This issue kicks off the “Pilgrims” arc (#11-15). The title echoes that of the first arc of the season, “Believers” (#1-5). It looks like IDW and Joe Harris have planned Season 10 to unfold in 5-issue chunks, alternating between 5-issue long mythology arcs, and 5 issues of more stand-alone stories. Entirely taking place in Saudi Arabia, this issue mostly sets up the mystery for what looks like an exotic adventure ride for our agents, filled with old foes.
Once more, Carter is busy!
A month after Amazon released its pilots in February 6 and hosts of reviews started appearing, rumors began on Chris Carter’s “The After” getting the green light for a full series, but with no official word or comment anywhere. This was only officially confirmed on March 31, with not only “The After” but a total of 6 pilots going to series out of 10. Many people expected that Amazon would choose among the two one-hour pilots, this being the whole point of the online competition, but instead both “The After” and “Bosch” were chosen, which puts into question as to whether viewer feedback was going to be taken into account at all — possibly viewer feedback will be used to steer the show in future episodes. The official synopsis:
“The After”: Follows eight strangers who are thrown together by mysterious forces and must help each other survive in a violent world “that defies explanation.” Written and directed by Carter; executive producer is Marc Rosen of Georgeville Television and Gabe Rotter is producer. Starring Aldis Hodge, Andrew Howard, Arielle Kebbel, Jamie Kennedy, Sharon Lawrence, Jaina Lee Ortiz, Adrian Pasdar and Louise Monot.
“The After” thus becomes Carter’s fifth series (although he is not mentioned as executive producer above), and his first since 2001’s short-lived “The Lone Gunmen“. Before Amazon ‘airs’ the episodes, “The After” now has to go into pre-production, Carter has to write scripts (alone or gather a team of writers), with full production and shooting (in 4K Ultra HD!) and post-production to follow — so a likely date for us to see the rest of the story is late 2014 or early 2015. We don’t know whether Carter and Amazon conceive this as an event mini-series or a first season in a multi-season story. In an interview with Carter at KCRW, it was hinted that the rest of the show would be four two-hour episodes.
See also on EatTheCorn: XFL/ETC exclusive interview with Carter | “The After” released | Details on “The After“
March was a big month for Carter, as his other project of a show was ordered into full development! We had first talked and theorized about it on EatTheCorn, it turns out that it’s different from what I expected! The official synopsis:
“Area 51”: Writer/EP: Chris Carter (The X Files); EP: Gale Anne Hurd (The Walking Dead). Based on the New York Times best-seller Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen. A contemporary conspiracy thriller revealing the true story behind the infamous Area 51, America’s most mysterious military installation.
Carter had mentioned that it would include some discussion on “the spectrum of political discourse as seen on the cable news channels” and would be “treading on some of this interesting ground that Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange have uncovered for us“, so obviously some aspects of it would be about media manipulation of information and the (un)covering of governmental/military secrets of debatable ethics. However the main subject is surprisingly close to what Carter came to be known for with “The X-Files“! Area 51, codename for a part of Edwards Air Force Base in Groom Lake, Nevada, is a huge myth for UFO lore, that’s where the Roswell UFO debris would have been stored and where reverse engineering of alien technology would have taken place; it was covered in XF in 6X04/6X05: Dreamland (and the Ellens Air Force Base, Idaho, in 1X01: Deep Throat was a stand-in for Area 51).
What is interesting is that the series would be based on Annie Jacobsen’s non-fiction book, which caused quite a stir when it was released in 2011. Jacobsen presents research on what really happened in Area 51 (and in Roswell), and presents not a story about aliens but a story about military research and Cold War era paranoia — although she has been criticized of sensationalistic writing and for not citing all her sources, the approach and presentation is a journalistic one. A whole commercial website was set up for the book (this kind of attention-seeking is not something very common for non-fiction), and it became a success. The synopsis of the book:
It is the most famous military installation in the world. And it doesn’t exist. Located a mere seventy-five miles outside of Las Vegas in Nevada’s desert, the base has never been acknowledged by the U.S. government-but Area 51 has captivated imaginations for decades.
Myths and hypotheses about Area 51 have long abounded, thanks to the intense secrecy enveloping it. Some claim it is home to aliens, underground tunnel systems, and nuclear facilities. Others believe that the lunar landing itself was filmed there. The prevalence of these rumors stems from the fact that no credible insider has ever divulged the truth about his time inside the base. Until now.
Annie Jacobsen had exclusive access to nineteen men who served the base proudly and secretly for decades and are now aged 75-92, and unprecedented access to fifty-five additional military and intelligence personnel, scientists, pilots, and engineers linked to the secret base, thirty-two of whom lived and worked there for extended periods. In Area 51, Jacobsen shows us what has really gone on in the Nevada desert, from testing nuclear weapons to building super-secret, supersonic jets to pursuing the War on Terror.
This is the first book based on interviews with eye witnesses to Area 51 history, which makes it the seminal work on the subject. Filled with formerly classified information that has never been accurately decoded for the public, Area 51 weaves the mysterious activities of the top-secret base into a gripping narrative, showing that facts are often more fantastic than fiction, especially when the distinction is almost impossible to make.
Keeping with the XF vein, Jacobsen’s next book will be “Operation Paperclip“! (see 3X02: Paper Clip)
AMC and veteran producer Gale Ann Hurd considered making a series out of it from as early as November 2011, with a different writer attached at the time! AMC approached Carter in 2013 to have his take on it, and now it’s moving into full production. Again, we do not know whether this will be conceived as a mini-series or a first season — nor whether the series will fully follow Jacobsen’s grounded (but debatable) explanation or whether it will involve actual aliens (à la “Taken” or “Dark Skies“). Even so, there are plenty of things that happened in and around Area 51 that didn’t involve Roswell: military planes development, astronaut trainings, Soviet technology reverse engineering, nuclear bomb tests! Area 51 was really “in” in the 1990s and covered several times, I hope Carter can find a fresh approach for this. It looks like a full season will be produced altogether, without first making a pilot; perhaps this will air as soon as late 2014, but probably it will be early 2015.
All in all, 2014-2015 is shaping to be a very interesting period for Carter!
Issue #10 “More Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” is Season 10’s version of one of the best episodes of the series, 4X07: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man. The Morgan & Wong episode, and endless source of interpretations and debates, depicted the Shakespearean life and times of the Cigarette-Smoking Man — but sheds doubt on whether what we saw was the real story or not by adding framing stories about a fictional autobiography and a re-constructed autobiography told by a third person (Frohike).
“More Musings” operates in somewhat a similar way, with straightforward flashbacks that upon closer inspection might not be as reliable as they seem. And in doing so takes us in a trip down 20th century American history and presents us with a series of scenes that fans of the mythology have been fantasizing about for well over a decade! Like with the TV episode, the absence of (Fox) Mulder and Scully makes this unique — and given how dense references to the show’s mythology are, this must have been very unsettling for readers that were non-obsessive watchers of the show.
Lots of spoilers below:
After many mythology-focused issues (Believers; Being for the Benefit of Mr. X) and a double issue that is a sequel of an episode of the TV show (Hosts), this is Season 10’s first fully original story arc! Joe Harris comes up with a gritty, graphic tale worthy of many of the show’s horror episodes: “Chitter“, with the Chittering God.
More after the jump.
I am very grateful to Matt Allair at The X-Files Lexicon for giving me the opportunity to contribute to the interview he conducted with Chris Carter very recently! Truly, this is an honor and one of the big highlights for Matt’s XFL and for EatTheCorn: getting to talk with the source of it all, the mind behind The X-Files, Millennium, Harsh Realm, The Lone Gunmen, and now The After!
Carter has been doing several interviews promoting The After: TV Guide, The Verge, KLTA, TV Wise, X-Files News, Studio System News, and even an “As Me Anything” at Reddit — unprecedented for someone who hasn’t been too keen on using social networks!
The pilot for The After is available for viewing worldwide with a single registration to Amazon.com, and viewer reviews should still be factored in in Amazon’s decision process to turn it into a series or not — a decision it might be making in a few days’ or weeks’ time! As a bonus, an IMDB poll that Amazon is looking at.
The XFL interview is available here. Or you can find it below!
Photo: Chris Carter directing on ‘The After’ Set; still courtesy of Amazon Studios
Chris Carter: Hi Matt, how are you?
Matt Allair: Hi Chris. It’s a great honor to speak with you. I really enjoyed the pilot and congratulations on the show.
Chris: Thank you so much.
Orodromeus: We first heard about The After well over a year ago, in October 2012, when Marc Rosen had been promoting it to the MIPCOM expo. For how long have you been actually developing this story?
Chris: I had the idea about six years ago, and then I finally sat down to write it about two years ago, so that’s pretty much the timetable.
Matt: The X-Files and Millennium thematically had a dialog between science and religion; will The After be a continuation of that dialog, or do you see it going in a completely different direction?
Chris: No, I think for me, those were the two big questions in life (chuckle) and so they inform everything, even if they don’t inform it directly. So I’m sure you’ll see those questions come up, but hopefully in as entertaining a way as possible.
Orodromeus: Selling The X-Files to FOX famously involved bringing forth statistics about alien abductions in the USA. What did it take to sell The After?
Chris: Really the script just sort of sold itself. I got it out there, Amazon saw it and liked it, which is pretty much all of the sales pitch I had. I met with Joe Lewis from Amazon once and we had a nice conversation, but beyond that I think the script sold itself.
Matt: You have been known for your innovative casting decisions. The After has an interesting range of fairly new actors; are there any current actors you’ve worked with who really stand out?
Chris: I think the whole cast is excellent, of course. Four have never been seen [before], certainly in the US, Louise Monot who’s our French actress. It was kind of a miracle that we were able to cast her, because we were told that she couldn’t get a work VISA, etc…But, I think she actually became available before we started shooting.
Orodromeus: You recently mentioned in interviews that you felt there is more freedom and flexibility in cable television instead of network television. What has been your experience with the new medium of online distribution so far? What are your expectations?
Chris: Well, my expectations are that this is the future. So while I think that while it’s new to me, and new to many, it will become the norm. I’m not, of course, used to the idea that you make something and then it’s put on trial, as it were, with a jury of hundreds-of-thousands of people. That’s a new experience, but it’s exciting at the same time.
Matt: Your track record for bringing in important writers who do groundbreaking work is quite impressive. Have your criteria changed over the years? Are there certain strengths you always look for when you hire a writer?
Chris: Yes, that they are imaginative, that they are in sync with my characters as I’ve imagined them, and the concept of the show, but mostly that they’ve had a body of work that shows originality.
Orodromeus: Over ten years have passed since your last show went off the air, yet there are still strong followers of that work, be it online communities of The X-Files and Millennium or the comics continuation of The X-Files. How does the creator feel to see his work live on in these ways? Is there a sense of pride and accomplishment, or rather a need to distance yourself so as to focus on new creative endeavors?
Chris: I don’t feel the need to distance myself, I always want to do something that excites me, that I feel is different and hopefully original, and I think that’s what we’ve got here with The After. For me, it’s a miracle that 20 years later people are still as interested in The X-Files as they are. There’s a whole new generation interested, and that’s amazing to me. Is that an once-in-a-lifetime experience? Maybe, I hope not.
Matt: Has Amazon Studios given you a lot of support in the production of the Pilot?
Chris: Amazon was terrific. They had really smart notes that helped make the project better which is what you want with a partner. They have been a terrific support for us and a guiding light.
Orodromeus: The After has a whole new crew. Can we expect to see any of the people you collaborated with previously in the crew?
Chris: It’s always hard to tell because people are busy, and certainly good people are always in demand. You know, it will be a combination of who wants to come work on the show – that we’ve worked with before because we love working with friends and other collaborators. But we are also looking forward to working with some new folks and faces.
Matt: Will this show being developed for AMC go in a completely different direction from The After? Is there anything new you are willing to share about this other project?
Chris: I’m not able to talk about it, but it’s not really directly connected to The After. I think you’ll see there is connective tissue there, but not obvious tissue. It based on a book that was given to me by AMC. I read that book, I didn’t see how it could be a TV series. They asked me to read it again, I did, and all of a sudden it just hit me–how you could do it. So that’s where I am in the process.
Matt: Back when you started as a writer for Disney and NBC, you worked on developing cop shows and family comedies, I even recall you wrote a script based on your surfing experiences. Now that you are getting back into television, would you like work in a genre outside of what you are known for?
Chris: Yeah, I’m interested in so many things that all of a sudden to become stereotyped as a science fiction writer. It’s funny to me because I never would have described myself as that before The X-Files. I did write something based on my–less my surfing experiences than my experiences with the surf culture–when I graduated from college. I did my journalism internship at Surfing magazine. I ended up staying at the magazine for five years. I had a tremendous experience and education there that was not just about the surf world, but about business, but about putting something out serially. So, that was a fantastic experience and I’d love to write about that–and in fact I did with a script that never got made. I’d love to revisit that.
Orodromeus: With the wide use of internet and discussion boards, the days of The X-Files were an important moment for the audience-creator interaction. Now it appears like viewer feedback for the pilot of The After will be part of the evaluation of the project on behalf of Amazon. Could you discuss the process a bit, and whether you see this as helpful or not?
Chris: I’m not reading the comments, it’s only helpful to me in that other people are and it’s helping them to evaluate responses that I’d call are more personal, in a personalized way. For me, as I have always done, I am going to try tell a story, a saga, that is interesting to me, because if I don’t do that–it’s beyond me to do that–I don’t know how to do something that doesn’t interest me on some kind of deeper level.
Matt Allair: With your previous projects, you have been known for developing mythology arcs, as well as stand-alone tales, will The After follow similar formats to your past work, or will it be more like the usual episodic television format?
Chris: It will be more like my past work. It will have a mythology, but it will have stand-alone episodes, as well.
Orodromeus: Hopefully The After will move forward with a full series order. How clear set are the other episodes? Would you work with other writers to develop them?
Chris: I do, yes, we will sit with the writers. They will sit with me and Gabe Rotter, the co-executive producer, and we will plot the series. If we are so lucky to go to series, there are no guarantees here even though I think the response has been positive, you just never know. It could go either way.
Matt Allair: Now that you have a few features under your belt, are you gaining more confidence as a director? You’ve worked with many directors in television over a decade; did they help influence or shape your choices with The After?
Chris: Absolutely. David Nutter originally was extremely helpful to me. My first episode, my first directing experience, David really helped me. He dug in there, he actually blocked scenes for me to show me how he did it, and it showed me, not only his style, but the economy and the way he thought about shots and editorial. That was extremely helpful to me. I’m still working off those lessons. Rob Bowman and Kim Manners in particular were very, very instructive. They had such a vast experience in television. They knew how to go fast, but to make it beautiful and cinematic. I’ll never forget Kim who’s no longer with us. In every episode, he tried to do something with a great degree of difficulty. I was talking to Bill Roe, the DP on the last four years of the show, and he said that in fact, ‘that’s right, Kim would always try something that was too hard’ during the show, and that’s what I think made his episodes stand out and that made the show visually superior.
Matt: Thank you so much for taking time to do this.
Chris: Thank you so much.
So much more could have been asked and said, that goes without saying, but of course the object of this interview was his most recent piece of work (covered on EatTheCorn here and here). What’s more, with this interview and others, we got hints of not just one additional project (the untitled AMC show) but more as well, and non-genre to boot — namely, a potential adaptation of his wife’s Dori Carter interconnected short stories We Are Rich, and a potential revisit to an old idea of his on surfing. It is great to see Carter active again!
EatTheCorn covered extensively the pre-production of Chris Carter’s new project, the pilot for “The After” for Amazon Studios. After shooting in October-November, the pilot was released on February 6 along with 9 other pilots in Amazon Original Series’ “pilot season”.
Eight strangers are thrown together by mysterious forces and must help each other survive in a violent world that defies explanation.
The 55-min pilot can be viewed at Amazon.com (for free, and from anywhere in the world, with a simple Amazon account). The television landscape is changing radically, with new distribution means come also new evaluation methods: viewer feedback will be taken into account on whether “The After“, or any of the 10 pilots released, will be ordered to full series!
This is Carter’s first production to see the light of the public since 2008, and 2002 before that! Carter is writing and directing; it is his first pilot that he is also directing. A “Spedis Owl” (with the voice-over “Who Made This?”) production logo has replaced the Ten Thirteen logo.
As for the content itself… admittedly, colour me underwhelmed. Characters, dialogue, plot, directing and general visuals are what one would expect from a generic Hollywood production. The whole thing feels a lot like the profusion of series that tried and still try to replicate Lost‘s popular success (Invasion, FlashForward, The Event, Revolution…), which is ironic given how Lost at times felt like it had taken inspiration from The X-Files; all these are shows that do not attract me in the least. Many of Carter’s trademark signs — concentration on few tortured and idealistic characters, dark photography, introspective ambiance — are absent here, nevertheless less important trademark signs abound (the ouroboros above, 1013, 1121…). Despite all this, by its very nature of serialized mystery storytelling, this is a concept that would need more time to be developed, what we have now are merely random glimpses of the whole mystery and starting points for future character arcs. Promotional material since 2012 have described “The After” as a 13 episode project.
Stay tuned for another exciting “The After“-related development for EatTheCorn!