X-Files 30th Anniversary EPISODE Retrospective: Humbug

 

 

It’s no longer thirty years since one of the greatest series of all time debuted on Fox. But it has been 30 years since some of the greatest episodes in series history aired.

What follows is a new series looking at some of the greatest episodes in the history of the X-Files commemorating the 30^th anniversary of when the show was at its absolute creative peak. We’ll also commemorate some episodes where some notable figures in TV history made their official debut in the writer’s room.

 

‘Humbug’

30 Years Ago, Darin Morgan Took Us to The Circus

And Changed The Series Forever

 

It’s almost impossible to believe today but the second season of The X-Files wasn’t a sure thing as the first season ended. The show’s reviews were good but not ecstatic the way that they were for such phenomena as the other iconic series that debuted that year NYPD Blue or the comedy giant Frasier. And the ratings for the first season were very low to the point that had it aired on any network but Fox – which was less than five years old at the time and still struggling for respectability – it almost certainly would have been cancelled by the middle of the season. As it was Chris Carter wasn’t certain the show would get a renewal and wrote The Erlenmeyer Flask as a potential series finale as much as anything else. Carter hadn’t even expected it to run that long; science fiction on 1990s TV was basically the world of Star Trek and that was in syndication.

When it was renewed in Season 2 the series had an outside factor to deal with: Gillian Anderson’s pregnancy. As I have written in my articles on Duane Barry and One Breath, the decision to keep Scully in the series but have an explanation for her absence that was essential to the show going forward was almost certainly the element that helped turned the show from a cult sensation to a ratings and critical hit.

The awards also started to rack up by the end of 1994. The X-Files was nominated for Best Drama by the Golden Globes with no other nominations. The assumption was the winner would be ER, which had become a critical and ratings phenomenon from its premiere that September or Picket Fences which had won its second consecutive Emmy for Best Drama. But the winner turned out to be The X-Files for the first of the three times. At the end of the year Carter would receive an Edgar nomination for ‘The Erlenmeyer Flask. It would be nominated for awards from the Saturn Awards, winning Best Genre TV that year, sci-fi magazines (remember the 1990s?)and the TV Critics Association. That year the show was nominated for Best Drama for the first of four consecutive years by the Emmys, though it would never win the top prize.

During the second season the series began what was fundamentally its creative peak which involved some of the most brilliant monsters of the week to date, beginning to form its mythology whether it was Scully’s abduction or the arrival of what would be known as the Alien Bounty Hunter. But an argument can be made that was the clearest step towards The X-Files long term success was an episode that debuted thirty years ago this month. And what may be the most remarkable thing is how close it came to not happening at all.

Frank Spotnitz joined the writing staff of The X-Files along with Darin Morgan during the second season. Morgan had arrived a few weeks before Spotnitz (as I reported in one of my first articles his brother Glen was responsible for getting him the job) Here’s how Spotnitiz remembers him during his first weeks:

“He had a very dry sense of humor, and we’d go to lunch every day, but he never went to the writer’s room, he didn’t really work on the other episodes. He was always in his office, which was right next to mine. I wrote my first episode (End Game) which got produced and I was working on my second episode and {I was like}, “What’s Darin doing? Nobody knew what Darin was doing.

And finally, one week I notice Darin is not going home; I leave in the evening, I come back in the morning and he’s still there – he has not left. And after the end of the week, he announced he’s finished the script, and my curiosity was enormous. So he hands it to me, and the first line is – I can’t remember what it was, but it was a very obvious cliché. I just felt my heart sinking, thinking Oh, my God this is going to be dreadful.’ And of course, I kept reading, and it was brilliant. It was so beautifully constructed and so moving and funny and profound and just fantastic. Everyone had the same reaction I did…However that didn’t mean they wanted to produce it.”

There was an excellent reason for this. To this point in the show’s run The X-Files had never done a comedy. There had been some attempts at poking fun at the show’s structure before, most notably in that seasons Die Hand Die Verletzt, the final script by Glen Morgan and James Wong before they left the series for the first time. But those episodes had always had a suspenseful or dark undertone. Darin wasn’t even pretending that Humbug his first script was anything but a comedy. And not just a comedy but one that was poking fun at all of the mores that Chris Carter and his co-writers had spent the last year and a half establishing.

As Carter puts it:

“’Humbug came out of left field, and it was something the networks and the studio were terrified of. I remember at the script level they didn’t quite understand what we were doing.” Spotnitz adds that the studio executives all but ordered Carter not to produce it saying: ‘People will no longer believe in your creation, they’ll think you’re making fun of it. (To be fair, Morgan kind of was.) Carter considered taking their advice but then changed his mind, saying it was just too good not to produce.

And they were helped by having one of the best creative hands in the history of The X-Files at the helm, though he didn’t have much more experience than Darin Morgan on the show either. Kim Manners would soon become one of the most brilliant directors in the history of The X-Files but to that point he had only directed one episode in the series so far. The combination of a relatively novice director and the first teleplay from a writer of any kind could have led to a disastrous episode. Indeed the network insisted on it being tested first, something Carter pushed back on.

And it worked. ‘Humbug’ instantly became one of the most popular episodes The X-Files had ever done; one that allowed for the series to stretch its subject in a way the series hadn’t before.

The tone for Humbug is set almost at the start. We see a bunch of kids in a wading pool in what we are told is Gainesville Florida. It’s clear someone is watching them, and even by this point in the series we think we know what’s coming. Soon we see that the man stalking the kids has scales, is grunting and looks like the scariest monster we’ve seen to date so far. Then he runs up to the pool…

…and the kids scream: “Daddy!” He tells his young boys that they have to go to bed before their mother gets mad. Then he stays behind to swim in the pool. He’s perfectly happy. Then we hear rustling in the bushes. The creature looks around: “What the hell?” he says before we hear a bunch of screaming. We then cut to a sign showing that this is the home of the Alligator Man.

Then Mulder meets with Scully and shows her a picture of the victim who was suffering from ichthyosis. He is the latest in a series of more than fifty murders in every state of the Union, of all races and both genders. There’s no clear pattern to the killers, no clear sign of escape, nothing but the savagery of the murders. After several moments expounding Mulder asks Scully for her thoughts: “Imagine going your whole life looking like this.”

The next segment cuts to the funeral. We hear a priest reciting the 23^rd psalm and we see Mulder and Scully sitting among the strangest group of mourners which include the bearding lady, a midget, a giant and when the priest finishes the verse, we see he has no arms and turns the pages with his feet. At the climax of the sermon, the coffin starts shaking and everybody rushes to move the casket to see a man come out from under the ground.

“Not having known the deceased I’m in no position to give a proper eulogy. I’m sure he was a nice guy, etc., etc. However out of respect, I am in a  position to pay homage to him. Namely by nailing this stainless steel spike right through my chest!” Which he does. “I think I hit my left ventricle.” Everybody is outraged, they drag him off and Mulder and Scully are left behind. Mulder turns to Scully. “Can’t wait for the wake,” he says simply.

And at this point, as one episode guide says, you can almost see the show winking at us: “Don’t worry. We’ll get back to the typical monsters next week.”

‘Humbug’ takes place in a town that was founded by Barnum and is mostly inhabited by retired sideshow and circus acts. There were still a few in existence in the 1990s and the show has two of the major performers of that era Jim Rose and the Enigma play versions of themselves. Rose plays Dr. Blockhead “body manipulator’ and the Enigma plays the Conundrum who as we are told ‘in the classical sense is a geek.’ Scully spends the episode assuming that years of being considered outcasts by society might lead them to become serial killers, something the local sheriff takes offense too. “These are very special people.” And Mulder considers the possibility that the killer might be a bit of hokum called the Fee Jee Mermaid. When the Sheriff asks about this Scully says: “You remember what Barnum said about suckers?”

Humbug is, as has been pointed out, possibly Morgan’s weakest script of the four he wrote for the series during its original run and the six he wrote for Ten-Thirteen during the bulk of his career. (That career was from 1995 to 1998 as I’ve mentioned before.) And there’s an argument for that: the pacing isn’t as good as some of Morgan’s other works and there is so many sidetracks into sideshow lore that have no connection with the story that clearly show a writer who’s only doing his first script. But it speaks to Morgan’s genius as a writer that the episode that would earn him a nomination for an Edgar the following year and was nominated for sound mixing and other technical awards that a landmark episode is considered ‘weak’. This is a show where Morgan decides to demonstrate every aspect of what made him one of the greatest writers in television history both in terms of dark humor and in a sense deep melancholy.

Morgan’s comedy, it’s worth noting, comes from a very dark place: an obsession with the idea that every single one of us will die alone. This is first made clear in a scene with a proprietor of a museum with circus lore that Scully visits. She has a conversation with the proprietor (Alex Daiken) who is clearly hideously disfigured but who Manners only shows that partially through reflection on glass surfaces. They discuss the death of Chang and Eng, the conjoined Siamese twins. Eng woke up to find out that Chang had died in his sleep, forced to deal with the fact that he was going to join his brother in death very soon. Finally he died of fright. Morgan is obsessed with the idea of our utter insignificance in the face of the cosmos, something that later title characters such as Clyde Bruckman can never get over and Jose Chung will hauntingly write about. (I’ve dealt with these episodes before; I’ll do it again.)

Morgan also has an obsession with weird arcana. In later episodes this will take the form of how he names his characters; in Humbug it involves circus folk who he has enormous respect for and who, being the kind of people Mulder and Scully chase down on a weekly basis, he pokes fun at how they view them.

This comes clear in the scene where Mulder and Scully check into a motel run by a dwarf. Mulder asks: “Have you done much circus work in your time?” Mr. Nutt (Michael J. Anderson) says scoffingly: “And what makes you think I’ve ever bought a ticket for the circus, much less work at the so-called big top?” Mulder tries to backtrack saying based on his height. Nutt says:

“Well, why should I take offense? Just because it’s human nature to make assumptions about people purely on the basis of their physical appearance? Why I’ve done the same thing to you. I’ve taken in your all-American features, your dour demeanor, your unimaginative necktie design (Mulder looks down) and concluded that you work for the government…an FBI agent. But you see the tragedy? I have unconsciously reduced you to a stereotype, instead of regarding you as a specific, unique individual.”

Mulder then meekly says: “But I am an FBI agent.”

That’s Morgan’s best trick: he loves to make fun of The X-Files. Now it’s clear he doesn’t hate The X-Files or think its beneath him. He just thinks there are stupid things about the show and he never tires of pointing them out. Morgan, as I said in my first article about him, was a meta writer before the term ever existed but its rare to find someone who’s ever done it this well since. (Joss Whedon is probably the closest example.) A lot of it comes at tearing down David Duchovny as Mulder. The best occasion comes at the end of the episode when Dr. Blockhead, talking about how genetic engineering will erase all imperfection says: “You see I’ve seen the future and the future looks like him.”

Cut to David Duchovny in an ‘inconspicuous’ heroic pose. Blockhead, sadly: “Imagine going through your whole like looking like that.” Like everything else in Humbug this is a gentle poke; by the time Morgan writes his final episode for the show Mulder will have been described by other observers as being a ‘mandroid’ because his face is so blank and expressionless and a ‘ticking time bomb of insanity with events having so warped his psyche’.

In what is his biggest rip at the format Scully is the one who manages to crack the case after Mulder makes so many bungled attempts. Throughout the episode we’ve had encounters with Lanny (Vincent Schiavelli), a sad sack who has a conjoined twin kept inside a small sack around his abdomen. In one of the best visual gags, Lanny knocks on the door of Scully’s  motel in the morning and both of them are in robes. Scully tries to sneak a peak and Lanny’s twin; Lanny tries to sneak a peak at Scully’s cleavage. Both are embarrassed to be found out. The killer is found out to be Leonard, who can detach from Lanny. Lanny insists he’s not malicious – he just resents Lanny for being the one who has to take care of him the one who’s kept him from freedom. He’s not trying to kill anyone; he just wants to think a new twin, a new caretaker. It’s a painful and poignant moment, so naturally when Dr. Blockhead learns of it he reacts: “What a great trick!”

It's a dark and despairing moment; one we’re distracted by when the twin runs away into a funhouse. As always Mulder and Scully do nothing to stop the killing and its ended by an outside factor that none of them are aware of. I won’t reveal how Leonard’s murder spree comes to an end. I’ll just say this: for the entire episode the Conundrum has done nothing but eat raw fish, baskets of crickets and never said a word. When he and Dr. Blockhead leave (Blockhead is sure that the twin is still running around) the Conundrum says his first and only line of dialogue. It’s a line that, in my opinion, ranks with the final line of Some Like It Hot  as one of the greatest closing lines in history. And I wouldn’t dream of giving it away.

Morgan had opened a brand new genre of episodes for The X-Files to tap into though critically no one but Morgan really tried to do it during his tenure on the show. (Chris Carter tried in Syzygy during Season 3 which I have a high opinion of but a mixed one by the fans.) It wasn’t until Vince Gilligan was comfortable enough in his tenure on the show during Season 4 that he began to take on a similar iconoclastic view of the show that would lead to similar comic genius. Gilligan, as I’ve written before, was just as meta as Morgan could be about The X-Files but not only was he gentler his more optimistic nature (on The X-Files, literally nothing else he did since) he tended to take a better view of humanity then Morgan did in his comedy.

At a certain point the lighter touch may have become overkill: when The X-Files moved from Vancouver to Hollywood in 1998, the series would spent so much time dealing with light-hearted episodes that many fans thought the writers had lost touch with what the show had once been. It didn’t help that so many of them were clearly trying to be funny as opposed to Morgan’s work, which was funny without seeming to be trying. But the fact is without Darin Morgan and the masterpiece that Humbug was The X-Files very likely would not have become the classic it was. Not bad for the first time effort.