Memento Mori
Transcript of the DVD Audio Commentary
by Frank Spotnitz
[Transcribed by: X_Follower (X_Follower@hotmail.com)
Edited by: Libby]
Hi, my name is Frank Spotnitz. I wrote this episode, 'Memento Mori', with Chris Carter, Vince Gilligan and John Shiban. It was the 15th episode of the fourth season of The X-Files. And as you can see, it begins with this kind of surreal image and very consciously the decision was made to begin the episode with this image of approaching a white light as if through a narrow tunnel because that's the myth or the belief that when you are dying you see a white light and you approach it as you get closer to death. And very slowly this image becomes less dreamlike and more literal and you find a figure standing there in a hospital gown, who soon enough will be revealed as Agent Dana Scully, Gillian Anderson, holding up an X-Ray. And sure enough, the x-ray is her own. And there is a very moving voiceover that accompanies this image and the voiceover was written 100% by Chris. I think it's one of the nicest and most poetic of the many voiceovers he has written over the course of the series. And, actually, he was vacationing once and a girl swam up to him at the pool and said, 'You're Chris Carter, aren't you, of The X-Files,' and he said, 'Yes, I am,' and she proceeded to recite the entire voiceover to him, word by word, which really took him aback.
[Opening titles]
This is really for me one of the highlights of my entire time on the show. It's one of my favorite episodes because it does so many things well, I think. It's a moving story, it's a personal story, it's got great performances by all of our actors. It did a number of things we'd never done before, and yet it didn't really expand the mythology of the show. Everything that happens and all the science fiction elements were things we had already established and we just did something new with them, which I like quite a lot. So to me, it was a great synthesis of everything that came before it. And it set a real high mark for the show.
[Mulder enters Holy Cross Memorial Hospital, carrying a bunch of flowers.]
As much as possible, we try to tell stories with pictures and that's what I like about this opening as you've got Mulder showing up with flowers and you see 'Oncology Unit' and it's very alarming to the audience right there, just that image.
[Mulder enters the hospital room where Scully is looking at her X-Rays.]
This scene, I remember being surprised not by how well it was played by Gillian because I think everyone anticipated this would be a great episode for her and it really was, but I was surprised by how much David made this his scene as well. So much of the magic of his performance in this show is his refusal to accept her condition. And that becomes as strong a position for him to take as hers is. And you would think a show where one of the characters is getting cancer would be solely that character's episode, but this functions very nicely as a Mulder-Scully show, I think, in large measure due to the strength of David's performance and choices he made in these scenes. And what's nice about it, too, is it's surprisingly unsentimental. He's playing against the melodrama. It's almost confrontational in his refusal to accept her illness. And I think that's another secret of this episode, indeed, of the entire X-Files TV series, is how much the characters don't say, how much emotion, you know, is behind what they're doing, not out-front. And there's a lot of tension in that, a lot of dramatic tension because you know how much these characters feel for each other without them ever having to say it. And I'll talk more about that later because there's this whole motif in this episode of the journal entries that Scully writes to Mulder. And that was another conscious choice to express Scully's affection for Mulder and what she's thinking without having to have them say it to each other. And if you are a viewer of the show, you know that so much of the Mulder-Scully relationship is unspoken. And I think that's why it's been so powerful for so long and why there's been so much fanfiction devoted to it because you can read into it an enormous amount.
[Skinner: This news comes as the worst kind of surprise, Agent Scully. I'm sorry, very sorry.]
This is the first appearance in this episode of Mitch Pileggi who plays AD Walter Skinner. Like so many of the supporting characters in The X-Files, Mitch Pileggi's rise on the show was completely unplanned. It was solely due to his strength as an actor. He came on and nobody knew that he would become such an important part of the show, but he was so good that we writers felt inspired to continue to bring him back and back and back and he really has become a third lead in the TV series. This scene continues to play the refusal to accept Scully's illness on Mulder's part, and it's beautifully directed as always by Rob Bowman, who was one of the premier directors of this series. Did an enormous amount of episodes. I'll talk more about him later.
[A woman scraping a label 'MUFON – Mutual UFO Network, Inc., from a window.]
This shot was harkening back to an episode we'd done in the third season called 'Nisei' where this sticker was featured very prominently. And this shot is meant to echo, while not quoting, the way 'Nisei' had been shot by another fine director of The X-Files named David Nutter.
[Mulder and Scully at Betsy Hagopian's house.
Scully: We're looking for Betsy Hagopian. No-one's returning our messages.]
This was the house, the very same house in that episode 'Nisei' in the third season where Scully came to investigate an abduction story and met all these women who were just like her, who had chips in the backs of their necks. This is the real estate lady selling the house because the occupant has died of cancer.
Maybe this is a good spot to just talk about the whole decision to have Scully's character contract cancer.
[Scully looks at the living room and has a flashback of her meeting with the women the previous year.]
Here are the flashbacks to 'Nisei', something we are always reluctant to do in The X-Files and we try and find artful ways to do them because it's such a pointing finger kind of thing to do in storytelling and we try and be as unpointing as possible about it.
[Mulder has picked up the phone and then hands it to Scully to listen – it has the sound of a modem.]
Here they're about to make a strange discovery.
Anyway, I was talking about the decision to let Scully's character contract cancer, and it was kind of a controversial one, honestly, among the writers who were on staff at the beginning of the season. Some people didn't think it was a good idea, but we felt when we came up with the idea, that was actually at the beginning of the season, the summer before the show was shot, that it was almost obligatory because we'd already set up there were all these other women in this MUFON chapter who had the chips in the backs of their necks and who had contracted cancer and died. And it felt like the other shoe had to drop, that Scully had to contract cancer, too, to be consistent with the story we'd set forward. Of course, it was an enormous decision to make in terms of her character and we weren't quite sure where it was going to take us or how we were going to resolve it. I guess the fears among some of the writers were that it would push the series in too melodramatic a direction. But, again, I think, one of the things the series has done well, is write against the melodrama. And, it's been moving as a result.
[Night. Mulder goes behind the apartment building and walks up the back stairs.]
This, I remember, Rob Bowman had to shoot... as usual, he had not enough time to shoot it, but he did an amazing job. This is one of the challenges of The X-Files as a TV series is it's enormously ambitious, huge number of locations and beats in the stories. And a beat is like a moment on-screen where you need to cover and give it its due. And that's why it's been very hard for directors to succeed on this show. It's because the money and time you have on a television schedule usually aren't enough to get all the work you have to get done on a show like this. And the really fine directors we've had have been able to figure out exactly the moments they need, exactly what needs to be on camera, where you need close-ups, such as these moments right here and where you don't. And so much of, you know, visual storytelling is where you place the camera. And it sounds simple but it's actually... it's actually not.
[Scully's nosebleed.]
Here was another non-melodramatic way we felt of expressing Scully's ill health, having this nosebleed at the end of the chase which tells you so much about her ability to go forward and her attitude, which is just trying to dab it off in the bathroom and keep working, is also very moving, and again, it's what the characters don't say but what we know is going on.
[Mulder: He says he's a member of the same Mutual UFO Network group that Betsy Hagopian belonged to.]
This person whom they've tackled in the alley and they're now questioning is Kurt Crawford who we will later find out is a clone. Kurt Crawford was actually somebody who worked at the FBI who Mary Astadourian, who was our researcher at the time and later went on to great things at Ten Thirteen, contacted all the time with questions about accuracy and making sure we reflected as much as possible true practices at the FBI. So it was a little tribute to Kurt, we named these clones after him.
I want to talk a little bit more about the directing of Rob Bowman in this episode and you'll see it again and again in this show, the compositions, you know, there's depth in the shots, nice lighting, he's been known to walk around the set and turn off the lights, to make sure the lighting is sufficiently dramatic, always pushing the edge about how dark it can be. And he's a very, um, elegant director, it's not flashy storytelling, he doesn't want to call attention to himself, he wants to hold a hard frame like these are and... and let the picture and the actors pull you through the story. He's very disciplined and it takes a lot of self-confidence as a director to direct that way because it's not, 'hey, look at me', but that's why he's so good.
[Scully: What am I denying?
Mulder: Where your cancer came from.
Scully: Mulder, it doesn't matter.]
So much chemistry between David and Gillian and I'm struck again and again by watching these shows, they're so different as individuals, private offscreen individuals, but there's something about them. Look at their eyes when you watch a scene like this. They really communicate with each other, you can just see the way their eyes are moving and they're really listening to each other, listening and you can watch this picture with the sound off, which is the way I'm watching it right now, and you just tell so much about the way they feel about each other.
[Scully: What it feels like to be dying of cancer? What it's like to know there is absolutely nothing you can do about it?
Mulder: If that's too hard for you then I think you should go as an investigator.]
This is an argument about Scully's ability to continue professionally but it's clearly about much more, it's really about how these characters feel about each other. And that really comes out at the end of this episode in the final scene between the characters in the hospital hallway, but it's moments like this that really set it up. And that's one of the things when you're writing an episode like this, is you're always looking to set up ideas, you need to set them up in the first act, which this is, in order to pay them off in the fourth and final act.
[Scully visits Penny Northern in her hospital room.]
This was one of many lucky accidents we had in The X-Files. I was saying earlier how Mitch Pileggi really sort of won his way into our hearts and made himself such an important character on the show through the strength of his performances. And here too we got very lucky. The actress who plays Penny Northern, Gillian Barber, had been cast in a very small part in 'Nisei', she was one of the women who we cast in that room, one of the housewives who Scully met, and now when it came time to do this episode we knew we'd want Scully to get to know one of these women who was sick but still alive and we were just incredibly fortunate to have cast such a fine actress in what was then a very small role, and it became a very important role in this episode. We knew we wanted that continuity, we try very hard to reward loyal and fanatical viewers by respecting the continuity of one episode to another, seasons over seasons, and, indeed, there are many, many episodes of The X-Files you have to watch for years to see something has paid off. In fact, this episode has the embryo, harvested embryo that Mulder finds at the end which didn't pay off until Season Eight, four years later.
[Mulder and Crawford.]
Here Mulder's working with Kurt Crawford still unaware that Kurt Crawford is a clone.
[Mulder is talking on the phone to Scully.]
This whole episode was in fact a happy accident. We had not made the decision to actually write the Scully cancer storyline. Darin Morgan, who had written so many fine episodes of The X-Files in the third season and 'Humbug' in the second season, had said he would write another episode for us, and we found out while we were writing the episode prior to this, 'Leonard Betts', that Darin wasn't gonna have the script ready and so it became a mad dash to come up with a story and 'Leonard Betts', as it turned out, was about a human creature who ate cancerous tumors so we realized that this was the perfect opportunity to end 'Leonard Betts' with the discovery that Scully had something Leonard Betts needed, that is a cancerous tumor, some kind of unsettling news and then we could indeed make this episode, episode 15, the fulfillment of that, um, bad news, but we had very little time in which to write this show. I remember it was right before the Christmas break and the script had to prep - that is the director and the crew in Vancouver had to get the script and begin, you know, finding locations and casting actors and building sets and so on, and then we'd go away for Christmas and we would come back and the script would then go into production. So Chris and Vince and John and I in about two days figured out this entire story which is very, very fast for us and then John, Vince and I wrote the first draft, that's why there're four writers of this show by the way on this episode which is a lot.
[In Betsy Hagopian's house, as Mulder's car leaves, The Grey-Haired Man enters, carrying a 'plam', and approaches Crawford.]
And here's another character who appeared in numerous episodes, there's a lot of continuity for this guy, he was a bad guy again and again. You may recognize him from Season 3, he was in an episode called 'Apocrypha', he was one of the people who threatened Skinner in the diner and here's the revelation to the audience that Kurt is not just another pretty face.
[Kurt Crawford's body dissolves into green slime.]
Anyway, three of us wrote a draft very, very quickly before Christmas to get out to the crew and Vancouver and to Rob Bowman and then over Christmas Chris went through and rewrote, and so, so many of the fine lines you will see in here are solely Chris'. Interestingly for fans of the show, anyway, he rewrote 'Memento Mori' and he'd just finished his rewrite when I arrived in Hawaii where he was writing and then we boarded the story for the movie over the next 10 days. So 'Memento Mori' and movie were born at the same time. We were wondering creatively where our heads were at.
[Scully awakens in her hospital bed to find Dr. Scanlon standing there, the bright sunlight making him difficult to see initially.]
That was a nice reveal of the doctor who turns out to be a bad guy seeing him ballooned out by the white light there, and it was also sort of an intentional recall to the teaser, the white light of the teaser. We write these things in the scripts and actually when we come up with the stories and when we board them, that's the wording I use without even thinking, I've been using it so long. I say 'board' because we put index cards up on a bulletin board. We try to think of all the images and even of the visual transitions from scene to scene and write them into the script and the idea is that these shows are so ambitious with the time and money that if you can be as specific as possible about exactly what you need to see, then the crew can prep more efficiently, the director can prep more efficiently and you have a much better chance of actually getting the work done in the time you have.
[Scully's mother arrives and she and Dr. Scanlon shake hands.]
As usual when you got a bad guy, you're trying to disguise it, making him seem amiable, not a bad guy, which is what we've done with the doctor here.
This actress is a wonderful actress by the name of Sheila Larken who, uh, has occurred consistently throughout the series beginning in the first season with a great episode called 'Beyond The Sea'. Um, a little trivia about her - she actually happened to be married to the executive producer of The X-Files while it was in Vancouver R.W. (Bob) Goodwin who directed a number of episodes and wrote one as well. We have some very nice scenes here.
[Scully and her mother talking.]
And this is playing the continuity I mentioned earlier, there were no new story points or elements really in the mythology of the show but we were harkening back to the fact that Scully is now her only daughter. She lost her sister Melissa at the beginning of the third season played by another wonderful actress named Melinda McGraw.
[Scully: I have found some clarity.]
So much of the characters of Mulder and Scully are reserved, don't want to let people in, they have shells you have to try and break through. You really just see it in Gillian's face as you watch this scene, so much going on inside which she's not saying. And her mother's not that way and that's really the conflict of this scene and what's touching about it, just watching their faces with the sound off you can tell so much about what the scene's about. There's Rob Bowman again. Just look at that. That's just a great, story-telling shot.
[Scully lying on a table, undergoing treatment, a plastic mask over her face.]
Here are all these nightmarish images of cancer treatment. We thought, one of the interesting things about this story was that here Scully, who we've always established was a medical doctor, was now, you know, a patient with her life at stake. And it is scary as the voiceover says, you know, it's like cancer is medicine's demon possession. It's a thing that takes over your body, it turns your body against itself. So this voiceover that we give her is a chance to talk about that. Again, avoiding melodrama as much as possible. Voiceover tends to be anti-melodramatic because by definition the character is speaking from a remove. And yet it can be very moving simply because the character is trying to be heroic.
[Mulder is walking through a darkened building.]
And this is another thing that we often do in these stories, is we have characters resolve their emotional conflict through action which is what Mulder of course does here. That's what makes him an heroic character. Again and again when you see these mythology episodes, which is what they're called, all the shows that deal with the continuing storylines about aliens and what men on earth know about aliens, you'll see personal storylines become larger, become about crusades and really the personal lives of Mulder and Scully are completely intertwined with the mythology of the show, certainly by this point in the series they become completely intertwined. I think Scully's sister's death in the third season was what fully invested her in the cause even more so than her abduction which she wasn't convinced was the work of aliens.
[Mulder's flashlight illuminates the face of Kurt Crawford.]
Aha, Kurt Crawford. Now the audience knows something is up because we saw him melt at the end of act one and here is he again. Of course Mulder doesn't know that.
That's another balancing act you do in these episodes, is determining how much information to give the characters, how much to give the audience. And in a situation like this, the tension is between what we know and what Mulder knows. He's putting his gun away and so our tension level is going up... well... while he's thinking it's safe to put his gun away, we're thinking here was somebody who may be an alien and we don't know what he's up to.
[Mulder puts his gun away and Crawford sits at the computer. Mulder notices a snow globe on the desk with the word 'Vegreville' on it.]
This was Chris' idea – the snow globe of Vegreville. I believe that snow globe cost something like 2000 dollars, believe it or not, to have this snow globe made especially. It's an incredibly expensive prop. Don't ask me why.
[Mulder suggests 'Vegreville' for the password which Crawford types in.]
And they're into the database.
[Scully is lying down and sees what appears to be a spinning drill coming toward her head.]
Again continuity, these are images that match the nightmare images Scully had when she was abducted in Season 2. And, of course, it was during this abduction that whatever was done to her happened, leading to her coming down with cancer here. The nasal... the nasopharyngeal mass was something that I got from my brother who's a neurologist. Um, I was looking for a particularly vicious type of cancer that would be incurable but would allow Scully to work without visible side-effects for some time. And we liked it because it gave us the nose-bleeds which were a way to visualize what Scully was suffering from.
[Penny Northern awakens Scully from her nightmare.]
Here's the beginning of the real relationship between Penny and Scully in this episode. And what's so nice about it is that these two people could not be more different, could not have more opposite views of the world. Scully, the skeptic and Penny, the absolute believer. And yet they have this humanity in common which Scully can't help but be moved by. Every episode you need to find the reason for telling this story, what's it about, and sometimes you have a very conscious message, and other times it's just a more human one. And, uh... when I say 'conscious messages' not like you try to be didactic about it, you're not trying to teach anybody anything, you just want an idea that makes it not just an exercise, that there's some point to this story. And, uh, I think the Penny Northern and Scully relationship was very important to the success of this episode because it was a bond. You really cared about this woman Penny and when she passes away you really, you know, you feel something for her but you understand, um, what Scully is facing.
[Mulder and Skinner in Skinner's office.]
I can't help but get nostalgic looking at scenes like this. They were such a staple of the series for so long... confronting the Cigarette-Smoking Man. William B. Davis, the Cigarette-Smoking Man, is another actor who really made his part and just does an amazing job with it. The story's been told many times before, but he was cast in the pilot in a non-speaking role and most of the first season went by without him ever saying anything. And then when he finally opened his mouth he spoke so beautifully. We just kept writing bigger and bigger things for him to do.
[Mulder to Skinner: He knows what they did to Agent Scully! He may very well know how to save her.]
You can see here that Mulder has not shaven. In DVD transfer you can really see it well. What a nice job the cinematographer Joel Ransom did here. Joel Ransom went on to do Harsh Realm for Ten Thirteen and Band of Brothers for HBO.
[Mulder with the Lone Gunmen.]
And here we see the Lone Gunmen. We were eager to give the Lone Gunmen something more to do in this episode. They'd been great mouthpieces and help a lot in exposition but we wanted them to be more than talking heads and really get out in the field for the first time. This here, I'll just mention, is again continuity playing back to what the Lone Gunmen discovered when Scully was returned in 'One Breath' with reference to branched DNA. I don't think we used that term because I'm not sure it was entirely accurate but it's the same graphic that you saw in that episode.
Anyway, this proved to be a precursor of what the Lone Gunmen would later do in The X-Files and in their own spin-off series which is a sort of Mission: Impossible caper type stuff, they were able to break into the Lombard Research Facility and help out Mulder.
[Skinner enters the basement office, where CSM is sitting at Mulder's desk.]
Unlikely action here to say the least. This is the unspoken, unheralded heroism of AD Skinner. This is always a violation to see a bad guy in the X-Files office. And this was the first time we had ever seen the Cigarette-Smoking Man in that office, I believe. But, uh, Skinner having told Mulder not to make a deal with Cigarette-Smoking Man now he takes it upon himself to approach the Cigarette-Smoking Man because that's just the kind of guy that Skinner is. William B. Davis has this wonderful sort of deadpan delivery, very dry and the way he holds the cigarette. It's just great. The poor guy's an ex-smoker. I don't think he ever started smoking again despite the huge number of cigarettes he had to smoke on our behalf - all herbal, by the way. Of course, this room is dark because it's a clandestine meeting, that's the story reason but also because it adds a wonderful spooky atmosphere to this scene, as does the cigarette smoke. These two characters have had a wonderful history where Skinner was under CSM's thumb for so long and then was able to tell him to go to hell at the beginning of Season 3. And now in this episode he's gonna find himself compromised once again. Skinner's always the man in the middle. Very tough role.
[The Lone Gunmen breaking into the Lombard Research Facility via a storm drain.]
Here we have the Lone Gunmen in action for the first time. These things, these sort of miner's lights they wear on their heads - that's a great idea. This was a scene I remember again just in terms of production, it was very hard to get. And they shot it in pieces. Different nights, different places. This is a set obviously... or not so obviously, this is a set but... this is someplace else, this was some other time. All through the magic of editing it seems like the same place. Mulder's of course impatient because he is eager to help Scully, doesn't want to wait.
[Langly has hacked into the security system.]
The X-Files really sort of grew up at the same time that the Internet was growing up and computers were rapidly increasing in power, computing power. And if you watch The X-Files from Season 1 on, every season you can see how much better technology got. We were always eager to use as much as was plausible in these shows.
[Mulder and Byers at the glass entrance door.]
Now here we are already setting up something that's gonna prove important later on, which are these glass doors. We don't call attention to it, it's just there, you see it but later that's what, you know, glass doors were what Mulder's fired at, through bullet-proof glass.
[Message board with names of doctors on call.]
Now he makes an accidental discovery. Dr. Kevin Scanlon, Scully's doctor, is here in this building. One factor that Chris's always conscious of is not wanting to make Mulder too much of a superhero. You know, if you have a hero who is too competent, too capable, then it starts to seem unreal. You know, these are huge forces that are arrayed against Mulder and Scully and so you'll see that things are often accidental, and that's by design because it forgives the hero's achievements that he happens to see something, he falls into something. Quite literally Mulder's fallen in a number of things.
[Scully in her hospital bed, writing her journal.]
Here is the journal sequence beginning. It's a narrative device on the one hand because it helps you tell the story in a very compressed way. But is also very personal and speaks about Scully's emotions for Mulder, something she would never say to his face, and I think it sort of confirms a lot of the unspoken affection that I was speaking of earlier. And then of course Mulder later discovers the journal and he reads it even if she never meant for him to.
[Mulder walking through the dark, empty building, being guided via radio by Langly and Frohike who have linked into the security system in the 'storm drain'.]
That's great images here.
One of the reason The X-Files has been so successful overseas is because it does to try to tell stories with pictures and a lot of these episodes you can understand an awful lot of what's going on just by watching it with the sound off.
[Mulder peers into a laboratory through the glass panel above the door.]
Mulder's gonna make another accident discovery here. Not one Kurt Crawford, not two Kurt Crawfords but three and more. There are a lot of cinematic tricks in this sequence to make you think there's all these Kurt Crawfords. When they're not shown from the front, we've got doubles, we've got people with the same kind of haircut and build. And then we've got green screens and split screens and all those other things.
[Longer shot of the laboratory showing large, liquid-filled tanks, each containing a clone.]
This is one of my favorite sets that Graeme Murray ever did for The X-Files. Graeme Murray was the production designer for the first five years of the show when it was in Vancouver and he just did, you know, amazing work, very quiet and unassuming about it, and would always have the scripts late. And rarely if ever grumbled. You'd just show up and there'd be these incredible sets and this one is one of my favorites, this and the stainless steel vault that Mulder and one of the Kurts are shortly going to enter.
I mentioned that there were no real new mythology elements in this show. We just kind of took the same pieces we already had and elaborated upon them and these tanks are really harkening back to 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' which was the season finale of Season 1 when Mulder ran into Zeus Storage and saw these bodies in tanks. This is deliberately harkening back to that. It's not just continuity, it's just simply good storytelling to have that kind of circularity in the stories.
[Mulder and Crawford enter the steel vault.]
This actor David Lovgren did a very good job as Kurt. It's deceptively difficult playing an alien. It's, you know, how do you strike the right balance of believability as a human character and yet an alien inside.
This is just a gorgeous set. And a great sound here when this thing pops open. And I'm listening to this with the sound off. (laughs) I can remember the sound, it's that distinct in my mind. I haven't seen this show in years.
[Mulder opens a drawer and finds a vial with Scully's name on it.]
And now we understand these Kurts are the offspring, harvested using the embryo from the women who now have cancer and are dying, including Scully. Mulder gets that vial here. Takes it with him. You'll see it again at the end of the episode. And as I said earlier, it was a plot point that we did not pick on again for four years. Season 8, he finally reveals that he did see if they were viable, he took them to a specialist later, when we learn that Scully was barren and a specialist told him they were not viable. And this is an episode called 'Per Manum' in Season 8 and Scully then gets a second opinion and her new doctor, Dr. Parenti, attempts to get her pregnant using the embryo and that fails as well.
[Mulder leaves, walking past stacks of metal drawers, through the door into the laboratory.]
Beautiful image again. Just look at the depth of that shot.
[Byers hides as the Grey-Haired Man enters the building.]
Okay, suspense, suspense, suspense. Here comes the bad guy putting on his gloves. Mulder's in big trouble.
[The man enters the laboratory.]
X-Files is a hybrid of so many different genres. It's really horror and science fiction, suspense thriller, mystery.
[Mulder opens the glass door, reaches an outside door and calls on the Lone Gunmen to open it.]
Here you go. Relying on the Lone Gunmen to get you out and here comes the bad guy. It's just great shots.
[Mulder locks the glass doors but the man opens fire, but the toughened glass stops the bullets.]
Really well played by everybody involved. Very tense. You know, this is one of the things we pride ourselves on trying to do. We're try and create movie moments on television every week and it's hard to do. It just takes times, takes a lot of pieces. Look at this one sequence, look at all the editorial pieces, shots are required.
[One of the bullets has created a small hole in the door. The man puts his gun to the hole, Frohike cuts a wire, the outside door opens and Mulder escapes.]
Here we go. That's a great story-telling shot. Not a moment too soon.
[Mulder runs down a corridor in the Medical Center into Scully's hospital room, which is empty.]
Wow, I can't believe we're already at this point in the episode. This has gone by fast. So what's happened, what's happened? Again withholding information from the audience, make them wonder what's gonna happen next. Now he sees the journal that Scully's been keeping. That's not Gillian Anderson's handwriting, by the way, in case anyone was wondering. But we do try to find handwriting we feel is appropriate for the characters.
[Mulder finds a nurse and asks her where Scully is, but she doesn't know.]
We wanted Mulder to discover the journal now so that those emotions could be completed in this hour of television so you could pay it off and have that communication, that dialog. And I think that's because Mulder is privy to what Scully was thinking. Um, this moment that is about to play out in the hallway felt earned. They're both on the same page emotionally now, they both understand what's happened in the past hour.
[Scully is with Penny Northern in her hospital room. Penny is now looking very ill.]
And here is the completion of the journey with Penny. And you just know that as Scully is looking in this woman's face, she's gotta be thinking about her own fate. And that this is what lies ahead for her even though she'd never say it. I think that's part of what makes these stories good, too, is trusting the audience to connect the ideas, you lay them out and know the audience will have the intelligence to connect them themselves. I think people are grateful to you when you respect their intelligence which is what we try to do. I've always felt like you can't be smart enough for the audience. I'm always amazed by how perceptive and critical people are in a good way. It's very hard to write smart characters. To be as smart as your characters. And Mulder and Scully are such smart characters. Of course, they're very smart actors, too, which helps keep us honest.
[Scully leaves Penny's room and starts walking down a long corridor.]
Look at this... you just think Rob Bowman... just look at that shot. Long hallway, long depth. Again, there's nothing flashy about the direction of this. It's just right, the sizes are right.
[Mulder calls to Scully and she turns, upset.]
Now, this scene became notorious because in one of several takes that they did here, Mulder and Scully did indeed kiss on the lips. And it was very nice and very effective and we... it was not scripted, however. And we thought and thought about it and finally we decided not to... not to use that take. And as so many things have gotten out on the Internet over the years, and this information did indeed get out on the Internet and there were some people who were upset with us for it but I still think it was the right decision. Again, returning to my theme, it's, you know, so much what the characters don't say, it's also so much what the characters don't do, is so important. And this is so intimate and personal and their eyes tell you so much about how they feel about each other without having to have them kiss on the lips. And their embrace. We felt like the kiss on the lips would be sending the wrong signal at this moment and distract from it, the emotion of it.
This show was nominated for an Emmy for writing which we were all thrilled and surprised by but I just look at all the other amazing values of this episode. I, you know, I have to say the directing and the production design and cinematography, everything about it, certainly the acting... and I just... it, it's always amazed me that these people weren't recognized more often by the Academy, most especially the directors because what they have to do is so difficult. In fact, neither Rob Bowman nor Kim Manners were ever nominated for an Emmy, first eight years of the television series.
[They smile at each other and embrace.]
Scully's rationale for why she's gonna continue on and go back to work was of Chris' devising and thinking, um, it's part of what makes these such romantic, heroic characters, is that they always put their personal lives on a back seat. In fact, they really don't have much in a way of personal life whatsoever. Um, they're people on a quest, they're really both united and separated by their quest. And look at this shot. You know these people love each other, they don't need to say it. Um, but she has to go back to work for herself, for the cause.
[Scully leaves, Mulder gazing after her. Then he takes the vial out of his pocket.]
And here's that vial not to be seen again for so many years. Great shot.
[Skinner's office. He answers his phone.]
And now the chilling ending. Every episode of The X-Files... we, we try to answer some questions and, of course, ask new ones. And here we... we put Skinner back in a snare that he escaped from for a season or so, which is having to make a deal with the devil which he'd warned Mulder not to do. And again, the camera just takes its time. And there you go. Puff a smoke and then there he is. That's so simple, that shot, and yet so well thought out and perfectly executed. It looks easy but it's not.
So this show, for me, it had it all because it had the personal story, it had the great mythology, great performances, great production values and so many of my favorite characters.
[CSM leaves Skinner's office, his cigarette still smoldering in the ashtray.]
That's the end of that. I hope you enjoyed it.