3x20 Jose Chung's From Outer Space
Transcript of the DVD commentary
by Rob Bowman and Darin Morgan
[Transcribed by Libby]
ROB BOWMAN:
OK, I'm Rob Bowman, I'm the director of 'Jose Chung'.
DARIN MORGAN:
I'm Darin Morgan, I was the writer.
ROB BOWMAN:
This was the opening sequence, the star field's all fake but the spaceship going overhead, actually just before we were ready to shoot it as Bill Lucking was stepping inside the bucket, actually broke it, so after three hours of preparation we had to stop and sort of glue our spaceship back together.
DARIN MORGAN:
This shot, if I'm not mistaken, took all night to get and I know that because Rob called me the next morning and said 'Actually I took all night to get it, thanks a lot'. That's the only way I know that, but I take his word for it.
ROB BOWMAN:
Um, this is a very familiar location. This is up in the greater Vancouver district forest up above the studio, and a location we used it seems like every episode. And these are our two sweet little kids that our story will center around.
DARIN MORGAN:
This is setting up the typical alien abduction, stereotypical alien ...
ROB BOWMAN:
Yeah, power goes out in the car.
DARIN MORGAN:
It's all the things that everyone is now familiar with, with what happens when people claim they're abducted, except that the corny sound effect which I always liked.
ROB BOWMAN:
The sort of the 50s reaction from the kids' faces, bulging eyes.
DARIN MORGAN:
And the first of all of the repeated lines of 'how the hell should I know', which will re-occur a couple times throughout the episode. There was another good cut, Rob.
ROB BOWMAN:
Thank you.
DARIN MORGAN:
Now that we've set up all this stereotypical stuff to play off this thing, now people are confused.
DARIN MORGAN:
This is the... he was from the planet Harryhausen, later called Lord Kinbote. This shot right here is too long, because we ended up short and we had a couple of seconds, and I said 'let's put it back on that Lord Kinbote shot'.
ROB BOWMAN:
And here's our two aliens which were a couple of skinny guys who were extremely miserable and not very helpful.
DARIN MORGAN:
They were the makeup assistants.
ROB BOWMAN:
They were very unhappy because they're naked out there in the 32 degree weather and the paint was coming off and the necks were unfurling and they're sweating, they're sweating on one hand underneath the hood and they're freezing on the outside and they get goosebumps all over them.
DARIN MORGAN:
The makeup people, I don't think, have any idea, the special effects makeup effects guys.
ROB BOWMAN:
What they put people through.
DARIN MORGAN:
Yeah.
ROB BOWMAN:
They build it and they send it out and in their heated little offices...
DARIN MORGAN:
They go, 'oh, this looks so cool' and the actors underneath are like going, 'get me out of here it, I'm going insane'.
ROB BOWMAN:
Sweet retribution.
[main titles end]
DARIN MORGAN:
We should explain those titles. (laughs)
ROB BOWMAN:
They're inexplicable.
DARIN MORGAN:
What can we say about Charles that hasn't already been said.
ROB BOWMAN:
First of all, I guarantee everything, as funny as it was on camera, the off-camera was even funnier and just the crew trying to keep from laughing here in the takes, including Gillian off-camera, was half the trick.
DARIN MORGAN:
I think a lot of the staff and crew were very apprehensive about the episode and a lot of people didn't know quite what to make of it, but this interview between Charles and Gillian was the first day of shooting, first day and a half, and I think after that everyone was on board, as they say, because Charles is just so great, not just his performance but just to work with and everyone after that was all into this episode.
ROB BOWMAN:
You know, I think on this episode more than any other that I'd worked on, people literally just said, 'look, Rob, I don't understand how this piece that we're shooting fits into it, I'll just do what you ask, follow the screenplay and hope it comes together'.
ROB BOWMAN:
We just had a lot of discussions about how this puzzle fit together and it truly is that. As long as we were careful each and every day that it would go together and make sense in the end. We hoped.
DARIN MORGAN:
I just remember this one line where he reaches across and goes, 'Exactly', that was his improv reach, reach across, which is the kind of stuff you want from your actors, you don't want to - right there.
[Jose Chung: Exactly.]
DARIN MORGAN:
That was Charles' own move, I believe. That kind of stuff's kind of priceless.
ROB BOWMAN:
This book that he wrote in was the funniest thing, a book of scribbles, he never wrote a single thing. Here were are again in the GVRD, probably a location people remember.
DARIN MORGAN:
All this stuff that people throughout the episode about people with their clothes on backwards and all that sort of stuff is what's reported by the people who claim to be abducted. It sounds kind of crazy but I'm trying to say that I did some research.
ROB BOWMAN:
God, I wish I could hear what's he saying.
DARIN MORGAN:
He's saying he prefers the word, he doesn't like "abducted", he likes, 'I've just had a little UFO experience'.
ROB BOWMAN:
Oh, right.
DARIN MORGAN:
This thing, I had so many people tell me, that their kids woke up in the middle of the night terrified because of this image of the alien at the foot of the bed. Which I always took a weird sort of pride in. Right here, because everyone just thought this was just a goofball episode, but there were, that was a ...
ROB BOWMAN:
Well, yeah, I mean there's too many recognizable and familiar images in the piece for it to feel like it's all fabricated and it really is truly a wellspring and a conglomeration of all the alien experiences as reported. The trick here was to try to make both what actually happened and what apparently happened feel as real and let the audience try to figure out which was which. Two kids in the same place experiencing two different realities and us trying to figure out which one actually happened. And of course this incident tears these two apart.
DARIN MORGAN:
This is Detective Manners who was named after our fellow director/producer, Kim Manners, who we wanted to play the part. He didn't because he claimed he was tired, it was the end of the season, but I think 1. he was scared, and 2. we made the mistake of letting him read the script beforehand.
ROB BOWMAN:
I think the truth was that the character was written to curse quite a few times and I think Kim realized that part of his reputation was...
DARIN MORGAN:
I think he was proud of that. But he just didn't want to do that.
ROB BOWMAN:
And here is the repetitive staging idea that was part of the screenplay where the two different interviews and again trying to figure out which part of the story actually happened, where did the story end for each one of them and where did it continue, and that continuation is really where the difference of the experiences, because one experience ended there on the road and somebody else was actually taken further into, the girl was actually taken further into a deeper, more frightening experience.
DARIN MORGAN:
But there were several lines and several stagings, that's the proper word, of the actors.
ROB BOWMAN:
Stagilisations? (laughs)
DARIN MORGAN:
There you go. That's repeated throughout the episode because we didn't know how to do it differently. (laughs)
DARIN MORGAN:
There's a mention here of The Caligarian Candidate which was a combination of 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari' and 'The Manchurian Candidate' which both had an emphasis on hypnotism and mind control, which this episode deals with.
ROB BOWMAN:
I think essentially what the central theme is through hypnosis what can you tell, what experience is real and what is not real.
DARIN MORGAN:
Now you tell me!
ROB BOWMAN:
I believe that's what we talked about five years ago.
DARIN MORGAN:
Yeah, at some point, I was tired, I just finished writing, I was babbling. But it's true, that's one of the themes.
DARIN MORGAN:
Alex Diakun. My all-time favorite actor. He's been in almost everything I've written because he's got a great voice and an interesting face.
ROB BOWMAN:
Well, alien-shaped face.
DARIN MORGAN:
Right. And, plus, he always knows his lines.
ROB BOWMAN:
Well, a mesmerizer, just a lens gag that we used. It's not the first time it's been used, it just seemed to work here.
ROB BOWMAN:
This was just actually a secret desire of Darin to see her dressed like that.
DARIN MORGAN:
Hey, now, careful, careful. We didn't really have... specifically know how we were going to do these transitions. I had them in the script and I told Rob they weren't very good, do them how you want. And we shot it a couple of different ways, ones with the lens thing and ones without, and Rob always thought there was some significance here with the donuts.
DARIN MORGAN:
The point of this was to show the fact when people are hypnotized that they can be influenced by what is in the room where they're hypnotized, those circumstances, and that's why the blocking of these aliens are in the same position as the people who were in the room hypnotizing her and the donuts, you don't want to forget the donuts, and you don't know how much of her memories are being influenced here by the actual memory or the experience of being hypnotized.
DARIN MORGAN:
Now here's where Scully talks about the alien abduction scenario which becomes so prevalent in our society. Which is one of the reasons why I have so many references to old films that have aliens and all that stuff, it's all become quite standard and kind of clichéd now.
ROB BOWMAN:
Except that, to take that further, the cliché actually is a cliché because it's what really happened all the time.
DARIN MORGAN:
Possibly, that's the mystery. Here's a really poorly written act-out, that's saved by Mark Snow's little musical sting here.
ROB BOWMAN:
Is this the bleeping scene.
DARIN MORGAN:
Yeah, he just said the bleeping thing. But this is really a kind of bad act-out, written, and Mark really kind of saved it with a little kind of sting.
ROB BOWMAN:
Oh.
DARIN MORGAN:
Where the hell are we? What is going on here?
ROB BOWMAN:
This is, I think this is Lord Kinbote's jail cell.
DARIN MORGAN:
This is somewhere in the bowels of the spaceship.
ROB BOWMAN:
Yeah. It's actually stage 5 at North Shore studios, but...
DARIN MORGAN:
What we kind of wanted was a contrast between what normal abduction is very kind of blank space, you don't see other aliens in jail cells.
ROB BOWMAN:
Yeah. Not something they were groaning over the fact that they were incarcerated. This is one of the more unique moments coming up here, though, back in the jail cell with this guy.
DARIN MORGAN:
Now might be a good time to ask, did this show, episode, single-handedly ruin the X Files. (laughs)
ROB BOWMAN:
I think it single-handedly shook things up.
DARIN MORGAN:
OK. Some people were upset at the cigarette-smoking alien. Do you have your Cigarette-smoking alien figurine, by the way? [...]
ROB BOWMAN:
Yeah, but I don't have more of the little cigarettes to burn, the little incense cigarettes, they burned out.
DARIN MORGAN:
Now here once again we're just contrasting the girl's story, which is kind of the stereotypical abduction, with this kid's which doesn't seem to make much sense. Well, here's the 'not really happening', isn't that the line?
ROB BOWMAN:
'This is not happening'.
DARIN MORGAN:
'This is not happening', which was said so many times when I was writing this episode.
ROB BOWMAN:
[...] shooting it.
DARIN MORGAN:
The thing I like about this line is that it's a gag line. The first time you see it you laugh at it because it's an alien saying, 'this is not really happening'. You go back at the end of the episode and you realize who that person is in that suit. It takes on a different meaning because it's actually a person who's trying to convince himself that this is not really happening, it's some sort of hypnotic suggestion, experiment, whatever. Which is really just sort of a kind of one step away from being completely insane.
ROB BOWMAN:
Mm-mm.
DARIN MORGAN:
So that's why I'm kind of proud of that line because it's funny first time.
ROB BOWMAN:
And it's funnier the more you think about it.
DARIN MORGAN:
Yeah. And then when you go back and look at it, it has kind of a deeper meaning which ties in with the themes. (laughs)
ROB BOWMAN:
Mm-mm. I think an acting note that I felt pretty strongly about from the beginning was I think in order for the show to have some grounding to it that David and Gillian, Mulder and Scully, had to be their normal investigative selves and not enjoy the humorous tone of the script and it was hard because that meant they didn't get to enjoy a lot of the fun of it, but on the other hand the outcome would be much better if they walk a straight and narrow path and they did and I think it really added credibility to the episode.
ROB BOWMAN:
And this was where the network demanded that we take out all the less-than-veiled metaphors or whatnot for cuss words and Darin just sort of rebelliously put in 'bleep, bleep'.
DARIN MORGAN:
Which actually turned out working better. I can't thank the censors enough with their help on that one. This is Bill Lucking.
ROB BOWMAN:
This was fun because there were stories about going backwards and forwards in time and I felt like the way, the visual metaphor I could use for that was that I felt whip-panning the camera left to right made it feel like we're going forward in time and whip-panning the camera right to left felt like we were going backwards in time, and whether or not anybody feels, notices intellectually, I think that viscerally it has an effect.
DARIN MORGAN:
There it was.
ROB BOWMAN:
That's backwards in time.
DARIN MORGAN:
Yeah, I feel backwards now. (laughs)
ROB BOWMAN:
Is that right? This is where Darin used the cheapest video effect possible to speed up that car, much to my chagrin.
DARIN MORGAN:
No, no, no. That was speeded up and then slowed down in the lab, remember? Because we screwed that up actually.
ROB BOWMAN:
Oh, man. Here's the beginning of Jesse The Body Ventura's public career.
ROB BOWMAN:
Aside from the wrestling ring of course.
DARIN MORGAN:
(laughs) Mow that was a nice transition there by Rob, because that wasn't in the script, but that was a nice way to cheat.
ROB BOWMAN:
Oh, to have him looking in the correct direction and not know you're back in the scene.
DARIN MORGAN:
Right. Like he's telling the story and it gives the audience that kind of not-quite-sure-actually where they are, what's going on with this part of the story.
ROB BOWMAN:
The camera work had to be far more aggressive and interactive, and yet never get in the way of what I thought was a very complicated and layered story that the screenplay as I had spent so many days and nights reading and re-reading and asking questions from Darin about what was real and what we were suggesting was real and was in fact not. I thought that I had to give every clue on camera and every metaphor I possibly could in the screenplay and therefore allow the audience I thought the pleasure of figuring out the mystery for themselves.
DARIN MORGAN:
You, you lost me again.
DARIN MORGAN:
Did you read Jesse's infamous interview in Playboy.
ROB BOWMAN:
I did not.
DARIN MORGAN:
He admitted he had no idea what the hell any of these lines meant that he was saying. (laughs) That's acting though, because you buy it, you actually think he knows what he's talking about here. I wrote this actually for Jesse The Body because he was my favorite wrestler at the time. If I was doing it now, I'd probably write it for Kurt ... - you familiar with him?
ROB BOWMAN:
I'm not enough of a wrestler to know.
DARIN MORGAN:
There the other man in black puts his hand on his shoulder, another kind of one of those clues that's repeated throughout the show.
DARIN MORGAN:
I love this going backwards, I don't care if it looks cheesy for you. We did that wrong, I forget how we screwed that up, but it had something to do with the time factor. It was very slow, and the fact too that the episode is crammed, we really didn't have any spare time to allow ...
ROB BOWMAN:
It's better if the big heavy Cadillac comes flying in anyway, it seems more incongruous.
DARIN MORGAN:
I should throw in here, when Rocky starts telling his story here, that the idea for this Rocky is, you meet these kind of people and they seem very normal and down-to-earth and straight-laced, then when you get to know them better and they start talking about their lives, what their beliefs are, you realize they're complete nutballs. So that's what this guy was, he appeared to be a blue-collar type of guy and then he's telling this story that ...
ROB BOWMAN:
You realize he's really taking his moment in the sun.
DARIN MORGAN:
Yeah, and just completely off his rocker, like everybody you meet.
DARIN MORGAN:
I've often been asked, I haven't often been asked, but a couple of people, one person, once asked me why does Lord Kinbote talk the way he does. Well, just simply because in bad science fiction movies, for some reason, in the future all creatures for some reason speak in like bad Shakespearean medieval lingo, and that's what Rocky, I guess his mind has been warped by too many of those where people speaketh thus, and thous, and whatever, so that's why Lord Kinbote...
ROB BOWMAN:
Again, history is made by those who write it.
DARIN MORGAN:
And this inner Earth thing, too, some people believe this, so I crammed that in there. Rocky thinks that it's an inner Earth.
ROB BOWMAN:
So that's where the alien creature ...?
DARIN MORGAN:
That's where Lord Kinbote.... and there are some people ...
DARIN MORGAN:
Wait, here's one of my favorite lines, which is Rocky writing his stuff in screenplay format, which for some reason I guess as a screenwriter is amusing to me because everybody now wants to be a screenwriter.
ROB BOWMAN:
Everybody's got their own take.
DARIN MORGAN:
Right. And if someone writes something in screenplay that's when you know they're a nutball, and so it was a good sign.
ROB BOWMAN:
Where's Lord Kinbote come from?
DARIN MORGAN:
Are you really asking me?
ROB BOWMAN:
I'm really asking.
DARIN MORGAN:
That's a literary reference which I'd really not discuss.
ROB BOWMAN:
Is it ...?
DARIN MORGAN:
There's a character in Pale Fire by that name and it ties in with the themes of some of this.
DARIN MORGAN:
This the re-hypnosis scene, which probably confuses some people. The idea is the first hypnosis scene only got to sort of the first level and now this re-hypnotizing, and he's hypnotizing her to see if what she remembers is really what she remembers. It's sort of a second layer.
ROB BOWMAN:
And again our repetitive staging with the drink in the right hand of the person on the left.
DARIN MORGAN:
So it's the same between these people and the hypnosis room with the aliens in the first alien scenario and then in the second scenario we've all these military guys, duplicating. I guess this stuff is sort of, this is where the Manchurian Candidate kind of really kind of comes to the fore there at all. The hypnosis scene in the beginning sort of influenced these scenes. The key once again is that the guys say, 'you're feeling very sleepy, very relaxed' is a clue throughout the episode. The person's about to be hypnotized, which happens I think three times and then happens at the end which is a clue with Alex Trebek. These guys here, the guy in the far right I think is our executive producer's nephew, and the guy here in the middle to the right was the dialogue coach's husband or something. It's like we cast everyone, family members. Except Mina Mina who's the guy here in the front - I remember his name because his first name's Mina and his second name's Mina.
(They both laugh.)
DARIN MORGAN:
I think we cast him for his bald head, to be honest with you.
ROB BOWMAN:
It's another unusual face.
DARIN MORGAN:
Somewhat alien perhaps, you could argue. Now here when the guy comes in and says, 'give her the usual abduction rigmarole', he's suggesting she's been hypnotized to remember the first alien abduction scene that we'd seen in the first act.
ROB BOWMAN:
But then to confuse it and cloud it with the usual cliché stuff, she gets cluttered in her memory.
DARIN MORGAN:
And the audience does as well, and that's where they just throw their hands up and say, 'I can't make any of sense of this.'
ROB BOWMAN:
All the bits are there for you to actually figure out the puzzle, it's just we keep trying to flip you back on yourself and you're not sure what you're conclusions are.
DARIN MORGAN:
Here's another poor written act-out, saved by Mark Snow again.
DARIN MORGAN:
This is Alan in what I think is a great performance and I remember Rob calling me from Vancouver and saying, 'we got a guy to play this part because when he says he wants to be abducted by aliens you really believe him'.
ROB BOWMAN:
(laughs) That's right.
DARIN MORGAN:
And it's true and that was the big thing with Rob and myself as well of course, we've got all this craziness going on in the episode but you've got to keep everyone as true as possible, as hard as that is, because everyone's so over the top and outlandish, it's still got to be somewhat real.
DARIN MORGAN:
This is, I think, one of your best shots here in the show.
ROB BOWMAN:
It is?
DARIN MORGAN:
Yeah, because you got him in the foreground here and you got them in the background and it pans over across his head, perfectly to coincide with his voiceover.
ROB BOWMAN:
Oh, right.
DARIN MORGAN:
Right here. It's beautiful.
ROB BOWMAN:
Well, you know, that's why they let me do a few of these, I try not to screw too many of them up.
DARIN MORGAN:
And here, of course, is David's famous yelp.
ROB BOWMAN:
This guy was a popsicle.
DARIN MORGAN:
I think that 'wrap it up' - you have a line where Gillian says like 'wrap it up' or something, I think you threw that in there. Here's Gillian at her sexiest.
ROB BOWMAN:
'If you ever', something like that.
DARIN MORGAN:
'You're a dead man'. That's also a line that's repeated: 'I'm a dead man', 'you're a dead man', that's another one of those key phrases that's said throughout the piece.
ROB BOWMAN:
Oh gosh, here we go, their alien autopsy.
DARIN MORGAN:
All this stuff was a take-off.
ROB BOWMAN:
What is yelling here? Attica?
DARIN MORGAN:
"Roswell! Roswell!"
ROB BOWMAN:
"Attica" would have been the same.
DARIN MORGAN:
It's a play on that. This is all a parody of the alien autopsy show which actually aired on Fox earlier that season. Quite ridiculous and got enormous ratings. Cutting this was kind of fun, I remember that, we had some laughs.
ROB BOWMAN:
I don't remember cutting it.
DARIN MORGAN:
Here's Stupendous Yappi, played by Yapp, Duchovny's stand-in. He was in an earlier episode I wrote. Surely can't say much, enough about Yapp.
DARIN MORGAN:
Oh, you know, the humbug is a reference to my first episode that I wrote rather than saying truths are fiction or whatever, I used "humbug" just to be a jerk. I remember David had a cold in this scene, we had to loop over his dialogue.
ROB BOWMAN:
Yeah, because he was very nasal.
DARIN MORGAN:
It's one of the problems of TV production is these guys get sick, you just got to keep shooting, you don't have time.
ROB BOWMAN:
Here we go.
DARIN MORGAN:
Uh. They started laughing after this because the guy's head hit so hard. Gillian started laughing right after this. It's hard to really ...
ROB BOWMAN:
What do you say? (laughs) Isn't it all their own [...]?
DARIN MORGAN:
Here's an excuse to get the character with the video footage out. He goes, so you never see him again, so he's got the video footage. These next two scenes I like to point out are pretty also kind of poorly written and they're just trying to get... these are kind of exposition scenes, trying to be written quickly as possible, and the main gist of them is simply to have Mulder find out the name of the second alien/pilot, and also to show that that body they just had and all that evidence has mysteriously disappeared, as it so often did with Mulder and Scully. So this is just kind of awkward scene for me, these are the only two things I'm not real crazy about. But they're done, they're shot quick so that you can get back to the ....
ROB BOWMAN:
Down to the... back to fun stuff. The entertainment value of that was because it's familiar, again cliché, events, it actually feels like you're really reading through the annals of alien abduction history and it's all combined in this one show.
DARIN MORGAN:
And where Gillian says, 'so what else in new', the evidence is gone again, Mulder.
DARIN MORGAN:
This scene here with the men in black, I originally intended like a dialogue scene between the men in black and this character. I was writing the script, I was long, I had like half a page, so this was the fastest way this scene could be done, they just break through, go to the VCR, rip it open, give him a backbreaker, and leave. It was just simply the quickest way.
DARIN MORGAN:
Hey! You're Alex Trebek. That was his own reaction to it.
ROB BOWMAN:
Yes.
DARIN MORGAN:
This was originally supposed to be a piledriver but just was too dangerous to do so it became a backbreaker. (laughs)
DARIN MORGAN:
And of course we get the evil Mulder scene. Now, if you're wondering, if you've paid your money, your money's been spent well buying these DVDs, the answer's "yes" because in the syndicated version which is shown on whatever channels, they cut two minutes out of the show so they cut right there and you don't get any of this, the rest of this scene has gone which has one of my best lines and one of Charles' best reactions.
ROB BOWMAN:
Which is?
DARIN MORGAN:
This is where he says the dungeons and dragons, about learning something about courage.
DARIN MORGAN:
That was an effect flare we had to put in there because the censor was concerned.
ROB BOWMAN:
About the butt?
DARIN MORGAN:
Although the guy was covered, we gave the appearance that he was nude.
ROB BOWMAN:
Yeah, I was thinking, I typically used that lens flaring device there.
DARIN MORGAN:
It was Mat Beck had to put that in. Now this is not a bad written act-out, because the guy's saying the same thing that the alien said and you're wondering, he goes "this is not happening". This is a nice shot which emphasizes the mashed potatoes.
ROB BOWMAN:
Oh, that's our Close Encounters homage there.
DARIN MORGAN:
Which is, once again, there's all these kinds of references to the movies that have something to do with alien abduction or aliens, which shows that is an effect on the culture and people are claiming to have these experiences, it's kind of a unconscious influence. Rather than us trying to be cool.
ROB BOWMAN:
We make up our own.
DARIN MORGAN:
I wrote this last act in one night and I didn't change one line except one line I put in here when Mulder kind of recounts everything that's happened, where he says, "but if aliens are just government aircraft and they're driven by pilots" because you and Bob Gruen said "we don't what the hell's going on here".
ROB BOWMAN:
Right.
DARIN MORGAN:
You need to have something where Mulder explains what the hell's going on. So this whole act I wrote in one night, didn't change a word, except for that little...
ROB BOWMAN:
Helpful...
DARIN MORGAN:
(laughs) Yeah.
DARIN MORGAN:
This is Dan Quinn, I should point out, which was kind of a nice performance.
ROB BOWMAN:
Yeah, he did a very nice job here.
DARIN MORGAN:
And I love this scene, actually. You don't get many scenes which are just two people in a diner, just talking. It's kind of a weird sort of gobbledygook nonsense which actually kind of makes a weird sort of sense.
ROB BOWMAN:
It's actually a diner on Hastings Street in Vancouver, it was a very bad part of town, and I don't know if I ever shot there again or before this.
DARIN MORGAN:
Yeah, they wanted to shoot there for a long time and for some reason the Diner said no, and this is the first time.
ROB BOWMAN:
May be the first and last.
DARIN MORGAN:
Now this is one of those lines once again, throughout this episode people said 'looks like I'm a dead man', or 'I'll be a dead man', or 'you're a dead man', and I told Rob, this guy when he says it, everyone else says it very melodramatically and over the top, but this guy says it sort of matter-of-factly because he's the only one who actually knows he's about to be a dead man.
ROB BOWMAN:
Right.
DARIN MORGAN:
This is where we get the pie, the pie-eating scene, which I would just like to say is not a tribute to "Twin Peaks", in some people's eyes just because Mulder's eating a pie, that wasn't my intention, but people thought it was. That's what the scene's not, but what the scene is I have no idea.
DARIN MORGAN:
This is my favorite cut in all my episodes where Mulder says "you ever experience a period of missing time" and then we have intentional jump cut right here because that is a period of missing time right here.
ROB BOWMAN:
Mm-mm.
DARIN MORGAN:
I love that cut. Very simple and Heather was afraid to do it because editors don't want to do intentional jump cuts - it scares the hell out of them! Heather McDougall, I think we should mention, was the editor of the show.
DARIN MORGAN:
This is the men in black scene. This was before the movie "Men in Black", it came after the comic book, but the legend of the men in black is just these strange men who show up and tell people who have claimed to see UFOs to not tell anyone and not talk, and their behavior is odd.
ROB BOWMAN:
Kept trying to use this triangular metaphor through here, to keep us in that hypnosis staging, so I'm always trying to keep somebody on deep right and foreground center and deep left, to sort of subliminally keep the audience in that state of flux, but is it live, you know, is it real or isn't it, hypnotic suggestion.
DARIN MORGAN:
There's the hand on the shoulder and the line, the hypnosis line. Of course Alex Trebek (laughs).
ROB BOWMAN:
Just a reminder, that also played in the garage scene with Jesse Ventura, that was the second man in the garage.
DARIN MORGAN:
The idea is you simply can't be for sure how much of that was true, how much of that was hypnotic suggestion because the implication is that character just hypnotized Mulder. It's what we don't see, and the idea of having Alex Trebek is simply.. it had to be someone who it obviously couldn't be. So viewers say to someone, "I saw a UFO last night", you go "oh, that's kind of weird", and if you then say "then these men in black came the next day, they told me not to tell anyone, even though I hadn't told anyone", you'd say, "well, that's very weird", but if then you said, "and one of the guys was Alex Trebek, that was a Jeopardy", you'd go, "oh, you're a nutball". So everything that I had just said would be discounted and that's kind of the idea behind that. If I'm not mistaken this episode went over budget. (laughs)
ROB BOWMAN:
I don't think so. I don't think I directed any episodes that went over budget.
DARIN MORGAN:
This of course, I don't know if this ever played but that's the guy that was on the autopsy thing, the first pilot they discovered, and the second guy, no, that was Dan Quinn who we just talked to in the diner, and then the second guy is the guy they had on the autopsy.
ROB BOWMAN:
Yeah.
DARIN MORGAN:
And that's why Det Manners could say, "that was the guy", and he's just so far out of his league, this character. Mulder and Scully are used to this type of thing so they just walk away.
DARIN MORGAN:
I make a joke here, some people complain about the X Files' episodes not having proper closure, whatever that means, so that's why Gillian says "that's as much closure as we usual have, more than usual", but closure: I don't know what the hell people are talking about, they just mean a good ending.
ROB BOWMAN:
Satisfaction, I think, of some kind.
DARIN MORGAN:
This was supposed to be staged so that you think maybe this is the men in black, I don't know if that ever worked, but it doesn't really matter. (laughs) It doesn't matter. And, you know, not a lot is said about David's acting but I love this scene. Because Mulder has a speech here, it's really kind of ridiculous and really hard to do with any sort of realistic conviction and I think he really pulls it off.
ROB BOWMAN:
You see him sort of brace himself and take a deep breath before he's about to start this, so you can tell he's struggling with it.
DARIN MORGAN:
And the same with Gillian, I mean some of the words we ask them to say really it's almost close to gobbledygook and yet they manage to pull it off. I think they actually have an idea what they're saying as opposed to, say, Jesse.
ROB BOWMAN:
And to say it with such conviction and surety as though it's coming from their soul, as opposed to just, you know, having memorized it.
DARIN MORGAN:
Now this is where Mulder gives the "how the hell should I know" which is another one of the repeated lines which is what the kids said and the alien said. I don't know why that works but it does.
ROB BOWMAN:
You know, the fun part about the script is that in spite of all the misdirection and hypnotic suggestion, it actually is an episode with an alien abduction in it and I think Mulder and Scully, certainly Mulder knows that he's really on to something here but it's just so cluttered and layered with deception, and deception by design, that he's never going to get the truth out of it.
DARIN MORGAN:
It's not like the whole black oil, alien rebel thing, which was so easy to follow.
ROB BOWMAN:
Ah-ha. Yeah.
(Darin laughs.)
DARIN MORGAN:
Here's the recapping of all the major characters which always works, too.
ROB BOWMAN:
This is the closure you were speaking off.
DARIN MORGAN:
Well, yeah. I don't like that word. But it's a satisfactory ending that we were talking about. There's a funny gag - this bit here, this thing is out of a parody or tribute to the way my brother, who was a co-executive producer on the show, he used to write jokes, he started off as a comedy writer, and he'd always have people give these really kind of long articulate speeches and it seemed kind of sensible and then they would always say something incredibly stupid right at the end, which is the lavamen joke, and when I gave my brother a script, I'd go "there's a joke in here that I wrote just like you used to write 'em". And I didn't tell him which one and he read it and goes "you mean the lavamen". (laughs)
DARIN MORGAN:
This thing here I'd like to point out, if they were doing this episode in season 6, Scully's reaction they'd put in a kettledrum sound effect right here, right here, boing.
DARIN MORGAN:
This is, I guess, also one of my favorite lines, where the girl says "love - is that all you men think about", which always gets kind of a nice laugh.
DARIN MORGAN:
And of course, this little downbeat ending. Why'd the ending have to be so downbeat and depressing?
ROB BOWMAN:
Ah, that's the way you wanted it.
DARIN MORGAN:
(laughs) OK.
[Executive producer: Chris Carter]
DARIN MORGAN:
Who is this Chris Carter fellow?
ROB BOWMAN:
He keeps sticking his name on all my episodes.
(Darin laughs.)