Obsessing on all things The X-Files and Ten Thirteen online since 2005
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 The X-Files mythology episode by episode analysis |
 Thematic articles on X-Files and everything 1013 |
 The archival database project |
The X-Files Revival 2016Introduction: Revival |
The X-Files Revival 2018Introduction: From Season 10 to Season 11 |
+ Perihelion (novel, 2024)
+ IDW comics (S10, S11, more, 2013-2018)
See and hear actors struggle to remember anything from a 30+ years old show!
Gillian having read Coogler’s pilot script is telling: the script would not have circulated to an actor unless Disney/Coogler want to convince her to participate. It looks like the new series would start without Scully (or Mulder), build up its own identity, then leave the door open for an appearance by Scully a few episodes in. But nothing is decided. “Give it a break” definitely sounds like she’s trying to anticipate a negative reaction (that inevitably comes with anything in fandom these days) and pre-empt it.
“Very different and very similar” is exactly what I would want from a new X-Files project.
Happy spring equinox!
Somewhat recently, already 4 months ago, a recording of the Millennium-focused panel surfaced, thanks to Kurt North from the X-Cast / The Time Is Now podcasts. This is the only panel from Philefest in September 2023 that had not been recorded by X-Files News, I suppose because it was not about The X-Files. The panel had Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz and Troy Foreman (producer of the Millennium documentary). Though short, this panel is excellent, on several points Carter has humorous comments followed up by very heavy stuff, and we finally got a good reason why MM is still not on any streaming platforms. Here are the highlights:
Speaking of which: an extended cut of the Millennium After the Millennium documentary is coming on April 7 on BluRay and streaming (Amazon Prime)! (I don’t know if this will be available globally on Prime, it wasn’t in the past.)
Lest we forget: actor Tom Noonan passed away a few weeks ago, on February 14 (The Hollywood Reporter article). The X-Files fans will remember him for his very memorable portrayal in one of the series’ best episodes, as child serial killer and Mulder’s dream tormentor John Lee Roche in Vince Gilligan’s 4X08: Paper Hearts.
Noonan had previously portrayed the serial killer Francis Dollarhyde in Michael Mann’s Mindhunter (1986), the first adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel and certainly an influence on Chris Carter on The X-Files and later on Millennium. Noonan had a very varied career, mixing high-brow with low-brow roles, all memorable: I remember him from Robocop 2, Last Action Hero, Heat, Synecdoche, New York, Anomalisa, and the short They’re Made Out Of Meat… Here’s to one of the great guest roles of the series.
Ten Thirteen’s fourth series, The Lone Gunmen, first premiered 25 years ago, six months before 9/11/2001 — with that now infamous pilot episode that involves a false flag operation from the US military-industrial complex to fly a plane into the World Trade Center and increase arms sales in the aftermath. The series would go on to be much more humorous after that pilot, with a type of humor that was not to everybody’s taste, more like some season 6 episodes than Darin Morgan episodes, but the photography and the Vancouver setting were unmistakable Ten Thirteen. It premiered during The X-Files’ season 8 and lasted half a season with 13 episodes. It was not picked up for a season 2 and the series would be given a finale with the controversial “Jump The Shark” in TXF’s season 9.
The Television Academy has an interview with show co-creators Vince Gilligan and Frank Spotnitz (the third member of the John Gilnitz trio, John Shiban, is missing!) to reflect on the show. Here are a few highlights:
Spotnitz: I actually think we wanted to do The Lone Gunmen [earlier] and it was delayed by Harsh Realm.
Spotnitz: I also think, looking back on it, it was season eight of The X-Files — we had already hit our peak, and we were already on the way down in terms of the mania for The X-Files. It was probably two or three seasons too late to do that spinoff. If we had done it in season four or five [during The X-Files’ run], we might have had a different reception. 9/11, in my view, really killed The X-Files. The mood of the country was no longer government conspiracy and all that.
[Entirely agreed that the spin-off came too late. The Lone Gunmen-focused episodes of TXF were during seasons 5 and 6, and this is when a spin-off should have started.]
[One thing that neither of them mention is that TXF season 8 was given a break between airing “This Is Not Happening” and “DeadAlive” in order to accommodate the first episodes of TLG. To introduce a break during what was perhaps TXF’s peak emotional moment and have viewers follow a humorous spin-off was not the producers’ best decision, and probably hurt viewership too. Of course all of these are past considerations, things would have gone very differently with today’s streaming format, and TLG is the kind of niche show that might have found its audience eventually.]
[I think this is the first time we hear that it was delayed because of “Harsh Realm”. As good as that one was, we can now blame it for first cancelling “Millennium” season 4, and for postponing “The Lone Gunmen” further into an untimely period.]
Spotnitz: There’s a story I’ve never told, but I feel like I can tell it now that it’s been 25 years and Fox has been sold to Disney. The deal that Tom and Dean and Bruce made — Fox screwed up. They paid them way more money than they meant to pay them. So, when the show got canceled, Vince, John, and I wanted to have a sendoff for them. We wanted to write “Jump the Shark.” Fox did not want to bring them back. They really tried to stop us; they were so mad. In their mind, they’d overpaid them for The Lone Gunmen. They were absolutely against it. And we just said, “We’re doing it, so you’ll have nothing to broadcast if we force their hand.”
Spotnitz: I do regret that that episode didn’t end with a laugh — it just ends with sadness. That was a mistake. If you’re going to do that, then you’ve got to bring back the joy that the characters represented, and we didn’t.
[Spotnitz said in the “Jump the Shark” DVD commentary that Fox was very difficult an only gave them the greenlight to do the episode when they decided to have the Lone Gunmen die. It was a heroic death all right, but this gives a whole another vengeful layer to this: the Lone Gunmen died because of some clerical error!]
Gilligan: I’ve said this a lot: You don’t know if it’s going to be hit. You don’t know if it’s going to be a failure. That’s what keeps it interesting and keeps your guts churning.
Gilligan: You don’t learn anything from success. And I’m not being funny, I’m being 100% serious. When something’s a success, you try to say, “It was because of this, it was because of that.” But you’re always wrong. There’s nothing I would call a mistake about The Lone Gunmen — not even time slots or any of that. You just do your best, and everybody did their best. I’m as proud as I can be of The Lone Gunmen, and to this day, I’d love for people to [read] this and say, “What show are they talking about?” And then look it up online and buy it. We put out DVDs.
Gilligan: We were lucky to get 13 [episodes]. Nowadays, it’d be six. I just couldn’t be more proud of it.
[I personally don’t think “The Lone Gunmen” was a very strong show, especially because of the way it handled its humor, and I’ve always thought it would have been a stronger show if it had half-hour instead of full-hour episodes. Given the quality work that Gilligan became famous for, it’s interesting that he still defends “The Lone Gunmen” so earnestly. It is undeniable that that show had a lot of heart, both in front of the camera and behind it. It is true that the popular success of a show relies on many factors that are conjunctural and difficult to pin down or purposefully recreate. Let us think about that when we consider the successes and failures also of TXF’s revival seasons, or the potential success or failure of the proposed TXF reboot.]
Let Gilligan have the final words about “The Lone Gunmen” and its heroes:
Gilligan: It’s just timely 25 years later. We need The Lone Gunmen more than ever. Three guys who, trying to save democracy, save the rule of law. God bless them. I want to think they’re still out there somewhere.
It’s official! After initially teased by Chris Carter in March 2023 — essentially 3 years ago! — and being confirmed by Ryan Coogler in April 2025, and 10 years after season 10, we now have an official confirmation that a new The X-Files project is underway. (Article at Variety, Deadline)
For years it looked like this reboot project by Ryan Coogler was stuck in development hell, and then something would happen and the project would seem much closer to fruition than previously thought, then the whole process would repeat. We speculated whether this would be a hard reboot or a continuation in the same universe, if there would be an actual season order and of how many episodes, if the focus would be again on two leads or on an ensemble cast. Now we know more.
“Two highly decorated but vastly different FBI agents form an unlikely bond when they are assigned to a long-shuttered division devoted to cases involving unexplained phenomena.”
So this is an in-universe continuation, with new characters working on the X-Files division, allowing for old faces to potentially show up, but distanced enough so that it can build its own identity. It could be the exact same pitch as for the original series, with perhaps the difference of “highly decorated”: Mulder and especially Scully were quite young and early in their career at the start of the series. We can call it a “spin-off” instead of a reboot, especially since Carter has said that he has hopes for a Mulder-Scully continuation.
Disney wants to feed its intellectual property and present the series to a new generation: there is no ending for any type of product that has some success, no rest, no eternal slumber. All of these are very mercantile motivations, and I hope that this project will be able to stand on its own artistic and storytelling merits.
This is an order for a pilot for Hulu (which, in the USA, is a Fox/Disney streaming channel; I guess internationally it would air on Disney+). Not a full series order. What to make of this? Is Disney not fully convinced about this and still wants a proof of concept before greenlighting (or not!) the production of more episodes? Maybe. In the 1990s series used to do pilots first, but more recently and with long production times full season orders have become more common. There could be a reversal of trend: Hulu is proceeding in a similar fashion for its new “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” (Deadline article). This allows to shoot a pilot, assess what worked and what didn’t, adjust, do reshoots, validate, and then proceed to series. This is what had happened famously with “Game of Thrones”. This also means that this will take time.
When could this be released? This has been in development for a while, so the pilot could be produced quite soon over the next few months. But then there’s the rest of the episodes. Series productions have been getting longer and longer. It could be within 2026 at best (if we go by the time it took to develop Jordan Peele’s “Twilight Zone” in 2019), but more likely not before mid-2027 if compared to development time of some recent projects (such as the recent “Alien: Earth”). Hulu will not just air the pilot, and will most likely wait for all episodes to be shot and go through post-production before deciding on an air date, so all of that adds time.
How many episodes could we expect, if and when this goes to full series order? Certainly not 20-25 like in the 90s. Other Hulu shows like “Alien: Earth”, “Shogun” and “The Bear” are all around the industry standard of 8-10 episodes, and I think this is what we should expect. And then if all goes well we wait more than one year for a season 2, most likely two years (as is the case with Vince Gilligan’s “Pluribus”, for example, Deadline article).
All in all, this is a project with some real talent involved and some people who do have a personal touch and are not just studio hands for hire, so this bodes well. However, there’s a “however”. It will be very challenging to make something original and something that justifies “The X-Files” brand as opposed to making a new series with a similar premise. It will be challenging to remain creative when there is so much scrutiny and things are discussed to death (there were dozens of articles just to say that Coogler had a conversation with such or such, can you imagine this happening over every single of his actions?). It will be challenging to tell a story about government conspiracies with a similar vibe to the original, when the USA is so obviously degrading towards authoritarianism in the real world. It will be challenging to maintain interest for this over a long enough time when there is So Much Content out there, and when years go by between seasons. And it will be challenging to not have the public reception of this completely destroy it, be it due to gatekeeping, to instrumentalized racism, to the overall dismal level of discourse in social media, or to plain legitimate quality concerns.
Mark me curious but also burnt by the Hollywood system’s desire to keep eating itself.
PS: happy 62nd birthday, Dana Scully! Was yesterday’s announcement timed to that?
Unfortunately, there has been another big, big death in The X-Files family. Ken Hawryliw, prop master for TXF seasons 1-5, passed away a few days ago.
Kenneth Harvey Hawryliw headed the props team: he designed and realized the props seen on the show. There’s a lot that the props team did: all the files and paperwork handled by Mulder and Scully, all the badges and guns, all the alien implants. In many cases the prop was a star of the episode, with perhaps the most iconic being the alien stiletto, with its simple and elegant design. But there’s a lot more we can mention: the alien fetus from The Erlenmeyer Flask; the sea shell from Fresh Bones; the demon drawings and sculptures from Grotesque; the Martian rock from Tunguska; the alien Rebels’ firewand from Patient X; the doll from Chinga; and many, many others, big or small.
The props department was also responsible for all the documents, newspaper clips, crime scene photos, or photos as part of the set design, all meticulously created to fit in with the item’s use within a scene. The UFO photo from Deep Throat; the DAT tape from Anasazi; the thought photos from Unruhe; young Fox and Samantha’s photo that the CSM had from Redux II; etc, etc.
In the late 90s, the “Unrestricted Access” CD-ROM showcased his work, with photos and videos and detail that was not visible on the few seconds these things are visible on the screen (although retrospectively this was very low-resolution!).
Ken also had a cameo appearance in the show as Byers’ co-worker in Unusual Suspects. He contributed with a script for the show, season 6’s Trevor. And he was also someone full of stories to tell, about his creative process and the behind the scenes adventures that went into making the show. Apart from TXF, he worked on “Battlestar Galactica” and many other shows shot in Vancouver. We covered here some of his long and detailed recent interviews (Conspiracy, TXF docu) and we reposted some behind the scenes photos he published on his social media Sci Fi Props Guy.
Please consider donating to the GoFundMe set up to support his wife and two minor children during this devastating time — his last credited work dates back to 2020, and the page explains Ken’s family’s situation. If you’re unable to donate, please share.
The image above was sent from Ken to Jesse J. Adams who shared it with me.
I also want to take this opportunity to share a piece of work from Ken, along with his assistant Jim Pate. I cannot tell you how elated and nervous I was when I acquired this recently. I have in my possession Scully’s medical file in the Strughold Mine from 3X02: Paper Clip, and this is the screen-used item. It is an excellent example of an expertly created prop fit for purpose. The paperwork, the numbers pointing to an archiving system, the pages design mimicking medical forms with fields to fill in, additional material such as a WHO vaccination card, and of course the biological sample box containing Scully’s DNA sample. An iconic prop for an iconic scene.
