I'm Frank Spotnitz. I was executive producer of the X-Files, and I co-write this episode with Chris Carter.
[Mulder's funeral.]
This was really a fun scene (laughs). You know, I look on the face of it like a fun scene, but what a fun scene to write and stage. The death of the hero of your series, and you're burying him. And I think it was shocking enough, after last week's episode, 'This Is Not Happening', that Scully would finally find Mulder and he's dead. I don't think anybody expected it. But here were are actually burying the man. You really take delight in doing things like that, just pushing something as far as you possibly can, because the audience can't quite believe you're doing it.
Interestingly, we were under a huge financial pressure at this point. But we still managed to stage this funeral in the snow in southern California, by dumping a ton of snow and then painting in snow in the background, so that was a mix of real snow and CG you saw there. And then bringing in the Lone Gunmen and bringing in Scully's mother, Sheila Larken, who lives outside of Vancouver in Washington State, for a very minimal appearance. It's a lot of money to spend but, you know, you just couldn't really do Mulder's funeral without having them there, so we did all that. Anyway, a great tease, that's what we call these little dramatic pieces before the opening titles, we call them teasers, and this is really designed to draw you in and make you keep watching because you can't really believe that we've killed Agent Mulder once and for all and are burying him in the frozen ground.
Incidentally, you know, in this season we had limited use of David Duchovny and it was some kind of very complicates formula, a certain number of days that we were able to use him over a certain number of episodes, I don't recall the specifics. But one of the ironies of it was that, you know, we ended up using him as a guy who lies in a hospital bed, semi-dead (laughs) throughout the entire hour. It's like you're paying all this money to get his services for a limited time and it wasn't the most satisfying use of the actor or the character, but we were boxed in with what we could do because he was so limited and that's how he ended up being used.
There's some wonderful dynamics at work in this season and I know seasons 8 and 9 are controversial for a lot of people and I was not really excited, honestly, about moving forward. Let me just stop my train of thought here and say 'three months later' - that's yet another way to sort of yank the audience's chain, it's like, yep, we buried Mulder and now three months have passed so he really is dead, that was what we had in mind there. Anyway, I was saying that I personally was not thrilled about carrying on with seasons 8 and 9 without David Duchovny, but I really, really enjoyed these last two years. For me as a writer on the show, it was a fresh franchise, it was a new set of problems and new characters, and in this season, season 8, it was just enormous fun writing and working with Robert Patrick, who is just a terrific actor, as you see in scenes like this, and he really, this character had wonderful things to play, especially in this episode I think because, kind of like Scully, he was drafted on to the X-Files, it was not his passion, and now because he's a character of conscience he's in a very tough situation, because he's come to see the value of the X-Files and he's come to see that politically they are a liability to the X-Files, I'm sorry, there a liability to the FBI. And now they're appealing to his self-interest, saying, good job, you found a dead Mulder, you can go, we'll give you a promotion, exactly what you wanted. But he's not sure he wants to do it, because even though it serves him and his ambitions, he knows that shutting down the X-Files is the wrong thing to do.
And now we see Scully is pregnant. I'm going to talk about her pregnancy a little bit later too. But Scully's pregnant and he comes in to see her and she's not going to pat him on the back either, she's not going to help him out and say, yeah, hold on to the X-Files, she's gonna tell him to go too. It's really Doggett's personal heroism that keeps him there, his personal code of honor and sense of right and wrong, which I just think makes him a wonderfully appealing character, and Robert played it beautifully.
We got some knocks right around this time about Scully's pregnancy and how our timeline was off, and I actually complained because it was not true. We picked up at the beginning of the season where the previous season had ended, we didn't allow for the ellipsis of the summer, so in fact we were honoring the timeline correctly and people who accused us of missing the timeline just weren't following it close enough.
I think part of the discomfort people had with this season and the next is, you know, you fall in love with these characters of Mulder and Scully and the quest is so obviously Mulder's quest and it becomes Scully's too, it feels almost like a betrayal to embrace another character or another actor, however fine he or she may be. And I think a lot of people just didn't want to make that change, which is understandable.
[A fishing trawler out in the rainy night.]
I was very pleased by this, I think this looks fantastic. And I was happy we were able to mount this in Los Angeles. This was a new director to the series, Tony Wharmby, who had come on at the beginning of season 8 with an episode I wrote called 'Via Negativa', who just did a wonderful job, visually this is a terrific show. He also, I think, was especially fine with the actors, really sensitive to the actors and drew things out of them that other directors might not have.
[Wilmington County Morgue.]
When you do a show like this for a long time, and X-Files was on 9 years, 8 years at this point, you do a lot, a lot, a lot of autopsy scenes. We did a lot of autopsy scenes and so it was particularly pleasing at this late stage of the game, to find something new to do in an autopsy scene, and I think this is a nice, fun, creepy scene. One of the challenges is that you look at the research about what a body would look like if it had been floating in the water for some time, and it doesn't look real. What a body really looks like under the circumstances is so grotesque and just disfigured that it actually doesn't look believable. So this is in fact a toned down version of what the reality would be. It's also so disgusting that it's hard to look at and so we kind of had to make it bearable for a television audience, to actually broadcast it.
[Skinner tells Doggett that the body has been identified as Billy Miles.]
Now, Billy Miles was established in the pilot of the X-Files, very first episode, Bellefleur, Oregon, and we had brought him back and brought that town back very self-consciously at the end of the previous season, season 7, because we believed that might have been the end of the series and we wanted to come full circle. Of course, it ended up not being the end of the series and we kept going on, and so this was the return of Billy Miles who had been abducted at the same time as Agent Mulder at the end of season 7. So already the audience's sort of dramatic sensors are on alert here because something's up with Billy Miles and maybe something's up with Agent Mulder too who's lying in that grave, and that's clearly what's on Walter Skinner's mind as they drive out to the cemetery.
It's worth talking about how so much of the mythology of the series, the original mythology, had sort of been wrapped up in season 6 and 7. You know, we'd seen the destruction of the Syndicate in 'One Son'; we'd seen the revelation of the truth of what happened to Samantha in 'Closure'; and now we were stripped of all that narrative drag or narrative baggage, I don't mean to make that pejorative, it's just that we were stripped of the obligation to service all those storylines, and so now we were free to move forward in new ground and I think 'Requiem' was really the beginning of a new chapter that carried through until the end of the series in season 9 in 'The Truth'. And you know you might look at this as the supersoldier chapter, if you will.
And yet, it kind of helps when you're watching these episodes to kind of imagine you're seeing it on television for the first time and you've been waiting week after week to see what's happening with Mulder.
The power of this is, is David Duchovny finally going to be brought back alive and how are they going to do it. And this is a pretty incredible scenario, even for the X-Files, that a man might be buried in the ground for three months and still be alive. This was one of our writing strategies, which sort of comes to mind because of that pathologist's line about this isn't curse of the Mummy, is that when you're dealing with some big matter like this which is so incredible, if you can have one of your characters make fun of it himself, mock it himself, not to steal to the language of the character, but you kind of take curse off of it. It's like you yourself are recognizing how fantastic it is and it makes it more palatable for the viewer.
This is kind of a cliff-hanger act-out. It looks like Skinner's wrong. There's a dead David Duchovny. Hmm. All that, and Mulder's not alive. Well, we'll find out just the opposite. Dead as he looked, here we are in the hospital.
Now this scene, if you didn't get the vibe from the earlier scene in the X-Files' office, and we had to start calling it 'the X-Files Office' by the way in our script pages, not 'Mulder's office' as it had been called, since Mulder was no longer around. But this scene is going to pretty clearly indicate a current that goes through these last two seasons as well, which is, I got the pretty clear sense that John Doggett was in love with Dana Scully. And of course Dana Scully was in love with Fox Mulder. So you sense this heartbreak, you know, she's in love with this guy and he wants to be there for her and he can't be, because her heart's taken by someone else.
He so wants to protect her, he so wants to be the one that she's turning to. And that just ain't gonna happen. And there was a very subtle shift in point of view over this season most especially, it wasn't so subtle by season 9, which was that this series was gradually being told from John Doggett's point of view. I say gradually because clearly this is a scene that's not, this was still with Scully here, but I think your sympathies and your take on the story really sort of line up with Doggett's more than anybody else's, which was really kind of a bold thing to do in a series like this as well.
One thing we were determined /not/ to do, you know, we'd lost David's services except for this limited run here and there, and we were determined as much as we wanted people to embrace the new characters, John Doggett and later Monica Reyes, we were determined to honor David and David's character. You know, we loved that character just as much as anybody else and we saw it as no disloyalty to the actor or the character to carry on with these other characters, and so we never shied away from playing the power of that character or the heroism of that character even in his absence, as a scene like that suggests.
This was another great find, James Pickens Jr played Alvin Kersh. So many times over the course of the series we just got so lucky with the actors that we cast in these guest parts and just kept bringing them back because they were so wonderful. That's what happened with William B Davis as the Cigarette-Smoking Man and with Nick Lea as Krycek, and with Mitch Pileggi as Walter Skinner, and that's what happened here with James Pickens. Just a fantastic actor, not at all like this person, really transformed himself to play this part. And Robert Patrick and James Pickens really had a chemistry, loved playing scenes together. And I think their scenes together were some of the finest ones in the last two years of the show. Again, here's Doggett being tempted to do the wrong thing - the right thing for him personally, but the wrong thing in the larger scale.
Now this is pretty creepy. We had to do a number of these big fat suits for Billy Miles. He no longer looks the same as he did on the autopsy table, he's kind of dried out here. Pretty disgusting.
[Billy Miles is having a seizure. The monitor briefly shows double heartbeats.]
Something's happening. In the storytelling here, we were always conscious of trying not to just to have the show be people talking. Wherever possible we wanted events, strange events, and the more visual the better. And so this is something that just happens with pictures. Those were our favorite scenes, no dialogue needed. Moving pictures.
The X-Files was always noted for its cinematic look and high production value, but it's an interesting exercise if you were to look at this DVD collection and compare the set designs, cinematography, shot composition, all those things, as excellent as they were, from the very beginning of the series to where they were by the end of the series, I think you'd see the show grew increasingly sophisticated, it really never stopped becoming more and more sophisticated until the end.
One thing we did have to do, and seeing this episode again reminds me, after the move to Los Angeles, for financial reasons the FBI became a much more important location in our storytelling. You saw a lot more of the hallways, beginning in season 6, than you ever did in the first five seasons of the show.
[Skinner collapses.]
Now this is referencing an episode from earlier where Krycek had infected Skinner with these nanobots, this nano technology, just seeing his vein bulge on his neck like that was a vivid reminder. Skinner was always the man in the middle. And the fun of that character was finding ways to compromise him, finding ways to force him to go to the dark side which he had done in 'Zero Sum' earlier, when he was being blackmailed by the Cigarette-Smoking Man, and now he's being manipulated by Krycek. Of course, he'll have the last laugh on Krycek at the end of the season, put a bullet through his head.
[Krycek picks up Mulder's nameplate.]
Lot of power in that prop.
[Skinner and Krycek.]
This is something that you don't often think about, but when a series is on the air as long as we were on the air, were lucky enough to be on the air, you get to know the people you work with really, really well. (laughs) The writers know the actors, the actors know each other, and it leads to scenes that emerge out of those offscreen relationships and you play to the strengths that you know exists between the actors as people, and these two guys knew each other very well by this point and so we had a lot of fun playing them as combatants, and they had a lot of fun doing it.
And Mitch is such a big, strong guy, the idea that that little remote control, TV remote control type thing, would have domination over him is interesting.
[Billy Miles awakes.]
A creepy image.
Something's going on. This next scene, we had to get a lot of pieces, it was not easy to do but I was very happy with the way it came out, it's kind of disturbing. Good storytelling with pictures again.
[Billy Miles in the shower.]
Yuk. If you think about it, this is awfully graphic. I think you might even have a hard time showing something like this in a PG movie in a movie theatre.
Here's that love triangle at work again, the way that Doggett reacts when he sees Scully sitting by Mulder's bedside. His heart's breaking for her.
Robert's eyes look tortured. They don't look tortured in real life, by the way, only as this character.
This is really interesting too. Here Doggett, poor guy, is giving up his own best interests, staying on the X-Files when he has no reason to do it other than his own conscience, and she's telling him that he's doing it wrong, he's doing it the wrong way. Being on the X-Files means looking after the unknown, not turning away from it. His not wanting to exhume Mulder's body was a big mistake.
Now observe the way this is shot. Naked man, very, very black body. It's one of the peculiarities of Standards and Practices on network television, is that you can not show butt cracks, pardon my language, but you can not show butt cracks. Why, I don't know. But it became an issue two times previous to this episode, there was an episode called 'Red Museum' in season 2, and, of course the episode's title is going to go out of my head, but the episode Darin [Morgan] acted and Vince Gilligan wrote - forgive me it's not in my head at the moment - where Darin is supposed to have a butt crack show as he leans down, Eddie van Blundht, you can't show butt cracks. So we had to digitally darken that part of Billy's body.
Of course, the fate of Billy is of burgeoning interest to us because as goes Billy so goes Mulder. Now he's telling us this story, the aliens are good.
This was also part of what made season 8 and season 9 refreshing for us, was that Scully the skeptic was always Scully the scientist, Scully arguing rationally why Mulder was wrong or didn't make sense. But not Agent Doggett, Agent Doggett is former NYPD Blue, Agent Doggett is common sense, Agent Doggett is like 'that's nonsense', and it was just refreshing and fun and a different way to play a skeptic character than we'd done before.
Of course, Doggett is right to be skeptical about Billy Miles.
And Scully's in an uncomfortable place. It's not her inclination to sign in to that kind of thing either, sign off on that kind of thing either. But she certainly would like to believe what Billy Miles is saying, if she only could.
[Scully says to Skinner that it's as though Billy Miles became a new person.]
This does not bode well for Agent Mulder.
[Skinner asks if it could be a virus.]
Here's Skinner's predicament. He's had the secret connection with Krycek which of course he can't tell Scully about.
[Skinner says there may be a vaccine but it doesn't come without a price.]
Mmm-mm.
[Scully says it's about saving a man's life, and Skinner agrees.]
Meaning: my own. You know, there's soap-opera elements in these mythology episodes and as I'm sort of relaying all the relationships I become kind of aware of that. But you also get to play the ethical dilemmas, moral dilemmas these characters face.
[Doggett and Absalom.]
This is a wonderful actor, Justin Scott, who we read many, many times over the years without finding the right part for him, and I think we finally found it here.
At the risk of belaboring the point, a character like Doggett was a freshening effect on the narrative for us, because we had lived with people talking about aliens and alien conspiracy theories for all those years, and now he comes in and he's hearing it all for the first time, and he's even more no-nonsense and sort of level-headed than Scully is by this point, and it does reinvent the idea of the show.
So now Skinner has the moral dilemma, wanting to save Mulder, wanting the vaccine that Krycek is dangling, knowing there's a high price to pay.
[Krycek: Oh, it's simple, really. Make sure Scully doesn't come to term.]
There you go, that's the high price.
That's a pretty tough choice. Mulder or the child. Again, that's the sort of moral, ethical dilemma I was eluding to that you can develop through the soap opera of this kind of story line and we always searched for.
Doggett the cop, the cop's instincts, putting it together, something's going on here.
Storytelling with pictures.
As I said, this episode was part of the new chapter that had been opened in the X-Files after season 7, and so it was really the supersoldier storyline or the alien hybrid that Billy Miles has become, a pod person, and Scully's baby and what Scully's baby meant.
Here was the first time where we really played with the meaning of Scully's baby, Krycek's insistence that she can't bring it to term, that it has to be terminated somehow. It has some kind of cosmic significance this baby, and at this point we're also not sure whether Mulder is the father of Scully's child or whether it's some kind of other miraculous or alien conception.
[Skinner has taken Mulder off life-support.]
One of the other things that this season did for us was that it gave Skinner, in particular, a lot more to do. When you have a two-lead series, which the X-Files was, by necessity you're giving the lion's share of the interesting, dramatic conflicts to those two leads. And when Mulder left at the end of the season 7, we suddenly were able to play the ensemble in a way that we never really could before. And interestingly, David was always urging us to use the ensemble more when he was on the show full time, but it wasn't easy to do. We felt as writers you wanted Mulder and Scully to be doing those actions. And so I think in season 8 and 9, Skinner really got to step out behind the desk a lot more and have a lot more active things to do in the X-Files mythology.
[Doggett and Krycek in the parking garage.]
This is a pretty exciting scene.
And I can't swear to it, but I think that was shot in the parking lot at one of the Fox office buildings.
Again, to John Doggett, Alex Krycek is a new character.
[Krycek holds up the vaccine for Mulder.]
Nasty, nasty man. Toying with it like that.
[He drops the vaccine.]
There it goes.
Of course, when you're structuring these stories, it's something they call 'rising action', and you're always trying to ratchet up the dilemma, ratchet up the problem for your heroes.
So at this point it seems hopeless. The action has arisen because every problem is worse and there seems to be no solution.
We wrestled with what role to give Scully in this. There was pretty wonderful but corny movie with Rock Hudson, directed by Douglas Sirk, called 'Magnificent Obsession' where he blinds Jane Wyman and actually goes and studies to be a doctor so that he can cure her personally (laughs) and that movie was on my mind and not in a good way when we were imagining Scully in this operating room where Mulder was being worked on.
This was a nice sort of unexpected turn that by trying to do the right thing Skinner inadvertently saved Mulder's life, by trying to kill him he accidentally saved him.
[Doggett's cell phone rings. It's Kersh.]
Those cell phones, like the autopsy I mentioned earlier, we went through endless ways of playing cell phones and dynamics with cell phones. One of my favorites was way back in season 3 in '731', Mulder's with the bad guy in that train car and the phone rings and it's for him, the bad guy's phone rings and it's for Mulder.
[Kersh: It's going to be awful crowded down in that X-Files office.]
Doggett's won, but he's lost. He gets the moral victory of knowing he's stuck on the X-Files.
[Mulder's hospital room.]
Those marks on Mulder's face are reminders of the terrible torture that was done to him on the spaceship you saw at the beginning of the season.
[Mulder awakens.]
Been waiting a long time for this.
[Mulder asks who she is. Then Scully realizes he's joking.]
I spoke earlier, if you listen to the 'End Game' commentary, about how it's a writer's trick to play these hospital room scenes and have the first line be a laugh line, so I submit this is further evidence of that assertion.
This was also sort of the dilemma, after all this time and after the probability that Mulder and Scully had consummated their relationship, to continue teasing the famous sexual tension instead of actually giving the audience romance was very difficult, and so just to be truthful storytellers we had to surrender some of that tension in favor of overt romantic feelings. And here, as I was saying, the point of view is Doggett's, and we went back and forth about how to end this episode, on Mulder and Scully in the hospital room, on Doggett in the hallway. And you can see the decision we made.
Thank you very much for listening.