Howard Gordon & Vince Gilligan on The X-Files, Part 1: How The X-Files Helped Make Howard Gordon A Great Writer – Very Slowly (2700th Article)

 

If a time traveler was going to go back to 2002 from twenty years in the future (something an X-File fan would have no problem going with) and told one of those fans that in twenty years' Vince Gilligan was going to be the creative force behind two of the greatest shows of all time, none of us would have been shocked one bit. We might have been slightly surprised that he had done so with some of the darkest dramas in television history and the details would have been odd to the fan but we wouldn't have been shocked. Well before the show was over everyone who'd seen his work knew that Vince Gilligan was arguably the greatest writer the series had ever produced and the ones who didn't would have been arguing for Darin Morgan, which no Gilligan fan would have fought.

However if a time traveler had come back to 1997 from fifteen years in the future and told us that by that point Howard Gordon would have been part of two series that had won Best Drama I'm pretty sure all of them, including me, would have summons our inner Scully and asked us to pull the other one. Because not even Howard Gordon ever thought he was the best writer on The X-Files.

This is something he's been very public about. When he was interviewed by Alan Sepinwall he talked about his tenure very frankly. He said when it came to writers like Glen Morgan & James Wong (who I've written about before) he admired their work and figured out how he could 'reverse engineer it to come up with a story of his own'. When it came to Gilligan and Morgan he knew he was outclassed and was in awe of their genius. That interview took place in 2012 when Gordon had already won his first Emmy for 24 and the one for Homeland was just a few months in the future.

This may seem like I'm saying Gordon was a hack at the time he wrote for The X-Files. He wasn't. There have been worse writers during the series long tenure (I'm not going to mention them here, fans know who they are) and while Gordon did write some bad episodes in the series early going he rarely wrote absolute stinkers.  It's mainly a case that there were a lot of great writers working on The X-Files during the four seasons he was on the staff, hitting it out of the park on every script or almost every script they wrote.  Gordon's episodes were good – and to be clear some of them were absolute classics -  but speaking as someone's whose rewatched the show multiple times over the years he doesn't have as many masterpieces as Gilligan and Morgan did during that seem period.  All of four Morgan's episodes are absolute masterpieces and even though Gilligan had only written five scripts on his own by the time Gordon left in 1997 three of them are among the greatest in the show's history.

And as someone who wrote more scripts, either in collaboration or on his own then Glen Morgan and James Wong did during their two separate tenures on the series it's not even a close question. Morgan & Wong did more than anyone to make the show a breakout hit during its first two seasons then even Chris Carter himself and three of the scripts they wrote when they came back in Season 4 are utter masterpieces. Gordon just doesn't have that same track record and I suspect he himself would admit it.

But in retrospect it looks like Gordon may have been figuring out during his tenure certain things that none of his colleagues ever got a chance to really doing that period. Unlike all of these writers Gordon, whether working with his colleague Alex Gansa, with Carter or on his own, actually wrote far more scripts that were either foundational to the mythology or about government conspiracies, if not exactly connected to the alien mythos. Many of his scripts involve the military in ways far more direct then even Carter himself was willing to go at this point in his writing and indeed years later. Carter was always about the idea of a shadow government, with men in dark suits giving vague orders. Gordon, by contrast, was all about the military and just as often the human repercussions played out by those who have to live with the consequences.

And anyone who has watched and loved 24 and Homeland knows that these shows have a far more direct link to The X-Files that Gilligan's (at least until recently). 'Trust no one' could just as easily serve as mantras for Jack Bauer and Carrie Matheson then they did for Mulder and Scully.  Both series deal extensively with moles in the government who are willing to sell out their country for profit or political advantage. They feature men and women who are working along side our heroes day in and day out and it is only when horrible things begin to happen that people like Jack and Carrie realize they never knew them at all. Both of them are more loyal to their country and government than Mulder it is – for him it's just a means to the truth -  but even before we meet any of them in the Pilot of the series they are very aware of the kinds of horrible things their government and military are capable of, in large part because they've done it themselves.

Gordon is also very interested in the wreckage these actions, done in the guise of patriotism, leave behind. And I think the best way to illustrate how Gordon learned his craft is to look at one script from each season he worked on The X-Files that deals with both the evils of the government and the carnage it leaves in its wake. Three of them are among the best episodes of the early years, one is a mediocrity but all of them serve that larger theme to the point that we can see Gordon becoming the kind of man who has greatness in TV not long after he leaves The X-Files.

In Season One understandably not even Chris Carter had a clear idea about what the mythology was going to look like. This is understandable considering no one thought the show was going to survive the first season. So throughout you can see the writers trying to come up with versions that work. 'Fallen Angel' is Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa's first attempt at it and they come out swinging in what is without question their best effort of Season One.

The title reference is a military code to an alien craft used by one of the military officers in charge. Critically we never get a real look at the pilot of the craft and there's no clear link to any of the aliens we'll see later on. That's not a flaw of the episode as Gordon (with Gansa's help) is not interested in aliens but how the military reacts both in terms of the coverup and the collateral damage. This episode is the first time we get a real look as to just how far the government is willing to go to keeps its secret and how the lost of human life is irrelevant in terms of the bigger picture.

This is seen the teaser which takes place in an air force base where a controller points out what is clearly a foreign craft and is told in no uncertain terms that what she is seeing is a weather balloon. When she protests she's told not to defy her superiors. The General then tells his superiors about the alien craft and that they have to send a salvage team. Mulder is informed by Deep Throat (Jerry Hardin) about the crash and that he has only twenty-four hours before the military has covered his tracks.

This episode demonstrates more than any to this point not only how reckless Mulder is but how little he cares for procedure. He's immediately captured and thrown into the stockade and when Scully comes to bail him out she tells him that a Section Chief has convened a disciplinary hearing and that if Mulder isn't there on time to defend himself he will likely be thrown out of the bureau.

A viewer in 1993 would have instinctually known that Mulder's job at the Bureau was safe: that's how TV worked. But its still striking to see how little Mulder genuinely seems to care about his job r even Scully's during the episode. He's already in trouble and staying on the scene can only make things worse for him, yet he spends the entire episode flaunting authority and essentially dragging Scully along for the ride. Viewers might have turned against him were it not for the fact that Gordon and Gansa make it very clear that Mulder's not wrong.

Early in the episode a strike team goes after the alien no doubt completely unprepared. They are attacked with some kind of unknown weapon and they end up at a hospital, suffering from fifth and sixth degree burns. Most of them die on the scene and we see just how little the military cares. They lie to the families of the deceased and tell the doctor who is treating them that he can never tell what they are doing and threaten him when he asks to learn how they got this way, By the end of the episode at least a dozen soldiers have died and both the military and the FBI are far more concerned with punishing Mulder for speaking out about it then all of the loss of life.

During this episode we also see our first living reflection of that damage, Max Fenig (Scott Bellis). Max is a slightly problematic character because he's clearly a conspiracy nut but the show argues that he's harmless rather than a problem.  Mulder meets him in the stockade and Max becomes a focus of the episode. The show makes it very clear that Max is the other side of the coin from Mulder in terms of his beliefs and determination to get to the truth. That's why he (and the viewer) connect with him. Mulder eventually realizes that Max is an alien abductee and has experienced this multiple times. He then realizes Max has been drawn to this site by the aliens and that their purpose is to take him.

At the climax of the episode we see Max being held in a tractor beam and disappear. The official story is that he shows up dead in the wreckage but Mulder doesn't believe it. (He's right as we'll see in a later story) When he angrily confronts his superiors you can tell that Mulder really doesn't care if he keeps his job or not.

The episode ends with Mulder being saved when someone goes over McGrath's head – Deep Throat.  The viewer is inclined to argue that this is an act of his informant trying to save him. But it's just as likely that Deep Throat is doing so to keep himself safe or perhaps doesn't even have the best intention. When he says: "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," we have reason to wonder: Is Deep Throat using Mulder as a means to an end himself? Later episodes will reveal Deep Throat had connections to the conspiracy himself and by the end of the second season it will be clear that Mulder's father was connected to it. (That's true whoever you think Mulder's real father was.) Looking back this may be the first time that Mulder might be more important to the conspiracy then you think.

Gordon's first solo script in Season 2 is also one of his best in his entire tenure. 'Sleepless' has no direct connection to the mytharc but its about as close as you can get. It deals with a government conspiracy and shows how the shadow government reaches everything. It's also the very first story to deal with the Vietnam War and considering that is where so much of our conspiracy culture begins we're honestly surprised it took until Season 2 to go at directly. It's even more related to the military then Gordon's previous script and is one of two episodes that deals with the rank and file soldiers. And we also our introduced to two characters who will be vital to the show going forward.

The story itself is a fascinating one. In it we meet a man who seems capable of killing men in impossible ways – the first victim believes his apartment has caught on fire and suffers immense burns even though there is no fire to be found, the second apparently is killed by a firing squad but no bullets are in the body. By the time of the second killing we know who the 'monster' is – and he's arguably the most sympathetic we've met to date: Augustus Cole.

Cole is played by Tony Todd who at that point in his career was not yet the horror film icon he would become in the Candyman and Final Destination franchises. Viewers who know him from those films would be stunned by his work here. Cole is the victim of a series of government experiments done during the Vietnam War which led to soldiers being able to function completely without sleep.  Most of them ended up dying but Cole we will eventually learn hasn't slept in twenty-four years.  He's clearly seeking justice as the murders he commits are done solely to kill the doctors who did the procedures that rendered him and his fellow brothers-in-arms this way.

This story demonstrates what was already becoming a familiar model for Gordon: the supernatural revenge storyline. To be fair even by this point in the series multiple writers had gone to this format: depending on your point of view there were at least four stories like this in the first season. But it takes on a different approach when it comes to Vietnam where no one can argue how badly we failed our troops during that war and in the aftermath. In that sense Cole's final act of revenge, when he summons the ghosts of every former member of his platoon to take a knife to the doctor whose brought the horrors on them is haunted and sympathetic. The fact that we've seen him kill one of those men makes all the more memorable.

In the final sequence by the time Mulder tracks Cole down there's a certain ambiguity to his final fate. (I'll get to that in a minute.) There's no doubt the government wants to shut Cole up so that he can never tell the truth about what happened. But one can't rule out the possibility that Cole wants release from all the horrors he's seen and this is the only way to get it. The term 'suicide by cop' was not part of the lexicon in 1994 but Cole's final words almost sound like he's giving a blessing to the people who killed him.

Now as to those two characters I mentioned. The first is Mulder's new informant who we heard on the phone two episodes ago but didn't see: X played memorably by Steven Williams. X is responsible for Mulder learning of the case in the first place and goes out of his way to guide him and Scully to get the information they need. But when the two of them finally meet, there's a clear difference in tone between him and Mulder's previous informant Deep Throat.

X clearly knew Deep Throat and its implied he's carrying on his work by assisting Mulder. But whereas Jerry Hardin always had an almost avuncular attitude towards Mulder even when he misled him Williams makes it very clear from the start that he doesn't want to do this job and is only doing so out of loyalty to 'my predecessor.'  When he informs Mulder of the experiments that were done on these soldiers he does so with a sense of menace and only gives so much before he leaves. Mulder doesn't seem clear of the rules and X makes it very clear: "The truth is still out there but it's never been more dangerous." Many of the characters on The X-Files will be forced to deliver ridiculous purple prose. X is one of the only ones who always talks bluntly with a threat of violence in his words – and as we shall see he is more than willing toc carry it out.

The other characters of significance is Alex Krycek. In his first appearance as the character who would fondly be nicknamed 'Ratboy' by fans of the show Nicholas Lea does everything he can to make Krycek seem like a fresh-faced rookie. He seems nervous meeting Mulder, is pissed when Mulder does his landmark 'ditch' and tries to act like he has some respect for him. During this period Mulder and Scully have been reassigned and Mulder is now working with a partner. Lea does much to make us seem to trust him.

So when the episode ends with Krycek killing Cole Lea has done a good enough job to make us think that maybe he was fooled by Cole. Cole has the power to make men hallucinate and we see a gun before we realize its his Bible. That's thrown into question in the chilling final scene when we see Krycek reporting to the Smoking Man. He makes it clear that despite their separation Mulder and Scully were closer than ever. The Smoking Man has the final word: "Every problem has a solution." Considering immediately after this Scully is abducted by Duane Barry the implication would seem to be clear – although keeping with the series we never know for sure.

In Wanting To Believe  Robert Shearman argues that the episode reveals Krycek's treachery to early. "Nicholas Lea is so convincing as a junior agent keen to impress Mulder and run around in his mentor's shadow, that you just can't help but wish there was more time to see the two of them in action. And to wonder what greater impact Krycek's treachery might be if he built up greater trust in the audience."  He has a point. If we hadn't seen this last scene then Krycek's first overt act of violence – when he kills the cable car operation in Ascension – would have been far more shocking. We'd have believed that Mulder had an ally to help him and the impact of Krycek's betrayal in that episode would have hit both him and the audience simultaneously and been all the more powerful.

But there's an argument that if the series didn't necessarily learn that lesson Gordon himself did and would use it later shows. By the time he and Gansa moved to 24 in seven years they would do a much better job at hiding moles in CTU and building up the trust in the viewer and Jack to perfection so that when the betrayal came it had this impact. And by the time they created Homeland they had it down to an artform.

While he wrote better solo scripts in Season 3 the most significant one to Gordon's career was a collaboration he did with Carter and Frank Spotnitz: 'Nisei'.  Combined with the follow-up '731' this is arguably the best two-parter in the entire mytharc because it builds on the theme from the opening of Season 3 that the conspiracy has nothing to do with aliens but rather something far more insidious: experiments on humans.

Mulder spends most of this two parter following the trail of an alien autopsy video that leads him across the country and on to a train. It’s thrilling stuff and Duchovny is superb in it. But the reason it's an unquestioned masterpiece is because Scully is following her own trail – and its far more terrifying because of how personal it ends up becoming.

During the episode Scully goes to the address of a MUFON meeting in Allentown, looking for a woman named Betsy Hagopian. When she rings the doorbell, the woman who answered Penny Northern looks at her with recognition. “She is one,” she tells this group of women. Scully has no memory of them (she has no clear memory of what happened to her) but all of the women in this group know her instantly.

Scully tries to deny it and then they ask her about her implant. One of the most frightening scenes in the entire series comes when one by one each of these women removed a small vial from their person, each of which contain an identical implant to Scully’s. It looks like the world’s weirdest book club – and then it takes an ever darker turn. Betsy Hagopian is in the oncology ward suffering from cancer. Northern then tells Scully matter-of-factly that they all have it. “We’re all dying,” she says. “Because of what they did to us.”

The series has basically told us in no uncertain terms what is going to happen to Scully. It’s a measure of the pace of the show that we’ll have forgotten about by the time it actually happens. Scully does what she has done so often, she buries what might happen to her. But she can’t deny what she sees before her eyes.

In the midst of Mulder’s inquiry he has been told of the story of four Japanese scientists who worked during World War II in a unit called 731. This is also based in reality: Japanese scientists also engaged in the similar kind of experiments that the Nazis did during World War II. Four of these scientists were killed on American soil doing the autopsy. But then Scully looks at the picture of one still alive: Shiro Zama and she recognizes him, even though he’s been missing for twenty years. She looks at the autopsy video where he is clearly pictured – and she has a flashback to her abduction and sees him standing over her.

With that being said I think that Gordon's contribution has to do more with Mulder's side of the story. Looking at Gordon's contributions to The X-Files as a whole the overwhelming majority focus on Mulder and frequently try to frame him as an action hero. You get this sense following Mulder's actions in the story: he chasing after a Japanese courier who knocks his service weapon from his hands and at that point Mulder reaches for a sidearm clipped to his sock. "I got tired of losing my gun," he says afterwards.  This could seem like a corny action line but at this point in the show it's happened often enough that it seems like a precaution.

Many of Mulder's actions very much seem like a typical episode of Jack Bauer; tracking down evidence from a diplomatic attaché to the Lone Gunmen for analysis; going to a ship to get information, following the path and being forced to dive into the ocean to escape and the climax where he tracks down our government's secret railway and ends up missing, choosing to leap from a bridge as it passes by. And the fact that moments earlier Scully has been warned by X not to get on that train and just as Mulder does he loses his cellphone, leaving a cliffhanger exactly the kind of crisis Jack would end up in. For that matter even though Gordon didn't write 731 the entire scenario that follows where Mulder ends up on a train tracking down a Japanese scientist and ends up trapped in a boxcar that is triggered to blow up really does seem like the kind of crisis Jack would have to survive.

The Season 4 episode 'Unrequited'  is one of the last he would write for The X-Files.  He collaborated with Chris Carter on it, which by that time was a common practice: in addition to Nisei Gordon would work with Carter on five different scripts before he would leave.  Most of them are superb episodes for good reason: both men were superb at writing about distrust of the government, even when they weren't per se writing about the mytharc. 'Unrequited' has no real connection to the mythology and is a flawed episode for many reasons. Yet in hindsight so much of the story seems to be an ancestor text for the impetus of Homeland  fourteen years later.

The central story involves an assassin who is killing off generals who have connections to the Vietnam War. The assassinations are tied to a paramilitary group known as the Right Hand. The leader is an ex-marine named Denny Markham. Skinner is put in charge of the task force and Mulder and Scully are pulled in because of the circumstances of the first death.

A three-star general entered his limousine and found a playing card on it. We see him killed by a gaunt-bearded man. By the time the drivers turns around the killer is gone. The driver claims he didn't kill him and the paraffin test indicates he didn't fire the weapon.

Mulder and Scully question Markham, who is very much the kind of militia leader that was unfortunately becoming common by 1997.  He gives Mulder and Scully a speech about one day their organization will take up 'an armed resistance against the government'. He denies responsibility but identifies the playing card as part of a group called the Bloody Sabers. The man is Nathaniel Teager. The Right Hand rescued him in 1995 at a Vietnamese prison camp – 23 years after the government declared all P.O.W's from Vietnam had been released. The government attempted to recapture Teager but he escaped. Markham has no idea how.

Nathaniel Teager spends the episode on a path of destruction to kill three generals. We learn via Mulder's newest informant, Marita Corravubias.  These men employed South Vietnamese soldiers as spies and commandos, leaving them behind to face capture or death. The operation had been disavowed but it has recently become public and if these men face charges it would be an embarrassment to the government.

The biggest shock to Mulder comes after learning the government wants them dead. "Why would they ask to protect us?"

Covarrubias's response is simple: "Because they know you can't."

This mission has a dual purpose: maintaining the policy of denial about POWs and silencing those men and as a secondary protocol, to further discredit the FBI and by association The X-Files. It is the kind of convoluted plot that we would later see on both 24 and Homeland. And that's part of the problem.  On those series Gordon would have several episodes to deal with the ramifications of these kinds of betrayals and see it play out. Here he has less then twenty minutes to deal with it once we learn the truth and by this point we know enough about The X-Files to know that if it doesn't involve aliens we won't be dealing with the story in a future episode.

This would be enough to undercut the episode. But that's only part of the problem. The first is that the episode begins in medias re with Mulder and the FBI walking through a speech a general is giving to Vietnam veterans looking for the assassin. This is the opening teaser and we don't understand what's happening. At the last minute Mulder sees the assassin and just as he's about to fire on Him he disappears. Then the episode flashes back twelve hours and the real story unfolds.

Then we see the entire sequence again basically shot for shot during the final act of the episode and only then do we see what happens in the aftermath. In 1997 this gimmick was still new enough that it had power. Problem is its used badly so that it takes up nearly a quarter of the entire episode's runtime, making it by far the worst kind of padding.

Nor is the only flaw. Aside from the killings he commits Teager only appears in two other scenes. The first when he tells a grieving widow that her husband is still alive before disappearing in front of her. The second is when he's actually on his final trip and another veteran recognizes him and follows him. The two men have a civilized conversation where he tries to persuade Teager the war is over and Teager says its not before handing him a list of names. This particular story isn't followed up either.

While this doesn't work in context of the episode it does a lot to make it clear that Gordon might have used the character of Teager when he created the character of Nick Brody for Homeland in 2011. There are clear similarities: Brody was left behind for eight years and his family believed he was dead. And as with Teager he has been 'turned' by spending eight years with terrorist Abu Nazir, who has convinced him to return and exact a terrorist attack on the U.S. intelligence community.  In his final conversation with his fellow veteran Teager makes it clear 'the war isn't over', which is very much why Nick Brody plans to strap a suicide vest and kill, among others, the Vice President.

We can also see signs of the corruption within the U.S government itself perhaps more clearly then most of the other X-Files episodes. Late in the episode when the surviving General, who knows he's the final target, confronts Markham who is in custody. Markham sneers at him and even when Bloch attacks him Markham is unfazed.  "Whatever you do to em won't change his mind, General. He's sending a message. And making damn sure everyone hears it loud and clear."

Markham is a domestic terrorist and he's making it very clear that nothing the government can do will stop what's to come.  

This is a frustrating episode because it almost works. There are individual scenes that are very exciting, such as when Teager walks into the Pentagon and is visible on the cameras – but when he sets off the alarm no one notices. (Teager has the ability to make himself invisible to the naked eye, but the show can't come up with a realistic explanation as to why or how he learned this skill, another issue.) We know by this point he's stalking another general and Mulder has sent him to the Pentagon and asked for an armed escort. His escorts walk him into the room and seeing no one the General enters his office. However we see that playing card.

The General then calls Mulder and tells him what he's found and Mulder tells him to call the men back in his office. We then see Teager behind him and Mulder hears the shot over the phone.  By the time he reaches the office the General is dead. Mulder spots the killer out of the corner of his eye  and whirls around – and then he's gone.

Also working is Teager's death scene when as he dies, he follows the habit of P.O.W's saying name, rank and serial number. The final scene when we learn the government is covering up who the assassin was and that the Right Hand has gone along with it is also powerful. And it helps the final conversation is with Skinner who is a Vietnam vet.

Mulder's final words have power that wouldn't work with any other killer. "They're not just denying this man's life. They're denying his death. And with all due respect sir, he could be you.:"

The line is a powerful indictment of are policies in Vietnam and the Cold War and they could just as easily apply to the 21^st century. And its worth noting in both 24 and Homeland Gordon would frequently deal with storylines where the primary 'villain' was a veteran of intelligence or military hung out to dry (multiple seasons of 24 deal with this as well as several of Homeland) or a government conspiracy to cover up a failed mission. (Both the first seasons of Homeland and 24 involve revenge plots based on these actions.)

Not long after this Gordon ended up leaving The X-Files to strike out on his own. But in these stories and others we shall look at later on, it's more than clear that The X-Files was the proving ground for the man who led the adventures of Jack Bauer and Carrie Matheson for eight brilliant seasons each.