The X-Files

This article is about the TV show. For other uses, see The X-Files (disambiguation).

In the series, FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are tasked with investigating the "X-Files": marginalized, unsolved cases involving paranormal phenomena. Mulder plays the role of the "believer", having faith in the existence of aliens and the paranormal, while Scully is a skeptic, initially assigned by her departmental superiors to debunk Mulder's unconventional work. As the show progressed, both agents were caught up in a larger conflict, termed "the mythology" or "mytharc" by the show's creators, and developed a close and ambiguous friendship which many saw as romantic rather than platonic.^[4] The X-Files also featured stand-alone episodes ranging in tone from horror to comedy, in which Mulder and Scully investigated uniquely bizarre cases without long-term implications on the storyline. These so-called "monster of the week" episodes made up the bulk of the series.

The show's popularity peaked in the mid-to-late 1990s,^[5] leading to a theatrical feature film in 1998. In the last two seasons, Anderson became the star as Duchovny appeared rarely, and new central characters were introduced: FBI Agents John Doggett (Robert Patrick) and Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish). At the time of its final episode, The X-Files was the longest running sci-fi show ever on American television, a title since lost to Stargate SG-1^[1]. The show was declared by TV Guide to be the second greatest cult television show^[6] (Star Trek being number one) and the 37^th best television show of all time.^[7] In 2007, TIME magazine included the show on its list of the "100 Best TV Shows of All Time".^[8]

[edit] Idea and pilot

California native Chris Carter, who had previously met with limited success writing for television, was given the opportunity to produce new shows for the struggling FOX network in the early 1990s. Tired of the comedies he had been working on,^[9] inspired by a report that 3.7 million Americans may have been abducted by aliens,^[10] and recalling memories of Watergate and 1970s horror show Kolchak: The Night Stalker,^[11] Carter came up with the idea for The X-Files and wrote the pilot episode himself in 1992. He initially struggled over the untested concept—executives wanted a love interest for Scully—and casting. The network wanted either a more established or a "taller, leggier, blonder and breastier"^[12] actress for Scully than the 24-year-old Gillian Anderson, a theater veteran with minor film experience, who Carter felt was the only choice after auditions.^[13]^[14] Nevertheless, the pilot with both Anderson and David Duchovny was successfully shot in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in early 1993, and the show was picked up for the Friday night 9:00 p.m. slot on the American fall TV schedule. Carter started a new company called Ten Thirteen Productions, named after his October 13 birthday, to oversee The X-Files. Carter's idea was to present FBI agents investigating extraterrestrials and paranormal events, but Carter also wanted to deal directly with the characters' beliefs. Carter said, "I think of myself as a non-religious person looking for religious experience, so I think that's what the characters are sort of doing too."^[15] Dana Scully, in addition to being the scientific "skeptic" and a trained medical doctor, was open to the Catholic faith in which she was raised; while Fox Mulder, in addition to being an Oxford-educated psychologist and renowned criminal profiler, was the "believer" in space aliens, derisively nicknamed "Spooky Mulder" by his colleagues. Carter said, "Scully's point of view is the point of view of the show. And so the show has to be built on a solid foundation of science, in order to have Mulder take a flight from it... If the science is really good, Scully's got a valid point of view... And Mulder has to then convince her that she's got to throw her arguments out, she's got to accept the unacceptable. And there is the conflict."^[16] Carter also felt Scully's role as the more rational partner and Mulder's reliance on guesses and intuition subverted the gender roles usually seen on television.^[17]

In the pilot episode, Scully is assigned to the X-Files as Mulder's partner, in order to serve as a scientific check on Mulder's belief in the paranormal. In later episodes, it becomes apparent that she was actually set up in that role so that the government conspirators could contain the implications of Mulder's work, which they viewed as a danger to their devious plans. Notably, the powerful shadow government official known only as the Cigarette Smoking Man, or "Cancer Man", appears without any spoken lines in the first and last scenes of the pilot episode—although at that point his ongoing importance to the series had not yet been established.^[18] The "unresolved sexual tension" between Mulder and Scully was also a central underlying theme from the beginning, although they were each given other brief romantic interests in future episodes. Carter thought the show should be "plot-driven", and was quoted as saying, "I didn't want the relationship to come before the cases."^[19] For example, throughout the series, Mulder and Scully, with rare exception, refer to each other in a professional manner by using each others' last names, rather than calling each other by their first names, which might seem more personal.

Carter's superior at FOX, Peter Roth, brought on more experienced staff members from the start, many of whom had previously worked with him at Stephen J. Cannell's production company.^[20] Two of the most highly-regarded writers were Glen Morgan and James Wong. Their contributions to the first two seasons, such as the episode "Beyond the Sea", were particularly popular among fans,^[21] television critics,^[22] the show's actors, and even Carter himself.^[23] Morgan and Wong also returned for the first half of the fourth season. Prior to their work on The X-Files, Wong and Morgan had worked extensively with David Nutter, Rob Bowman, and Kim Manners on cop dramas such as The Commish and 21 Jump Street. Nutter, Bowman and Manners all became frequent X-Files directors, with Nutter working on many of the darker episodes in the first three seasons. The duo of Wong and Morgan also had an important role in hiring several supporting actors on the show, as well as John Bartley, the cinematographer who gave The X-Files its early dark atmospheric look, for which he won an Emmy Award in 1996.^[24] Bartley left after the third season and was replaced by directors of photography Ron Stannett, Jon Joffin, and ultimately Joel Ransom until the end of the fifth season.

The show, which made a big move to Los Angeles in its sixth season, was originally going to be filmed in California in the first place. Carter said, "we originally intended to film the pilot in Los Angeles. When we couldn't find a good forest, we made a quick decision to come to Vancouver. As it turned out, it was three weeks that turned into five years. The benefits of being in Vancouver were tremendous."^[25] The temperate rainforest climate of Vancouver itself was also seen as crucial to The X-Files, allowing directors to create a mysterious, foggy aura,^[26] seen as somewhat similar to that of then-recent TV hit Twin Peaks. Responsibility for casting the show fell to Randy Stone,^[27] who had first recommended both leads to Carter, and to Rick Millikan, who predominately used local Canadian actors.^[28]

[edit] History

[edit] Season 1 (1993–1994)

In the first two seasons, executive producer Carter and co-executive producers Morgan and Wong, along with other writers, helped to define the show's fledgling story arc.^[21] The "mythology", as the producers called it, was initially established as a government plot to cover up anything pertaining to the existence of extraterrestrial life, and Mulder's attempts to discover the fate of his sister, Samantha. He believed that she had been abducted by aliens years prior, when Mulder was a child, which profoundly affected him and ignited his obsession with the paranormal. Carter himself wrote the show's second episode, "Deep Throat", which was directed by Daniel Sackheim. It introduced a character named Deep Throat (played by Jerry Hardin), the first of several secret government informants who would at times help or hinder Mulder and Scully's investigations.

"Conduit", the first of many episodes to deal with Mulder's repressed memories of his sister's abduction, was written by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. Gordon became another key writer/producer in the show's first four years, also writing "Fallen Angel" and other episodes in the first season with Gansa. That early mythology episode centered on Mulder's futile efforts to discover a crashed UFO which was being covered up by the government. It also introduced UFO enthusiast and abduction victim Max Fenig, one of many idiosyncratic outsiders portrayed on the show, which helped attract an "intensely loyal" cult following^[29] (see below). Fenig, played by Scott Bellis, returned for two episodes in the fourth season. Ironically, "Fallen Angel" also received the lowest Nielsen ratings of the first season. Another early and influential mythology effort, the Wong and Morgan-written episode "E.B.E." (for "extraterrestrial biological entity"), which saw Mulder and Scully tracking another crashed UFO, did almost as poorly; it was the fourth least-watched episode of the series overall until its final season.^[5]

Carter and his writers were mostly left to their own devices because FOX was concentrating on The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and other shows that they considered more commercially promising at the time. The producers still ran into early opposition on some key episodes, among them "Beyond the Sea",^[21] "E.B.E.", and the popular "Ice".^[30] According to Carter, "the issue of closure has been an ongoing dialogue with the network, because we've always resisted wrapping up each episode with a neat little bow at the end. You can't do that... because pretending to explain the unexplainable is ridiculous and our audience is too smart for that." Eventually FOX backed down and it was decided "X-File stories would not have forced plot resolutions, but would conclude with some emotional resolution."^[17]

Doug Hutchinson as Eugene Victor Tooms in "Squeeze", the first of many "Monster-of-the-week" episodes.

However, the duo's first episode, "Squeeze", was not a part of the mythology. The episode featured Eugene Victor Tooms, an elastic, liver-eating mutant serial-killer who emerged from hibernation every 30 years. After the first two episodes, the writing staff wanted to broaden the concept of The X-Files; executives had initially rejected Carter's idea for a series centered only around alien conspiracies, having already had one at the time, Sightings.^[32] "Squeeze" became a template for the paranormal "Monster-of-the-Week" episodes that would be a mainstay of the series. Wong and Morgan followed it up later in the season with a direct sequel called "Tooms." "Tooms" was also the episode where the writers gave the Cigarette Smoking Man his first lines, and introduced FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi), Mulder and Scully's boss. Whilst a relatively in-the-background type character in the 1st season, the character's role and importance in the storyline would evolve over the next seasons, until Skinner became an integral part of the X-Files plot.

[edit] Early production issues

Initially, The X-Files was fighting for its life in the ratings, and as a result, there was no long-term plan in the beginning to guide its writers.^[33] The only guideline provided by Carter was that the show should take place "within the realm of extreme possibility".^[34] The show's first season thus featured numerous standalone stories involving monsters, and also diverse alien/government cover-ups, with no apparent connection to each other — such as the Arctic space worms in "Ice", and the conspiracy of genetically engineered twins in "Eve." Carter himself wrote "Space", a low-budget affair about the manifestation of an alien "ghost" in the NASA space shuttle program, which was subject to cost overruns and became the most expensive of the first season;^[35] he later called it one of the worst hours ever produced for the show.^[26]

According to Glen Morgan, the writers were inspired by a glowing New Yorker review noting the show's exploration of "suburban paranoia", and planned for more thematic unity in the second season: "the whole year was to be about the little green men that you and I create for ourselves... because there’re not nuclear missiles pointed at our heads, you can’t consolidate your fears there anymore."^[30] However, the plan fell through quickly due to the pressure of the network TV schedule.

But by the end of the first season, Carter and his staff had come up with many of the general concepts of the mythology that would last throughout all nine seasons, whose outlines first appeared in Carter's Edgar Award-nominated season finale "The Erlenmeyer Flask", written in early 1994 before he knew whether the show was going to be canceled.^{[citation needed]} In the episode, The X-Files are closed down and Mulder and Scully are to be reassigned. The finale was the first episode directed by R. W. Goodwin, a senior producer (and husband of Sheila Larken, who played Scully's mother on the show) who went on to direct every season opening and closing episode for the next four years.

The X-Files was picked up for a second season despite finishing 102^nd out of the 118 shows in the U.S. Nielsen ratings.^[36] It also received its first Emmy nod, for best title sequence. The electronic theme song in the sequence, featuring eerie whistling sounds, was by Mark Snow and became very well known (club versions of the theme song have reached the pop charts in France, the UK^[37] and Australia, where a remix by Triple X became a number 2 hit in 1996^[38]). Snow's music scores for each episode, often dark, synthesized^[39] and ambient, were another distinctive aspect of The X-Files from its earliest years, as the show used more background music than typical of an hour long drama.^[40] A soundtrack CD, The Truth and the Light, came out in 1996.

The show's mix of genres, the stressful schedule (22 or more episodes per season) and the shooting in different settings each week, required a large and experienced technical crew. At least 300 in Vancouver were under the supervision of producer Goodwin, who called The X-Files "the most difficult show on television" and "the equivalent of making a feature film every eight days".^[41] The first year, budgets were at times as low as $1 million.^[28] By 1998, its final year in Vancouver, the show cost $2.5 million per episode,^[42] most of which was not the stars' salaries.^[43] The longtime crew included producers Joseph Patrick Finn and Paul Rabwin, in charge of post-production; production designer and art director Graeme Murray, who won two Emmys for his work on the show; film editor Heather MacDougall, who worked on 51 episodes and won an Emmy for "Kill Switch"; Emmy-nominated editor Stephen Mark, who also edited the 1998 film; sound designer Thierry Couturier, who won two Emmys, and whose son says "I made this" over the Ten Thirteen company logo;^[44] Mat Beck, visual effects supervisor (many were created on computer, unusual in early 1990s TV) for 91 episodes^[45] and also wrote the episode "Wetwired"; Emmy-nominated makeup artist Toby Lindala;^[46] and props master Kenneth Hawryliw, who later co-wrote the episode "Trevor".

[edit] Season 2 (1994–1995)

As the series ended its first season, a problem had arisen for the producers: the pregnancy of Gillian Anderson, who played Dana Scully. Some network executives wanted the role recast, which Carter refused to do.^[47] Another problem arose for Carter, who was unable to finish his planned season opening extravaganza. Morgan and Wong were asked to come up with a lower-key replacement,^[21] but their "Little Green Men" was nevertheless the first episode to actually show an alien and got the show's best ratings thus-far (with a 19% audience share).^[5] The early part of the second season solidified Mulder and Scully's close relationship, even as the two had been separated on drudgery assignments in different departments when the X-Files had been closed at the end of season one. Due to her pregnancy, Anderson was largely demobilized from active scenes with Duchovny, which matched her character's confinement to teaching medical students at Quantico. During early episodes of season two, Scully is typically pictured only in closeup, at a desk, or conducting autopsies — one of her usual roles on The X-Files due to her training as a medical doctor.

Flukeman in "The Host", played by future writer Darin Morgan under prosthetics. The episode, like several others, was inspired by classic sci-fi B-movies.

The beginning of the second season saw an increasingly frustrated and hopeless Mulder, having been reassigned at the FBI to tedious wiretaps. He also had his prior informant taken away and replaced by the far more reluctant and less friendly Mr. X (Steven Williams), who never fully revealed his true allegiances. Carter's script "The Host" somewhat symbolized Mulder's frustration and loss of hope. In the episode, he is given what he thinks is a dead-end assignment in Newark, New Jersey, literally sifting through sewage, which actually turns out to be an X-file — a giant mutant Flukeman who breeds in nuclear waste. Critics felt The X-Files of this period often consciously resembled classic B-movies in containing environmental and political morals,^[48] as in Carter's earlier "Darkness Falls" (about ancient forest bugs who exact revenge on Pacific Northwest loggers), Morgan and Wong's "Blood" (dealing with mind control from electronic devices and pesticide spraying), and Howard Gordon's script for "Sleepless" (about Vietnam veterans who had been guinea pigs in a cruel government experiment in sleep deprivation). Notably, "Blood" was the first episode whose story credit went to Darin Morgan, the actor who had portrayed Flukeman and the brother of writer/producer Glen Morgan (of the Morgan and Wong writing team). "Sleepless" was the second X-Files episode directed by Rob Bowman, who would become one of the most prolific X-Files staff members behind the scenes, directing dozens of episodes as well as the 1998 feature film. "Sleepless" introduced Agent Alex Krycek (Nicholas Lea) as Mulder's new partner. Their partnership would last only into the next two episodes, "Duane Barry" and "Ascension", which proved crucial to the fate of the series. Searching for a solution to the now acute problem of Anderson's pregnancy, Carter and his writers decided to have Scully abducted by Duane Barry (Steve Railsback), himself a likely alien abductee, in the episode, "Duane Barry." The episode was both written and directed by Carter (his debut) and received several Emmy nominations the following year.^[49]

Anderson was not featured at all in the episode "3", but reappeared when Scully mysteriously returned in Morgan and Wong's "One Breath" (directed by R. W. Goodwin), an episode which consistently scores among the highest in fan ratings.^[50] Scully's abduction provoked an existential crisis in Mulder. Although the show left it up in the air for years as to who was directly responsible (aliens, the government, or some combination of both), the earlier episode "Sleepless" had foreshadowed the events with the Cigarette Smoking Man's declaration that "every problem has a solution" (referring to Scully). Scully was now seen to be firmly on Mulder's side in the larger conflict, regardless of her original role as a debunker and her continued skepticism towards the paranormal.

After Scully's recovery (and the birth of Anderson's daughter, Piper), Mulder and Scully returned to work on the re-opened X-Files, investigating cases ranging from Haitian zombies ("Fresh Bones") to animal abductions ("Fearful Symmetry") and exorcism ("The Calusari"). This period would see the show gain more mainstream appeal, often earning winning scores during its Friday night timeslot.^[51] Its Nielsen ratings rose to their highest peaks thus-far with the occult-themed "Die Hand Die Verletzt" and the epic "Colony"/"End Game".^[5] The latter was a two-part episode introducing the idea of colonization, the Alien Bounty Hunter, as well as the characters Bill (Peter Donat) and Teena (Rebecca Toolan) Mulder, Fox Mulder's parents. "Die Hand Die Verletzt" was Morgan and Wong's final X-Files script until the fourth season, as they departed to start their own series Space: Above and Beyond, but at the same time there was new involvement behind the scenes. The episode also marked the X-Files directorial debut of Kim Manners, who would stay with the show until its end and direct the largest number of episodes of the series. On "Colony", star David Duchovny collaborated with Chris Carter on the story, the first of Duchovny's involvements in writing for the show. Frank Spotnitz, a new story editor brought on by Chris Carter, wrote "End Game", the second of the two-part episode; Spotnitz would be a producer and writer on The X-Files and other Ten Thirteen projects for years and had a key role in shaping the mythology. The middle of the second season also saw "Irresistible", an episode directed by David Nutter and written by Chris Carter, which Carter later credited as a blueprint for his even darker show Millennium.^[31] This was the first non-paranormal episode of The X-Files, dealing with the trauma of investigating Donnie Pfaster, a "death fetishist" (so named instead of "necrophiliac" to get past the FOX censors).^[52] A sequel, "Orison", was made in the seventh season.

During its second season, The X Files finished 64^th out of 141 shows, a marked improvement from the first season. The ratings were not spectacular, but the series had attracted enough fans to be classified as a "cult hit," particularly by Fox standards. Most importantly it made great gains among the 18-to-49 age demographic sought by advertisers.^[51]^[29] The show was chosen as Best Television Show of 1994 by Entertainment Weekly and named best drama by the Television Critics Association, and it received seven Emmy nominations, mostly in the technical categories, with one nomination for best drama series.^[36] In 1995, The X-Files won a Golden Globe Award for best television drama, winning out over several more established series such as ER, Picket Fences and NYPD Blue.^[53]

The last weeks of season two brought more changes, beginning what some saw as The X-Files' peak creative period.^[54] The Edgar Award-nominated "Humbug", an unconventional standalone episode about a small town inhabited by circus sideshow performers, was the first script fully written by Darin Morgan. At the time it was also considered a risky experiment, as it was the first outright comedy episode. Gillian Anderson famously swallowed a real cricket in one ad-libbed scene.^[55] Eventual senior writer Vince Gilligan also offered his first episode, the darker sci-fi "Soft Light", guest starring Tony Shalhoub as a remorseful physicist whose shadow kills people.

Season two ended in May 1995 with "Anasazi" (co-written by Carter with David Duchovny), which attracted widespread attention with its cliffhanger ending^[51] and put the future of the mythology up in the air. In the episode, Mulder and Scully are contacted by a computer hacker who has gained access to the Majestic-12 documents. Now-free agent Alex Krycek also made his first reappearance since "Ascension". The episode began a three-part arc, the show's most ambitious mythology episodes thus-far, which extended into the third season and centering around Navajo former code talker, Albert Hosteen (Floyd Red Crow Westerman).^[56] The show could not afford location filming, so a rock quarry in British Columbia was painted to match the desert hues of the American Southwest.^[9] Outside the U.S., The X-Files was by now one of the most popular shows in the world,^[54] and was being broadcast in (approximately) 60 countries.^[15]

[edit] Season 3 (1995–1996)

Continuing from "Anasazi", "The Blessing Way" and "Paper Clip" opened the third season, bringing in the involvement of former Nazi scientists, formally introducing the leading conspiracy member Well-Manicured Man (John Neville), and containing revelations about both Mulder and Scully's families. Ratings-wise, "The Blessing Way" was the most successful X-Files episode thus far.^[5]

The third season confirmed the existence of extraterrestrial life within the show^[57] and suggested that a shadowy international consortium known as the Syndicate were conspiring with the aliens to colonize Earth. This would be achieved via use of the so-called black oil, introduced in the two-part "Piper Maru"/"Apocrypha." However, the season's other main mythology episodes, "Nisei" and "731", continued to call some of these conclusions into question. Chris Carter began to receive criticism for posing as many questions as answers in the mythology, while the mythology episodes were also praised for their increasingly Hollywood-like production values.^[58] "Nisei" received Emmy Awards for its sound editing and mixing. Season three was noted for its wide variety of "monster of the week" episodes. "Pusher", the second effort by writer Vince Gilligan, depicted the cold blooded Robert Patrick Modell, a man who could control people telepathically (a sequel, "Kitsunegari", came two years later in the fifth season). Simultaneously, the show continued to yield darker episodes, such as "The Walk" (a mysterious deadly force in a veterans hospital), "Oubliette" (a metaphysical connection between a recently kidnapped girl and another woman) and "Grotesque" (Mulder's descent into the world of a gargoyle-possessed killer, which received an Emmy for John Bartley's cinematography).

Behind the scenes, Darin Morgan continued his involvement with the show, becoming The X-Files' most critically acclaimed writer.^[59] Despite intense perfectionism and having been unsatisfied with his well-received "Humbug",^[60] Morgan managed to turn in three dark comedy episodes which were considered original for the show. The first of these, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose", concerned a St. Paul insurance salesman (Peter Boyle) who could predict death. It won Emmys for best writing and guest actor Boyle, and comes in very high in fan polls of favorite episodes.^[61] "War of the Coprophages" was Morgan's parody-tribute to H.G. Wells/Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, this time with an infestation of cockroaches driving a town to hysteria. It also mocked the sexual tension between Mulder and Scully by introducing the attractive female entomologist Dr. Bambi Berenbaum. A similar technique was also used in Chris Carter's own "Syzygy", only one week later, leading to what some viewers felt was a comedy overdose.^[62] Morgan's third effort of the season, and his final episode as an X-Files script writer, was "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'", which presented multiple perspectives as in Kurosawa's Rashomon, and made fun of the X-Files mythology while remaining consistent with it. Graeme Murray and Shirley Inget were nominated for an Emmy for art direction. Morgan would later write a sequel also involving the writer Jose Chung (Charles Nelson Reilly), for Chris Carter's other series, Millennium in 1998.

In the spring of 1996, The X-Files began to achieve wide recognition. In addition to its eight Emmy nominations in its third season, of which it won five, it was awarded a George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in television broadcasting. Both David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were nominated for Screen Actors Guild Awards for the first time, and Anderson won. Both actors were also nominated for Golden Globe Awards. Guest stars in season 3 included Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek (both "men in black" in "Jose Chung's"), Giovanni Ribisi and Jack Black (in "D.P.O.", about a young man who can control lightning), Lucy Liu and B.D. Wong (in "Hell Money", about mysterious and deadly occurrences in the Chinese immigrant community), JT Walsh (in "The List", about the reincarnation of a death row prisoner), and R. Lee Ermey (in "Revelations", about a stigmatic boy, played by Kevin Zegers, the first of several episodes in the series to deal directly with Scully's Catholic faith). Black, Ribisi and Liu were not widely known at the time they appeared on The X-Files. Dave Grohl also had a cameo in the "Pusher".^[63] His rock band, Foo Fighters, were fans of the show, and contributed songs to the compilation album, Songs in the Key of X, released that spring. They also contributed to The X-Files film two years later (see below for other pop culture inspirations).

Mr. X, played by Steven Williams, became closely involved from the second to fourth seasons. The informant was so-named for Mulder's masking-tape "X" on his window, used to call a meeting.

The final part of the season brought the episode "Avatar" (the first episode centered around Mitch Pileggi's Assistant Director Walter Skinner, who was being punished by the Syndicate for his efforts on behalf of Mulder and Scully), "Quagmire" (about a lake monster; the famous "conversation on the rock" between Mulder and Scully was added by script editor Darin Morgan as his last contribution to The X-Files^[64]), "Wetwired" (an episode involving a conspiracy to send subliminal messages in TV reception), and season finale "Talitha Cumi", which introduced Jeremiah Smith (Roy Thinnes), an alien with healing powers. The finale had a complex plot, tying back to Mulder's mother's past with the Cigarette Smoking Man. One scene, produced by writers Chris Carter and David Duchovny, was modeled directly after "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.^[65] The episode was again a cliffhanger, "to be continued" in the next season.

[edit] Season 4 (1996–1997)

The next season began with The X-Files' highest ratings success to that point, with "Herrenvolk".^[5] The season premiere introduced several new elements to the conspiracy: "killer bees" designed to unleash smallpox, clones and alien hybrids, United Nations Special Representative Marita Covarrubias (played by Laurie Holden), and the removal of a previous important character. Covarrubias became an informer to Mulder and Scully in several episodes in the season, such as "Teliko" and "Unrequited." However it was the horror episode "Home", signaling the return of Morgan and Wong as writers after their canceled Space: Above and Beyond, that was most noticed. "Home" told the story of an inbred family of murderers in rural Pennsylvania, with references to The Andy Griffith Show and grisly violence contrasted with calm, becoming a hit with many fans ("X-Philes") and dividing others.^[66] FOX's Standards and Practices department granted it a rare TV-MA "Parental Advisory" rating and refused to ever air it again,^[67] though the episode later went into syndication. Two major changes occurred behind the scenes in the autumn of 1996, during the early part of the fourth season. Chris Carter's new series Millennium, also produced in Vancouver, debuted on Friday nights. As a result, The X-Files was moved from Friday night to Sunday, seen as a key to better ratings success, although Carter was initially wary^[68] and the decision was controversial with the show's audience.^[69] The first episode to air in the new time period was "Unruhe", written by Vince Gilligan and directed by Rob Bowman. It was one of the series' darkest episodes, dealing with a man (played by Pruitt Taylor Vince) who lobotomizes women and can project his fantasies in "thought photography". Gilligan also wrote "Paper Hearts", an emotional episode for Mulder, twisting his memories of his sister's disappearance with a case involving an unrepentant child killer.

Wong and Morgan contributed their own, possibly non-canon addition to the mythology,^[70] "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man", which referenced Shakespearian history, tied The X-Files to real life conspiracy theories about the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King, and was the first episode in which neither Mulder or Scully appears on screen (except in flashback). The death of Lone Gunmen member Frohike was originally going to be in the episode, before Carter nixed the idea, but the scene was actually shot by director James Wong.^[70] Chris Owens, later to play other roles for the show, first appeared in this episode as the young CSM. The action-oriented "Tunguska" and "Terma" were the more traditional mythology episodes for the autumn sweeps period, sending Mulder and Krycek to a Russian gulag and involving the black oil and the Syndicate closely. X-Files ratings by the middle of the fourth season were as high as they had ever been,^[5] and by autumn 1996 it was the FOX network's most popular show.^[9]

Renegade agent Alex Krycek, played by Nicholas Lea, was central to the X-Files mythology, such as in the two-part "Tunguska" and "Terma" episodes set partly in Russia.

Many episodes of the fourth season were character driven, such as "The Field Where I Died" and "Demons", both about Mulder trying to recover his past, or past lives. "Never Again", Morgan and Wong's final episode of the series, centered on Scully's personal life, with Jodie Foster providing the voice of a tattoo. It had originally been planned as a collaboration with director Quentin Tarantino,^[71] but Tarantino was not allowed to work in network television because he was not a member of the Directors Guild of America.^[72] The episode was ultimately directed by Rob Bowman, with an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy. FOX had attained rights to broadcast Super Bowl XXXI in January 1997 and planned to showcase The X-Files in the premier post-game slot. As a result, "Never Again" was bumped to the next week, and "Leonard Betts", a stylish and gory monster-of-the-week episode about an EMT (played by Paul McCrane) who was decapitated and could regrow his body, received the coveted spot (episodes of The X-Files were often aired slightly out of production order). "Leonard Betts" became the all time most-watched X-Files episode, with 17.2 Nielsen rating and 29% audience share.^[5] It was also the first episode to be written by the team of Vince Gilligan, John Shiban and Frank Spotnitz, who were responsible for many episodes during the show's middle-to-late era.

The air date of "Leonard Betts" became relevant because the final scenes of the episode were central to the ongoing story arc of the show and led directly into the events of "Memento Mori", in which it is revealed that Dana Scully has contracted terminal brain cancer. When originally aired, however, the episode "Never Again" came between these, implying Scully's behavior in that episode was a result of her diagnosis; Gillian Anderson said she would have played the role completely differently if that had been the case.^[71] Nevertheless, Anderson's performances during the fourth season "cancer arc" were praised. She won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 1997, as well as her second straight Screen Actors Guild award and a Golden Globe. "Memento Mori" relied on extended emotional voiceovers, a technique that had become increasingly common in the show over the years, as Scully came to grips with her illness while simultaneously investigating its origins, leading back to her own abduction. Mulder, Walter Skinner and the Cigarette Smoking Man all became dramatically involved, which played out in the later episode "Zero Sum", one of the few episodes of the show not to feature Anderson's involvement, although the events were driven by Scully's worsening condition, as well as the Syndicate's plans for unleashing killer bees.

Once Scully had contracted cancer, she continued to work in her former capacity as Mulder's partner investigating X-Files, apparently debilitated only by occasional nosebleeds, though the issue of mortality was again addressed in "Elegy" late in the season. In the intervening time, notable episodes included the two-part "Tempus Fugit" and "Max", in which Max Fenig from season one's "Fallen Angel" returned briefly as the agents investigated mysterious "lost time" in a deadly plane crash, loosely modeled on TWA Flight 800.

Dana Scully contracted cancer in season four, an acting challenge for Gillian Anderson, who won an Emmy for the role in 1997. Her illness was central to "Memento Mori" and was resolved in the "Redux" episodes, beginning the fifth season.

Amidst what was considered the show's darkest year, "Small Potatoes" provided a lighter tone.^[73] The episode was written by Vince Gilligan, and featured departed X-Files writer and former Flukeman Darin Morgan in the role of Eddie Van Blundht, a shape-shifting self-described "loser" who becomes the focus of Scully and Mulder's investigation of a West Virginia town where children are being born with tails. The final scenes of the episode provided "shippers" with the sight of "Mulder" and Scully finally together, the first of many such jokes by the writers in later seasons. Season 4 ended with "Gethsemane", a resolution which appeared to leave one main character near death and kill off the other one, as well as turning his entire belief system into a house of cards.

[edit] Season 5 (1997–1998)

When season 5 opened, to the show's best numbers ever^[5] (with the exception of "Leonard Betts"), it turned out Fox Mulder was still alive, having gone into hiding after becoming involved with Michael Kritschgau, a renegade Department of Defense employee. The continuation of the three-part arc with "Redux" and "Redux II" brought Scully's metastasizing cancer to the fore, as Mulder continued to question his own ideas about aliens and government conspiracies, while working to find a cure to a disease he believes the government gave Scully. Scully is finally cured, though it's unclear what has caused the intervention, and what sacrifices have been made for the end. Skinner's loyalties are in question, and the Cigarette Smoking Man is seemingly put out of commission by the Syndicate.

These events were soon followed by Chris Carter's "The Post-Modern Prometheus", which he both wrote and directed. It was the show's only episode filmed entirely in black-and-white, a retelling of the story of Frankenstein (subtitled by author Mary Shelley, The Modern Prometheus), mixed with allusions to Young Frankenstein, Jerry Springer, comic books, David Lynch's The Elephant Man, and Cher. Carter earned his second DGA nomination for his work. A few months earlier in 1997, The X-Files had received its largest awards recognition yet for its fourth season, with 12 Emmy nominations including best drama series, sound mixing, makeup, music, directing, writing, two nominations for editing, and wins for sound editing, art direction, and Anderson. Duchovny was also nominated at both this event and at the Golden Globes, where along with Anderson's win, he won best actor in a TV drama and the show itself won that category for a second year — taking all three top awards. The X-Files also won a second Saturn Award for best genre television series, and Anderson won for best actress; these awards were given by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films.^[49]

Chris Carter's contract with FOX ran through the fifth season,^[36] and he and the stars had originally preferred to stop there,^[68] turning The X-Files into a series of films; but the show was such a hit that FOX was intent to continue it on TV in some form, and Carter was convinced to sign a new contract, retaining creative control.^[74] In a very rare move for a show still in production,^[2] a feature film of The X-Files had been planned by Carter ever since the show achieved commercial success in season two.^[26] The film's scripts were printed in red ink on red paper to ensure secrecy by making it impossible to photocopy,^[43] and it was largely filmed in California between season four's "Gethsemane" and season five's resumption of the plot with "Redux", pushing back the debut date for the season to November 1997 and resulting in the fifth being (until the ninth) the shortest season, only 20 episodes.^[75]

As a result, several episodes in season five featured either Scully or Mulder at the expense of the other, to make time for personal projects or re-shoots on the film throughout the season (both stars were now reportedly receiving the same pay, $100,000 per episode^[43]). "Christmas Carol" and "Emily", written by the team of Spotnitz, Gilligan and Shiban, were the first mythology episodes mostly centered around Scully. In "Christmas Carol", she receives further information about her abduction, coinciding with the mysterious arrival of a young child into her life.

Early in 1998, the show, largely written by a staff of regulars,^[26] aired its first episodes by well-known guest writers. Stephen King contributed "Chinga" (also known as "Bunghoney"), about a demonic doll, which was co-written with Chris Carter and featured Scully investigating the case, between tongue-in-cheek phone conversations with Mulder. The episode, directed by Kim Manners, received mixed reviews. Next up was "Kill Switch", written by cyberpunk author William Gibson along with Tom Maddox. The episode covered issues of virtual reality and received better reception.^[76] Then an episode aired where both Mulder and Scully's diverging viewpoints on a vampire case were presented, and humorously contrasted. Vince Gilligan's "Bad Blood", another pairing with "Small Potatoes" director Cliff Bole, was a fan favorite^[77] and featured Luke Wilson in a guest role as a young Texas sheriff with or without "buck teeth".

In February, the fifth season continued a tradition of mythology episodes in sweeps month and aired the dramatic two-part episodes "Patient X" and "The Red and the Black", the latter of which was again directed by Carter. These dealt with the beginning of colonization, and introduced two new characters, Cassandra Spender (a chronic alien abductee, played by Veronica Cartwright, who was nominated for two Emmys in the role) and her estranged son Jeffrey Spender (a colleague of Mulder and Scully at the FBI, played by Chris Owens). The episodes also juxtaposed Mulder's ongoing crisis of belief in the existence of aliens, with the machinations of the Syndicate and Scully's own personal experiences. Krycek and Covarrubias were involved, while the Cigarette Smoking Man continued to be largely out of the picture during the fifth season. Leading up to the end of the year, more monster of the week episodes were aired, including "Mind's Eye" (guest starring Lili Taylor as a blind woman suspected of murder, and written by season 5 story editor Tim Minear), "The Pine Bluff Variant" (about Mulder's involvement in a plot to spread deadly biological terrorism, with tie-ins to the ongoing mythology) and "Folie à deux" (about Mulder and Scully's investigation into a telemarketing employee who claimed his boss could turn into an insect).

"The End" was the last episode to be filmed in rainy Vancouver, British Columbia (pictured), closing season 5. The show produced 117 episodes in Canada before moving to Los Angeles in its sixth season.

David Duchovny had been unhappy with his geographical separation from his wife Téa Leoni, although his discontent was popularly attributed to frustration with climatic conditions in Vancouver.^[78] Gillian Anderson also wanted to return home to the United States,^[25] and Carter decided to move production to Los Angeles following the fifth season. The season ended in May 1998 with "The End", the final episode shot in Vancouver and the final episode with the involvement of many of the original crew members who had worked on the show for its previous five years, including director and producer R. W. Goodwin and his wife Sheila Larken (who played Margaret Scully and would later return briefly). "The End" introduced Diana Fowley, a new character who had apparently once worked with Mulder on early X-Files, but it focused largely on the efforts of the Syndicate to get control of mind-reading chess prodigy Gibson Praise.

The X-Files were closed for a second time in this episode (following season 2). This set up the events of the film, The X-Files, which had just completed post-production and was to open in theatres one month later. The show finished its fifth season with a season Nielsen average of 12.1, its all time peak viewership,^[5] and an X-Files record of 16 Emmy nominations (winning two), in addition to winning the Golden Globe for best drama series for the third year. Overall, seasons three to five appear to have marked the show's most popular and acclaimed period.

[edit] Film (1998)

The worldwide theatrical box office total was $189 million. The film's production cost was close to $66 million,^[79] and its advertising budget was similar. In summer 1998 the series produced a feature length motion picture, The X-Files, also known as The X Files: Fight the Future. It was intended to be a continuation of the season five finale "The End" (5x20), but was also meant to stand on its own.^[75] The season six opener "The Beginning" picked up where the film left off. The majority of the film was shot in the break between the show's fourth and fifth seasons.

The film was written by Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz and directed by series regular Rob Bowman. In addition to Mulder, Scully, Walter Skinner and the Cigarette Smoking Man, it featured guest appearances by Martin Landau, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and Blythe Danner as characters that only appeared in the film (though Mueller-Stahl's Conrad Strughold is later mentioned in the series). It also had the last X-Files appearance by John Neville as the Well-Manicured Man. Jeffrey Spender, Diana Fowley and Gibson Praise do not appear in the film. The film had a strong domestic opening and got mostly positive reviews from critics. However, its box office dropped sharply after the first weekend. Although it failed to make a profit during theatrical release, due to a very high promotional budget,^[80] The X-Files film was more successful internationally. Anderson and Duchovny received equal pay for the film, unlike their original contracts for the series.^[43]

[edit] Season 6 (1998–1999)

Over the course of the previous two years, the show had built upon the mythology storylines that grew in complexity and prominence (and confusion, especially for new viewers^[3]) as the show progressed. The loyalties of the Cigarette Smoking Man and Krycek were continually shifting and the influence of CSM appeared to be waning. Above all, the Syndicate's co-operation with the colonizers was proven to be a ploy, as they were secretly attempting to develop a vaccine to the black oil (also known as "purity") which was shown to be an agent which would allow for the transportation of alien beings, and which would be spread through bees come the time for colonization. However, another alien faction was proven to exist, and these rebels opposed the colonists and the Syndicate for their co-operation. Consequently, in mid-season 6 "full disclosure" episodes "Two Fathers" and "One Son", the rebels destroyed the Syndicate.

At the end of The X-Files film, the X-Files had again been re-opened. However, Agents Spender and Fowley were assigned to them rather than Mulder and Scully, who were reassigned from Walter Skinner — who continued to appear on the show, nevertheless — to a new boss, Assistant Director Alvin Kersh (played by James Pickens, Jr.). Gibson Praise was dispatched in the first episode of season 6, "The Beginning" (which also posited a possible alien source for humanity), and Jeffrey Spender was also written out of the show during season 6, while

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