the truth, they were kept from consummating that bond. It's like their battle kept them from being together and I felt finally allowing them to be together, however brief that moment was, but allowing them to be in that room, to be together and to feel their love for each other, was the simplest and most perfect way to end the show. I was really happy with the way it came to a close.
[Mulder: Maybe there's hope.]