May-??-2002
tv-now.com
The “X-Files” (William B. Davis)
Maelee McBee

“Bill Davis was hired to smoke a cigarette. That’s what his job was.”-Former Co-Executive Producer Bob Goodwin on CSM.

We are literally down to days before the series finale of FOX’s long running The X-Files. I recently had the opportunity to speak with William B. Davis (the Cigarette Smoking Man, aka CSM) about his run on the show, the finale and what’s next for him.

For a character who started out lurking in the background of all his scenes smoking cigarettes, the Cigarette Smoking Man became the central figure in The X-Files Mythology. A shadowy figure that we gradually discover controls the destiny of not only Mulder and Scully, but also mankind.

Generally regarded as the devil incarnate with no redeeming qualities, CSM’s portrayer, William B. Davis, prefers to believe that CSM is “doing what he thinks he has to do, not necessarily what he wants to do.” When asked if that makes him more misunderstood than evil, Davis replies, “he’s both. In a sense nobody’s ever really evil, I suppose.” When I point out that American serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims might disagree with that assessment, Davis asks who Dahmer is, and after he is filled in with the details of his crimes, Davis responds with, “yeah, it’s kind of hard to find a positive side to that.” He goes on to draw a parallel between CSM and two other notorious men in history. “I usually use somebody like Sadaam Hussein or Adolf Hitler. You can find why they think they are doing the right thing.”

In the case of CSM he believes “he was an ambitious man faced with a diabolical situation when he knew they (the aliens) were going to be invading the planet. And in effect he essentially made a pact with the devil, the devil being the aliens. In a sort of way the Vichy government did with Hitler. It seemed like it was making the best deal that could be made in the circumstances. But then it got worse and worse. The aliens wanted more and more and he became more and more ruthless. He was on a track he couldn’t get off, and eventually he kind of hollowed out his insides.”

The hollowing of those insides includes having Scully abducted, being subjected to medical testing that left her allegedly barren and gave her cancer, shooting his own son, Special Agent Jeffrey Spender, sleeping with the likes of Diana Fowley , and undergoing a brain surgery that he believes will leave his other son, Fox Mulder, dead. That’s not counting any of the back-story we are given on the character in the fourth season episode CSM, written by Glenn Morgan and James Wong. If that episode is to be believed, the man has killed presidents, rigged an Olympic hockey game and doomed the Buffalo Bills to never win a Superbowl as long as he’s alive. And speaking of alive, he’s also been killed and resurrected twice, most recently for the finale. He previously rose from the ashes after what should have been a fatal gunshot wound in the early fifth season and this time he managed to survive a tumble down the steps in a wheelchair at the hands of Alex Krycek at the end of season seven. Oh, just prior to the tumble, he is seen smoking his trademark cigarette through a tracheotomy.

On the topic of the much ballyhooed series finale, Davis, who is in one scene that is shown in two parts, is a bit tight lipped, asking, “am I allowed to tell you these things?” When asked if he is indeed alive or merely a part of a vision Mulder has, all he will say is ” here’s a clue-my make-up took four and a half hours.” After a bit of needling and wheedling, he finally confirms that CSM is indeed alive, and being taken care of “by someone new.”

When asked if he believes the finale answers all of the questions Mulder and the fans have ever had, he pauses before answering. “You see, it’s funny. Some of the questions, they get asked, they get answered and you think ‘I’m not sure about that.’ So I find myself thinking ‘I don’t know if I believe what I heard.’ So, I don’t know if the questions get answered. It’s almost like the questions get asked and answered to get the information out there, let’s move on. I thought any information that comes that easy, I’m suspect of.” When asked if CSM has any redeeming moments before he gets blown to bits in the finale, he merely laughs.

Davis counts among the highs of working on The X-Files getting to write an episode, En Ami. Davis came up with the idea to do an episode based on Richard III, in which he would pull Scully to his side, or at least make her tempted to go to his side. He took the idea to Co-Executive Producer Frank Spotnitz who then took it to Chris Carter. The idea then went through the story machine, where changes were made. In the end, “the basic structure of the story was mine and the dialogue was Chris’.”

“I wrote the script because I had never really gotten to work with Gillian, but then they wouldn’t let Scully go as far as I wanted her to. CSM was a little hung-up on Scully, and she effected him so that in the end, when he got what he thought he wanted, the CD-ROM that would give him all this power, it didn’t matter. That’s why he threw it in the lake.”

Davis says he enjoyed the episode Talitha Cumi because it allowed him to “have intellectual debates with Mrs. Mulder and we find out she had had an intimate relationship with him.” Another favorite episode of his was the sixth season “Two Fathers, One Son” arc, where he shoots his son, Special Agent Jeffrey Spender, played by Chris Owens.

“I always loved working with Chris. I was sorry to be told I had to shoot him. I always pretended, thought I didn’t shoot him, but I scared him. I guess I did actually shoot him. Those were all good times.”

Life beyond The X-Files has been busy for Davis, who plays a doctor in the upcoming ShowTime film, Damaged Care with Laura Dern, scheduled to run the day after the finale airs and based on a true story. Davis describes his character as a doctor who is caught in the middle. “I’m trying to play both sides and Laura Dern’s character comes in as a rebel and tries to fix things. We try to make things more fair for the patients, but on the business side we are trying to make a profit. And I’m stuck in the middle.” Sounds a bit like CSM.

This summer Davis will also be directing a short film that he has written and is producing called Exchange. “It’s a very tightly focused conflict about sexual power between a professor and his student.” Davis does not have a role in the film, but adds that well regarded Canadian actor Jay Brizzo has been cast as the male lead.

Davis worked the last day the show filmed on the lot. “That was kind of nice because everybody came over, Chris was there, people came and just sat around and chatted. David and Gillian were in very good form. It was just really very pleasant.” When asked how Gillian Anderson seemed to be holding up he remarked, “she seemed fine. I mean, they hadn’t finished working because they had another week to go working on location. She seemed in great form. She had her video camera out shooting pictures all over the place. She certainly wasn’t moping about.”

When asked about his emotions the last day on set, Davis pauses for a moment before answering.

“My answer to this is going to be different from anyone else’s. The hard one for me was two years ago when I didn’t know for sure whether I was dead or not, but thought I probably was. Well, we didn’t really know what was going on with the series either. I kind of did a lot of mental good-byes then. I patted the set, patted the lot and said good-bye to everybody in my head two years ago, then the goddamned series went on without me! I wouldn’t have minded if it had ended, but oh no, it went on. They didn’t use me, so for a couple of years I felt a little, well, a little out of joint and disappointed. So for me it was just a real treat to be back on the show and be there for the end. It was just one great big treat, just a pleasure. It wasn’t sad in that sense, it was just a satisfying completion.”

May-??-2002
SciFi Magazine
Executive producer Frank Spotnitz closes the final X-Files
Melissa J. Perenson

The elusive truth that Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) have searched so long for remains just that – elusive. Even as The X-Files ends its impressive run on television, there are still truths to be spoken – and realities that cannot be changed.

Executive producer Frank Spotnitz has spent the past eight years with the show, the latter half as creator Chris Carter’s right hand – carrying the day-to-day production duties and co-writing the mythology episodes. On the eve of the show’s conclusion, Spotnitz spoke to us from his office on the Fox lot to discuss what went into crafting the series’ finale, “The Truth” – and to reflect on the series’ final days and what it is that made X-Files so special.

This time, the end is really here.

Spotnitz: Yes. It’s very strange. It’s pretty amazing.

Was there a sense of nostalgia leading up to the final days on the show before the finale aired?

Spotnitz: Oh yeah, every day. This is the last time we’re going to spot a show, this is the last time we’re going to edit a show, this is the last time we’re going to hear the music. We had playback of the finale yesterday [Thursday], which is when the sound crew plays their first pass of the mix for us, and one of our editors was just sobbing when it was over.

What are some of the good things that you’re going to take away with you?

Spotnitz: The amazingly talented people that I’ve worked with here, both in Vancouver and in Los Angeles. How gifted the actors were. The writers and all of the staff people, the crew. And the work itself, and how proud I am of the work. That’s the great thing about a job like this – that the work will still be around. That’s really great.

The finale, “The Truth,” is monumental, not just because it marks the end of the show, but because it’s also the first two-hour episode you’ve done in the history of the series. How did you go about pulling the story together?

Spotnitz: It’s interesting, because we knew this time that it was indeed the end – and so that really changes the way you approach it. We came up with this format that allows us to look back on the past nine years and comment on what they meant, and then really the show talks about the journey Mulder and Scully have taken together, and where they have been left after nine years. Most of the show – a huge portion of the show – is in a courtroom.

We had never done a courtroom [like this]; actually, Chris isn’t big on courtrooms, so that was very unusual for us. You say, courtrooms are a staple of television dramas, it’s not that big of a deal, but for us, it was a case of how do we do it in a way true to our show, and how do you keep it visually interesting. So that was one thing that was strange – and a challenge of sorts for us. And then I think the attempt, just generally, to make sense of, and be coherent about, the mythology of the show, and what you could address and you could not address, and what questions you could answer and what questions you couldn’t answer, just because it becomes too complicated for a general viewer to follow, that was a big challenge, too.

With respect to the mythology, how did you decide which elements to address in the finale?

Spotnitz: It was interesting. The first thing I did was I went online and I looked at what people had written about the mythology. And I was alarmed at how many people who are extremely knowledgeable about the show and had followed it had drawn false conclusions and false connections between things. I realized that was going to confuse me even more if I looked at those things, so I abandoned that approach.

I had our researcher go through all of our mythology episodes and pull the script pages that talked about the larger framework of the series; and I reread all of those. Then I organized the mythology of the show by character – which characters would be best to explain which parts of what the show has been for nine years. And so that’s really what happens – you have witnesses who tell you different parts of what’s happened. An awful lot is said, an awful lot, but even then, you realize it’s still just skimming the surface, because you would need eight hours if you really were going to touch on everything we’ve done over nine years. It’s an amazingly complicated, sometimes convoluted conspiracy. I’m just astonished people stuck with it for as long as they did.

Are there things you wish you could have taken into account in the finale that you couldn’t do in the end?

Spotnitz: Oh yes. We actually wrote things, filmed scenes explaining things, that we had to drop because of time, because you only have two hours. The actual running time of the episode when we’d edited it the first time was much longer than we had broadcast time for.

Lots of familiar faces reappear in some form or another. How did you decide who should return for the final send-off?

Spotnitz: Fox spent a huge amount of money on cast. But I think it all fits. I think when you see the episode, you see how it all fits, and you’ll realize why we chose certain people, and why we left out others. It tells a story.

Do you see the finale as bringing a sense of the show full circle?

Spotnitz: Oh, yeah. I would say that the finale services the mythology of the show. And so, yeah, it does feel like definitely, in terms of the mythology and the journey that Mulder and Scully began in the pilot, there’s a sense of closure and completion – and that was very important to us, we were very aware of the need to do that. There’s a scene – the final scene with Mulder and Scully – that could not be more direct in terms of closing a circle.

Leading up to the finale, we had the episode “William,” a very pivotal episode for Scully – and one whose ending begs the question of why have Scully go through the pregnancy arc to begin with.

Spotnitz: Yep. I had a lot of reservations about that storyline and about her giving up the baby, and was not at all sure that it was the right thing to do. But in the end, I think it was the right thing to do, because it becomes unsavory. And I think everybody – David and Chris, especially – felt that this was going to be an obstacle to us in the movies. And I think the solution we came up with was kind of Solomonic in its wisdom in the end, which is, it’s true to Scully’s character and the pattern of behavior that she’s had for the past nine years: that she sacrifices her own happiness for a greater cause. It’s true to the tragic series of losses she’s endured over the course of the series, and I thought it was very moving in the end. It kind of helped us go forward with Mulder and Scully – and whether there are movies or not, it serviced them – and us, as storytellers – in a good way.

What has Mulder and Scully’s journey meant for each of them?

Spotnitz: The final scene addresses this head-on. You can’t get the truth. You can’t. There’s a larger truth, though: that you can’t harness the forces of the cosmos, but you may find somebody else. You may find another human being. That may be kind of corny and all of that, but that’s really it: Love is the only truth we can hope to know, as human beings. That’s what Mulder and Scully found after nine years. And that’s a lot.

What do you think the lasting legacy of The X-Files will be?

Spotnitz: The only thing I know for sure, because it’s very hard at this point in time to answer that truthfully, but I know for sure that The X-Files had great ambition, in every department. In its production, in its drama, in its writing, in the ideas it attempted to capture. Sometimes we failed miserably, and then many other times, it was glorious. That was so exciting to be a part of that. That’s the thing that other shows will try to shoot for, and it’s very hard to hit – is the level of ambition the show had. And I think that’s why The X-Files is a singular show – because it’s very hard to reach the heights that we were able to reach now and then.

May-??-2002
TV Guide.com
X-Finale: The Confusion Is Out There
Michael Ausiello

Here’s a puzzle even Mulder and Scully would be hard-pressed to solve: How do you wrap up nearly a decade’s worth of convoluted – and some might say downright undecipherable – mythology in just two hours? That’s the challenge currently facing producers of Fox’s The X-Files, which ends its nine-year run on May 19.

“The truth is, it would be impossible to answer all of the questions people might have,” executive producer Frank Spotnitz tells TV Guide Online. “More than answering questions, the [final episode will be] about giving meaning to the story that we’ve told for the past nine years – giving closure not just to the hard plot of The X-Files, but to the lives of the characters.”

Still, Spotnitz – who is mapping out the series finale with X-Files creator Chris Carter – concedes that tackling the drama’s myriad of unsolved mysteries (Gibson Praise, those pesky bees, Scully’s hairdos) will be tricky. “If you’re really a fanatical viewer, the important questions have already been answered,” he says. “But because most people aren’t fanatical viewers, we’re going to retell some things, and I suppose some new answers will come out.

“I’ve been looking on the Internet at how people have assembled the mythology in their own minds, and many of them have drawn false connections,” Spotnitz adds. “They’ve said that things are linked that aren’t. So, [the finale] will be an authoritative version of the history of the show.”

Luckily, a critical piece of X-Files lore will be back to help guide viewers through the special two-hour episode: David Duchovny (aka Mulder). When last we saw the believer, he was smacking lips with his fave skeptic, Scully (Gillian Anderson). So, naturally we have to ask: Come May 19, should X-Philes prepare themselves for an X-rated (wink, wink) reunion? In a word or two: Don’t count on it!

“The Mulder-Scully romance has always been understated, and I don’t think you’re going to see us suddenly change our stripes in the last two hours,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean that their romance isn’t central to the show. The resolution of that storyline will be very important.”

Remaining episodes will also close the book on a number of other X-plots: The April 21 show will serve as a conclusion to the ill-fated Lone Gunmen spinoff; the April 28 episode (co-written and directed by Duchovny) will be a pivotal one for Scully; and the May 5 installment will address the mystery surrounding the death of Doggett’s son.

“We’ve really had time in these last few episodes to plan for the end,” Spotnitz says. “I think we’re going into this with our eyes open.”

May-??-2002
tv-now.com
The “X-Files” (Chris Owens)
Maelee McBee

I categorically deny my client was anywhere near the bullet when it left the barrel of the gun. – Chris Owens’ publicist on whether or not his character, Agent Spender, was dead following the two part episode, “Two Fathers, One Son”.

Actor Chris Owens has the rare distinction of being the only actor to portray three different major characters on The X-Files. Well, four if you count Agent Spender as before being infected with the alien virus and then what’s left of him after being injected with the virus.

His list of characters on the show include, young CSM (Cigarette Smoking Man), The Great Mutato, a deformed man with a heart of gold in the fifth season episode Post Modern Prometheus written and directed by Chris Carter and shot in black and white, and Special Agent Jeffrey Spender, the smarmy, goody-two-shoes agent fans nicknamed “Weasel Boy,” and “Ferret.”

Owens, whose return to The X-Files was prompted by a story idea by David Duchovny who always thought Spender was a misused character, was happy to be back for the episode William, even if it did mean being in make-up for seventeen hours a day and even twenty hours the day he was in full body make-up. “Being asked back came out of the blue and was a complete surprise. A year and half or two years ago I sort of expected it, but then the series went on and was ending and I thought, ‘That’s it.’ When I got the call I was really excited first of all because I just assumed Spender really was dead and buried. And second because David was directing and that strongly appealed to me.”

The fate of Owens character, Agent Spender, was always left in doubt following an ambiguous meeting with the Cigarette Smoking Man (Agent Spender’s father, played by William B. Davis), in which we hear a gunshot but no other reference is ever made to the fate of Agent Spender. For his part, William B. Davis says, “I always loved working with Chris. I was sorry to be told I had to shoot him.” Fans were left to wonder and speculate as to what actually happened to Spender. William answers some of those questions.

Owens recounts that he, David Duchovny, and Gillian Anderson weren’t always sure about what was going on in William. “In that particular episode, with David directing, there were a couple of scenes where Gillian says, ‘What does this mean? What am I doing?’ and David would scratch his head and we were all sitting around and David would make a suggestion ,’I think maybe this.’ His usual answer was ‘She’s confused and she’s going back and forth.’ Well Gillian herself was confused, going back and forth which was perfect for Scully. Then when I see the episode it makes perfect sense. She plays confused and confused works. It’s a good choice.”

Owens has high praise for Duchovny as a director saying, “He’s an actor’s director. The line about needing braces was David’s idea and it was something Mulder would have said. And David being David, there had to be some reference to basketball. That’s why I was in those bright red tennis shoes. The guy was directing. He had to make his statement.”

While the episode dealt primarily with baby William, we are given enough background on where Spender has been and what he’s been through that it necessitates his return for the first part of the finale, titled Truth. “I found out I was returning for the finale from the make-up department. They knew before I did!”

“I testify as a character witness for Mulder. Mulder is in big trouble and he needs some assistance now. When I walk into the courtroom people are like ‘what happened to this guy?’ which leads to a really long scene I have in the courtroom where we go over what happened to me. I have a long explanation inter cut with flashbacks. We talk about being burned, they show being infected with the black oil, all that stuff. A lot of information is given. My father is also brought up a lot. I thought I had a lot of pages but Gillian has even more, something like ten or eleven pages of dialogue where she takes us from the beginning of time right up to the present day. Oh, and I’m wearing my Spender suit in this episode. My Spender suit and that face. And I’m alive at the end.”

As for his time in The X-Files universe, he says that the most physically challenging part he played was that of the Great Mutato in Post Modern Prometheus. “The make-up for that took longer than the make-up for deformed Spender. Gillian said that out of all the characters her daughter had seen, that one was a little too realistic for her. It kind of freaked her out, but I ended up playing blocks with her in fully Mutato make-up. That was a little surreal.” For the episode Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, Owens says he studied tape of actor William B. Davis smoking, until he got “the finger role down just right.” As for Spender, he is philosophical when he says, “I thought the two parter and his demise was really good, though it would have been nice to hang around a while longer.”

A favorite memory he has of his time on The X-Files occurred while filming William. “I was sitting across from Gillian waiting to do a scene, and someone slipped her something. Her entire being lit up. I asked her what it was and she answered ‘A brownie.’ Watching her face as she chewed I thought ‘My God I want whatever she’s having.’ It was almost orgasmic.”

Since returning to his native Toronto, Owens has appeared in the ShowTime film My Louisiana Sky with Juliette Lewis, the Genie-nominated (Canadian equivalent of the Oscar) The Uncles, landed a small role in an Al Pacino movie, and is doing voice work. He is also tentatively slated to appear at the Toronto Sci-Fi convention, Toronto Trek, July 5-7th.

May-??-2002
Mercury News
‘X-Files’ makes mark on TV sci-fi history
Charlie McCollum

Alien-Spacey show re-established genre during skeptical decade and created pop catchphrases

Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny created two of the most enduring TV characters of the 1990s as FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder in “The X-Files.”

“The X-Files” has been one of the best dramas on television for almost a decade. It has also been one of the most influential series in TV history, a rare show that not only altered the medium of television itself but also American pop culture.

Yet, in recent seasons, it has also been one of the most maddening, disappointing series on the air.

In fact, when “The X-Files” finally leaves the air tonight, the show that told viewers “the truth is out there” but to “trust no one” will exit with only a small measure of the fanfare it deserves and with a viewership that is a fraction of what it was.

“If it called it quits three or even two years ago, it would have been a much bigger deal,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.

“I’m not saying that this was a terrible season of `The X-Files’ — or that the last three years didn’t have any good episodes. . . . But there is a sense that they’d said what they had to say, the whole concept began to wear out and it lived a lot longer than it needed to.”

“It should have ended a couple of years ago,” says Maria Sardina, an office manager in the East Bay who has watched the show since 1993 and regularly participates in online dissections of the series. “I still watch it, but it’s more out of habit than any strong feeling.”

Even the show’s creator, Chris Carter, sounds more than a bit ambivalent about the show stretching out to nine seasons. He says that he had to think long and hard about returning for the final year because “I’d basically wrapped up everything.” And he attributes the series’ plunge in viewership to the fact that “people sensed a journey was completed and weren’t ready to start a new one.”

None of this should, or probably can, obscure the impact “The X-Files” had during most of its run.

A series that executives at its own network thought would die by midseason went on to film more than 200 episodes. It developed a cult following on Fridays and then built an even bigger audience when it became the cornerstone of Fox’s potent Sunday lineup. Of all the scripted series on the air when it made its debut, only four — “Law & Order,” “NYPD Blue,” “The Simpsons” and “Frasier” — are still around.

The show featured one of television’s great “couples”: agents Fox Mulder, the true believer, and Dana Scully, the skeptic. It created an impressive array of indelible supporting characters, from the sinister Cigarette-Smoking Man to the Lone Gunmen, a group of nerds who often helped Scully and Mulder. It mixed wry, sophisticated humor and sly pop-culture references with tales of terror that seeped into viewers’ nightmares.

More than good TV

But “The X-Files” went beyond being merely a very good TV show.

The series had an influence on television and pop culture during the 1990s that was matched by only a handful of shows. Its best episodes rippled through offices, schools and coffee shops the morning after they aired. Its catchphrases — “the truth is out there,” “trust no one” — became part of the American lexicon. It took U.S. television drama beyond the standard formats — cops, lawyers, doctors — and revitalized science fiction as a genre.

“In drama, `The X-Files’ is comparable to `Seinfeld’ and `The Simpsons’ in comedy in that they really did something that left the medium a different place than when they first got on the air,” says Thompson. “ `The X-Files’ has earned a position in that very small pantheon of truly influential shows.”

It also tapped into the 1990s cynicism about the government and the pre-millennium jitters that became more pronounced as the decade went along.

Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) were two outsiders seemingly caught up in a vast conspiracy involving an alien takeover of the world with the complicity of high-ranking government officials. Some of the show’s best episodes had nothing to do with what became known as “ `The X-Files’ mythology.” But for nine years, the show’s narrative has been driven by the agents’ search for the truth about the conspiracy.

In the end, the complicated story line proved to be the seeds of the show’s destruction. The longer the show stayed on the air, the more the creators had to work to keep the mythology going and key questions unanswered. There was no psychic payoff for viewers in terms of resolution.

Carter dismisses the criticism, contending that “we’ve always played fair. If we withheld anything . . . well, we’re dealing with unexplained phenomena. Often times, people want explanations for things that we really don’t want to explain. It would be limiting to explain them.”

But Thompson responds that the series ultimately became “one of the biggest teases in all of American television. There was this constant need . . . to create these perpetual cliffhangers that they’d then have to back off from completely solving because they had to come back and fight another day.”

Many fans point to the 1998 film version of the series as something of a breakdown point for the show. The film promised at least a measure of closure. Instead, it asked more new questions and answered few old ones.

“Now, it’s become so complicated that it’s no fun,” says Dan Weissman, a bookstore clerk from Sunnyvale who started watching the series as a 13-year-old. “I don’t think the writers can even keep all the conspiracy stuff straight, and it really went off the tracks when it lost the Mulder-Scully relationship.”

In fact, the emotional core of the series was always the relationship between Mulder and Scully. Their interplay — whether poking around dark places with big flashlights or discussing the meaning of what they see but can’t believe — was the heart and soul of “The X-Files.”

“I always saw the central appeal of the show as the relationship between these two people who share everything in life but the physical love that they so desperately would like to share,” says Carter.

But two years ago, Duchovny decided he wanted to leave the series. He reluctantly agreed to do a handful of episodes last season and then disappeared entirely. (He does return for tonight’s two-hour finale.)

Failed experiment

Since the fall, the series has tried to establish two new agents — John Doggett (Robert Patrick) and Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish) — as characters who could carry on “The X-Files” tradition. It didn’t work.

“If you ask me, we should have ended it two years ago,” said Anderson in a recent TV Guide interview. “They couldn’t have found two better actors to take over, but the show was about Mulder and Scully. I think it was a difficult transition for the audience to make.”

Even though Carter won’t fess up to it, he and his fellow writers are too smart not to know that their show stayed around too long. As a result, a certain amount of self-awareness has filtered into recent shows.

An April episode was titled “Jump the Shark,” a sly reference to a well-known Web site where TV fans vote on when long-running series started their downhill slide in terms of quality. In another recent show, an acquaintance of Scully’s tells her that her older cases with Mulder are “pretty cool but the later ones I’m not that into. I don’t even know who these two new agents are.”

Carter feels longtime fans will be satisfied with tonight’s finale and the answers it contains.

“You find out where Mulder has been, what he’s been up to,” Carter says. “You see a lot of old faces that, if you’ve been a longtime fan of the show, you haven’t seen for a while, and you might wonder how it is that you’re seeing them again. And you see a really good story that brings us full circle, back to the pilot.

“We also make some sense of the mythology. I’m not suggesting that we can answer everything or answer the unanswerable, but we certainly take a logical, cohesive approach to trying to answer some of the bigger questions.”

Carter also says the creators will not “save anything” for a second “X-Files” scheduled to begin production next year: “We’re expending all our capital here trying to wrap everything up.”

But asked whether, at the end of tonight’s episode, the vast alien conspiracy is still out there, Carter pauses for a moment and then replies very carefully:

“The conspiracy,” he says, “does live on.”

May-??-2002
Orbit Magazine
The End is Out There
Greg Archer

Chris Carter, the brainiac behind The X-Files, TV’s most addictive, head-scratching sci-fi hit, is ushered into the Zanuck Building on the 20TH Century Fox lot with stars Gillian Anderson, Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish not far behind. Sniff the air and you can smell prestige, power- pressure. The buzz is out there-literally. What’s the 411 on David Duchovny’s TV persona, Mulder- really? Who’s the father of Scully’s baby- really? And why, exactly, is this award winning cult show, which spawned gaggles of Internet-surfing chat room chatties (X-philes), fading to black? Carter, clad in comfy tan pants and a handsome shirt sprinkled in cinnamon tones seems ready to fess up: “I didn’t want it to be the sort of thing where people were going to write what The X-Files used to be. [That] it’s past its time or running on some past glory.”

That glory began in September, 1993. The Fox drama about two FBI agents investigating unexplained cases involving the paranormal was a hip amalgam of Twilight Zone, Outer Limits and Night Stalker. In one corner was agent Mulder, a brooding guy trying to shake off the childhood trauma of his sister’s alien abduction. In the other corner was agent Scully, a doctor and realist who would no more believe in aliens than be caught dead without her skepticism. (How’s that baby doing, Dana?). In between, there was Skinner, the boss who didn’t mind going out on a limb. Viewers worldwide quickly soaked up the show and soon there was www.thexfiles.com.

Critically, it hit high notes, garnering 61 Emmy nods, winning for Outstanding Lead Actress (Anderson), Outstanding Writing, Art Direction, Makeup, and more. The show also nabbed the George Foster Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting and several Golden Globes-Best Dramatic Series, Actor (Duchovny) and Actress.

At its best, The X-Files pushed the envelope. It was cutting edge. It provoked thought. It was often downright scary-those aliens, those hair-raising conspiracies, that mystifying Cigarette Smoking Man. We’ve seen everything from clever cloning and time shifting to primordial beasts and psychic phenomena. And the comedic episodes weren’t bad either.

Fortunately, diehard fans embraced the dramatic shift the show experienced over the last few years, which included The Lone Gunmen spinoff, Mulder’s character being abducted and the addition of Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish as agents John Doggett and Monica Reyes. The spinoff fell flat, but in a surprise twist, which only a show like The X-Files seems experienced enough to pull off, the Patrick-Gish addition paid off.

But how does the gang feel about calling it quits?

“I felt as if I’ve just begun to hit my stride as Monica Reyes and have grown to have a deep affection for the cast and the crew, so it’s sad,” Gish admits. “Although, there’s an elegance to the way they’re dropping the curtain… and there’s a little more chemistry between Doggett and Reyes – an event, shall we call it. I think it’s apparent that Reyes is deeply in love with Doggett. Unrequited love seems to be the theme that The X-Files thrives on.”

Patrick, who’s still dusting off Terminator 2’s “Liquid Man” mystique, is disappointed that his first TV gig is ending but respects Carter’s decision to go out on top.

“They wrote a great character and it’s been fun playing a guy that loves America, loves his job, believes in doing the right thing,” Patrick says. “[Doggett] has a lot of codes that he lives by and I think it’s a throwback character. I believe in a lot of things that Doggett believes in, I tell you that.”

But for Anderson, knowing the end is coming doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to accept.

“It feels very obscure to me, very surreal,” Anderson says. “It’s hitting me. [But] I think it’s great [that David is coming back]. I didn’t realize how important that would be. I really didn’t realize how much I was missing him and how integral he was to the story.”

So, what can fans expect from Carter’s May finale, which Duchovny appears in?

“We’ve gone so far from where we’ve began, so now … I’m going back to where we began,” Carter reveals. “There’s this mythology that people thought was very convoluted and very confusing and it actually all does make perfect sense. And I think that’ll be the thing that makes it [the finale] very satisfying. There’s a beautiful structure to it.”

And Scully’s baby?

“I think everybody knows now who the father is,” Carter adds. “We’ve kind of said that it was Mulder’s, but still, she was barren. So how does a barren woman give birth to a child? I think that it’s pretty clear now that there was some hanky panky.”

Fortunately, the end, as it were, isn’t really the end. Fans can expect another X-Files flick, the plot of which won’t depend on the finale.

“We’re always going to be true to the characters,” says Carter. “We really see the movies as taking the best part of the series, which is the Mulder/Scully relationship and The X-Files franchise, and doing stand alone movies that are their own thing – good scary stories the way we’ve been telling them now for nine years.”

But does Carter really believe in aliens?

“Me? No,” he laughs. “But if there are aliens out there, they owe me a visit after all that I’ve done for them in the last nine years.”