Original subtitles

The idea of doing a Lone Gunmen spin-off had been suggested very early on.

I always thought it was perfectly cast.

They all had that kind of great visual take on who they were.

We tell the stories others refuse to tell.

- I'm Bruce Harwood. I play Byers. - I'm Dean Haglund. I play Langly.

- I'm Tom Braidwood. I play Frohike. - (all) And we're the lone gunmen.

The lone gunmen were introduced to The X-Files in the first season,

in an episode written by Glen Morgan and James Wong called "EBE".

We're talking about a dark network.

A government within a government controlling our every move.

I went in. I auditioned once. I got the part. I didn't think much of it.

And they kept calling me back for one day

here, one day there, playing these characters.

All right. What do you know about Gulf War syndrome?

- Agent Orange of the '90s. - Shells coated with depleted uranium.

Jim Wong and Glen Morgan, who created the characters,

had a little difficulty casting the character of Frohike.

They had already cast Bruce Harwood as Byers

and they had cast Dean Haglund as Langly,

but that third character was kind of elusive.

- Hey, Frohike, can I borrow those? - If I can have Scully's phone number.

Glen Morgan and James Wong had written them to become

the even more paranoid group than Agent Mulder.

In fact, that's the way they were billed, as the paranoids.

These are unlikely heroes,

not only in their characters, but in the actors we cast,

and that's, for us, the fun of it.

They were funny. They became, for the writers subsequent to that, a comic relief.

We'd go to the lone gunmen when we wanted strange and weird facts, information.

That is a Eurasian cluster fly.

They infest vegetation like apples or cherries,

and inflict a great deal of damage to crops.

Each episode that we got as the gunmen in those little early years

were feeding the next one, so the information that we got from the first one

would inform the character choices for each following episode.

(Frank) The lone gunmen were popular among the writers.

We always looked for ways to bring them back.

Ironically, they almost were no more in season four,

because Glen and Jim, who'd returned for a number of episodes in season four,

wrote an episode called "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man".

The end of that episode originally had Frohike

being killed by the Cigarette-Smoking Man.

We were very upset. All of us who were going to stay on the show,

we didn't want these characters to go, and so we made our case to Chris.

If you watch that episode, the music ramps up to when Frohike's about to die,

then it's almost like it goes back in reverse,

like that moment was supposed to happen, but didn't happen.

But not today.

We were glad they got a reprieve and lived another day.

So at the beginning of season five, we were without David and Gillian for a few weeks

because they were still filming The X-Files feature film.

So we had to find ways to start the series

so we could debut in time in the fall, but not have their characters.

Vince Gilligan, my colleague, came up with the idea of doing a lone-gunmen episode.

- You wanna cha-cha? - Aw time, aw place.

- Both of you, relax. - Shut up, you narc.

It's your fault we're here.

(Vince) The lone gunmen first appeared as cameo characters, and I wanted to see more.

We got our opportunity with the episode "Unusual Suspects".

That was an episode that our three guys carried, and carried it admirably.

Welcome to the dark side.

(Frank) Due to the success of that, we did another one,

a comedic episode with the lone gunmen called "Three of a Kind", set in Las Vegas.

I think that episode was such a success

and a pleasure to write and watch,

that it really was the spark for the idea of doing a lone-gunmen TV series.

Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan and John Shiban said:

"We'd like to do a spin-off of The X-Files

starring the lone gunmen." It seemed perfect.

You wanna know why Joey Ramone's my hero?

Cos people like you never managed to grind him down.

They never stole his spirit. He never gave in, never gave up, and never sold out.

Right till his last breath.

I'm not sure they got it until we pitched it. When we sat with the Fox executives

and pitched broad strokes of the pilot episode, and the mystery of it.

Because the three leading men aren't classical leading men,

aren't the types of guys who drive a television series,

and we all had a hard time kind of picturing what it would be.

When we finally did this episode "Three of a

Kind" at the end of season six of The X-Files,

it became clear what this show could be - Mission: Impossible with three geeks.

We knew from the pilot that we needed someone else for them to play off against,

and someone who would help redefine the world of The Lone Gunmen,

as opposed to the world of The X-Files,

and that became the character Zuleikha Robinson played, Yves Adele Harlow,

which is an anagram for Lee Harvey Oswald,

and we always looked at her as sort of a competitor.

You would not know whether she was good or bad, what side she was fighting on.

All you knew is she thwarted their attempts to get their stories.

(Tom) The first day that Zuleikha and I met was the day that...

We were doing the episode when I was on the wires

and I end up upside down and she's dressed up as a guy and she kisses me,

and she was so bashful about it.

She felt so badly that we didn't know one another

and she had to kiss me while I was hanging upside down.

I was the ugliest man I think I've ever seen in my entire life.

They put the wig on. I said, "I don't look so bad with short hair."

Then they put the moustache on and I'm just like, "Oh, I'm so ugly",

and I went outside and was asking the women if they'd go out with me,

and they're all just standing there going... cos I was just so weird-looking.

You sure that man was Yves Adele Harlow?

Trust me. No guy kisses like that.

The shot where Frohike was dangling was kind of fun just because it was so comic.

It was simple and difficult.

(man) Wirework is an alt in itself.

You can't stick actors in them and say:

"Fly around like you know what you're doing."

There are artists who do that, and double actors.

The fact that he was able to stay in character, survive a day in the harness,

which makes your mid-area really sore,

and then perform acrobatics that are actually fun and entertaining...

He dove in to that role as though he was made for it.

(Byers) Frohike? Hang on tight.

What?

We did have a stunt double, but poor Tom had

to be hanging in that thing an awful lot.

I don't remember if he got out of it and threw up or not, but we were all being...

from the look on his face, we were being careful not to stand under him

after two or three takes.

- Shut it down! - Hang on!

- Shut it down! - Shut it down!

ABC Recycling was an actual car-reclamation thing,

and it was filthy, it was wet, it was cold.

The mud was about this deep,

and it was toxic mud, because it was full of rust and gasoline and who knows what.

- Come on, shut it down. - Stop, stop!

It was fun. The director really wanted me to do it. They had a stunt double.

I said I would do it, but I would only do it once.

If it didn't work, I wouldn't do it twice.

There was concerns cos there was metal,

so what we had to do is we scraped out a square area about six to eight feet square,

and nine inches deep, and cleared it and put a

base in there so that it couldn't be polluted,

and then we filled it with a combination of peat moss

and a special clay and mixed it all up. So it was all very clean.

I just went for it, you know. I sort of figured out the timing on it,

and we went back and did it in the first take, and I did the face plant in the mud.

I guess they were happy with it cos that's what ended up in the picture.

This old friend, you know, run and fall down face first,

dig his face into the mud to make sure it's on good,

and then come up and then play as if it's not there,

I can say that I had to cover my mouth laughing at the monitor,

and applaud his commitment to doing it, and fearlessness, also.

Byers, your flight's gonna make an unscheduled stop.

Corner of Liberty and Washington. Lower Manhattan.

World Trade Centre. They're gonna crash the plane into the World Trade Centre.

We were trying to imagine, you know, crimes that weren't paranormal,

that would involve serving terrorism - in this case, government-sponsored terrorism.

And so we had the idea of running an airliner

into the World Trade Centre in Manhattan.

As a writer, particularly on The X-Files, that's how you spend your day.

You imagine the unimaginable and the unthinkable.

We want to set them up as heroes who will, unbeknownst to all of us, save the world.

What would be a terrible, horrible thing that could happen?

Unfortunately, it was the World Trade Centre.

I have to say, at the time, if it ever occurred to me, I imagined:

"Of course the government has thought about

this. Of course there are systems in place..."

"If we can imagine it, we're just Hollywood writers."

"There are people in the Defense Department charged with defending our country

who think about these things and that there

are things in place to defend us against it."

I remember that Mat Beck, who did our visual effects, flew to New York,

and buzzed around the World Trade Centre in a helicopter

to get all the shots that were used as plates to cut in with the CGI plane.

In retrospect, it's a little bit painful to

talk about, but I went there and, you know,

we did a lot of flying around and I kept

doing pass after pass flying at the building.

We flew over it and quite close to it,

and we got footage that, you know, was beautiful

and, in retrospect, really poignant.

We got special permits at the time to go into New York City,

to have a helicopter shoot at night heading towards the towers.

It was... The difficulty in just mounting

that and getting the authorisation to do it,

and hear, you know, months later...

The morning of 9/11, I was directing an X-Files episode,

and I woke up to see that on television, and my first thought was The Lone Gunmen.

And, you know, of course, my first thought was, "God, I hope..."

Cos I didn't know yet what had happened or why,

but, "I hope this has nothing to do with what we did on TV."

"I hope we aren't somehow guilty of inspiring this or..."

It became clear within hours that we had nothing to do with it,

but it was a terrible... obviously a very terrible feeling.

When you live and work in a world that has so much imagination,

and then when reality just comes and sort of slaps you in the face, it's scary.

I couldn't bring myself to even look at that episode again

until I sat down and prepared for this interview today.

Oh, no. No way.

- Jimmy? - I wanna help.

After looking at the pilot, which we were pleased with,

we realised we needed one other character, because the lone gunmen,

even though we had separate positions for

them, they all basically know the same thing.

They work for the same newspaper, have the same beliefs about conspiracies

and the same knowledge about computers,

and they needed somebody they could explain this stuff to,

because the audience doesn't know all these things.

And so we came up with a character who would not only serve that function...

- Stupid, stupid, 5111954- - (ball beeps in beat)

(Frank) ..but also stand in relief to them,

because he would be a really classically good-looking guy,

and could potentially serve as a love interest for Yves Adele Harlow,

which was unlikely for the lone gunmen.

These boys are out here because it's

difficult, because people say it can't be done.

They have courage...

Jimmy Bond had the heart.

He wasn't really smart, but he always saw the love and the heart

and the emotional side that people had.

I knew that I was gonna be in the other episodes.

A lot of the crew just thought I was a guest star.

People were coming up and they were saying, "Bye. What a great job."

"It's a funny character too." "lt'd be nice to see you again."

Then I came back.

Monday Night Football better watch their butts. (Grunts)

Love this game.

I didn't know what people's reactions would

be to this character that I'd been working on,

cos it is a little absurd and I thought:

"Well, OK, let's film this and hope everybody likes it."

(speaks German)

(commentator) "I will never tell you. You'll never find her."

I love the teaser for "Eine Kleine Frohike",

harking back to the old Fox Movietone News.

And I love the way our special-effects team, led by Mat Beck,

mixed old Movietone footage with this really hi-tech computer animation,

maps and stuff of Europe during the war, that segueways beautifully.

The child's father was this man.

You think Frohike could pass himself off as the son?

And bring the poisoner of Alsace to justice.

Those of us who wrote for the show were geeks in the best sense of the word,

in that...

A geek is someone who's very passionate about a very small area, or minutiae,

whether it's computers or cars,

and I was always a film geek in a lot of ways,

and this was an opportunity for me to bring a lot of influences and play with them.

No, thanks, Ma. I'm not hungry.

You have not eaten a thing since you got here.

This is made special. Just for you.

(John) I'd always been a big fan of the Eating comedies of the late '40s and '50s -

British comedies - Alec Guinness.

Once we started doing The Lone Gunmen, it was something that I kept saying:

"I want to do The Ladykillers."

- Have you got a girl in there? - Pardon me?

(John) For a lot of reasons. It's an undercover story.

It's an undercover mission, and there's so much tension in that,

and from that, so much comic possibilities, in my mind.

Just the character Frohike is such a...

He's driven, he's a little bit of a curmudgeon,

and the idea to put him in a situation

where he has to be a fish out of water and

maintain another identity, I knew it'd be fun.

But it was so much fun to do,

and playing with Ruth Manning from New York, who played the old German Frau,

she was just a delight.

She was an absolutely fantastic person to work with.

Is that too hot for you?

It's fine. Could I get a lime privacy here?

The idea was outrageous and foolish,

and the whole idea of making me up to look like her son.

The makeup girls and the costume people had a

lot of fun doing all the different costumes.

It was a fun, fun show. It was great.

Another one of the ideas we had from the get-go about The Lone Gunmen

was that we could be a lot looser in the tone

of the show than The X-Files ever could be.

And so that meant using a lot more source music.

There was a music supervisor who found this most eclectic, bizarre, wonderful stuff.

We used a music supervisor named Barklie Griggs,

who would come up with dozens of possibilities

of songs to use for these pieces,

and so we had a great time inserting this music.

And it was sort of an inspiration to me, cos when I heard these pieces,

it made me think, "Boy",

and I knew that Chris Carter and company was going for this stuff.

I knew I could really step out a bit, you know,

out on a limb, and try all kinds of things.

Chris is enormously interested in music, and listens to everything

and is always listening to new music, so he welcomed the chance to do a show

where you could use a lot more contemporary music.

In the episode that he wrote by himself - "Three Men and a Smoking Diaper" -

he specified what all the tracks would be.

He knew exactly what he wanted and wrote for those tracks.

Sometimes Daddy feels ill-equipped to bond with baby.

And that's why we're here today.

Gentlemen, keep those nipples high and proud!

Chris created The X-Files, and he created that feeling of gloom and despair

that we love so much from The X-Files.

The thing to know about Chris - he's really a funny guy,

and that episode is that other side to him that you don't see that much.

A lot of bodily-function jokes. That's the other side to Chris Carter.

- Melvin, you should be ashamed. - (baby starts crying)

How are we supposed to get any work done? How do we publish our paper

and root out graft, corruption and greed for

our readers if we 're changing poop y diapers?

What if this is some kind of government-bred, superintelligent chimp?

I'd heard whispers of this for years.

The military warns a perfect undercover operative.

Imagine what spies they'd be. Total access. No one would suspect.

I had the idea for intelligent animals

created by the CIA or the Department of Defense a long time before this,

and I was thinking of a straight thriller.

No one would even know it was murder. It's brilliant.

Except for one small detail.

You can create an intelligent animal, but you can't be assured of its politics.

I always say you can tell chimps are smarter than actors.

The monkey would get it right on the first take, then he'd be bored,

and he couldn't understand why he had to do it again.

So you'd see that. You know, you'd say, "Do this" and he'd do it once,

but we'd have to take it again and he'd think of other things to do.

His trainers would have to work really hard to get him back

to do what he was supposed to be doing.

When they were supposed to be typing,

they would use their strong fingers to pick off the keys and eat them,

so they basically just ate our really great laptops.

Working with chimpanzees is not easy,

so we had a very hard time executing that show.

I remember there was one shot where they wanted to film all the chimps.

They were all sitting together drawing.

So I said, "Let me sit down with the chimps."

And it kind of reflects my character, you know, very similar to the chimps.

And I was drawing with crayons,

and this chimpanzee reached over and he'd take the crayon from me.

So I'd pick another one. He was like a kid.

Every colour that I drew with, he wanted. He would take it away from me.

Chimpanzees don't work well in cold weather. They're not cold-weather animals.

I mean, that episode focused mainly and was driven by these chimpanzees.

I had a call saying, "The chimpanzees won't work. They won't come out."

(Vince) There's a scene toward the end, on the

bridge, when they're gonna make the switch,

the chimp was gonna go back to his Air Force doctor,

but it was, I hear, bitterly cold, and chimps do not like the cold.

There were special accommodations made for the chimps.

Ladies and gentlemen.

Let's get ready to get married.

Hold it. One minute. Hey, hey. Hold it. One minute.

I object.

"Madam, I'm Adam" is one of the craziest hours of TV ever,

and I'm so glad we got to somehow get it past the censors.

(man) At the opening scene there's a shot of Stephen sitting on the toilet,

so you know you're in for quality television when...

You turn on your television and there's a man on the toilet,

it doesn't get any better than this.

The humour in that episode is so evil and nasty and just deliciously bad taste.

I pitched this idea about a man being reprogrammed, who's... he's a bad guy.

He's troubled, and is it right for society to change a person

to make society safer, or do you let the misfits run wild?

It was a takeoff on Clockwork Orange, sort of, somebody who was being reprogrammed.

It became this thing about him arriving at this house, where he thinks he lives,

and the original owner coming in behind him, and it becomes a very funny situation.

What are you doing with your hand?

(screaming)

Tom Schnauz, who has a deliciously perverse sense of humour.

If we worried about Frohike's reaction to "Eine Kleine Frohike",

in which he wore lederhosen and was bathed by an old woman,

we especially worried about his reaction to "Madam, I'm Adam",

where Stephen Tobolowsky, who is hilarious,

keeps flashing to a midget wrestler whenever he sees Frohike.

Tom Braidwood is truly a class actor.

He's a guy who put up with a lot of indignities, to say the least,

during the making of the series, and God bless him for it.

Cos some of those moments are absolutely the funniest moments in the series.

(police sirens)

We shot quite a long sequence of a wrestling

match, that they had to have for video,

and I brought in a stunt guy we have, who was an ex-jockey.

He's the right size for this, and he's pretty tough,

and he went in there with this guy who's actually done some professional wrestling,

and the guy didn't know how to pull a punch

and he was just hammering the living heck out of this poor stunt guy.

We would do a shot, and then we'd talk about it a bit.

Our stunt guy'd come back and he'd go, "This guy's really killing me."

I'd talk to the wrestler again, they'd go back and he'd hammer the heck out of him.

He's just whaling on him and kicking him and jumping on him.

You couldn't get him to back away. It was the toughest day that stunt guy ever had.

My whole life is gone.

There's strangers living in my house. Lois, my wife, I don't know where she is now.

Neighbours, they don't know who I am any more.

He's just a fantastic, funny actor, and he was just the best casting for the role.

I mean, I couldn't imagine a better choice.

Proof of alien contact.

Take a look at this.

I found this in every crevice of my body all over, everywhere.

I got a local hairstyling company who made us 2,000 gallons of blue gel.

It had nothing else in it. It was just a blue gel, a clear, blue gel.

We had to pump it into tanks. We pumped it on the weekend,

and the director, Bryan Spicer, came over on Saturday morning and said:

"I can't see anything. You gotta change it."

We worked all weekend, and we got this big

truck, we had to suck it out, except one tank,

and filled it with blue water, so he could see the people in it.

What we didn't know was when you'd got 200 gallons of it,

you couldn't see anything, so we just changed it.

The only time we used the actual gel

was when we saw him climbing in and going

into the bottom, but the rest of it was water.

I guess this looks bad.

We found a house, that they were gonna tear down, that we could cut the front off of.

So that house was about to be demolished and the locations guy found it perfectly,

so that we could just shear off the whole front and it comes down.

We only had one take to do that, of course, as you can well imagine.

Did you let him see your face?

Here he comes.

Whoa. What's he doing?

"Diagnosis, Jimmy", as in Diagnosis: Murder.

It didn't hurt that it was gonna save us some money.

It had some very clear James-Bondian elements in the ski chase.

We were looking to give Steve Snedden more

of a showcase episode, to really feature him.

He didn't see me. There must be something else.

I'll find out what.

We got to go up in Vancouver, up on the mountain,

filmed two days in the snow, which was a challenge.

I'd never shot in the snow before. It was fun.

(man) Action.

Did that work?

(Vince) They shot the skiing scenes up in Whistler, up north of Vancouver.

I think it was one of those situations where we wrote Jimmy and Yves skiing

before we ever asked the two actors,

Zuleikha or Stephen Snedden, whether or not they could ski.

The scene where I ski into the tree...

Of course, I just kind of ski a couple feet and then they put in someone and he skis,

and there's a rope that yanks him back.

I was blown away. I kept thinking,

if he just leaned forward too far he'd hit himself on the nose.

Jimmy had a ski accident and ended up in the hospital.

- You going to be all right? - Yeah, sure.

(John) It's a challenge when a character's immobile,

and I kept, again, going back to what inspires me.

I kept watching Rear Window, and thinking, "How do you solve this problem?"

A lot of it is what he sees and reacts to, even though he can't move, and hears.

And so we tried to build set pieces around what he sees on TV,

his suspicions of the doctor, what he hears from the next bed with the old man,

who may or may not be the victim, etcetera.

The toughest part was actually that they put me in a real cast.

So I would have to show up, put a cast on,

and then they would saw the cast off and do the same thing the next day.

Say something. Testing, one, two, three.

(Skinner's voice) Testing, one, two, three.

This is Walter freakin' Skinner of the FBI, and I am going to prison, big time.

"The Lying Game" was a fun one because we worked with Mitch Pileggi,

and it was so much fun to have him in that episode.

Mr Skinner, would you explain what is going on?

You are interfering with an FBI sting operation. That's what's going on.

You put an undercover operative in danger.

At Ten Thirteen we'd always been against crossovers.

We resisted them throughout Millennium.

They'd been suggested and we never did one.

Only after Millennium ended did we bring over Lance Henriksen to The X-Files.

With Lone Gunmen we felt differently.

We thought crossovers would be fun, because it's comedy, it's a different genre.

So.

What's on for tonight? Who do we...

What evil deeds are afoot?

It was so good to see Mitch get to be

funny, because Mitch in person is hilarious.

He's absolutely not Assistant Director Skinner.

Ara, buddy. Come on, will you... Ow! Ow, ow, ow. OK, that hurt.

He's playing me playing him.

The funny thing was Mitch is such a nice guy,

and he watched tapes of me and my performances.

- Can I get anybody anything? - Yeah, what the hey. I'll have a...

A Cuba libre.

Uh... Pretty cool, huh?

We had Mitch, who's a trouper, a really great guy to work with.

We lined him up and we shot him with and without a terrible mask,

and then in order to make the sequence work,

we actually had to take footage of him performing

and track it onto a computer-generated face,

so that we had control over the surfaces,

and that allowed him to actually deliver a line,

and then have his mouth pull off and deliver a line again.

Frohike, the radar composite is in the CD. Get that CD.

I had this idea about them going undercover and something to do with dance,

and I seem to remember pitching it being in a disco,

and luckily Frank Spotnitz said, "Tango".

(Frank) The tango episode is one of my favourites,

because it gave Zuleikha Robinson so much to do - I know she loved doing it-

and because it got to deepen the romance

between her and Jimmy Bond - Steve Snedden's character.

The tango is such a beautiful dance,

and, you know, for Yves's character to actually do something normal...

I think, for me, that was the best part about the whole show.

The guy they cast to play opposite me was a fantastic dancer.

He was a salsa dancer. He was John Vargas.

It was very challenging because we really didn't have much time to learn this dance.

Had to learn how to do an Elvis impersonation pretty quick.

Then I had to learn how to tango dance - two or three lessons.

I had a great partner, great people teaching, and out of necessity, you learn.

But that frightened me, cos I'm not much of

a dancer, especially, I'd never tango danced.

We had to spend hours learning to tango,

for what was a 30-second opening bit, or something like that.

I'm a terrible dancer, and I hated learning how to tango.

The woman I danced with in the teaser was the one who taught me. She was really good.

It was nice, because all I had to do was the basic moves and she'd dance around me.

This crash course on learning how to dance.

Once the guys learned that really in the tango the woman does all the work

and you just stand there like an idiot and look good.

Depending on how good she dances, that's how good you look.

I don't want to brag, but that was me doing the splits.

Arghg!

I have a bit of dance training in my background.

Not that you can tell from that shot, but I did four years of modern dance

and three years of ballet, as a double major with my theatre degree.

So when they said, "Oh, just make up any sort of dancing you want",

that is the result of thousands of dollars of tuition.

(in Spanish)

One of the funny ideas of that script was

that Frohike was this incredible tango dancer,

and that he had this very hot Latin lover that he'd abandoned

and he had to go back and pick up the mantle again,

which was just hilarious.

The idea that Frohike had had this deep, platonic relationship with this woman

was kinda fun to work on, you know, it was enjoyable.

(in Spanish)

It just thematically was the perfect choice for an episode,

because it's all about loneliness and isolation,

and these characters - Yves and the gunmen themselves - they're lonely characters.

That's why the episode is so sad in the end.

Yves and Santavos - two lonely characters - make a connection,

but Yves is doing it to get to another end,

but she ultimately has romantic feelings for Santavos.

So that's what makes it really sad in the end,

when he takes a knife in the back for her.

(Vince) Bryan Spicer, our linchpin producer/director,

who directed most of the Lone Gunmen episodes,

every time we'd do one, he'd outdo himself.

But that one in particular, the tango-contest sequence at the end,

I think he had half a day to shoot it.

We only have seven days of prep and eight days to shoot,

and the script was changing as we were going, and it was challenging.

But we learned a lot about tango and dancing,

and we were able to utilise the camera movement and make it sexy and make it flow

and make it a really neat piece.

I got choked up every time I watched the final dance with her and Steve Snedden.

I actually lost an argument about that, because originally it was scripted

that he gets to dance with her at the end,

and she's heartbroken about what's happened.

And they dance, and it's a nice moment, and then he stumbles - ever the klutz.

And I was insistent that we had to preserve

that stumble, and they didn't want to shoot it.

They really wanted to preserve the niceness of that moment, but they shot it for me,

and I saw both of them and I realised that they were right.

With Jimmy Bond, there was a lot of jealousy

about Yves falling for someone else.

Then the tragedy at the end.

But it was a great episode and I felt like we were really getting into our groove.

We were really figuring out what we wanted to do

and how we wanted to continue the show and approach things.

(Vince) Our strongest episode is "Al| About Yves" -

the one that should have ended the series.

See that it gets to Agent Mulder.

"Al| About Yves" was kind of the beginning about "Al| About Yves",

and we never really got into it that much.

We find out that she has a father and he's this kind of ominous presence.

What about Romeo 61?

Someone who's been looking for me for quite some time now.

Which means if we can't track down Byers, Frohike and Langly...

They'll kill them.

It took a while for the character to find itself.

At first, she was simply just a nemesis, a very pretty nemesis,

which was counterpoint to us rough-and-tumble guys,

but then she grew and became an interesting character.

But, hey, you know, I'm not the hardware guy.

Tell us everything.

(yells)

(screams)

They made these little appliances, and it's basically just thin rubber around here

with little nodes to attach the fishing-line stuff with.

We're betting that you need us.

Oh? And why's that?

Romeo 61.

(Byers) You're soared of it, aren't you?

(Il/lichael) The lone gunmen were growing when it was cancelled.

They were becoming more and more defined.

We felt like we found our groove and that the show was really working.

The ratings were acceptable and good and as good as X-Files in the early days.

(Frank) We wanted to give The Lone Gunmen a big finish,

and we knew that we'd sort of let down our fans

by ending the Lone Gunmen series with a "to be continued".

And there was a tremendous battle royal with the studio

about bringing The Lone Gunmen back at all.

(Frank) And then what we attempted to do

was blend them into the fabric of The X-Files at that point, which was not easy.

(Bruce) It was the ninth season of X-Files,

they wanted to finish everything off and they wanted close that loophole,

so they did an episode called "Jump the Shark",

where they kind of tied up the loose threads of the Lone Gunmen series

in an X-Files sort of way.

They brought back Morris Fletcher to kind of tie it all in,

and Zuleikha and Stephen, and sort of wrote an end to the series.

The decision to kill them off was made because we didn't want to dishonour them

with sort of a tepid ending.

It was their last appearance in the series.

We didn't know if there'd be any life for The X-Files beyond that season,

so we wanted to give them a proper heroes'

exit, and that's why we decided to kill them.

I felt like it would be the ultimate tribute to these unsung heroes,

in that, if these guys really are the guys who are saving the world,

and they're willing to sacrifice themselves, there's nothing more heroic.

Guys?

(alarm bell)

I was actually quite thankful that we got an awesome death scene,

cos, you know, if we didn't it would just be:

"Oh, the gunmen walk off into the sunset with a stick and a hobo bag."

That would have been a lame sendoff, so it was something heroic and phenomenal,

but as you know, in science fiction no one is ever dead.

I mean, level-five quarantine coffins are supposed to be fitted to the person.

All the coffins are the same size.

One of the gunmen is shorter than the others. Huh?

Maybe our bodies aren't in those things.

With purest intentions, we wanted them to go out on a high note,

we wanted them to be recognised as heroes,

and that ending with them being buried in

Arlington, you know, heroes, national heroes,

was a high point, but very bittersweet as well.

I think it was the right thing to do. We tied

up some loose ends in the final X-Files episode.

Why risk your lives?

- Because I need to know the truth. - You already know the truth.

We have been very blessed, both with The X-Files and with Lone Gunmen

to have very loyal, smart, supportive fans.

And the fans of Lone Gunmen have been particularly vocal and active,

and loved these characters and supported the show when it was on.

We're right there with them.

We would have loved to have brought it back,

and still would, if there was a way to do it.

- When we started it was a day player. - We were day players.

And what did we get? Nine years and a spin-off.

- We're the luckiest day players around. - Ready for that next day-player role.

- We are a bit of a fairy tale come true. - Yeah.

- Including the frog prince and everything. - Yeah.

- It has been fun. - Yeah, fun. That's the word.

- Well, that's it. - Thank you.

English SDH