31 years ago — thirty one! on 24 Sep 1993 — the first non-aliens-related “monster of the week” episode of #TheXFiles aired, “Squeeze”, and a myth was born with Eugene Victor Tooms! With his green eyes against a pitch black background, he became one of the most recognizable aspects of the X-Files “brand”. His influence is still felt today: here is a 2022 song entirely dedicated to him, video clip and all, named after Tooms’ address, from the German thrash metal band TRAITOR!
(And 30 years ago, Piper Maru Anderson was born, all the while “The Host” and “Blood” were airing.)
Today is the 30th anniversary of #TheXFiles season 2 premiere, “Little Green Men“! Yes, time flies and the series as a whole 31 years old, not just 30. “LGM” had a great atmosphere and plenty of memorable character and visual moments with unique photography (Mulder’s introductory monologue, Mulder’s recollection of Samantha’s abduction, the introduction of Senator Matheson, Mulder recording his thoughts for Scully at Arecibo, Scully trying to escape her surveillance, “contact”…). And yes, this was my first X-Files episode, way back then (but not in 1994).
Here’s a quick interview with Chris Carter about the new book “Perihelion” in this episode of XF Diaries: in short, he is very glad that there are still new things TXF coming out. He was consulted and offered notes, but this was really Claudia Gray’s work. As usual, he avoids answering anything directly, but he stresses that the book is “keeping with the canon” (a nuance of “canon” per se), I think he just makes the distinction because this is a novel and not a live continuation and it’s not his own work; but it also means that whatever happens in the novel does not comes into contradiction with what he would have done were there to have been a season 12. It’s not clear if he directly shared his own ideas for the future with Gray or just tried to steer Gray away from something. But if the book series continues, more answers will have to be given and we might end up knowing what he’s hiding. For what that’s worth.
He also teases that there’s an easter egg in “My Struggle IV” about where the show and the characters were going and leaves us wondering My bet? William/Jackson was shown holding an egg hatching, and the episode ends with Scully pregnant: he is a life-giver, and he could have had a role in Scully’s new pregnancy, hence the final smile. What do people think?
30 years ago already, May 8 1994, The X-Files season 1 ended with a bang, and the buzz from that resulted in the show getting renewed for season 2 and beyond! “The Erlenmeyer Flask” was one of Chris Carter’s best scripts and includes so many memorable images — a man breathing underwater, a secret room full of tanks with people being experimented on, proof of alien biology, Scully finding an alien fetus, Deep Throat being killed… The music is mysterious and the mystery is thick, this is the series at its best. 30 years!
Happy birthday to Dana Katherine Scully, born on February 23, 1964! She has reached the round and respectable age of 60. By now she must have retired from the FBI, after becoming FBI Director! Incredible that her abduction back in season 2 was 30 years ago, which is now just at the mid-point in her life…
25 years ago today, The X-Files mythology essentially wrapped up with “Two Fathers” and “One Son”! A quarter of a century ago! What better way to celebrate than with a new interview with writer-producer and mythology second-in-command Frank Spotnitz, courtesy of The X-Files Diaries. “Incredibly ambitious episodes!” Here are the highlights [and my comments!]:
Why end the Syndicate storyline then? “When I look back on the evolution of TXF mythology and the storytelling, it was very elusive and teasing a lot, the first 4 seasons at least. Then the movie came along and we had to deliver more explicit pieces, that was sort of our mandate, the movie has to give to give you something you haven’t had in the TV show. So by the time we got to s6 we felt like we need to give more answers, we’ve teased people long enough.” We were “telling the audience it all does makes sense, this is what we’ve been hiding from you and here are the pieces all in one place, bringing that chapter to a close with the death of Jeffrey Spender and the Syndicate”. [The puzzle-like way the mythology of TXF was built and written is something that fascinates me endlessly.]
The flashbacks in the scripts: inspired by Godfather II. The scripts were late, not enough time for hair & makeup to do good work; all scenes were shot, the footage exists; but they were not happy with the wigs; but also the past/present narrative connections were not working. They were happier with the decision to substitute them with scenes where CSM is exposing everything to Fowley. [I agree, although I’d love to see those scenes!]
What was planned ahead? “I can’t entirely answer this question honesty because a lot of these things were in Chris’s head before I even came on the show” “when I came on, I don’t think anybody really understood the ‘mythology’, that we were actually building a coherent narrative” “the Black Oil, which was my thing, I didn’t understand how it connected, I didn’t even realize it was going to need to connect later on”. “Some of it was there from the very beginning, some of it had to be knit together, most of it we did understand going into the movie”. “Chris and I had talked in s4, maybe earlier, a lot of it didn’t make it into the show explicitly — it was sort of the petrochemical era of human civilization that brought the virus back”. [Amazing that Carter wasn’t sharing everything about the mythology not even with Spotnitz. The oil connection adds an ecological-historical reading to the mythology that I find very appealing, I wish they had developed that more.]
Diana Fowley: the writers wanted to play the ambiguity regarding Fowley’s allegiance, on who to trust, Mulder’s or Scully’s reading of Fowley? To the point where Mulder calls on Fowley’s bluff to see where her loyalties lie (end of One Son). But how the episode reads to the viewer is that she is an antagonist to M&S, not as ambiguous as intended. He would have liked to see more of Fowley. “That was explicitly one of the reasons why we wanted the Fowley character, it was a way to indirectly mine the sexual tension between M&S, by creating this new threat that you hadn’t really seen since s1, a rival for Scully”. [The inclusion of Fowley was very soap operatic from the beginning, but it worked rather well for what the show was doing by then.]
It was another time in terms of storytelling on TV: “We were so busy having to move the story and the plot along, you almost wish it had been 3 episodes and you had more time to slow down and look at the character dynamics and the emotional reality.” [3 episodes, I agree!]
On the MSR: “their work is what brought them together and is what kept them together, if they become lovers it threatens their ability to work together. This is one of those issues that I’m sure nobody anticipated at the beginning of the show, because you don’t know how long the show will go on you don’t realize it’s going to be 9 seasons+. By s6 and 7, you’ve got to go somewhere with this, you just cannot keep teasing the audience, you’ve got to honor the reality of these characters after all these years together.” [Similar thoughts to wrapping up the Syndicate plotline here, agreed. But extending the same thought further, it becomes less and less interesting the longer it goes on, like in s9 and beyond.]
On Mulder’s wedding ring (Unusual Suspects, Travelers): definitely not in the writers’ intention, was a DD thing: “we didn’t have the visual effects capability to erase the ring.” All the fan theories about Fowley being the ex-wife are good, but they were “not in the text”. [We’ll always have fan theories!]
On Krycek: “one of my regrets is we were going to do a Krycek episode, that would have been maybe a chance to explore the Marita-Krycek dynamic more fully”. Krycek as the ‘one son’? “Krycek not born to the throne, he’s working to earn his place”. [He doesn’t refer to a draft script for a Krycek episode, I wonder if he’s forgotten or if it really existed.]
On whether the CSM was Mulder’s father [at that point]: “that was an idea we had, an argument we had about whether he should be, we just agreed to not commit.” A revealing sentence about how Carter thinks: “Chris would often have ideas he wasn’t going to share until it was time, and we’d realize, oh you were thinking that?” Also, FS always assumed that Samantha is Bill Mulder’s.
On Jeffrey Spender: “Once he understood the moral dimension of what his father had done to his mother, it was a natural point for him to stand up to his father and redeem himself, and in redeeming himself he had doomed himself. There was no way he could stand up to the CSM and walk away. it felt like the inevitable Shakespearian conclusion.” [Again, great, but spread over more episodes would have been better.]
Cassandra’s “I’m going to pee the floor” was probably a Carter line; Mulder’s reply “don’t do that” was a Duchovny ad-lib.
M&S shower scene: stolen from James Bond “Dr No”. The partition between M&S was not scripted.
Ending: they were not allowed to shoot the Syndicate burning for fire safety issues, “it’s the largest wooden hangar in North America” [unfortunately just burned down in November 2023!]. When the show was ending in s9, if they had the money, he would have liked to redo some of the effects, like the morphing.
Next mythology was less about the grand conspiracy and was more focused on the characters, was that planned or not? “It just came about”. “We just trusted, as we often did, that we would find our way”. “We’ve never done the show with a map, with a plan, we always trust we’ll figure it out when we get there”. Fox was not happy to hear that from FS, when CC was absent, when they asked what s9 was going to be about. With all the changes, “it became very hard, even if we wanted to, to plan ahead the last 3 seasons”. [No change of method over the years, but it became more and more difficult to reconcile the cumulative storytelling of what was done already with what was going on behind the scenes.]
