Aug-??-2002
The X-Files Magazine [US]
The Uncanny X-Man
Ian Spelling

He’s the person without whom The X-Files would be nothing- Chris Carter. Ian Spelling caught up with the series’ creator to discuss the past nine years of the show – and his life – as well as what’s in store for the future.

It’s a bittersweet time for Chris Carter. His television baby – The X-Files – is all grown up and moving out of the house. The kid’s not quite gone yet; let’s just say he’s busily packing his bags – in other words, at the time of this conversation production and/or post-production was well underway on the last few episodes of The X-Files and on the two-hour series finale itself, The Truth. During a short break, Carter sat down to talk with The X-Files Magazine and several other publications in an old screening room on the Twentieth Century Fox lot. Carter sounded by turns proud, realistic, sad, and enthusiastic about the situation. And well he should: he created the show, executive-produced all nine years of the program, wrote, co-wrote, or fine-tuned dozens of episodes, directed a good many hours, spearheaded the popular X-Files movie and even made cameo appearances in two episodes (namely Anasazi and Hollywood A.D.).

THE X-FILES MAGAZINE: How hard was it for you to make the decision to end The X-Files?

CARTER: Actually, it wasn’t that hard to make the decision because we aired [Season Nine] against stiff competition. Our numbers were down from Season Eight. We’d always had the good fortune of being the winner for eight seasons, basically, and then this year the ratings were respectable, but we were sort of neck and neck with the competition. We’d been heavily counter-programmed. Saving Private Ryan was against us our first night. The next Sunday, the competition was Britney Spears on HBO. It was like we were taking flak, to use a war term. And so when the ratings had leveled off at about the sixth airing of the show, we came into Christmas vacation and I thought, “You know something, there are going to be articles written now about the show and what it used to be and they’re going to take shots at Annabeth Gish and Robert Patrick, and they’re going to take shots at the show.” I thought that was pretty unfair because they were doing good work. I thought the ratings weren’t justified. I thought the audience just didn’t show up. It’s not like they showed up and then decided they didn’t like the show. They just didn’t come for whatever reason. I don’t know. It’s a mysterious x-factor. So I just decided it was time to go and to go out strong and to look forward to the future, which is hopefully doing some X-Files movies. And I wanted to reward people for watching the show for nine years and to go out strong and give them something and have people say, “Wow, we didn’t realize how good the show was, and now we’re sorry to see it go.”

XFM: You sound disappointed. Are you?

CC: Well, hey, I created the show. For me it’s been 10 years now. It’s been on the air for nine years or it’ll be nearly nine years when we complete this year. It took me a year to get it off the ground. So I’ve been riding it 200 episodes worth. I haven’t written every episode, of course, but it’s something I’ve been doing for quite a long time and I just thought we were doing such good work this year that the disappointment is really the result of that good work.

XFM: How tough was it for you to pass along word of your decision?

CC: It was very hard for me to do it. Actually, I had to kick myself because I started getting emotional. I’m very attached to the show, as you might imagine. I feel very fortunate to be working with the people that I work with. It’s an amazing experience to work with a team, to feel a team spirit. That’s one of the best parts of my job. So it was very difficult, and it was also very difficult to tell the actors.

XFM: Can you go back to the very beginning and then forward in terms of where the idea for The X-Files came from and how ideas come about at this point?

CC: This idea was floating around in my head for a long time. There was nothing scary on TV in the early 1990s. When I was a kid there were good scary TV shows. I liked all these shows – The Twilight Zone, The Night Stalker, The Outer Limits. And so here I was, a television creator, and I was finally asked what I wanted to do. I said, “I want to do a good, scary show.” And that’s how The X-Files happened. And now, coming up with stories, they just come to you in the weirdest ways. One of the best experiences on the show for me has been having these other great writers that I work with come in and expand on what I originally did, and seeing what other people do with the show. I’m talking about people like Darin Morgan, Glen Morgan, and James Wong, and people like Vince Gilligan and Frank Spotnitz. They’re the people who came in and expanded the idea of The X-Files.

XFM: How do you go about wrapping up the show while simultaneously keeping enough of a hook to lure fans into the next film?

CC: You know me well enough to know that I’ve always got a hook, and I do have a trick up my sleeve, but we really look to the movies as an opportunity to do stand-alone movies, not mythology movies. It’s not like what we had to do with the first movie, which I thought was worthwhile, but it was really a movie where you couldn’t have a beginning, middle and end – you could have a beginning and middle, but the end was going to come with the rest of the series, so it prevented us from really making it, I think, as big and blockbuster-ish as we might have. So I’m looking forward to just doing what we call stand-alone stories, but doing them as a movie franchise.

XFM: How quickly can we expect to see another X-Files movie?

CC: I don’t know. It depends on how long I take for vacation. I hope to write it over the summer of 2002 and I hope to prep it over the fall and spring and to shoot it in the late spring and summer of 2003. So I think you would end up seeing it in 2004.

XFM: Do you have the story in your head already?

CC: I have rough ideas and I’m sort of deciding what to do. Frank Spotnitz and I will write it. It’s one of those things where we will just sit down one day and throw out a lot of things and put in a lot of things. It’s a process rather than an idea that’s in my head. It sort of takes shape.

XFM: Any chance that Annabeth Gish and Robert Patrick will be in the next feature?

CC: We don’t know. I’d work with Robert in a heartbeat and Annabeth too. So we might find something. It just depends on the kind of story we’re doing.

XFM: Were you at all surprised that David Duchovny agreed to return as Mulder for the finale?

CC: I wasn’t surprised because we’ve been in contact all year long and any differences that we had seem to have been something we’ve both gotten past. He and Gillian [Anderson] are both very anxious to do the movies. We’ve got to do them one at a time, so I’m only fantasizing about more than one. And so he realized that it was important to the future to participate in the present.

XFM: Take us through the process of David Duchovny both directing an episode in Season Nine and then reprising his role as Mulder. How did that all come together?

CC: I approached him about the finale. I called him up and said, “Well, the show’s over and I’m making the announcement.” He said, “Congratulations, it was a good, long run.” Then I think we spoke some time later about him being in the finale. We’d actually approached him before I had ever made the decision [to end the show] about possibly directing. That looked like it was going to go away because he was going to write and direct. When he ran out of time to write I said, “I’ll write something for you,” and I wrote the episode he directed.”

XFM: In hindsight, was it a mistake to let Duchovny go?

CC: I didn’t let David go. David went. We could have tried to hang onto him, but he wanted to go. It wasn’t a question of not trying. It was a life decision for him and you can’t blame a person. When you do something for so long and you reach a point in your life, certainly around your 40s, you’re going to want to try something else. You’re never going to have another chance to be at that point in your life, so I don’t hold it against him at all. And I still think we’re doing great work. I think the reason that Fox brought the show back this year – and it was their decision to bring the show back – was because our ratings were still good and we were doing good work and David was only in roughly half the shows last year. It looked like the franchise was still very strong. That’s the reason I came back. I didn’t have to come back this year. The reason I came back was because I thought we had an opportunity to do good work and maybe even recast the show, as it were, in every sense of the word.

XFM: Some people think the spirit of the show changed when the production relocated from Vancouver to Los Angeles. What are your thoughts on that issue?

CC: I disagree. We actually had more resources in Los Angeles, resources we didn’t have in Vancouver. I thought we had more to work with, but you can look at it as pre-movie and post-movie. I look at it that way, but I think there was so much good work done after the movie on this show that it’s hard for me to look at it that way. It changed, but I don’t think it actually meant that it changed for the worse. And every show has its season. You know, every show is built on a curve, unless you’re The Simpsons, which seems to have a never-ending curve.

XFM: Why do you think The X Files works so well all over the world?

CC: Because people are scared of the same things. I think scared travels across borders very well and I want to knock some wood right now because I’m very fortunate to have created something that everyone seems to like. I get to write what I’m interested in and people like it, so that’s one of those miracles.

XFM: Would you do another TV series?

CC: If it were the right series and the right task with the right people. If I could surround myself with the right people. I’ve got lots of ideas.

XFM: Which episodes from the last season have you been most pleased with?

CC: You know, I’ve been happy with the whole year. I’m trying to think of a specific episode that stands out for me and the one I’m thinking of right now is Improbable, the Burt Reynolds one. It’s very close to my heart because I wrote it and directed it and got to direct Burt. He’s Burt, so I have to say that’s a standout because it does what the best X-Files episodes do, which is to expand this sort of storytelling possibility, meaning I’m telling a story we’ve never told before. That’s the beauty of the show. And if you’re asking me why I seem disappointed [that the series is ending], it’s because the show’s format and storytelling structure was so incredibly elastic. It was a comedy. It was an intense drama. It was a melodrama. It was a horror show. It was a thriller. It could be so many different things and so that’s what I’ll miss.

XFM: It’s got to be strange dealing with the finale. What’s the experience been like for you?

CC: It’s interesting because we’ve gone so far from where we began and now, as I’m going back to where we began, it feels like just yesterday that we were there. This mythology that people always think is very convoluted and confusing, it actually all makes perfect sense. That, I think, will be very satisfying, that there’s a beautiful structure to it all.

XFM: Did running your own show ever give you nightmares? Did you ever wake up in the middle of the night?

CC: My trouble is going to sleep. I’m a very light sleeper. I don’t sleep very much and so I tend to lie there and I work a lot even when I’m in bed.

XFM: So that’s where your creativity comes from?

CC: Yeah, that and the bathtub.

XFM: You’ve written countless episodes of The X-Files and directed a batch over the years as well. Do you have a preference, writing over directing or vice-versa?

CC: Well, I’m a writer first and that’s how I got into this business, but I have to say it’s a lot more enjoyable to direct because the words are already on the page and you just have to figure out how to get those images you have in your head, the images the script gives you, and get them out on film. That’s a trick, but looking at the blank page is probably one of the more daunting aspects of the business of what I do.

XFM: What’s next for you?

CC: There’s a movie with Miramax/Dimension that Frank Spotnitz and I have a deal to do. This one is about a guy who may be sort of a missing link. And then [I’m contracted to] Fox for approximately a year, and beyond that I was supposed to have written a novel a long time ago and I must get around to that. The novel is about one of two things. I have two ideas that I’ve had for a long time and it’s really just which one I choose to do first. One is historical and the other is a little closer to home. So that’s kind of the order of business.

XFM: Could you have done The X-Files for another 10 years?

CC: Could I have done it for another 10 years? Yeah.

XFM: At this point, do you believe in aliens?

CC: Me, no. But those aliens owe me a visit after all this time. #

May-24-2002
Cinescape
Interview with Frank Spotnitz
Melissa J. Perenson

Agent Mulder’s (David Duchovny) return leads to a military tribunal that could cost him his life in The X-Files two-hour series finale.

Frank Spotnitz on the End of The X-Files – Part Two
Chris Carter’s right hand man on the close of Mulder and Scully’s TV journey

Last Sunday saw the conclusion of The X-Files’ formidable run after a nine-year stretch. We finally did learn The Truth – though much of it proved to be a recap of the past more than new revelations in the present. And we finally had to say goodbye to Mulder and Scully – two characters whose odyssey we’ve followed through monsters-of-the-week and labyrinthine government conspiracies alike. Today, executive producer Frank Spotnitz continues his chat with Cinescape about the end of the groundbreaking show.

We know now that Mulder is the father of Scully’s baby, William; Mulder states it himself. Yet now that he’s back, the family can’t be reunited, since Scully made the heart-rending decision to give her son up for adoption in one of the show’s final episodes, “William.” “She doesn’t get him back in the finale,” acknowledges Spotnitz, who adds the decision to have her give up the baby was a difficult one. “But I think the decision to have Scully give up the baby was something that, in no small way, makes it easier to do another movie, and really sort of frees you in what that movie can be, in a way that you would not be free if the baby storyline had to be serviced. You’d just have to have another threat to the baby in the movie, and that dictates the entire story of the movie.”

Then again, he adds, “I can’t predict, because I don’t know how many movies there are going to be. I’m sure if there are enough movies, William will become important. Maybe William will be in the next movie. I don’t know, because Chris and I haven’t even started talking about what the next movie might be.”

The show may have served up unpredictable plot lines, but the one thing Spotnitz was always able to predict was the pace of Mulder and Scully’s evolution – if for no other reason than the fact that it was, by nature, glacial. “The characters evolved very, very slowly. Chris was very strict about who Mulder and Scully could be,” explains Spotnitz of the world’s best-known team of FBI investigators. “But I think through the plots, through the mythic journey these characters were on, they slowly began to change.”

The more Scully saw over the years, the more voices cried out that she should change. “We used to get criticisms all the time: ‘Oh, come on, she’s seen so much.’ By the end of season one, season two, people were already saying, ‘C’mon, how can Scully still be a skeptic, she’s seen so much?'” remembers Spotnitz. “But Chris knew that’s what made the show work, and you needed to preserve her skepticism. And even in ‘Endgame,’ there was a voiceover in that episode that was designed to tell us where Scully’s head was at that early point of the series; that, after all she’s seen, she’s still going to bring science to everything she sees. And it was an attempt to preserve Scully as a scientist and a skeptic. Yes, there’s stuff that we can’t explain, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be explained one day.”

Now, that one day has arrived.

Whether you loved the finale – or loathed it – will have little impact on The X-Files’ historical contribution to dramatic television. While many will argue the series went out past its prime – the stories the show told, right up to the end, were some of the most ambitious projects on the small screen. “I think in terms of the ambitions of stories, and the ideas we tried to communicate – I mean, there was no idea too big. One of the first things that struck me when I came to work here was how smart we tried to be,” muses Spotnitz. “It’s the opposite of what everyone’s impression is of television. We were never smart enough. We were always trying to be smarter.”

“To this day, we’ve always tried to be smarter, because our audience is so smart. And no matter how smart we are, our audience is always smarter,” explains Spotnitz. “It became a very constructive dialectic. Less so the last two years, I’ve got to say, because so many of the voices on the Internet have been dumbed down, and it’s no longer what it was – a race to see who could surpass the other in terms of achievement and understanding the ideas we were going for.”

As smart as the fans were, Spotnitz laments the changes among the show’s Internet following. “Before ‘Sunshine Days’ aired I was distressed to read on the Internet that a lot of people were saying, ‘Oh, this is going to be them dissing the fans, and telling us that we were idiots.’ It’s such a misreading of us and how we feel about our fans. We love our fans, we’re so grateful for our fans – we think they’re so smart and attentive,” he reaffirms. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We would never do that. There was also a misreading of the ending of ‘Scary Monsters.’ ‘What are you trying to say, people are stupid for watching our show?'” he quotes. Determined to set the record straight, he adds, “You’ve got to be crazy to think that or do that if you’re in our line of work. I think that there’s a lot of wasted energy in some quarters talking about things like that.”

There’s no doubt that the devoted fans are still out there, though: some 13.4 million viewers tuned in for the finale – more than two-thirds of the show’s audience when it hit its peak four years ago.

Nostalgia for X-Files of yore brought back viewers in droves, but nostalgia of another sort has set in for someone like Spotnitz, who joined the series in its second season. “Oh sure,” he says candidly. “This is what happens in human nature; you forget about all of the pain. It’s the nice thing about human beings – you just forget about the pain and you just remember all of the good things. That’s what’s moving about [the end].”

At the Fox lot hub of 1013 Productions, they’re preparing to turn out the lights. The X-Files has taken its final bow, executive producer John Shiban has moved over to his new home at Paramount’s Enterprise, Chris Carter has a one-way plane ticket for a long-overdue vacation, and even Spotnitz will be moving on in a few weeks to take a producing job on a new CBS cop show series. But Mulder and Scully’s impact will not soon diminish. And while the logistics (including the final go-ahead from Fox) for another movie have yet to be worked out, there’s always that little hint bit about an alien colonization set for the year 2012…

May-20-2002
[Unknown]
‘The X-Files’ bows out after nine years
Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

Thanks to FBI Special Agents Mulder and Scully, the aliens never managed to take over Earth and the mother of all conspiracies never quite materialised, despite many hints and dark suggestions.

That was, of course, all in the fantasy universe of television entertainment. Back in the real world, even David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson could not prevent The X-Files falling from favour in the eyes of Fox Network executives and, after nine seasons on air, the cult programme bowed out in the United States last night.

“Yes, I feel like something is gone, but every day I wake up with the nagging feeling that it’s still there,” the programme’s creator and lead producer, Chris Carter, told reporters last week. It’s an understandable reaction from the man who, for years, played on the American weakness for conspiracy theories and on the notion that nothing is quite as it seems.

It also attests to the deep cultural influence of a programme that inspired passions in a way matched only by the – very different – cult following for Seinfeld, the sitcom whose absence is still sorely felt in the US four years after its much-trumpeted finale.

Last night’s X-Files was a two-hour special with a lot of loose ends to tie up. No doubt the fans will talk long about the explanations given for some, if not all, of the outstanding mysteries. Would they really be the final word, or would there be some truth beyond the truth that will now never be told?

The programme went out too late for discussion here, but Mr Carter gave a few advance hints of what it would contain. It would set the record straight on whether the baby born to Agent Scully (Anderson) was fathered by Agent Mulder (Duchovny). It would tidy up the mystery of Mulder’s sister. And it would give some kind of answer on whether aliens and humans were involved in a government-run conspiracy to take over the planet.

It would be tempting to blame the decline of The X-Files on the paranormal, but the reasons are mundane. Costs jumped when production moved from Canada to Los Angeles in 1998. A lawsuit by Mr Duchovny over profits meant Agent Mulder all but disappeared from the programme and the ratings dipped.

The moment when The X-Files lost its oomph came in 1999 when the simmering, but hitherto platonic, relationship between the principals was broken with a New Year’s Eve kiss. Breaking the sexual tension robbed the show of one of its most fascinating qualities.

May-19-2002
Gannett News Service (Honolulu Advertiser)
‘X-Files’ series finale offers closure to 9 chilling seasons
Mike Hughes

For nine years, “The X-Files” has teased us and terrorized us, dazzled us and amused us.

It has turned weirdness into an art form. And on Sunday it ends.

The final episode – 8:10 p.m. tonight on Fox – will put Special Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) on trial. It may answer many of the dangling questions.

“The series will come full-circle,” Chris Carter, the show’s creator and producer, says by phone.

“Viewers will have a sense of closure.”

There will still be “X-Files” movies ahead, Carter promises. “I think we have everyone on board now.”

And those will have self-contained stories. Tonight’s finale, in which Mulder must prove the existence of aliens, will wrap up the “X-Files” mysteries, Carter says.

You can trust him on that. Then again, he’s the guy who told us: “Trust no one.”

Carter, now 45, started “The X-Files” in 1993, with Mulder and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) chasing the unexplainable. It was a wild ride.

“Each week, something happens to Mulder and-or Scully that is completely life-changing,” Duchovny reflected in 1999 before he left the series for good to spend more time on movies. “And yet we come back the next week as if nothing happened.”

They confronted shape-changers, gender-benders and time warps. Mulder was shot five times (once by Scully) – or more, if you count his imagination.

Still, this wasn’t just a series of odd adventures. “You need this to become the vehicle for (Mulder’s) personal story,” Carter says. “This is his personal quest.”

Along the way the audience has learned details about Mulder.

He graduated from Oxford and from the FBI Academy where classmates called him Spooky. His favorite snack is sunflower seeds. He was playing the board game Stratego with his 8-year-old sister when she was abducted by aliens.

He also has a kitschy side. Mulder went to Graceland for a vacation; he’s seen the movie “Plan 9 From Outer Space” 42 times.

When the series first started Carter cast two unknowns in the lead then had them work marathon hours in Vancouver, Canada. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” Anderson said midway in the second season.

For supporting roles, Carter chose people who didn’t have the usual TV look. He had bald actors (Mitch Pileggi, Terry O’Quinn), craggy actors, and odd and interesting performers.

For the first five seasons – before “The X-Files” began filming in California – he had lots of Canadians in the cast.

“They have a wonderful talent pool in Vancouver,” Carter says, “but it’s thin. We used the same actors in five or six different roles.”

He also kept re-using the same gifted directors.

In the first year or so, Carter says, he replaced more than one-third of his directors in the middle of episodes. Eventually, he found ones that fit his style.

“We have a director who has surpassed 50 episodes now,” Carter says. “We have another who’s pretty close.”

The champ is director Kim Manners, also one of the show’s six producers. His personal vocabulary made him the prototype for the profanity-spewing character, Detective Manners; the finale will be approximately the 53rd “X-Files” he’s directed.

Coming close was Rob Bowman. He’s directed more than 40 episodes, plus the 1998 movie.

What Carter wanted from his directors was a delicate balance – dark but not dreary, serious but fun. He relates that to the times he saw shows being tested with viewers, recording their interest minute by minute.

“I’d get so upset by the valleys,” Carter says. “But then I realized that you need a valley, before you can have the next peak.”

That’s sort of how he sees the mood of “The X-Files.” On the surface, Carter is a sunny guy – a handsome surfer with wavy hair and a polite, well-spoken manner, a sharp contrast to the guy who is fond of dark drama.

“You have to have the darkness in order to have the light,” Carter says. Now, after nine years of dark brilliance, his show is ending and except for writing the next “X-Files” movie, he’ll have time to play.

“I started having too much fun too soon,” he says. “I went skiing and broke my arm.”

May-19-2002
The Boston Globe
‘X-Files’ to mark the final spot
Erin Meister

For nearly a decade, aliens, mutants, crooked government officials, and other monsters have run amok, terrorizing and generally grossing out millions of people in America and abroad, thanks to the cult hit series “The X-Files”. Since the show’s creation in 1993, loyal X-philes have tuned in weekly to watch the trials and tribulations of their favorite FBI agents – Mulder and Scully – in hopes that with each episode they come closer to the truth they relentlessly pursue. The long-awaited series finale (airing tonight from 8 to 10 on WFXT, Channel 25), promises to close some of the agents’ case files – but not to answer all the questions.

Chris Carter, the show’s creator, says that solving the mysteries woven into the show’s nine years would be untrue to the series. In a recent telephone interview, Carter said, “There’s a huge, complicated mythology to the show, and everybody’s asked, ‘Are you going to answer the questions?’ We’re going to make it come together in a way that makes sense, but we’re not going to answer everything.”

Although the final details of the last show are clouded in characteristic mystery, Carter promises a return appearance by David Duchovny’s character, Fox Mulder, who has been in hiding from supposed governmental conspirators. Many fans have been wondering if Duchovny, who has been working behind the scenes on the show but no longer appears weekly, would return for the finale and shed some light on the relationship between him and his partner, Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully.

Carter hints that things will become clearer during the reunion of the two agents. “This should be a satisfying episode for anyone who’s wondered where that relationship is going,” he said.

Of course, with this show, that could mean anything.

“The last episode is called ‘The Truth’,” Carter said, “and it deals with what [Mulder] has been searching for, and a truth that he’s found that he can’t even tell Scully.”

Though the television series will end, Carter says that there are “X-Files” film projects in the works, and he said that future movies “won’t continue where the series left off. They won’t have to be a part of the mythology.”

During its run, the show has dealt with alien visitors, clones, FBI cover-ups, and any number of phenomena ranging from the supernatural to the superficial. Early on it blossomed into a cult hit, making it one of Fox’s longest-running and most popular series. “I’m so thankful for the fan base,” Carter said. “I’ve gotten to do exactly what I’ve wanted to do over the last 10 years. It was a miracle.”

At the same time, he said he is “looking forward to a life of anonymity. The real luxury is that I’ll be able to stop and think, because I’ve been on the run like a wanted man for the last 10 years.”

When asked if he believes in the little green men Mulder and Scully have been chasing all these years, Carter said, “I don’t believe in them, but I want to believe. It’s the desire to believe these things, to have my faith confirmed – I think that’s really what the show is based on. There are more ‘X-Files’ stories to tell, and I’m sorry to see [the series] go.”

May-19-2002
Ottowa Citizen
Vancouver salutes X-Files legacy

Tonight, Boyd McConnell and his friends and fellow ‘X-philes’ will be watching the two-hour finale of The X-Files in the apartment that was used in the series as the residence of FBI Agent Dana Scully.

VANCOUVER – Boyd McConnell knows where he’ll be tonight. The Vancouver entrepreneur will be at FBI Agent Dana Scully’s old apartment building, checking the creaky floorboards for poltergeists and watching The X-Files’ ghostly images with friends and fellow “X-philes” on a flickering TV set. He probably won’t mark the window with a giant “X” in masking tape, as Agent Fox Mulder did in several early episodes, but God help you if you call him on his cellphone while he’s occupied with the cult classic’s two-hour series finale.

The rustic heritage building that he owns on Pendrell Street in Vancouver’s West End played host to The X-Files’ unflappable FBI agent and resident nonbeliever for the five seasons it was filmed in Vancouver, and even today resembles the Georgetown neighbourhood in Washington, D.C., where Scully ostensibly unwound when she wasn’t chasing down alien conspiracies and deranged whack jobs.

Her apartment’s keynote performance was delivered in the second-season episode Duane Barry, in which Steve Railsback, playing a man who claims to be a victim of alien experimentation, is beamed aboard a flying saucer by a malevolent shaft of light that penetrates Scully’s inner sanctum, well-nigh wrecking the furniture in the process.

Since The X-Files pulled up stakes and headed to L.A. nearly four years ago to the day, Pendrell Suites has played host to some 30 film and TV productions, all the while doubling as a bed-and-breakfast. (In their 1999 book, X Marks the Spot: On Location with The X-Files, veteran Vancouver location managers Louisa Gradnitzer and Todd Pittson said the one drawback of the West End location was 11 p.m. curfew times for night shoots — midnight on Fridays — and the need to light the scene without lighting up half the adjacent apartments.)

In his spare time, Mr. McConnell, whose family owns and operates Pendrell Suites, runs sightseeing tours of Vancouver’s movie and TV locations, including the two-block stretch in Gastown that doubled as a turn-of-the-century Montana cattle town in Legends of the Fall and the abandoned shipyard and warehouse district that hosts Dark Angel. Mulder’s apartment, throughout The X-Files’ stay in Vancouver, was at the Wellington, a brick apartment block in Kitsilano that again doubled for the Washington, D.C. neighborhood where Mulder lived.

“The X-Files put us on the map, as far as gaining credibility for film and TV productions,” Mr. McConnell said. “People were proud when it was here. It was the No. 1 show, and everybody could brag about it. And then when it left, a lot of people felt it lost its edge. A lot of the locals just didn’t want to watch it anymore. I think some people felt a bit betrayed when it left.

“I’m actually quite upbeat about this. I’m glad that it’s coming to an end now, because that means we’re still going to have, historically, 118 episodes I think, and 90-something that were L.A.-based ones.”

His math is not far off: Technically, 117 episodes were shot in Vancouver, 83 in Los Angeles.