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May
01
2002

Starlog: End Games

May-??-2002
Starlog
End Games
Ian Spelling

With murky questions & enigmatic answers, creator Chris Carter closes The X-Files.

It’s starting to sink in. It’s the end of The X-Files. And, like a gallon of black oil, it’s starting to seep into the warped mind of Chris Carter, the man who created The X-Files, executive-produced it for nine years, scripted dozens of episodes and directed several as well.

What began in 1993 as a cult TV favorite – about FBI Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) investigating the paranormal, aliens and government conspiracies – blew up to become a full-fledged phenomenon on the order of Star Trek – right down to the conventions, fan fiction and the official magazine. Now, with The Truth – the two-hour series finale Fox aired in late May – the show has come to a close.

“Only in small ways is it sinking in right now,” Carter says during a break from production on The Truth. “I sense it when I say, ‘This is the last production meeting’ or ‘This is the last casting session.’ There are lots of lasts. It’s sinking in slowly, but there is still loads of hard work to be done. We have to finish filming and then edit the finale, which will have a quick turnaround. We’ve got plenty left to do before we can really think about the end.”

Final Truths

So what’s the truth about The Truth?

“You see the return of David Duchovny,” Carter replies. “You find out where Mulder has been, what he has been up to. You see some old faces who, if you’ve been a long-time fan of the show, you haven’t seen for a while – and might wonder **how** it is you’re seeing them again. You’ll also see a really good story that brings us full circle back to the pilot. And we 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. It’s very fitting that David is back, and it’s a chance to come full circle. He fits into this season’s story arc anyway, so it’s as if we had **planned** it this way.

“It has been interesting for us because we’ve been able to build up to this finale. The last two or three years, the final episode of each season was done without knowing if the show would be back or if I would be back. That was tough, but it’s almost harder now, because we know we have no [other] chance to go back and re-explain things. We have to hit all our marks now. Also, emotionally, we have to be honest with the characters and the journeys they go on. You don’t get a chance to go back with them, either. These are all things we’re taking special care with. I’ve never had a show that has gone 200 episodes, where I had to wrap up nine years of storytelling. Who teaches you these things? I don’t know.”

Carter himself decided to terminate The X-Files. The show’s ratings began their decline after Duchovny became a part-time player during Season Eight, and this year, with Anderson, Robert Patrick (John Doggett) and Annabeth Gish (Monica Reyes) as the leads, the ratings started off lower than ever before. Although the Nielsen numbers remained stable throughout the season – especially after it was announced that this would be the show’s last hurrah – Carter elected to leave the party before being unceremoniously tossed out on the street.

“I think there are some other good shows [now] on Sunday nights,” he reasons. “But we’re still neck and neck with the competition. And while our ratings are down, we’re actually doing the same numbers as a new hit show like Alias, so everything is relative. I don’t know what happened. You could blame it on so many things. You could say it was because of David’s departure. You could say it was because of 9/11. You could say it was because we premiered late and in heavy competition. I ultimately **don’t know** what it was, but I’ll tell you this very interesting experience I had. I was speaking at a college over the summer, and I’m in this classroom that’s full of 100 kids. I’m looking out at them and I’m thinking, ‘These kids are 17, 18, 19 and 20 years old. These kids were 8, 9, 10 or 11 when the show started. They probably didn’t watch The X-Files. I’m dealing with a whole new generation of viewers.’

“Everything changes, and sometimes you can’t quite figure out **where** the viewers have gone. They may have grown up, gotten married, changed their habits or tastes. There are so many variables when a show gets into its grey years. It was very difficult to tell Robert and Annabeth [of the decision to call it a day] because I think they feel responsible, and they’re **not**. They worked hard. They’re terrific actors and they gave everything to the show. If there’s any blame, it’s really on some mysterious x factor.

“The acting has been superior this year,” Carter praises. “The addition of Annabeth and Robert has been really fun for the writers and producers. They are excellent to work with and excellent to write for. We told X-Files stories in new ways, using the trio of Scully, Reyes and Doggett. It has been an interesting exercise telling the stories. And it has been interesting to have David gone for a year and still have him be such a looming presence on the show – even though he was not on it.

“I thought we had some great episodes. 4-D was kind of a Twilight Zone episode as was Audrey Pauley. I was very happy with the episode I wrote and directed [Improbable]. Most people probably didn’t get it, but if you watch it again and again, you’re going to see things in there that you might not have seen the first time. Burt Reynolds did a great job. I was thrilled that we were able to get Burt for the show. And I thought David did a really beautiful job on William [which Duchovny directed but did not act in]. The episode was a departure for us in that it was very talky. He did a great job with it.”

Eternal Proofs

Carter, like anyone else out there who cares about The X-Files, will never know for sure if Fox would have renewed the show for a tenth year if he hadn’t pulled the plug. The network axed Ally McBeal, another graying show that struggled to spike the ratings. “I don’t know,” Carter allows. “The X-Files is a show that provided them with success, popularity and Nielsen numbers for so long. I honestly think there was a sense of, ‘Oh dear, that show.’ It wasn’t a feather in anyone’s cap anymore. All the players have changed since this show was first on the air. What makes careers are new hit shows. I think when a series gets to be a certain age, certain people love it for certain reasons, but it’s not always the people who broadcast it week in and week out.”

Even as The X-Files fades to black as an original series, it will live on in other ways. Repeats will be ubiquitous on cable (SCI FI, TNT) and in syndication. A second film is in the works. Seasons One through Four are already on DVD, and Season Five hit stores in May as a six-disc set from Fox Home Entertainment which includes all 20 episodes (among them, Post Modern Prometheus, Bad Blood, Kill Switch and Unusual Suspects), a fresh half-hour documentary (The Truth About Season Five), Carter commentary on several shows, deleted scenes and even a DVD-ROM game.

“I’m very satisfied with the DVDs,” Carter remarks. “I wish there was more time for me personally to spend on them, but I did spend every minute I could. It was kind of emotional to sit there and talk about Season Five, especially Post Modern Prometheus [which he wrote and directed]. When you watch your own work, you’re rarely emotional about it, but there was something about that monster losing his dad that was very touching to me. Season Five was one of our best seasons. The seven mythology shows we did that year were very important in platforming to the theatrical release. But I think the thing that’s the best – and this isn’t just about Season Five – is that you get to see the good work we’ve done in one of the best, if not **the** best, reproduction formats, DVD.”

Some fans out there, no doubt, would like to see Carter’s other series – Millennium, Harsh Realm and The Lone Gunmen – receive the DVD treatment. For the record, so would Carter. “Millennium, I’m told, will be on DVD,” he says. “Harsh Realm is selling very well on video, and I guess it could find its way to DVD. I don’t know about The Lone Gunmen yet. I foresee Millennium being on DVD, certainly. It has many hardcore supporters. It was a modest hit.”

Last Facts

As for the future of the X-Files feature franchise, Carter reports that everything is proceeding as planned. Duchovny and Anderson are signed to star in a second movie, and Carter will pen the script with Frank Spotnitz, who has been the show’s co-executive producer since the second season. “The film should go into the works pretty quickly,” Carter reveals. “I don’t think we will be filming it before summer 2003. You’ll probably see it in summer 2004.”

It’s at this juncture in the conversation that Carter is informed that he has been named one of STARLOG’s Most Important People in SF & Fantasy. The writer-producer acknowledges the accolade, but doesn’t quite know how to assess his impact on the genre. “That feels odd to me, since I’ve never considered myself to be a SF maven, aficionado or even devotee,” he says. “It’s something I have a great interest in, but that interest is in a certain kind of SF, which I would really categorize more as speculative science. So far as the show [and its impact on SF], I think it drove up certain standards of quality, production-wise. It’s very regular and unflagging quality certainly raised the bar for SF shows. The X-Files is a [type of] show that you may never see again, because Fox was willing to spend the money to do it right. Right now in network television, money is tightening, and the ability to do the things that we’ve done will be far less achievable. It’s a simple matter of economics.”

Looking ahead, Carter says that beyond a rest and jumping into the initial phase of work on the next X-Files feature, he’s going to direct and co-write (with Spotnitz) a feature for Dimension Films, pen a book and, as per his contract with Fox, develop a TV pilot. “I won’t do a domesticated show,” Chris Carter says. “We did little movies with The X-Files each week, and I really want to do a show that has that scope. The X-Files had a large canvas, and I don’t want to limit my canvas by doing something that is a typical, traditional franchise show. And if you look at the shows I’ve done – The X-Files, Millennium, Harsh Realm and even The Lone Gunmen – they were big-canvas shows. They were scopey, and that’s what I want to continue to do.”

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May
01
2002

SciFi Magazine: Executive producer Frank Spotnitz closes the final X-Files

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.

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May
01
2002

Mercury News: 'X-Files' makes mark on TV sci-fi history

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.”

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May
01
2002

Orbit Magazine: The End is Out There

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.”

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May
01
2002

[Unknown]: Interview with the Stars: X-Files: Countdown To The Truth

May-??-2002
[Unknown]
Interview with the Stars
X-Files: Countdown To The Truth
Leslie Miller

[typed by Nancy]

HOLLYWOOD – The countdown to the truth is on. Just two more episodes of “The X-Files” are left. The popular sci-fi series which has become a worldwide phenomenon is finally concluding after almost a decade. The stars of the show have mixed emotions. Q13’s Leslie Miller sat down with the cast in Hollywood recently to see what they would reveal about the series finale.

Gillian Anderson/Agent Dana Scully: “It’s an important time for all of us to kind of sit and take in the full aspect of what we’ve just participated in.”

After nine successful seasons, the sci-fi show that became a cult hit and made “paranormal” a household word, is finally drawing to a close. The x-files will wrap up with a two hour series finale. The return of David Duchovny as Agent Fox Mulder.

They say the truth is out there, but so far there are many unanswered questions surrounding the final episode of the X-Files, cast members are keeping pretty tight lipped about the ending, but they do say it promises to deliver.

Gillian Anderson/Agent Dana Scully: “There’s a lot of stuff that gets wrapped up, you know, a lot of answers that get tied together and some interesting Mulder and Scully stuff for the history books, and I think that’s about all I can say.”

Robert Patrick/Agent John Doggett: “It’s kind of neat to be sitting in the position where I have the secret and I can’t reveal it, or I can or I won’t.”

But the stars of the show are revealing how they would like to see the series conclude.

Robert Patrick/Agent John Doggett: “I kind of had this vision of Doggett gets on a Harley and he throw Reyes on the back and they drive off into the desert and the suns sinking that’d be kinda cool..”

Annabeth Gish/Agent Monica Reyes: “I personally would like to see some more love relationships and hot stuff between Doggett and Reyes, but it doesn’t look there’s going to be much time for that.”

Show creator Chris Carter has taken viewers on a thrilling journey into the world of aliens and conspiracy theories with more than 200 episodes of the X-Files.

Chris Carter/Show Creator: “The show has been very murky and vague by design and now it’s chance to sort of tie up a lot of those threads and maybe shine some light through the murkiness and show people what it’s all been for.”

But if the saying holds true that all good things must come to an end. Carter says that time is now.

Chris Carter/Show Creator: “I think it did run its course I think that this is a good time to end.”

The stars of the show agree.

Robert Patrick/Agent John Doggett: “I feel like I’ve had mission accomplished you know I came in and we got two more years out of the show and we’re moving on.”

Gillian Anderson/Agent Dana Scully: “It’s definitely had its time in history and its time for it to conclude and be put to rest.”

X-Files fans don’t despair. Creator Chris Carter says while the TV show has concluded, the *X-Files movies* will continue. He also told us he’s working on another television series, but this one won’t deal with the paranormal.

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May
01
2002

[Unknown]: Find out all you need to know about 'The X-Files' on Sunday night

May-??-2002
[Unknown]
Find out all you need to know about ‘The X-Files’ on Sunday night
Rob Lowman

What: David Duchovny returns for the final two episodes of the series.
Where: Fox.
When: 8 to 10 Sunday night.

Chris Carter was trying to do his last bit of juggling for “The X-Files,” which ends its nine-year run on Fox tonight with episodes 200 and 201. He had already been interrupted once because of a call from the set as they were finishing up the final filming. Did David Duchovny leave again? One of the show’s original stars, Duchovny had tired of the grind of a long TV-season shooting schedule and left two years ago but is returning for the finale tonight.

“Nothing that dire,” the 45-year-old creator of the series said with a chuckle, “but there’s always something.”

The something includes monsters, aliens, the paranormal, government conspiracy, more aliens and an elaborate mythology, which for “X-Files” fans has always been the heart of the show, along with the complicated (sexually repressed) relationship of FBI partners Fox Mulder (Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who have been looking for the truth out there since the series went on the air Sept. 10, 1993.

On a gradual descent

At its height, during its fifth and sixth seasons, “The X-Files” averaged more than 18 million viewers each week. This season, the numbers are down to around 8.5 million.

“I feel this year we’re doing great work, but the ratings have gone down,” says Carter, adding, “I feel like it’s almost a new show and needed to build an audience. I don’t know how interested Fox was in doing that, and I wasn’t interested in watching the show suffer the indignity of what I felt was the mood out there to start taking potshots at it.”

What Carter was referring to was how, after Duchovny left after the seventh season, the show was retooled with the addition of Robert Patrick as FBI agent John Doggett as a new partner for Scully and then Annabeth Gish as agent Monica Reyes.

But nine years for a show is a long time, and it takes its toll. Even Anderson, who on one hand has stated she was sad about the show ending, told the Hollywood Reporter recently that she’d like to find a film role with a character who doesn’t give a “rat’s ass” about the truth.”

With Mulder gone — though, as Carter points out, his character always has had a presence — and Scully carrying a lesser load, the series has tried to generate sparks between Doggett and Reyes this season. But their pairing never had the low-burning intensity of the original pair’s relationship.

When discussing what made “The X-Files” successful, Carter simply says, “I think that what I had that no one else had was Gillian Anderson and Dave Duchovny. I think what we had was something fresh and new on television that was hard to clone. It was, in a weird way, a perfect little television idea with a believer and a skeptic.”

Out there … on DVD

Out this week on DVD is the complete fifth season of the series, which led to the 1998 movie “The X-Files: Fight the Future,” the height of “X-Files” mania. “You can look at the show before the movie and after the movie,” says Carter. So the fifth season, while it was filmed after the movie, was the season that led to the movie.”

That’s right: The movie was shot first.

“It was very tricky. If we would have failed with the movie or failed with the season leading up to the movie, we would have failed going forward. Everything had to be done right,” says Carter. “If season five had not been good, we would have headed into the movie with less than a head of steam. It was a miracle to me that we hit all our marks.”

Certainly, the success of “The X-Files” changed the landscape of television. The series has been hailed since the beginning. TV Guide critic Matt Roush recently noted that it helped TV grow up. No better proof of that is the television landscape over the past several years, which seems to be littered with shows dealing with the paranormal, and it was Carter’s smart writing that helped give legitimacy to the sci-fi genre. Until “The X-Files,” that genre had mostly been relegated to television’s back benches.

However, “The X-Files” also generated many failed attempts to clone its success. Even Carter’s two tries — the ominous “Millennium” and the loopy “Lone Gunmen” — ultimately ended up on the scrap heap. But the faithful are still out there. “X-Files” fan Web sites are speculating that “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”/”Angel” creator Joss Whedon is turning into “the new Chris Carter.” Whedon has a new sci-fi series coming next year called “Firefly,” which will be on Fox.

And they are also guessing as to how “The X-Files” will end up tonight.

True to the series’ motto — “Trust no one” — Carter wouldn’t reveal any specifics on how he was going to wrap up the show, except to say there will be an explosion and some familiar faces would return.

They’re baaaack

Web sites speculate that the finale, written by Carter, will bring back Nick Lea as the eerie Crick and Laurie Holder as Marietta Covarrubias, who, when we last saw her, was infected with weird alien oil. And there may be “at least one kiss and some affection” between Scully and Mulder, who will be on trial for murder.

But, as they say, trust no one.

Carter would add this, though: “We are not so much answering all the questions as we are going to make it all make sense, if we can.”

Still under contract to Fox for another year, Carter says he has another idea for a show and is in talks about a second “X-Files” movie.

“I think it will happen because I know that David and Gillian want to do it, and if they want to do it, it will happen,” he says.

The pair have both publicly declared that they would like to do another film, but getting any movie off the ground is tricky business.

“I have kind of an idea (for it), but I don’t know how much it will cost,” says Carter. “It would be better if it cost less rather than more, because movie budgets have grown so big that the expectations of what the movie is going to do at the box office is sometimes too great.”

He added that the movie would be like a stand-alone episode and not part of the mythology, which should wrap up tonight.

“I keep saying to people, ‘I’m not sad, I’m not sad,’ but … maybe I’m not admitting I’m sad,” says the series creator. “I feel this year we’re doing great work, but the ratings have gone down. I decided to call it a day … and end on a strong note. ”

To paraphrase another series motto, the fans want to believe.

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