Original subtitles

I 'm Frank Spotnitz.

I was executive producer of The X-Files.

And I co-wrote this episode with Chris Carter.

This is really a fun scene.

May not look, on the face of it, like a fun scene

but what a fun scene to write and stage.

The death of the hero of your series, and you're burying him.

And I think it was shocking enough

after last week’s episode, "This Is Not Happening, "

that Scully would finally find Mulder, and he is dead,

which I don 't think anybody expected.

But here we are actually burying the man.

We really take delight in doing things like that.

Just pushing something as far as you possibly can

’cause the audience can’t quite believe you're doing it.

Interestingly, we were under huge financial pressure at this point.

But we still managed to stage this funeral in the snow in southern California

by dumping a ton of snow and then painting in snow in the background.

So, that was a mix of real snow and CG you saw there.

And then, bringing in The Lone Gunmen

and bringing in Scully’s mother, Sheila Larken,

who lives outside of Vancouver in Washington state

for a very minimal appearance.

It's a lot of money to spend,

but you just couldn't really do Mulder's funeral without having them there,

so we did all that.

Anyway, a great tease,

that's what we call these little dramatic pieces

before the opening titles.

We call them "teasers."

And this is really designed to draw you in and make you keep watching,

because you can’t really believe that we 've killed Agent Mulder once and for all,

and are burying him in the frozen ground.

Incidentally, in this season, we had limited use of David Duchovny.

And it was some kind of very complicated formula

about a certain number of days that we were able to use him,

and over a certain number of episodes.

I don 't recall the specifics.

But, one of the ironies of it was that we ended up using him as a guy

who lies in a hospital bed semi-dead for the entire hour.

It's like, you're paying all this money to get his services for a limited time

and it wasn't the most satisfying use of the actor or the character.

But we were boxed in with what we could do

’cause he was so limited.

And that's how he ended up being used.

There 's some wonderful dynamics at work in this season.

And I know Seasons 8 and 9 are controversial for a lot of people.

And I was not really excited,

honestly, about moving fon/vard.

Now let me stop my train of thought here. Say, "Three months later",

that's yet another way to sort of yank the audiences' chain.

It's like, "Yup, we buried Mulder and now three months have passed

"so he really is dead. "

That was what we had in mind there.

Anyway, I was saying that I personally was not thrilled

about carrying on with Seasons 8 and 9 without David Duchovny.

But, Ireally, really enjoyed these last two years.

For me, as a writer on the show, it was a fresh franchise,

it was a new set of problems and new characters.

And in this season, Season 8,

it was just enormous fun writing and working with Robert Patrick,

who is just a terrific actor.

You see it in scenes like this. And he really...

His character had wonderful things to play, especially in this episode, I think,

because, kind of like Scully, he was drafted onto the X-Files.

It was not his passion.

And now, because he is a character of conscience,

he's in a very tough situation

because he's come to see the value of the X-Files.

And he's come to see that politically, they are a liability to the X-Files...

Sorry, they are a liability to the FBI.

And now, they’re appealing to a self-interest saying,

"Good job, you found a dead Mulder. You can go.

"And we 7/ give you a promotion, exactly what you wanted. "

But he's not so sure he wants to do it

because even though it serves him and his ambitions,

he knows that shutting down the X-Files is the wrong thing to do.

And now we see Scully is pregnant.

I wanna talk about her pregnancy a little bit later too,

but Scully’s pregnant, and he comes in to see her.

And she's not going to pat him on the back either.

She’s not going to help him out and say, "Yeah, hold on to the X-Files. "

She’s going to tell him to go too.

It's really Doggett's personal heroism that keeps him there.

His personal code of honor and sense of right and wrong,

which I just think makes him a wonderfully appealing character.

And, you know, Robert played it beautifully.

We got some knocks right around this time about Scully’s pregnancy

and how her timeline was off.

I actually complained because it was not true.

We picked up, at the beginning of this season,

where the previous season had ended.

We just didn’t allow for the ellipses of the summer.

So in fact, we were honoring the timeline correctly,

and the people who accused us of missing the timeline

just weren't following it closely enough.

I think part of the discomfort people had with this season and the next was

you fall in love with these characters, Mulder and Scully,

and the quest is so...

Obviously, Mulder's quest, and it had become Scully’s too,

it feels almost like a betrayal to embrace another character or another actor,

however fine he or she may be.

I think a lot of people just didn’t want to make that change,

which is understandable.

I was very pleased by this.

I think this looks fantastic.

I was happy we were able to mount this in Los Angeles.

This was a new director to the series, Tony Wharmby,

who'd come on beginning of Season 8

with an episode I wrote called "Via Negativa, "

who just did a wonderful job.

Visually, this is a terrific show.

He also, I think, was especially fine with the actors.

Really sensitive to the actors

and drew things out of them that other directors might not have.

When you do a show like this for a long time,

and, you know, X-Files was on nine years, eight years at this point,

you do a lot, a lot, a lot of autopsy scenes.

And we did a lot of autopsy scenes,

and so it was particularly pleasing, at this late stage of the game,

to find something new to do in an autopsy scene.

And I think this is a nice, fun, creepy scene.

One of the challenges is that you look at the research

about what a body would look like

if it had been floating in the water for some time, and it doesn’t look real.

What a body really looks like under the circumstances

is so grotesque and disfigured

that it actually doesn’t look believable.

So this is, in fact, a toned down version of what the reality would be.

It's also so disgusting that it's hard to look at it.

So we kind of had to make it bearable

for a television audience to actually broadcast it.

Now, Billy Miles was established in the pilot of The X-Files.

Very first episode, Bellefleur, Oregon.

And we had brought him back

and brought that town back very self-consciously

at the end of the previous season, Season 7,

because we believed that that might have been the end of the series,

and we wanted to come full circle.

Of course, it ended up not being the end of the series

and we kept going on.

So, this was the return of Billy Miles who had been abducted

at the same time as Agent Mulder at the end of Season 7.

So, already, the audience’s dramatic sensor is on alert here

because something’s up with Billy Miles

and maybe something’s up

with Agent Mulder, too, who's lying in that grave.

And that's clearly what's on Walter Skinner's mind

as they drive out to the cemetery.

It's worth talking about how so much of the mythology of the series,

the original mythology, had been wrapped up in Seasons 6 and 7.

You know, we 'd seen the destruction of the Syndicate in "One Son. "

We 'd seen the revelation of the truth

of what happened to Samantha in "Closure."

And now, we were stripped of all that narrative drag, or narrative baggage.

I don 't mean to make that pejorative, but just that we were stripped of

the obligation to service all those storylines.

And so now we were free to move fon/vard in new ground.

I think "Requiem" was really the beginning of a new chapter

that carried through until the end of the series

in Season 9, in "The Truth. "

You might look at this as the super-soldier chapter, if you will.

Again, it kind of helps when you're watching these episodes

to imagine you're seeing it on television for the first time,

and you've been waiting week after week to see what’s happening with Mulder.

The power of this is, "Is David Duchovny finally going to be brought back alive?

"And how are they going to do it?"

And this is a pretty incredible scenario, even for The X-Files,

that a man might be buried in the ground for three months yet still be alive.

This was one of our writing strategies, which comes to mind

because of that pathologist line about, "This isn’t Curse of the Mummy, "

is that when you're dealing with some big matter like this,

which is so incredible,

if you can have one of your characters make fun of it himself, mock it himself,

not to steal the language of the character, but you kind of take the curse off of it.

It's like you, yourself, are recognizing how fantastic it is.

And it makes it more palatable for the viewer.

This is kind of a cliff-hanger act-out.

Looks like Mulder's... Like Skinner's wrong, pardon me.

There's a dead David Duchovny.

All that and Mulder's not alive.

Well, we 7/ find out just the opposite.

Dead as he looked, here we are in a hospital.

Now, this scene,

if you didn’t get the vibe from the earlier scene in the X—Files office.

We had to start calling it the X-Files office, by the way, in our script pages,

not Mulder's office as it had been called

since Mulder was no longer around.

But this scene is gonna pretty clearly indicate

a current that goes through these last two seasons, as well, which is,

I got the pretty clear sense

that John Doggett was in love with Dana Scully.

And, of course, Dana Scully was in love with Fox Mulder.

So you sense this heartbreak.

You know, she's in love with this guy, and he wants to be there for her,

and he can’t be.

Because she’s...

Her heart's taken by someone else.

He so wants to protect her,

he so wants to be the one that she's turning to.

And that just ain’t gonna happen.

And there was a very subtle shift in point of view.

Over this season, most especially.

It wasn't so subtle by Season 9.

Which was, that this series was gradually being told

from John Doggett's point of view.

I say gradually, ’cause clearly this is a scene that's not...

We 're still with Scully here.

But I think your...

Your sympathies and your take on the story

really, sort of line up with Doggett's, more than anybody else's.

Which was really a bold thing to do in a series like this, as well.

One thing we were determined not to do.

You know, we 'd lost David’s services

except for these limited runs,

here and there.

And we were determined,

as much as we wanted people to embrace the new characters,

John Doggett and later Monica Reyes,

we were determined to honor David and David’s character.

We love that character just as much as anybody else,

and we saw it as no disloyalty to the actor

or the character to carry on with these other characters.

And so, we never shied away from playing the power of that character

or the heroism of that character even in his absence.

As a scene like that suggests.

This was another great find.

James Pickens Jr. played Kersh, Alvin Kersh.

So many times over the course of this series

we just got so lucky with the actors that we cast in these guest parts

and just kept bringing them back because they were so wonderful.

That was what happened with William B. Davis

as the Cigarette Smoking Man,

and with Nick Lea as Krycek, and with Mitch Pileggi as Walter Skinner,

and that's what happened here with James Pickens.

Just a fantastic actor, not at all like this personally.

Really transformed himself to play this part.

Robert Patrick and James Pickens really had a chemistry.

Loved playing scenes together.

And I think, their scenes together

were some of the finest ones in the last two years of the show.

Again, here 's Doggett being tempted to do the wrong thing.

The right thing for him personally, but the wrong thing on a larger scale.

Now, this is pretty creepy.

We had to do a number of these big fat suits for Billy Miles.

He no longer looks the same as he did on the autopsy table.

He's kind of dried out here.

Pretty disgusting.

Something's happening.

In the storytelling here we were always conscious of

trying not to just have the show be people talking.

Wherever possible we wanted events, strange events,

and the more visual the better.

And so...

This is something that just happens with pictures.

Those were our favorite scenes, no dialog needed.

Moving pictures.

The X-Files was always noted

for its cinematic look and high production value.

But, it's an interesting exercise if you were to look at this DVD collection

and compare the set design, cinematography, shot composition,

and all those things, as excellent as they were,

from the very beginning of the series to where they were by the end of the series,

I think you'd see the show grew increasingly sophisticated.

It really never stopped becoming more and more sophisticated until the end.

One thing we did have to do, and seeing this episode again reminds me,

after the move to Los Angeles for financial reasons,

the FBI became a much more important location in our storytelling.

You saw a lot more of the hallways, beginning in Season 6,

than you ever did in the first five seasons of the show.

Now, this is referencing an episode from earlier

this nano-technology.

Just seeing his veins bulge on his neck like that was a vivid reminder.

Skinner was always the man in the middle.

And the fun of that character was finding ways to compromise him.

Finding ways to force him to go to the dark side,

which he had done in "Zero Sum, " earlier,

when he was being blackmailed by the Cigarette Smoking Man,

and now he's being manipulated by Krycek.

Of course, he'll have the last laugh on Krycek at the end of this season

when he gets to put a bullet through his head.

A lot of power in that prop.

This is something that you don 't often think about.

But when a series is on the air, as long as we were on the air,

that we were lucky enough to be on the air,

you get to know the people you work with really, really well.

And, the writers know the actors, the actors know each other.

And it leads to scenes that emerge out of those off-screen relationships.

And you play to the strengths

that you know exist between the actors as people.

And these two guys knew each other very well, by this point.

And so, we had a lot of fun playing them as combatants.

And they had a lot of fun doing it.

Mitch is such a big, strong guy.

The idea that that little remote control, TV remote control-type thing,

would have domination over him was interesting.

Creepy image.

Something's going on.

This next scene, we had to get a lot of pieces,

it was not easy to do,

but I was very happy with the way it came out.

It's kind of disturbing.

Good storytelling with pictures again.

If you think about it, this is awfully graphic.

I think you might even have a hard time

showing something like this in a PG movie in a movie theater.

Here 's that love triangle at work again.

The way Doggett reacts

when he sees Scully sitting by Mulder's bedside.

His heart's breaking for her.

Robert's eyes look tortured.

No, they don 't look tortured in real life, by the way, only as this character.

This is really interesting, too.

Here, Doggett, the poor guy,

is giving up his own best interests, staying on the X-Files

when he has no reason to do it other than his own conscience.

And she's telling him that he's doing it wrong,

he's doing it the wrong way.

Being on the X-Files means looking after the unknown, not turning away from it.

And his not wanting to exhume Mulder's body

was a big mistake.

Now, observe the way this is shot.

Naked man.

Very, very black body.

It's one of the peculiarities of standards and practices on network television,

is that you cannot show butt cracks.

Pardon my language, but you cannot show butt cracks.

Why? I don 't know.

But it became an issue two times, previous to this episode.

There was an episode called "Red Museum" in Season 2.

Of course the episode 's title is gonna go out of my head,

but the episode that Darren McGavin acted in, Vince Gilligan wrote.

Forgive me, it's not in my head at the moment.

Where Darren is supposed to have a butt crack showing as he leans down,

Eddie Van Blundht.

Can 't show butt cracks.

So, we had to digitally darken that part of Billy's body.

Of course, the fate of Billy is of urgent interest to us

because as goes Billy, so goes Mulder.

Now, he's telling us this story.

The aliens are good.

This was also part of what made Season 8

and Season 9 refreshing for us

was that Scully the skeptic was always Scully the scientist.

Scully arguing rationally why Mulder was wrong or didn’t make sense.

But not Agent Doggett.

Agent Doggett is former N YPD Blue.

Agent Doggett has common sense.

Agent Doggett is just like, "That's nonsense. "

And it was just refreshing and fun

and in a different way to play a skeptic character than we 'd done before.

Of course, Doggett is right to be skeptical of Billy Miles.

And Scully’s in an uncomfortable place.

It's not her inclination to sign into that kind of thing either.

Sign off on that kind of thing either.

But she would certainly like to believe what Billy Miles is saying, if she only could.

This does not bode well for Agent Mulder.

Here 's Skinner's predicament.

He 's had this secret connection with Krycek,

which of course, he can’t tell Scully about.

Meaning, "My own. "

There 's soap opera elements in these mythology episodes.

And as I'm, sort of, relaying all the relationships,

I’ve become, kind of, aware of that.

But you also get to play the ethical dilemmas,

moral dilemmas, that these characters face.

This is a wonderful actor, Judson Scott,

who we read many, many times over the years,

without finding the right part for him.

And I think we finally found it here.

With the risk of belaboring the point, a character like Doggett

was a freshening effect on the narrative for us.

Because we had lived with people talking about aliens

and alien conspiracy theories for all those years.

And now he comes in and he's hearing it all for the first time.

And he's even more no-nonsense and level-headed

than Scully is by this point.

And it does reinvent the idea of the show.

So now, Skinner has the moral dilemma,

wanting to save Mulder, wanting the vaccine that Krycek is dangling,

knowing there is a high price to pay.

There you go.

That's the high price.

That's a pretty tough choice.

Mulder or the child.

Again, that's the sort of moral-ethical dilemma I was alluding to

that you can develop through the soap opera of this kind of storyline

that we always search for.

Doggett, the cop's instincts,

putting it together. "Something's going on here. "

Storytelling with pictures.

So as I said, this episode was part of the new chapter

that had been opened in The X-Files after Season 7.

So, it was really the super-soldier storyline

or the alien-hybrid that Billy Miles has become.

The pod person.

And Scully’s baby, and what Scully’s baby meant.

Here was the first time where we really played

with, you know the meaning of Scully’s baby.

Krycek's insistence that she can’t bring it to term,

that it has to be terminated somehow.

It has some kind of cosmic significance, this baby.

And at this point, we’re also not sure

whether Mulder is the father of Scully’s child,

or whether it's some kind of other miraculous or alien conception.

One of the other things that the season did for us was that

it gave Skinner, in particular, a lot more to do.

When you have a two-lead series, which The X-Files was,

by necessity, you're giving a lion's share of the interesting dramatic conflicts

to those two leads.

When Mulder left at the end of Season 7,

we suddenly were able to play the ensemble

in a way that we never really could before.

Interestingly, David was always urging us to use the ensemble more

when he was on the show full-time.

But it wasn't easy to do.

We felt, as writers,

we wanted Mulder and Scully to be doing most of those actions.

So, I think in Seasons 8 and 9,

Skinner really got to step out behind the desk a lot more

and have a lot more active things to do

in The X-Files mythology.

This is a pretty exciting scene.

I can’t swear to it, but I think that was shot in a parking lot

at one of the Fox office buildings.

Again, to John Doggett, Alex Krycek is a new character.

Nasty, nasty man.

Toying With it like that.

There it goes.

Of course, when you're structuring these stories,

there 's something they call "rising action. "

And you're always trying

to ratchet up the dilemma, ratchet up the problem for your heroes.

So at this point, it seems hopeless.

The action has arisen because every problem is worse

and there seems to be no solution.

We wrestled with what role to give Scully in this.

There is a pretty wonderful but corny movie with Rock Hudson

directed by Douglas Sirk called Magnificent Obsession

where he blinds Jane Wyman

and actually goes and studies to be a doctor

so that he can cure her personally.

And that movie was on my mind, and not in a good way,

when we were imagining Scully in this operating room

where Mulder was being worked on.

This was a nice, sort of unexpected turn.

That by trying to do the right thing, Skinner inadvertently saved Mulder's life.

By trying to kill him, he accidentally saved him.

Those cell phones, like the autopsy I mentioned earlier,

we went through endless ways of playing cell phones

and dynamics with cell phones.

One of my favorites was way back in Season 3 in "731."

Mulder's with the bad guy in that train car,

and the phone rings and it's for him.

Doggett's won but he has lost.

He gets the moral victory of knowing he's stuck on the X-Files.

Those marks on Mulder's face are reminders of the terrible torture

that was done to him on the spaceship that we saw at the beginning of the season.

Been waiting a long time for this.

I spoke earlier, if you listened to the "End Game" commentary,

about how it's a writer's trick to play these hospital room scenes

and have the first line be a laugh line.

So I submit this as further evidence of that assertion.

This was also, sort of, the dilemma.

After all this time, and after the probability

that Mulder and Scully had consummated their relationship,

to continue teasing the famous sexual tension

instead of actually giving the audience romance was very difficult.

And so, just to be truthful storytellers, we had to surrender

some of that tension, favored over romantic feelings.

And here, as I was saying, the point of view is Doggett's.

We went back and forth about how to end this episode.

On Mulder and Scully in the hospital room or on Doggett in the hallway.

And you can see the decision we made.

Thank you very much for listening.