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)
In my effort to cover in-depth all the Ten Thirteen interviews, there are times I get lost in my obsession with notes-taking. Here is a long (3 hours!) interview with the unparalleled Darin Morgan from… January 2025 — an interview for the X-Files Diaries podcast (now rebaptized Seriously Obsessed). What a joy to have such long interviews! In the past, interviews were most often written pieces by professional journalists for published magazines; in the past few years, there has been an explosion of interviews with the democratization of podcasting. Today, I get the impression that we are at the tail end of that wave as well.
Darin goes in-depth on all of his X-Files episodes and offers many details I don’t remember hearing elsewhere. Enjoy! Here are my notes [and occasional comments].
Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’: from the very moment he was hired in season 2 he had the idea of the teaser, an alien abduction abduction; he didn’t have the rest of the episode, he couldn’t figure it out. As a result, he did “the killer cockroaches episode” first. While casting that, one actor was just like Truman Capote (they didn’t cast him). He thought that instead of In Cold Blood he would write a story about alien abductions, and he figured the story out! Earlier in Coprophages he has Scully reading a Capote book, which was an inside joke to Duchovny’s appearance on Jeopardy, as if the idea was there and trying to tell him to pay attention, he was not receptive to it yet.
Blood: Glen gave him the story, machines tell people to kill people, and told him to write it. Glen would try to convince Carter to hire him, then they needed urgently a script in a day. He came in to break the story with Glen, Jim and Howard Gordon, then Glen and Jim would write the script real quick. Darin remembers contributing with nothing. Gordon thought Darin “got” the show. Then a writer was fired, there was an opening. The Flukeman role was because Carter knew Darin was looking for a job. He thinks he got the writing job thanks to Gordon. Carter says he perceived something in Darin, but he hadn’t read anything of his. Carter had a sixth sense to recruit people he could trust, a talent.
He discussed with Glen how long the show would last, they estimated 3 seasons. Jim told him to save the idea for season 4.
Humbug: Glen told him to do an episode about circus freaks, he loved the movie Freaks. He gave him a VHS of Jim Rose. He can’t write without comedy, he’s not purposefully trying to deconstruct. Carter should have fired him when he pitched the idea, but he liked the story. Glen had him change a few things, but mainly he wanted Chris to know what he got into. Carter liked the script even if it was “not the show”. Fox had a huge problem, they were worried. The talent of Chris was that he thought the fans would accept the difference.
He recognizes that he wrote few episodes and had an influence on the show. Although he thinks that somebody would have done comedy down the line, and he’s not a fan of many of the comedic episodes that followed. If the first one had been bad, like Fight Club [ha!], then they wouldn’t have done more. Everybody was nervous. Manners thought it would end his career. He is somewhat resentful of the comedy episodes that followed his because they didn’t have to go through what he did, they were not new, there was no pressure. Humbug was enjoyable, it was raw energy. The end product is always less than what the idea was, some lines were not great [typical self-depreciating Darin]. He would have written it differently now, better.
The audience is so-called more sophisticated now. But Humbug was received more easily than Were-Monster. He had no computer during the original run. In the revival he read everything, that was unhealthy.
Coprophages: he had a very hard time writing it. His own opinion of the episodes is tied to the personal experience of working on them. The inspiration for Bambi was an entomologist in the University of Illinois, she did a festival around insects in horror movies, and a few years ago she invited Chris to show Fight the Future and Coprophages, and Chris invited Darin, so he saw it with an audience. About the stoners: he read someone was trying to get high on crap. TXF needed unreliable eye witnesses.
Quagmire: he is credited as doing a rewrite but it isn’t true, he wrote the Conversation on the Rock [That’s already a lot!] and he helped break the story. The stoners were not his idea, it was Vince who wrote that scene. It was a group effort. He doesn’t like Easter eggs, he likes references to past episodes, it’s amusing, like how the past carries weight, like how a continuous story series would do now.
Back in the day nobody wanted to have Mulder and Scully romantically involved, as it would become a different show; they had to be thinking about weird stuff, monsters. The M&S couple was interesting because they had been through so much and nobody else could relate to them. The jealousy in Coprophages was for comedic effect, it had not been tried before. Gillian had to do some other work, she would not be much available, hence she had less scenes, Bambi was introduced, it was a scientist taking Scully’s job away from her, it was also a professional jealousy. The performances played the MSR well.
MSR in the revival: people who have been through so much, on and off, understand each other like no other, they don’t need to define what they have. He wonders what it would have been like if M&S each had had life partners. The long term trajectory of the MSR was accidental.
Coprophages doesn’t have a good main character that the episode would be centered around. Bambi and the roboticist are one-note.
The only actor he wrote the part for and was cast was Jesse Ventura. He didn’t have actor in mind for Clyde Bruckman; he considered Bob Newhart jokingly for 5 minutes. He drove Rick Millikan crazy, he was a movie guy, he didn’t know TV actors. He was very lucky with the casting. Casting is very fun but also torture. He wanted to cast Rip Taylor for Jose Chung, he seemed more hip, but he was unavailable. Charles Nelson Reilly gave the best audition. His first scene was the interview with Scully, Darin was there on set, he seemed perfect for the role. He knew Reilly from “Lidsville” (1971-1972) and “Match Game” (1990-1991). He didn’t meet Peter Boyle [Clyde Bruckman] until after the episode was shot. The guest stars had problems adjusting to his episodes, they thought TXF was a drama. Watching Stuart Margolin’s audition tape [Dr They], Glen said older actors understand what they’re looking for, they have experience in theatrical performance, younger actors don’t. He knew Stuart from “The Rockford Files” but he didn’t watch it as a kid. These actors always worked, either in theatre, or directing. He gave him directions and he understood immediately, he was in complete control of the craft.
He didn’t write Scully to be immortal, that’s bad sci-fi. But after he left, the writers were free to do whatever they wanted, it was out of his hands. Maybe that’s what Chris’s plan. Same with Mulder-Scully relationship, if they’d ever kiss he wouldn’t be the one writing it.
Clyde Bruckman: he was trying to do an episode like Beyond the Sea, he thought it was the best episode of the early seasons, very inspired. Vince was an admirer of Clyde Bruckman, perhaps it inspired him for Tithonus? Chris let writers have their own voice, their own approach, but not everybody had a good experience writing for the show. The best work of the different writers is recognizable and connected across the series. A series is its best episodes and for TXF they are very different from each other. He is proud that Chris didn’t have to spend time breaking, writing and re-writing his season 3 episodes. Glen & Jim could do 8-10 episodes per season on their own, Chris needed writers like this.
Mulder was on a mythic quest and acted like it, he wanted to make fun of him. He felt sorry for Scully, to be involved with someone she cares about but is crazy. In the revival his attitude to Mulder changed dramatically, he was more sympathetic to him, David appreciated that. Once he finds the truth, then what happens, what does my life amount to? And he is still sorry for Scully. M&S are obviously in love with each other, but they don’t get along all the time necessarily. Mulder is absorbed in his quest, he couldn’t see he had this beautiful woman next to him, in the revival he is more receptive.
The preying mantis scream in Coprophages was from his own experience, he saw a “walking stick” in a tree as a kid. He still laughs at Mulder’s yell in Jose Chung.
Jesse Ventura’s car scene in Jose Chung: the old car moved slow, so it was accelerated to make it look faster. Then they started pulling apart the set, and Rob Bowman was not sure if it would look too comical; Darin’s answer was “maybe!”, then Rob rushed to shoot one more take with a different speed. That’s the chaos on set. The car exit in reverse is an example of Darin’s theatrical writing, like a scene exit.
While he was walking his dogs he ran into Rob Bowman! He hadn’t seen him in decades, they had lunch. He told him about fans loving Jose Chung, this was odd for him, he doesn’t consider it his best work. [Wow!]
Jose Chung: He was a fan of Jesse “The Body” Ventura, he was a wrestler fan as a kid. He’s hilarious as a commentator and in action films. He wrote lines for him, but he had trouble with them. It was the best performance in any of his film work!
For the Men In Black (Alex Trebek) he had originally in mind Salman Rushdie [!]. Carter and Bowman shot down that idea. Glen suggested Johnny Cash, but he was unavailable. Darin thought of Steven Spielberg [!!!]. He wrote a letter to Spielberg, but they got word he was unavailable before the letter was sent. A couple of years later Darin had a meeting with him, and he said he would have done it! [Imagine that! Also, Darin and Spielberg met?! In what context?]
He was throwing names around with Jeff Vlaming and came up with Alex Trebek, with the Duchovny Jeopardy connection.
Small Potatoes: He did a single shot after morphing back into Eddie from Mulder, Gillian was probably not there when it was shot, the SFX shots were done last; he was not wearing pants during that shot. If you don’t see David or Gillian from the front, then probably it’s not them, it’s their stand-ins. He hadn’t acted in a while, he could have been better. Vince saw a weird quality in him, that he had an ability that he didn’t know what to do with, so he cast him.
Queequeg: he didn’t have a dog at the time, he gave Scully a dog without thinking of the implications or running it by Carter. The fans started asking about it, and Carter said to get rid of it. Gillian didn’t like the dog, Darin didn’t choose it. He broke the Quagmire story in a day. He needed a victim for the end; he pitched it to the staff; someone suggested the dog. He wouldn’t do that now, neither would Carter.
When they started the revival he didn’t know that they had had a kid.
In the revival, Scully needed a dog, to make up for it. She got a better looking one. He didn’t have the intention to bring Dagoo back. In his mind, Scully has a pack of dogs.
Directing in revival: he had forgotten how long things took, it was frustrating for that. There are things wrong with Were-monster but he doesn’t know what he would change in it. He had fun with Forehead Sweat. When the director is another person you have to explain things, sometimes they bring good things. He learned a lot from the 3 great TXF directors. He was glad Carter let them direct in the revival.
Guy Mann has a line about internal logic, it was a meta comment about TXF, none of it makes sense. He was watching old Universal monster movies like The Wolf Man, the detailed logic didn’t make sense. TXF is that type of story. It was also a comment on our lives that make no sense. He lived in fear somebody would do the were-monster story before he could do it.
Forehead Sweat: what would Rod Serling write about Trump?
The best Twilight Zone episodes are a guy trying to explain what’s happening, and their heads have forehead sweat. “Lost art” because he doesn’t see that any more. Then he would rewatch it and he would only find just a handful of episodes like that, a Mandela effect.
His dad’s favorite episode that he wrote is Small Potatoes. [Ironic!]
He read comments that fans said this episode is going to age so quickly because of Trump references, but the episode is more relevant now than when it aired. He watches news about gaslighting, disinformation, waiting to hear “it’s like that episode of TXF”, it’s only gotten worse.
It predated QAnon; the middle name of Dr They was “Q”; he wanted to start a rumor that QAnon was a publicity stunt by TXF.
Being specific vs being vague. In the end, was Reggie crazy? The episode aired one year after Trump’s inauguration. One year ago, Reggie had a nervous breakdown. The last flashback was when Trump was coming. It was the demise of American idealism, Trump becoming president was the last straw. He had a line for Reggie, “Trump became president and my head exploded”, it was too on the nose and he cut it. The alien-as-Trump is part of his breakdown. Reggie was when the president no longer represents your country’s ideals. But nobody saw that. TXF had to have a vagueness to the ending, like, “here’s the explanation, but, who knows?”.
For the fake credits scene, the script was due the next day and it was the last thing he wrote. He watched the series in fast-forward, he only had the DVDs for 2 seasons, he bought a subscription to Hulu just to search a scene to insert Reggie during that one night. In the Small Potatoes butt crack shot, the SFX guy told him there was only enough room to insert Reggie if they just removed Mulder. He always laughs when Reggie shoots him [Darin].
The intention was for the alien to give a Trump-like speech. But then it would be perceived as anti-Trump. So it the speech had to be verbatim, to use the exact words.
He has tons of references to the 1970s, film quotes. It was the beginnings of conspiracy paranoia. One of the references was the Elvis cape, his Las Vegas era, which people found weird; then recently people started referring to Trump as being in his “fat Elvis” stage, now it works.
He doesn’t remember that Mulder is color blind.
The episode’s ending “can’t be” a series ending, but it is his ending, his finale for the series. [It’s a great series finale all right!]
He didn’t call the episodes “monster of the week”, he called them “stand-alones”.
As per Frank O’Connor, two characters in fiction are actually one person. This is Mulder and Scully. They are “platonic soul mates”.
Jeff Charbonneau passed away last week, according to X-Files News. He was the music editor for everything Ten Thirteen produced: The X-Files from the pilot all the way to the revival seasons; Millennium; Harsh Realm; The Lone Gunmen; the two TXF movies; even Carter’s pilot for The After. The Vrach Frankenshteyn director’s cut was the last thing he worked on.
He was one of the foundations of all of Ten Thirteen and one of those figures behind the scenes that didn’t get a spotlight but were important. Our thoughts are with his family.
Jeff worked with the sound effects team and music mixer Larold Rebhun to balance music and sound, creating the shows’ unique atmospheres. A close collaborator of composer Mark Snow, who passed away last year, he edited Mark’s music into the episodes, did some arrangements and occasionally contributed with music himself.
Most memorably, he composed the music in 4X13: Never Again where Scully gets her tattoo (and found on La-La Land’s TXF Volume 4):
Just looking at his Ten Thirteen work, he won two Emmy Awards for sound editing for The X-Files and got nominated three more times, plus once for Millennium.
See here a detailed interview with Jeff at The X-Files Lexicon (via Archive.org) from 2012.
He also worked on many other shows, such as 24, Homeland (both with ex-TXF alumni Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, and Larold Rebhun), Love, Death + Robots… not to mention his film work: Dazed and Confused, Seven Years in Tibet…
Jeff had a rich background, well-travelled, studied film and anthropology, a performing musician and an acrobat, and was an accomplished photographer. Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French collaborated together on peculiar photography projects that I can only describe as surreal gothic fantasy by way of Jean Cocteau and the Quay Brothers. Below is a small selection of their work. Personally, I find them very enchanting and intriguing! See more at their website is Seven Sisters Asleep.
This is a rather recent interview with Ken Hawryliw that I postponed covering because it turned out to be his last interview: Ken died earlier this year. (The GoFundMe fundraiser in his memory is still open.) He was the props master for the first five seasons of The X-Files and season 3 of Millennium (and things like Battlestar Galactica), and I am the proud owner of one of his props.
He had a treasure trove of stories to tell around the making of the shows. The interview ends on an interesting note on how things have changed since the analogue 90s. The interview is from December 2025, from the Hey Danny It’s Mulder podcast. There is some overlap with two other detailed interviews he did not too long ago. Detailed notes follow:
He would have loved to have worked on the pilot, but timing didn’t work out. 1X01: Deep Throat was his first episode. He “got” Chris Carter immediately. They had both seen the very same TV rerun broadcast of “Mysterious Island” when they were young.
He designed a lot of the props: the art department was glad to get this task off their back. He and his team ended up doing a lot of the research, and that meant libraries, phone calls, pre-internet. Over the years he had collected six 6-foot tall bookcases full of books, on topics like forensics. He sold much of that all together for a bookshop that was opening.
They’d develop a relationship with useful contacts, like the head medical examiner of the BC province, military advisors. Starting with 1X08: Space, they had military advisor Ian Fryatt, who got them to use military surplus uniforms correctly; he eventually opened a specialized company on military equipment, Phoenix 1 International Film Services. Then they got Ron Blecker [he has credits on all 1013 series], ex-Black Hawk Down, just two weeks after he left the Army, he wouldn’t say if he had been CIA or not.
They brought people in to make Scully act like a scientist.
In 1X23: The Erlenmeyer Flask: due to the liquid nitrogen, the acrylic fetus neck cracked and snapped off, the head fell on Gillian’s foot, thankfully she didn’t knock over the nitrogen tank. He designed the cradle.
He learned a lot on prop design working with Richard Hudolin [of Stargate SG-1 and Battlestar Galactica fame], and with Harry Lange on “Hyper Sapien” (who had worked on “2001”, “Star Wars”!). Carter wanted props designed from scratch, not take another object and modify it. Film didn’t have the high definition resolution of today, so they had some leeway.
He directed a lot of the insert shots during the first years, which drove the Guild crazy. His first time was for 1X07: Ice, with meal worms.
For the alien stiletto, he knew immediately how it should look like. If it were done with a spring mechanism it would have been twice the size, so they did it pneumatically. The alien artifacts’ look was based on the feel of the Roswell debris, metal fragments, their sheen. For the firewand, Carter told him to make it look like it came from the same factory as the stiletto.
His philosophy was to make it look real. He had the same philosophy in Millennium season 3. He had a reputation as the writers’ Nemesis, correcting them, but it was just to help things be realistic and credible.
Jeanne Lister was their props researcher.
About the 3X18: Teso Dos Bichos funerary urn: Originally it would have been from Uruguay, not Peru. The UN passed a law, you have to get permission to transport human remains across borders. She got hold of the Ambassador to learn what such a letter would look like. It was an urgent phone call, things were lost in translation, the Embassy thought they urgently needed the permit or the shooting would stop.
They got huge cooperation from the military. They got a VIP tour of the USS Constellation, visited the CIC. Story of photos [unclear whether this is for 1X01: Deep Throat or a later episode]: Jeanne was from West Sussex, could seduce people on the phone. She called a Colonel at the Pentagon, they had to know what security and uniforms look like for Edwards Air Force Base. The Colonel dispatched his own photographers to Edwards, back to Pentagon to develop the photos, flew them to the Fed Ex hub in Kentucky because they missed the day’s deadline, so they got them in Vancouver before next morning for the show-and-tell meeting.
For 5X01: Unusual Suspects where he acted: he had a line, “Whatever”. He asked Kim Manners how to say the line, but Vince had written it exactly because that’s what he always said, “Whatever”. Just be yourself.
“Apocalypse Now”: that’s where the CSM was from, and the texture of the print files. Secret files used to be printed on onion skin paper, so they couldn’t be photocopied. They tried to do the same and photocopy them, they burned down their Xerox machine. They had to be typed by hand with old typewriter.
They had two photographers. Ken Staniforth, who has since died, and Marcel [?]. Ken did the art direction of the photo shoots, he had a small crew, to do the crime scene photos. Like with the 3X23: Wetwired photos. It was guaranteed that such photos would be in a close up, because they move the story forward. He had to train the crew that these were important. For the UFO photo in 1X16: E.B.E., they shot the plate, then the art department would do photo retouching.
The case files would be in extreme closeup. The info in them was extremely accurate. This was to help the actors too. Story from Battlestar Galactica: His wife Alison is an author, she wrote a report that Admiral Adama would read. When shooting, Eddie James Olmos stopped the shooting to congratulate the writing, he summoned Ken on set.
Sometimes they would add a little joke in the text. They did it once with Gillian. Clyde Klotz’s nickname was “Dog Boy”. They gave Scully a file to read, and the perpetrator was Clyde “Dog Boy” Klotz, she had a good laugh. They worked long hours, the agenda was to make the best show possible, there were no personalities.
Before 6X17: Trevor: Film director Phil Spink asked Ken to meet Jim Guttridge [a film music composer], who had written a spec script for The X-Files. Ken found it was not quite a TXF script. They thought, why don’t we write one together? They wrote “Remembrance Day”. Carter’s assistant Joanne Service and Vince Gilligan thought it was really good. They got it to Frank Spotnitz; time passed, weeks. Gillian is the only actor with who Ken is friends with, he introduced her to Clyde, he was the first one they told when she got pregnant; so Ken asked her to read the script. In the interim, Ken and Jim wrote another script, just to prove to themselves they could write one in two weeks: it was about the Monkey King, Bigfoot, Stupendous Yappi was in it, it was comedy. Eventually Carter read both, he said to take more time next time. So it became a writing assignment.
Making 6X17: Trevor: It took them 13 pitches to get to Trevor. By season 6 almost everything had been done. The episode’s “beautiful idea” was that this man could do anything except connect with his son. They worked a lot on the scientific part but most was left out. They worked with a theoretical physicist. In an electromagnetic vortex, nobody knows what happens inside. A tornado is like a particle collider. What if you could survive something like that but it would change your molecular structure? It would only work with high-conductivity matter, not for things like glass. If you’d cross something, matter would be charred to its basic molecules, only carbon would remain. The first idea was that Pinker would walk through people and water in their bodies would turn to heavy water, and all cells in their body would rupture, bleed out spontaneously. It wouldn’t fly, too gory, it couldn’t be too sci-fi. The core was that he was propelled by the love for his son. In the first draft they wanted a huge action sequence for the end: Pinker runs through walls of motel rooms. The wind shield idea was taken from what was an earlier scene, where Pinker was stopped by car, and then Mulder figured out the conductivity thing.
Props move the story along, they are like clues. A senior props master who worked in movies like “Legends of the Fall” [Jimmy Chow] used to call him every two months to tell him “you guys are doing amazing work”, it was great to get credit. He is most proud of the attention to detail. At the end of some season, he told Chris “thanks for making me do the best props in my life”, Chris said “we are making television history”.
The only prop from the show he has left is a firestarter wand. There’s a detail that you couldn’t see in the final episode: the handle has a side glass with a liquid fuel gauge.
He’s happy he got to design props. His inspiration is from Richard Hudolin, he’s a child of the 60s, Batman (1966), Irwin Allen shows like Lost in Space and Land of the Giants. , the way prop curves give texture.
John Bartley [TXF director of photography for the first 3 seasons], the first thing he directed was a series pilot with David Hemmings [?], he learned not to use pure white. The directors of photography that came after just tried to “make a Bartley shot”, don’t make it your own. He worked so many hours in the first episodes to get the look right. Studio people asked if they could make production go faster, Bartley said, “hire a different camera man”.
The process to make props has changed a lot: the CNC [Computer Numerical Control] mills, the 3D printing. Things made by human hand had an organic quality. With Harry Lange things had an organic design, which is lost when using keyboards and machines. He’s old school, likes to sculpt, there is no replacement for that. Chris was inspired by “Jason and the Argonauts”, the skeleton fight had a nightmarish quality, you can’t get that with computers. He’s glad TXF was made in an analogue period, it would have been a different show today, way too much CGI. It was the last gasp of analogue times.
The Album that accompanied Fight the Future‘s 1998 release featured many classics — among them my all-time favourite, Noel Gallagher’s Teotihuacan — and ended with a secret track where Chris Carter just explained the entire mythology.
Album producer David Was was the one who approached the bands to collect songs. Among the contributions that were considered but didn’t make the cut were songs by U2, No Doubt and more. Some were not selected by Was (presumably), some might not have been even written (U2?), some were submitted but retired (Nine Inch Nails).
Gathering information, it’s possible to make a set of “the ones that got away”: that album’s B-sides.
YouTube playlist (4 songs): https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCSr4nJrT0hw
Featuring:
Now, it would be great to know which were the other songs.
Sources:
Eighteen years ago (!), in the middle of the summer, a little winter-set thriller was released against the latest Christopher Nolan pompous blockbuster. Incredibly, the story repeated again this year — instead of waiting for a more fitting time like winter, the new cut of IWTB was released in the middle of the summer. When in 2008 the release date was dictated by a writers’ strike that left little else for Fox to release that summer, what can be the motivation for this release?
A few (belated) words on the Director’s Cut of “The X-Files: I Want To Believe”, “Vrach Frankenshteyn” (what a mouthful!).
Carter has tried to promote it extensively — I covered here no less than 30 interviews with him — but all in all there is little to say. The changes are, paradoxically, few and many at the same time. Overall, they do little to change my rather lukewarm appreciation of the film.
Eighteen years of fan analysis and time passing have been kind to the movie. There are a number of things that can be said in the movie’s favour that might not have been obvious at first viewing. The movie’s script is dense with interconnections between its various storylines: the “don’t give up” motto echoes through Scully and the boy she wants to save, through Mulder and pursuing the case, through the “evil” lovers wanting to save one another just as Scully holds on to Mulder even as darkness have a way of finding them. The viewer is challenged upon to think of the concept of Christian forgiveness when faced with a pedophile priest, who is used as a conduit to stop further crimes. There are plenty of narrative coincidences — like Scully finding out about the two-headed dog experiments by searching for an unrelated procedure, or Scully finding the compound via the numbers of the scripture Father Joe quoted — become examples of meaningful synchronicity when viewed from a mystic or religious angle. The first half of the movie is a remake of “1X12: Beyond the Sea” with religious elements while the second half is the Frankenstein part with more horror. It is first a questioning of whether morals mean something taking place in a frigid climate, before a figurative descent to Hell full of dirt and blood, and an optimistic ending that takes place in a sunlit spring day with snow melting. The story is about alien abductions performing experiments on women, but of a different sort than the show’s mythology. Some who are more attuned to this movie than me have been quite perceptive about all this.
It must be said, the quality of the photography in undeniable: this was shot on film and you can tell. The cold blue colours in the snow scenes, the warm oranges of the domestic scenes, the grain in the horror scenes. Revisiting this after being saturated with the badly lit badly focused all-digital scenes of most of current productions is refreshing.
And then there are all the issues — a slow and unengaging beginning and an anti-climactic ending, unmemorable villains, forced character behaviour, non-deconstructed clichés, some odd choices a bit all over. Despite the above, my feelings haven’t changed much.
So what does the new Director’s Cut do to enhance the experience?
Overall, it is the same movie. There is no new dialogue whatsoever. We learn nothing new about the “bad guys” of the film, who remain unnamed (!) (apart from fleeting glimpses at some paperwork). There is no new scene and much of what is “new” was actually already there in the original Extended Cut/Director’s Cut from the DVD/BluRay release. How could it be any different? The script didn’t have any extra material, and the shooting was holden to the script; even the novelization, based on the script, had nothing extra. Any changes are due to editing — and to what was cut.
Some tighter editing, especially during the first third, helps the movie get along. This is welcome, although despite these efforts the first half is still a slog to this viewer! Some attempts at making the pacing faster make no narrative sense, like the cross-cutting between Scully talking with Christian’s parents and the police questioning the bad guy.
In filmmaking, the editing of image and soundtrack are conceived as parts of a whole: as a result of the changes in the editing, in several places Mark Snow’s music has been changed for a better fit. The orchestral/electronic mix has been substituted with music from the revival series, with its fast rhythmic percussions and tense moments. It does the job of creating an atmosphere typical of a thriller, although I quite liked Snow’s score.
Some superfluous and fancy bits are cut (the dated George W Bush joke, Agent Drummer flirting with Mulder; but I will miss that shot of Mulder digging in a pile of sunflower seeds). Some baggage from the series is cut out, making this more stand-alone and approachable for new fans (exposition to Father Joe about who Mulder is, references to William and Samantha), although in the process we lose the parallels to our agents’ past lives that inform their emotional state. In particular, the references to William are gone, but the line to Scully “If you were a mother you’d understand” is kept, which is like going half-way there in doing the removing, oddly. A mixed bag.
Some scenes are moved around in an effort to make some of the narrative connections I mentioned earlier. The scene of Scully performing the surgery on Christian is now bookended by scenes of the abducted woman witnessing the horrific surgery performed by the Frankenstein-like doctor. We understand the parallel of using science for good or of using science to inflict pain, with both stemming from wanting our loved ones to survive. Unfortunately, Carter has substituted one of Mark Snow’s best tracks, “The Surgery”, with Clannad’s theme for “Harry’s Game”, which is a beautiful song in of itself but I don’t see what it is doing there. The only way I can justify this decision is that Snow’s track was too ethereal, warm and hopeful; the new edit juxtaposes both surgeries and the horrific elements make Snow’s track out of place — but the new track is not a much better fit.
The main selling point for this new cut has been to make it the scary film that was always intended. Compared to the original theatrical cut, the whole climax of the film on the “Frankenstein” compound runs longer, allowing us to see more of what is being done. But as far as I can tell, it differs little or not at all from the original director’s cut. See this comparison.
The main difference in runtime is actually what has been cut from the scenes where Mulder and Scully are together. The new cut makes away with the romance entirely, even mentions to a “home” are removed, to the point where one might think they are not living together and indeed are not together whatsoever (things were rather unclear back then, even reviews of the original cut thought that Scully just visited Mulder’s home; imagine now!). As a person who is attracted to this show for its stories and how these characters relate to them, rather than the romance, I am a bit conflicted. I do welcome the removal of some cringey lines that are completely uncharacteristic of The X-Files (like the scratchy beard tease) and I can even live without the final kiss, although I don’t quite see why it should be removed, and in its absence there is an abrupt cut. However, several scenes no longer work because the Mulder-Scully bits have been trimmed. There are some hard cuts from one scene to the next that don’t feel natural, like when Scully is thinking in bed. The whole Mulder-Scully argument about getting involved in the case feels even more rushed and forced and at the same time not quite there because it is not the focus of the film. In my review of the original, I had conceded that I had so many issues with the “monster of the week” plot that the best part of the movie was how it explored the Mulder-Scully relationship, how the plot was more a background. The new cut wants to return to an early seasons dynamic where the focus is back on the investigation. But what is lost is the emotional connection to these characters. All the scenes in this movie were conceived and shot in a certain way: the original intent still half-remains in what is left and the attempt to remove the relationship is only half-achieved. They would have to have done extensive reshootings to make this fit. The movie is less strong because of it.
Most of the work that went into this new cut, in terms of time spent to do it, is actually nearly unnoticeable if you are not intimately familiar with the original. Carter and his editors have gone back to the original footage and re-examined it in-depth. Many scenes are the same but some shots are different: a different take of the same shot, the same shot but from a different point of view, a reaction shot instead of the shot of who is doing the talking… For Carter, who complained that post-production was done under a big time pressure, this was done to make the best edit out of the material available. It took a lot of dedication; but for these changes I can’t tell what is best. Some more dedicated fans have already done a detailed comparison.
All in all, one is left to wonder: who is this for? It’s far from deserving some of the vitriol it’s getting. With fewer connections to the show’s larger storylines, tighter editing, less romance and more violence (but no more than the original director’s cut!), Carter is marketing this is a film for old fans to revisit or, especially, for new fans to discover. However, even with these changes, I cannot imagine that anyone that would want their friends to discover The X-Files would recommend this over so many other options. What’s more, who would know about this if not the fans? In the USA, it is on Hulu under a separate entry; but in the rest of the world it is on Disney+ under the extras to the original cut, making it extremely unlikely for anyone but hardcore fans to see; and unless you are a fan of physical media the original director’s cut, which is arguably the superior of the three cuts, is nowhere to be seen. So why release it now? This cut feels more of a pet project of Carter’s, who seems to have plenty of spare time. He is asserting the intellectual ownership of the brand just as the huge corporation actually owning it is about to give it away to newer hands, with that other project possibly fast approaching a green light. If it could eventually lead to more X-Files being made by him, all the good for him!
Now I wonder if there is out there the possibility for an even heavier cut. I imagine a cut that tries to keep it as close as possible to the length of a double episode of the series, complete with opening titles and a cliffhanger in the middle. Or, why not go all the way with this surgery? Away with the sick boy and psychic priest storyline and those silly end credits: if you are going to put Frankenstein in the title, focus on that. Mulder and Scully come to investigate disappearances and the findings of body parts, even tighter pacing, some plot relevant dialogue repurposed as voice-overs over phone calls, most of it takes place in the still-unnamed-bad-guys’ compound, Mulder and Scully wonder about the darkness in the world, end. It would lack all the depth of the original, but it might be an entertaining 45 minutes.
Happy 33rd anniversary, The X-Files! Ripe age for dying and being resurrected, if you’re into that kind of thing.
On this day in 1993, the 1X79: Pilot episode aired. The rest is history.
