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From Cinescape Magazine, May 2002 Issue.
Transcribed by Megan. Thanks to Gertie for the scans!
A quick walk through the 20th Century Fox sound stages that house The X-Files' standing sets only underscores how much has changed.
Gone is Mulder's apartment - that set, along with all its furnishings, including the fish tank and fabled leather couch, is packed away in a warehouse. The pencils remain on the ceiling of the small basement office that Mulder used to work out of, but the nameplates have changed, and there are two desks instead of one. Scully's apartment has a dedicated nursery now. And there's a permanent set - Scully's office at Quantico, where she finally gets a nameplate of her own after all of these years as Special Agent.
Change isn't new to The X-Files - given the series' nine-year run, it's more a matter of art imitating life.
"We've all gone through life changes, so to speak," says executive producer John Shiban. "We've grown as people. It's very rewarding to have been able to take the show with us."
Certainly since The X-Files' debut in the fall of 1993, the show has transformed itself on more than one occasion. It has survived endless, mind-numbingly complex plot twists; character deaths, birth, exits and additions; a change of scenery (the well-publicized move from Vancouver to L.A. at the start of season 6); and behind-the-scenes intrigue (the will-he/won't-he-return drama of David Duchovny at the end of both season 7 and season 8).
But as much as things have changed - particularly in the series' final season - there are some things on The X-Files that have stayed the same. Take today, a typical Thursday on the set: The hours promise to be as long as late as ever, with filming on "Improbable" starting late in the afternoon. On a day like today, the cast and crew won't break for "lunch" until 9 p.m., and filming will continue well into the night.
Chris Carter, The X-Files' mastermind himself, is at the helm of this aptly - if not ironically - titled episode. Just a year ago, there was no telling whether the series would see a ninth season, let along whether Carter would still be spearheading the effort.
To set the scene, rewind to May 2001. It's a familiar crossroads: Once again, the season has wrapped, and we're just days from the final episode's air date... not to mention that Fox will announce its fall schedule. The studio was aggressive, making no secret about the fact that it wanted the show - an important staple on the network's Sunday night schedule - to return. And in the end, the studio announced season 9 was a go just in the nick of time. Carter had yet to confirm his involvement, but executive producers Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan and John Shiban were all set to return.
Carter remained undecided about coming back for several reasons, not the least of which, he recalls candidly, was "because I was tired. I felt like I had accomplished so much on the series. And I was happy with the ending of the season finale."
In the end, Carter was persuaded to return by the prospect of exploring new avenues with the new characters introduced in season 8 - Special Agent John Doggett (Robert Patrick) and Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish).
"I felt we could actually try something new with the show, that we could tell stories in new ways with new characters," he says. "We had terrific actors to work with and write for - Robert and Annabeth were two great additions to the show. I got excited about the prospect of doing that."
The addition of Patrick last year actually proved invigorating for a number of the writers. By expanding the fold to include Gish on a full-time basis, The X-Files suddenly found itself with an abundance of new perspectives to explore. And that's been fun after so many years of the familiar yin-yang of Mulder and Scully, says Gilligan. "It's been nice to have these two new characters to write for. They're not Mulder and Scully, so they really do have a different take on things."
In order to accommodate the new palette of central characters, Spotnitz had to consider how to reconstruct the show to move it away from the believer-skeptic paradigm that had worked so well for Mulder and Scully.
"We really had to redesign the show," explains Spotnitz. "First of all, we had to respect what the show had been, and then we had to imagine what the show could be. Respecting what the show has been meant respecting the Mulder-Scully relationship, and doing nothing to violate what they mean to each other and where we'd left them at the end of season 8."
That in turn meant separating Scully, a new mother, from the X-Files proper. Bad enough that she was going it along this year while Mulder was in exile; giving her a full-time permanent partner who wasn't Mulder just wouldn't hold water, not after all they've been through together.
Having Scully off at Quantico allowed Monica Reyes to step up to the plate as Doggett's new partner. Doggett assumed the role of skeptic and Reyes that of believer, through the lines of demarcation between the two are not as clearly drawn as in the days of Mulder and Scully.
The new arrangement, Carter says, "created a nice opportunity to take these characters and invest them in a show that we were all very familiar with, which was the telling of X-File stories. and [it gave us a way] to bring Scully in and to play with her now-eroded skepticism."
New Season, Fresh Perspectives
Whenever a long-running series tinkers with its core cast members, there's potential for discontent amongst viewers. But both Gish and Patrick have taken a pragmatic approach to their roles - and how they fit into the bigger picture of a larger-than-life series like The X-Files
"Robert and I have been very intent upon upholding the quality of work that has been established before," offers Gish. "But we are not Mulder and Scully - we are Doggett and Reyes. And so we've had a lot of opportunity to just come in and be ourselves."
For Patrick, this season has offered a chance to take Doggett further that he could before.
"The character is still new to me," he says. "All of my relationships with everybody are continuing to evolve. The big transition from last season is that at least Doggett now acknowledges there is something to these X-Files, and that there is some sort of conspiracy going on within the FBI."
Like last season, many of the series' stand-alone stories have returned to exploring the scary, unexplainable phenomena that formed the backbone of The X-Files in its heyday.
After nearly 200 episodes, you might imagine it would be harder to come up with appropriately scary material, but according to Spotnitz, finding the stories to tell hasn't been the issue. The tougher challenge, he says, lies "in trying to push away from situations that you've been in before. And that's become much easier the last two years, because we have new characters. It changes so much about what stories you can tell."
The Mulder-Scully Era
No matter whose names have been seen in the opening credits these past two season, Mulder and Scully are inextricably linked to The X-Files. For many long-time viewers, the series is only as great as the sum of its parts - and without one or the other of those key ingredients, the magic is missing.
That magic - a credit to the kinetic energy that radiates between actors David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson on-screen - is what helped Mulder and Scully vault into the popular culture lexicon as one of television's all-time great pairings.
"David and Gillian are not only talented actors, but they have unbelievable chemistry," enthuses Spotnitz. "When I did the DVD audio commentary for 'Memento Mori,' I was watching it with the sound off, and I was struck by how you could see how David and Gillian read each other's faces and eyes. They just click."
As the seasons passed, Duchovny and Anderson's textured and nuanced work together took on a life of its own, giving rise to a relationship between Mulder and Scully that the producers never wrote into the scripts. This unique bond soon became a point of fascination and frustration for viewers, many of who chafed at the relationship's glacial pace.
"It was a very slow evolution," agrees Spotnitz. "But that was because we were extremely resistive to the idea of any romantic entanglement. I loved the fact that they were two, smart strong professional people who just loved each other in a platonic sense. They respected each other and worked together, there was no sex in it. I thought that was great and powerful. And we were very protective of that - to the point of it being a huge deal when they actually touched each other's hands at the end of 'Pusher' in season 4. And I think that was the right call [at the time]."
However, time isn't frozen in a bottle, not even for formidable TV characters like Mulder and Scully.
"No one anticipates that a show is going to go on for six, seven, eight, nine years," says Spotnitz. "After a certain point, you realize that it's just not like life to keep it at the same state - the relationship has to evolve. What I started to realize about their relationship was that the quest for the truth had brought them together, but it was also what was keeping them apart. That's why I think it was so satisfying for everyone at the end of season 8, when Mulder and Scully actually got to have peace and happiness and be together after the baby was born."
By giving Scully a child, adds Shiban, the character was given a chance to grow beyond the mold of the ever-skeptical scientist. In the two-parter "Provenance and Providence," Shiban explains, "you'll see sides of Scully that we never would've played. This is Scully as the protective mother, and it's amazing. And Gillian just ate it up - she was great. But it's such emotional territory that the scientist Scully from years past wouldn't go there because the stakes weren't there. I think the key to it [working] was the baby. She now has a real-life agenda."
This approach also gives the series a chance to come full circle from the early days, when the quest for the ever elusive truth was Mulder's, and Mulder's alone.
"That was part of the genius of the original idea, that Mulder's quest for the cosmic - are there extraterrestrials? - was connected to the personal, which was the abduction of his sister when he was a boy," says Spotnitz.
But by the launch of season 3, that started to change, and Scully was just as invested in the search for the truth as Mulder. Once her sister had died in her place, Spotnitz says, "Scully would never walk away from the truth of what was going on. From that point on in the show, they both wanted the truth, but for different reasons. And they both saw the truth through different lenses."
Improbable Production
It's 7:30 at night, and anonymous FBI agents in their dress suits mill about the FBI briefing room, waiting for the next take. The crew is adjusting the monitors. Carter is both a relaxed and intense presence on set; his easygoing, soothing attitude proves a balm for the actors, particularly when a guest actor stumbles over his verbose, jargon-filled lines.
Meticulous to the last, Carter never seems to miss anything. In one take, he notices the newspaper on the wall is not bright enough. On another shot, he asks Patrick to shift over slightly, so as not to block something on the bulletin board. When Patrick cocks his head slightly in one rehearsal, Carter approves, and tells him he likes what he's doing. In the event of a flubbed take, Carter often keeps the camera rolling, maintaining the rhythm and urgency of the moment for his actors - who'll then pick up the dialogue to proceed as needed through the take.
As a director, Carter knows what he wants from his shots, and he doesn't hesitate to go after it.
"I love the visually artistic part of filmmaking, particularly the look of a film being its production design, its art direction and its direction," says Carter. "Those things - beyond being a writer - and what's very important to me."
The scene filming here on Stage 5 is standard fare for The X-Files, but this episode, "Improbable" (which guest-stars Burt Reynolds), has some other, more impressive shots - a sign, no doubt, of Carter's desire to push the envelope in a visual sense.
During another break between shots, Carter calls up the dailies from the night before so Patrick can see them on the monitor. The shot is an unusual one, with a Ferris wheel towering over a festive, Little Italy-styled street. The camera pans up, and up, providing a sweeping, almost breath-taking view that elicits murmurs of approval from Patrick and the other crewmembers gathered. While small cranes and often used in television production, "We used a crane like those they build skyscrapers with," Carter explains. "It pulled the camera up over 200 feet in the air. It's not a piece of equipment you see on sets all that often. But I had saved all my money by carefully constructing the episode so that there were savings elsewhere so I can do this big set piece."
It's that kind of no-holds-barred approach that places The X-Files in a category by itself when it comes to the show's production values. In fact, the series was on of the first to tout itself as making little movies every week - and one of its legacies is surely its production values, which have always been a high priority.
"In our attempt to do something different each week, at the level we tried to do it, X-Files may have raised production standards," agrees Carter. "What we did took time and it took money."
We've given people something to aspire to," adds Spotnitz. "There's a lot of really good television out there - but what The X-Files has done, I still don't see."
A Decade Later, Time to Take a Bow
At The X-Files's peak - somewhere during seasons 4 and 5 - the show was attracting nearly 20 million viewers per week. Even now, after exposure for so many years in reruns, The X-Files still regularly ranks as one of the top-rated genre series currently in syndication - topping even first-run syndie shows like Andromeda, which stars Kevin Sorbo. Not too shabby for a series that's reinvented itself more times than Agent Mulder has returned from the dead. But prime-time ratings have clearly suffered - in spite of the demographic numbers remaining strong.
"Unfortunately, when we premiered in mid-November, the audience that had always come for the season opener didn't come this year," acknowledges Carter. "Or, I should say, they didn't come in great numbers. Maybe we're dealing with generational changes. Maybe it's because of 9/11 and the things people want to watch on TV [have changed]. Maybe it's because of the loss of David Duchovny. It's very hard to quantify this situation."
Lending credence of the latter possibility is the chorus of naysayers, many of them vocal on Internet community boards, who've spoken out against the Mulderless season 9. Spotnitz and Carter both follow Internet conversation about the show, but Spotnitz admits to taking the feedback with a grain of salt.
"I don't kid myself that it's representative to the larger audience," he says. "And I think it'd be foolish to let it guide your decision-making, because ultimately you've got to tell the stories that you feel passionate about that you trust are right for the characters and for the show."
In the end, Carter made the decision to call in his marker. After a mid-January meeting with the studio executives, it was a fait accompli: The X-Files would end its run at the end of this season, logging a remarkable 202 episodes - no small feat in the fickle world of television.
"The writing was on the wall," explains Carter. "I didn't want to see the show limp along. It was an opportunity to do what I said I always wanted to do, which is to take the series when it ended, and try to make good movies with the idea of Mulder and Scully."
Before the series bows out, though, there was just "a few" loose ends to tie up of the tangled mythology.
Had the harsh realities of life outside the fictional world of X-Files not interfered, Mulder's arc might have proceeded differently, says Spotnitz. "The shape of the show, and the path of the mythology and the characters' lives changed because of the off-screen politics of deals and who was willing to come to the show and who wasn't. The obvious thing is that availabilities of actors changed, David most notably. And that definitely affects the outcome of the show."
However, fans can rest easy knowing that the actor will not only reprise the role of Mulder for the two-hour finale ("He's coming back because he realizes what he's doing for the show now will be good for the future if we want to do movies," says Carter), but he will also be directing one of the show's final episodes in an effort to close the door on the television series and open the door on the feature films.
"We actually approached him before, but that looked like it was going to go away," says Carter. "He was going to write and direct, and he just ran out of time. But I wrote him an episode and he's directing it right now."
Aside from that, Carter is expectedly cagey when asked which other familiar faces may pop up in May's finale. He only offers this morsel: "As always, on The X-Files, you should be prepared for anything."
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