If you’ll allow a bit of a
poetic license:
In the beginning, there was
the X-Files. Then came Glen and James. And they brought forth monster of the
week. And they created the Lone Gunmen and Skinner and Margaret Scully. They
gave voice to the Smoking Man and menace to X. And it was great.
Then Glen and James said
unto to Chris: we want to create our own series. And Chris said, Yea, for he
now had Vince and Darin.
So Glen and James brought
forth Space: Above and Beyond and it was very good, but it was expensive and
the bean counters at Fox destroyed it. And Chris said unto his old friends,
please return to Ten-Thirteen.
And in their absence, The
X-Files fanbase had grown ten-fold. And Darin had utterly deconstructed the series
fourfold and many cried for more and bemoaned his departure. And the mythology
looked like it might make sense and then the black oil came, and it became
confusing. But few cared because the series had millions of viewers and had
been nominated for numerous awards and won many. The cult show was now a
masterpiece.
And Glen did look unto James
and say: “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
When Morgan & Wong came
back to Ten-Thirteen, they spent much of the next two years beginning to tear
down the foundation of the series that Chris Carter had built. They would also be part of Millennium, essentially
staff writers and would eventually take over as show-runners in that series
second season. There’s an argument that their work in both Season Four of the
X-Files and the second season of Millennium is of the same ilk: in both
cases, they are tearing down the foundation of the series that Carter had spent
so much time building.
It's not part of this
series, but it’s worth noting that in the case of Millennium they were
far more of a destructive force. The foundation of Season One – the most
consistent of the show’s three-year run – is that for all the horrors Frank
Black faces on the job, he is always able to return to the sanctuary of the ‘yellow
house’ where his faithful wife and six year old daughter live. However, in the odd Morgan & Wong script,
you can see them poking at this idea. In
an early episode, they showed the instability of a fellow profiler who ends up losing
himself in the job and losing his family as a result – something that happens to
Frank at the beginning of Season Two. In another episode, after Frank is in a
situation where he is on the verge of killing a man, Catherine assures him in
the final minutes that he is no more capable of hurting a monster than he is Catherine
or Jordan. In the second season premiere, when a man abducts Catherine, he ends
up beating her abductor to death.
Morgan & Wong’s acts of
deconstruction are not of the same type in the four scripts they ended up
writing during the X-Files fourth season. They don’t attack the foundation of the series
so much as they do the format. And nowhere is the more apparent in the first
episode they wrote: ‘Home.’
‘Home’ is the most infamous
episode of The X-Files which is interesting since its been seen far less
than any episode in the original run in syndication since its debut in October
of 1996. It was the first episode that
was aired with a ‘Parental Discretion Advised’ warning, which did nothing to
allay the outrage when it aired. Fox immediately took out of circulation and it
did not air again, even in syndication, until the fall of 1999. It was in
syndication for a while afterwards and (at least as far the network that airs
in concerned) has been removed from rotation. (I assume you can still find it
on streaming; it is available on both DVD and one of the original series of VHS
recordings that were released in the immediate aftermath of The X-Files success.)
What is perhaps the most
interesting thing about ‘Home’ in hindsight is that, in the strictest sense of
the word, it isn’t an X-File. It has
some of the most unforgettable monsters-of-the-week in the show’s run, but they
are still human beings. The Peacock family have lived in the outskirts of Home,
Pennsylvania for generations and the only reason Mulder and Scully are called
in to begin with is because a dead baby has been found on buried in the ground.
You can’t exactly pretend it
doesn’t deserve the reputation it has it is one of the bloodiest and goriest
episodes The X-Files would ever do. Once you see them, they will etch
themselves in your nightmares. (I acknowledge this is a masterpiece but it’s a very
hard one to rewatch.) The teaser involves a gory home birth in which we see the
umbilical cord of the child being clipped with pinking shears. The baby’s body
is found when a little leaguer digs in at the plate and uncovers a pool of
blood. The autopsy of the child shows some of the most horrific birth defects
imaginable. The climax of the episode reveals that one of the characters has
been living under the bed with even more hideous defects and is a quadruple
amputee.
And one of the most unforgettable
sequences in series history occurs when the Peacocks gets out of their car,
syphon gasoline with their mouths and begin to drive into down to the sound of
Johnny Mathis’ ‘Wonderful, Wonderful’.
We see an intercut between the road and Sheriff Taylor. (In a dark in joke,
the sheriff’s full name is Andy Taylor. However Tucker Smallwood – who had a
leading role on Space Above and Beyond is African-American.) When the
Peacocks arrive at the house, the sheriff tells his wife to ‘hide under the bed”
and he’s going for the gun. He never makes it as the Peacock brothers beat him
to death with clubs. This horrific sequence climaxed with the sheriff’s
terrified wife watching as her husband’s blood trickles towards her. She tries
to hold back a gasp but the Peacocks hear it and yank the bed away. The scene ends with her
screaming over the sounds of Mathis’ lyrics.
This was strong stuff for
viewers in 1996; I wonder now if even the viewer accustomed to Game of
Thrones and American Horror Story could handle it. Most of the gore
and violence those shows indulge in take place in a slightly difference
universe. ‘Home’ makes it very clear that this kind of ugliness is going on
right in small town America. The Peacock
family, you see, has been isolated from the rest of the world for decades.
Their house has no running water or electricity, they have an outhouse and they
don’t come into town that often. The deeper meaning about them comes clear when
the Sheriff says: “they breed their own stock, if you catch my meaning.” And in
the climax it becomes horribly clear to the viewer just how extensive that is.
Mulder and Scully spend the
entire episode dealing with the horrors they see and deflecting them with their
own versions of humor. Much of the discussion they have during the episode is either
reminiscence of childhood, having families or just how idyllic this town
is. This was derided at the time given
the darkness of this subject matter but you get the feeling their banter is
about trying to deal with a horror that can’t be explained away as the
traditional monster. ‘Home’ is an ugly episode, but it also looks back at the
world of isolated towns that even in the late 1990s was quickly
disappearing. And it does bring up the
question of what we consider home and what we would do to protect it. The last thing Taylor says before the attack that
will kill him is that he’s taking a look ‘before it all changes.’ He wants to
keep his standard of living the same – and so, in their twisted way, do the
Peacock family. In a sense, the darkest
part of this episode is not the murders that take place but both Taylor and the
Peacocks have completely lost their sense of what home means.
‘Home’ was the most extreme
example of how Morgan and Wong were going to tweak the format, but the three
episodes that followed were just as willing to twist it. For a long time, I
actually found their next episode ‘The Field Where I Died’ far harder to watch
then Home and in away, this episode is far more polarizing than Home is among
fans.
Ostensibly this episode is
about Mulder and Scully’s involvement when the FBI is called into prevent what
they assume is a cult massacre in Tennessee. When Mulder and Scully arrive they
have just prevented what was nearly a mass suicide and they are trying to find
a weapons cache to lock up the cult leader (played by the notorious Michael
Massee). That’s what the plot of the episode but you could be forgiven for
forgetting it.
The lion’s share of the
episode involves Mulder’s interactions with a woman named Melissa, one of the cult
leader’s wives. Melissa is played by Kristen Cloke. Like Smallwood (and indeed,
there was a guest star from Space Above and Beyond in every episode
Morgan and Wong wrote) Cloke had a
critical role on the previous series but her connection to Ten-Thirteen is
deeper. The next year, she had the critical role of Lara Means on the second
season of Millennium and later on she and Glen Morgan would get
married. This isn’t entirely favoritism:
Cloke is a gifted actress. That said, the performances that both she and David
Duchovny give in this episode has caused a lot of gnashing of teeth among fans
of the show.
An initial interview reveals
that Melissa seems to believe she as a Hassidic Jew named Sidney who lived into
the 1950s. Scully thinks it’s another personality; Mulder thinks it’s a past
life. As the episode unfolds Melissa goes
through hypnosis and believes herself as a Confederate nurse in the Civil War.
In a trance she leads Mulder and Scully into a field which was a battlefield
and tells Mulder that ‘this is the field where I saw you die.”
Mulder in an effort to prove
that Melissa is not deluded undergoes
hypnosis himself and remembers back to this past life as well as being a Jewish
man during the Holocaust. They have a
long conversation in which he keeps remembering that he and Melissa are always together
in their past lives as are the Smoking Man as a destructive force and Scully as
a friend.
Now when this episode aired,
understandably, the ‘shippers’ were outraged that Mulder and the guest star of
the week and soulmates and not the beloved Dana Scully. This was the least of
my problems with the episode then and for a good long time. Cloke and Duchovny give the kind of
performances that are either seen as great histrionics or incredible
over-acting; in trances they take on different voices and sometimes different
accents. Even the most generous
interpretation of their work says both actors are good but not nearly good
enough. For years, hearing Duchovny in this episode could see my teeth on edge
and it was one of the episodes at the bottom of the barrel.
The larger problem I have is
that Mulder and Melissa spend so much time dealing with past lives that the
viewer forgets the crisis that brought them here. The end of the episode is one
of the grimmest in series history – the FBI is standing over the bodies of the
mass suicide they were unable to prevent. But because we’ve spent so much time
away from it, the impact is minimalized. And it doesn’t help matters that given
the show’s already bad track record with voiceovers, that when Mulder reads a poem
by Robert Browning at the beginning and end of the show, we’re inclined to
dismiss as more of the purple prose Carter has given us (and will keep giving
us, unfortunately). I don’t hate this episode as much as I once did and you’ve
got to admire Morgan and Wong’s decision to complete throw caution to the wind
and say, “Mulder and Scully are not meant to end up together at the end of
this.” (Of course, the show never took that idea seriously.)
‘Musings of A Cigarette-Smoking
Man’ is one of the series great episodes. Morgan and Wong didn’t approach it
the same way they had any of their prior collaborations. Morgan is the sole
author of the script, while Wong makes his directorial debut. (He deservedly
received an Emmy nomination for it.)
In a way, this episode may be the most
subversive thing the X-Files ever tried. The adverts and the opening teaser make us
think we are going to learn the truth about the show’s most notorious villain –
and then tells us anything but that. It
unfolds in four acts.
In the first act, the young
smoking man is a man in the military in 1962 and a friend of William Mulder,
whose son has just said his first word. He goes into a meeting with shadowy
figures, who offer him a cigarette. “No thanks, never touch them,” he said. They
then ask him about his previous activities and he offers a series of non-denial
denials. (This scene is taken straight out of the opening of Apocalypse Now.)
He is called in to carry out the
assassination of “an American civilian, aged 46. Former PT-Boat Commander.
Married, father of two.” (We already know what’s coming because there are subtitles
for every act. Act 1 is: “Things really did go well in Dealey Plaza.”
The next scene takes place
in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and this man, calling himself Mr. Hunt has a meeting
with Lee Harvey Oswald about leaving ‘curtain rods on the second floor of the
Texas Book Depository.” (Oswald is played by Morgan Weisser another Space:
Above & Beyond veteran.) The assassination is carried out in a way
telegraphed far more like one we saw Oliver Stone do five years earlier in
JFK. Oswald learns of the
assassinations, kills a cop and is arrested in a movie theater where the smoking
man lights his first cigarette.
In this sequence, though we
don’t believe, the show takes itself seriously. I’m also inclined to believe in
the mood of the next one filmed entirely in black and white. The Smoking Man is writing a spy novel, and
while he finished it up he hears Martin Luther King giving a famous speech
warning against involvement in Vietnam. He hears and says: “No, no. Why’d you
have to say that?” He then has a conversation with J. Edgar Hoover, who is
clearly uncomfortable when he tells him he dropped the ball. He respects King, but the idea of convincing black
men not to fight in Vietnam will lead them to lose “and then the first domino
will have fallen.” There is discussion about discrediting him and the Smoking
Man the solution must be more final – something that Hoover and Tolson seem
uncomfortable with. They discuss having the killing in the South by a ‘cracker
patsy’ but the Smoking Man says he’ll do it himself. “I have too much respect
for the man.”
The scene unfolds
majestically as we see him meet with James Earl Ray, go to the sight in Memphis
where he has his last speech, and over the voiceover pulls the trigger on King.
Back in his apartment, he hears Robert F. Kennedy give another famous speech
and as he recites the words of Aeschylus, the Smoking Man mouths along. We know
in our hearts what’s coming next.
So far the episode has been
taking itself seriously. The rest of the way it is pure satire. The next
meeting takes place in Christmas in 1991 and a group of men are quietly
discussing every conspiracy theory you can imagine from the series (“the Rodney
King trial has been moved to Sarajevo) to the ridiculous (“What I don’t want to
see is the Bills winning the Super Bowl. As long as I’m alive that doesn’t
happen.) He dismisses Saddam Hussein’s phone calls, takes credit for the American
Ice Hockey gold in 1980 and witnesses news that Gorbachev has resigned, all
while fingering a nicotine patch and being shy about what he’ll do over the
holidays. That night, while working on another spy novel he gets a call from
Deep Throat (Jerry Hardin): “You’ll never guess what we got for Christmas.”
The conversation these two men,
who we know are knee deep in the mythology, is hysterical because they speak as
if aliens are a myth and they have not spent their lives covering it up. Their
alarm is based on having to kill this alien in order to ensure domestic
tranquility. The two men debate doing so: “I’m the liar. You’re the killer.”
Deep Throat says. “I’ve never killed anybody.” CSM recites. “Now who’s the liar?”
Deep Throat counters. The only reason we think this episode might have a grain
of truth is because of a monologue that Deep Throat gave of being one of only
three living men to kill an extra-terrestrial.
However, given everything else.
The final act involves the
Pilot and Mulder’s first meeting with Scully where CSM listens in, implying the
X-Files is bugged. But there’s another scene in which it seems the Smoking Man
has finally gotten one of his novels published after decades of frustration.
There’s a childish delight in William B. Davis’s voice when he accepts and dashed
off his resignation later as well as horrible gloom when he sees the first
chapter in a magazine. “This isn’t the ending I wrote. It’s all wrong.” I won’t
reveal his final reaction and what he says afterwards because it needs to be
heard and seen.
What’s hysterical about the
episode that even though it’s made clear in the last moments that all of this
based on a story that Frohike read that ‘rang some bells’, so many fans were sure
it was gospel. Hell, I thought it myself for a long time after seeing this
episode. Indeed Morgan and Wong couldn’t agree on which parts of the story were
real, something that deeply frustrated Davis during the process. And that helps with the mood. In a sense, I
don’t think anything we see in ‘Musings’ is true. In another, everything is. We
know just watching the episode that some of the dates don’t line up with the
flashbacks we’ve seen in some of the mytharc.
But what matters is the mood. It's highly unlikely that the Smoking Man
did any single one of the things we see him do in this episode. But you could
see him, Zelig like, being in the room when all of them happened. This episode doesn’t deconstruct the
character of the Smoking Man because there isn’t a character to study. And it
also argues, perhaps in the clearest sense, that the show’s catchphrase – the truth
is out there – may be fundamentally a lie.
There’s a part of me that truly believes none
of the episode took place because so much of it seems to be the trappings of
the conspiracy ridden mind of the X-Files fan. (Hell, his cigarette lighter has
‘Trust No One’ on it! You really think
he’d be dumb enough something like that?) But it is a riot to watch from start
to finish.
The fourth and final episode
Morgan & Wong wrote is as controversial as the other three. ‘Never Again’
has been argued about since it first aired. It was originally scheduled to air
before ‘Leonard Betts’ , the episode in which we learned Scully had cancer. Instead it aired the week after. For the last quarter of a century, fans have
been eternally divided as to whether Scully’s behavior in this episode is
because of her recent diagnosis or has nothing to do with it. I’ve leaned in both
directions, but I think the main reason people want to believe (heh heh) in the
former is because it would explain to them why Scully acts in such a reckless
fashion in this episode. In their minds, it would no doubt justify the fact
that so much of what we see in ‘Never Again’ tears deeply at the foundation of
the show we’ve been watching.
The episode shows Scully listening
to a conversation between Mulder and a Russian informant with a bored
expression on her face. We never see either of them as Scully wanders off and
picks up a rose petal that has been left near the Vietnam War Memorial.
In the next sequence with
them, Mulder is manic because he’s about to go on a vacation he doesn’t want to
go on. His attitude in this entire episode is really horrible. One reviewer
says that they don’t think they’d ever hated Mulder so much as they do in Never
Again, and there’s a reason to feel that way. Mulder has acted childish,
reckless and usually with no concern for his partner so many times over the
years; as this reviewer reminds us, Scully is the grownup in this relationship.
But at least most of the time he treats his partner with respect. Here he is callous and bullying, utterly
dismissive of her needs, and mocking some of her own problems. He mocks her for
ditching him at the meeting, dismisses her idea that the informant is relating
a plot from Rocky and Bullwinkle and basically orders her to follow up on
something.
Scully spends much of the
episode in a state where she seems to be drifting which leads her to interact
with the first man who thinks she cute. It may be the first time in a long time
she’s allowed herself to interact with a man socially. Unfortunately, it’s the worst
man possible.
Ed Jerse (Rodney Rowland,
who starred on you know what) just got through an ugly divorce and in the drunken
aftermath gets a tattoo with a girl that says Never Again on it. That tattoo begins
talking to him in the voice of Jodie Foster. We hear eventually that there’s something in
the dye of the tattoo that causes some kind of mental poisoning but we also
learn Jerse didn’t have enough of it in his system to affect him. It’s just as
likely the divorce has led him to indulge in his toxic masculinity impulses,
which by the time he meets Scully have already led him to kill his upstairs
neighbor.
It is the fact that Scully
is herself in drift that she allows herself to go on a date with him, get a tattoo
of her own, and go back to his apartment. (We never learn if they have sex, but
it’s implied.) In the aftermath, Scully learns both about the tattoo’s effects
and Jerse’s murder and when Jerse realizes it, he nearly kills Scully.
Yet even this behavior pales
in comparison to the final five minutes which somehow are worse. Mulder opens
it by saying: “Congratulations on your second appearance in The X-Files. A
record.” The moment he does this, the gap between them seems almost
irreparable. Mulder tries to make everything that happened all about him, and
Scully who is still adrift says: “Not everything is about you, Mulder. This is
my life.” Mulder answers: “Yes, but its…” He trails off.
The last moment of the
episode is one of the most unsettling The X-Files would ever do, not
because its terrifying but because the two leads of our series just sit there
unable to say anything. There’s a gulf between them, a few feet on the screen,
miles in real life. The viewer knows
they’ll move on – this is 1990s TV after all – but Morgan and Wong make it very
clear in this scene that in a way, these two allies are human and capable of being
awful to each other, recklessly stupid and sometimes feel trapped by their partnership.
In their last script for The X-Files during its original run, Morgan
& Wong question whether the key relationship we’ve spent four years loving is
as perfect as network TV demands. That’s pretty radical.
Though they stayed on for
the rest of the year, Morgan and Wong never wrote another script during the
season. They left the show to take over Millennium from Chris Carter in
Season Two (I wrote an earlier article on the series if you’d like to know what
they did when they were in charge) then left the show after it was renewed for
Season Three. In TV the two were connected with The Others and Final
Destination series, The One and the remake of Willard in
film.
Final Destination 3 was
the last project they worked on together as a team, though both men have been
active in film and TV, though too far less success. Morgan’s work included the
remake of Bionic Woman, which may have been a victim of the 2007 writers
strike, The River which died quickly in 2014 and two different projects
in 2014 Those Who Kill and Intruders (the latter connected with
BBC America is most notable for a performance by Millie Bobby Brown before she
became Eleven). He wrote several episodes for the Jordan Peele version of The
Twilight Zone and the horror anthology Lore for Amazon. James Wong’s track record is similarly hit or
miss. He was a producer and writer on the NBC series The Event and has
written episodes for American Horror Story (fourteen episodes over eight
years). He also consulted on the Fox Show Next which had the misfortune
of airing during the pandemic.
When The X-Files returned in 2016 and
again 2018, both Morgan and Wong wrote scripts for the show on their own, each
of which they directed. Morgan’s wife Kristin Cloke has since become a writer
herself, writing a script for the eleventh season of The X-Files. The
two collaborated on a script for Almost Paradise, a series currently
airing on Freevee. James Wong also wrote an episode.
I might eventually deal with
the scripts that Morgan and Wong individually wrote for the revival of the
series but that will wait for a separate article. What can not be questioned is
that, as collaborators, the two men did more than anyone – perhaps more than Carter
himself – to put The X-Files on the map and on their return, showed that
the show could not rest on its laurels. They are the originators of The Lone
Gunmen, Walter Skinner, X and gave the Smoking Man his voice as well as some of
William B. Davis’s finest moments. It is
possible The X-Files could have existed without them,. It’s impossible
to imagine it becoming the success it was without them being there at the
start.
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