Original subtitles

Hi, this is John Shiban. I was co-producer of The X-Files during season five,

and I wrote this episode you're watching, The Pine Bluff Variant.

This was supposed to be Folger Park in Washington DC. There's the Capitol.

This is actually shot in Vancouver.

We chose this park because of the cheriy blossoms, to match Washington DC,

and the Capitol dome was put in.

Those are 06/ shots, that we did two of there, which worked pretty well.

I always wanted to do a story that was a thriller,

and the great thing about The X-Files is that you can do different genres.

We did comedies, we did horror, we did drama...

The paradigm The X-Files can stretch to do a lot of things,

and we hadn't done a thriller like this in a long time, or ever, at this time.

I was inspired by the movie The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,

the Martin Ritt movie from 1965. It was based on the John Le Carré novel.

I had been thinking about doing a story like this for a long time.

I had a card up on my bulletin board that said "Mulder undercover".

And a couple of years went by

before we found the right moment in the show to do it.

I was inspired by that and I was inspired by the movie Heat,

which had a lot of good action sequences and some surveillance sequences.

And we talked about just doing something very different from the beginning.

In fact, what’s great about this to me is from the start you're questioning Mulder.

That was the thing about season five,

starting with the season ender from the previous year, and Redux and Redux II,

the episodes that started, where Mulder has faked his own suicide,

there 's a tension between Mulder and Scully.

That was the idea, to sort of miX it up so that we don 't know.

Scully doesn’t know whether to trust Mulder, in a way, this season.

She doesn’t know what his motives are, and she's still dealing with her cancer.

Of course, his motives were pure, he was trying to find a cure for her cancer.

But that environment was perfect for this episode.

The way this is shot, too, was very different for an X-File.

Rob Bowman directed it and did an amazing job.

Look at all the pieces that are in this teaser,

which is the piece that starts the show.

Long-lens surveillance-type shots mixed in with Steadicam shots,

mixed in with traditional close-ups, makes for a really exciting...

There 's Action Mulder.

We like to say "Action Mulder" when we come up with these stories.

The great thing about Mulder, and about David Duchovny,

is he can play a lot of roles.

He 's great with comedy, he was great with action,

he was great with the cool, detached, cynical character that Mulder is.

But it was always a pleasure to see it, to get him running.

In fact, I understand he quite enjoyed this episode

because he got to play a different side of Mulder.

This is all about paranoia, and so is The X-Files in a lot of ways.

But what was exciting about this story for all of us

was that the first half of the story is Scully’s paranoia about Mulder.

And it's set up here in the teaser, where she sees him do something

that is very un-Mulder-Iike, which is apparently conspire with this terrorist.

This shot is not David Duchovny, it's his double.

Unfortunately, when you're on a TV schedule,

you have to pick up shots at different times,

sometimes the principals are shooting the next episode.

We had to do that piece without Mulder.

It works pretty well, though, in the context. I don 't think you would notice.

The thing about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

is that it's an intricate mystery:

lies upon lies upon lies. The audience doesn’t know who to believe.

And we were trying to do that in 43 minutes,

the running time of a television show,

real time, not counting the commercials.

And I think we did a terrific job of telling this kind of intricate story.

The first half, in a lot of ways, is Scully's,

and it starts with this scene that you're watching now.

She wants the truth from Mulder.

And her character is such that she would just ask him.

And what was, I think, shocking to the audience and part of the fun of this,

is that Mulder won 't tell her. He's got a secret.

And in the context of season five, you really believe it might be true.

This episode also calls back to an episode, I think it was number 13,

called "Patient X where Mulder spoke at a UFO conference.

And that's actually spoken about during the course of the show

as the point when, possibly, Mulder was recruited

by these government-hating domestic terrorists to join them.

That's actually mentioned later by our bad guys.

One thing also to keep an eye out in this episode,

and again, being praise of Rob Bowman, it has a very movie-like feel.

If you look at the wide shots contrasted with the long-lens tight shots that he does,

a lot of tie-ins, it's really amazingly directed.

Especially considering that you shoot these things in about eight days,

where you shoot your average movie in three, four, five, ten times that.

So it was really a pleasure.

The other thing that is special when you look at other X-Files in that season,

and throughout, is the score by Mark Snow.

He chose a very, sort of, thriller-like...

Where I would characterize The X-Files

as usually having a haunting and moody, scary type of music.

This drives throughout, which I was very pleased with.

I think it works really well.

This character that is leading the briefing...

This character leading the briefing

is US Attorney Leamas,

and the name Leamas is from The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

That was the character Richard Burton played. That was my little nod to that.

I and the other writers like to put in little nods in these things whenever we can.

I'll point out a couple as we go.

The title Pine Bluff Variant comes a little from truth.

There is a government lab in Pine Bluff, Arkansas,

that, up until the late '60s,

was part of the bioweapons program in the United States.

And, as mentioned in the episode,

that lab was... The bioweapons program was shut down by President Nixon,

but the speculation that we 're doing here is that maybe it wasn't.

And this harks back to something that Chris Carter has been saying

since the beginning of the show, "It's only as scary as it's real".

We make a lot of effort and do a lot of research

to try to give the illusion that this could be happening. That’s...

I was pleased with the Internet response I got to this episode,

a lot of people said things like

"Vampires are scary, but I don 't think I 7/ meet a vampire.

"But this could happen. This could happen to me. "

Watching this episode again in light of the World Trade Center attack,

sort of underscores...

It's a creepy feeling because, as a storyteller,

you push the envelope, make things as scary as possible.

And when they come true, it makes you think about your role as a storyteller.

And I still believe drama is supposed to face

those things in the world that are scary.

It's how we deal with it.

This movie theater is a real theater. The Dunbar is in Vancouver.

The actress playing the ticket taker is Kate Braidwood,

daughter of Tom Braidwood, who plays Frohike on our show.

She actually read for the part and was very good. So we cast her.

Frohike's daughter.

This kind of shot here I love, and it's very Rob Bowman.

That wide shot in the lobby that sets a mood.

He called me from the set saying "I just did a Kubrick shot. You're gonna love it. "

And in a lot of ways it is.

It's unconventional for television, but it really works

to set this man, Bremmer, who is the bad guy, August Bremmer,

to make him scary to the audience, because placing him in that environment,

putting some distance to him, has that effect.

These kind of shots are so efficient,

that go from a close-up to tight on this little canister.

We 're really careful about props on The X-Files.

I should say, this, Aaron Burr Motor Court,

was my little nod to the history books for another American traitor.

I'm hoping people got that, that the whole idea of this episode is "Is Mulder a traitor?"

And it's fun to make those little comments,

whether in character names or place names, et cetera.

This is a motel that we've used several times in The X-Files,

if you watch the show carefully. Vancouver is a great place to shoot.

There are a lot of locations, but sometimes, when you're trying to match America,

you end up using the same places again and again.

Because there aren't many motels

in the same style that we have in the States, that kind of thing.

The character that Dan Von Bargen plays, Jacob Haley,

who is talking to Mulder right now, is Mulder's contact in the...

With the domestic terrorist group called the New Spartans.

He's done a lot of movie acting.

He has a role in the Fox show Malcolm In The Middle.

He 's a terrific actor.

We're back at the Dunbar Theater.

My inspiration, actually, for this moment...

I spent many years working as an usher at various movie theaters in Los Angeles

and always wanted to do something in a theater.

We were a little nervous about this moment,

because one thing Chris is always talking about

and we always try to do on The X-Files

is keep it from looking like a horror movie. Again, to keep it real.

The more real it is, the scarier it'll be, and I think that's true.

But the make-up department,

and the way Rob Bowman shot this, worked tremendously well.

Die Hard with a Vengeance is what’s playing on the screen.

Because it's a Fox movie, to be honest, we can get it cheap. So we picked that.

It seemed like it also had a terrorist theme to it, so it fit.

Here's another little nod of mine. We hear the name George Kaplan here

as Mulder's alias, and that is a nod to North by Northwest.

That's the mysterious character that Cary Grant is following

and is mistaken for in that movie.

It's another one of my little references.

And here's the point when Mulder gets fully sucked in.

He is inside.

The terrorists have accepted his excuse

for what happened in the park and why they were nearly caught.

And now he's going to be taken into their inner sanctum.

And this is when the story begins to shift, although not until later in this act

do we completely go to Mulder's side of things.

But up until now, or through this scene, I should say,

we 're still in Scully’s head, and this is still "ls Mulder a traitor? "

"Has he gone that far?"

And this is the moment now.

This is what we call an act-out. When you do a TV show as opposed to a movie...

Movies have acts as well, but in TV they’re divided by commercial breaks.

And so what we call an act-out when we’re boarding a story, outlining,

is that you want to engage the audience so that they'll wanna know what happened.

This is a perfect example, men with guns coming out to stop Scully.

What does it mean? Is it the terrorists?

Is it the government? Is she in trouble? We don 't know.

And it's a good place to end an act, because, hopefully, then the audience says

"I’ve got to tune in to see what happens". And we do.

Again, we're in Vancouver. This was a building downtown,

and our art department actually painted the hallway and this entire office.

Graeme Murray's palate in this deep green...

Really, it's interesting to me because not only is it spooky,

but it gives it a government feel, gives it an officialdom feel.

He was very good at playing with the palate of the show,

but keeping it dark and moody at all times.

This is the scene where the first deception is sort of unveiled.

Scully learns that Mulder is undercover.

But what’s fun, and what we've tried to do, is make this seem the truth.

And it is the truth as far as Skinner is concerned.

But as you peel back the onion you see more layers in this thing,

and, hopefully, you're shocked at the end to learn that this isn’t the whole truth.

Of course, on The X-Files we 're blessed with an amazing cast.

Not only the principals,

but we had some excellent casting people who always found great guest casts.

And we used some of the same people several times because of that.

Because when you find a good actor, you try to keep him.

I've been on The X-Files... I started at the top of season three.

The show has grown, not only technically...

The technology has gotten better, digital technology has gotten better.

The effects that are in here, the CGI of the Capitol dome,

the man with the flesh-eating bacteria in the teaser was also CGI,

that kind of thing has gotten so much better in a small amount of time.

It's amazing to me.

But what also happens, because the show was such a success,

as it continues, you need to find ways to make it grow

in directions that are unexpected and interesting to keep it alive.

And also to keep your actors interested.

You don 't want to play the same thing every week.

And what I think is great about this episode is that both Scully and Mulder,

David and Gillian, got to play different things for their characters.

This moment here, the torture of David...

Not the torture of David personally, the torture of Mulder...

We just wanted to do an intense scene.

This line here, "Is this the Pepsi Challenge?",

was David Duchovny's improvisation, and we loved it so much we put it in the show.

David did a lot of that over the years.

Other things that have changed...

What I was saying was,

as the show grew and has grown, and the characters have changed,

we try to challenge ourselves and the actors with a new direction.

Like season five, which did have a lot of distance between Mulder and Scully,

opened up, dealt with Scully’s cancer in new ways.

Chris Carter's feeling and our feeling was that if you don 't mix it up,

even though the audience worries that the show’s gonna change,

I think the show stagnates,

and wouldn't have continued on to be as successful as it was.

I always loved that head butt. And David, Ibelieve, loved doing that, too.

It's something you've never seen on The X-Files,

but it's very cool for Mulder to have that kind of guts. You want a hero like that.

I thought this scene in particular was marveloust edited by Lynne Willingham.

Just to keep the tension going and to make your stomach hurt

for grabbing the man's finger and breaking it.

We had quite a debate among the writing staff

over which finger was the scariest, whether it was the thumb or the forefinger.

We finally... I went for the pinkie

because it was so easy to break and it seems so fragile.

But that's the kind of stuff you talk about for hours and hours

when you are on writing staff on The X-Files.

"What’s the scariest this? What's the most disgusting that?"

So it's a fun job in that way.

It really is, if you have a slightly twisted point of view.

When we broke the finger in act two,

we didn’t anticipate that it would become so important, but as we started shooting...

One thing about shooting a TV show is you need a new script every eight days,

because you have to fill 20 to 22, 24 episodes of television.

So the crew keeps shooting and the staff keeps writing.

And we were still working on the script. I was still rewriting as we were shooting,

and there was a plot point that we couldn't quite figure out.

And I remember talking to Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz,

how would Scully recognize Mulder in act four

on the videotape that is taken of the bank robberies?

And suddenly it just occurred to us, "Wait a minute. That finger.

"He broke his finger. He 'd have a cast. " Those serendipitous things happen a lot,

especially in TV, because you don 't have the time always

to write as carefully as you'd like,

and you have to keep making it better as you go.

I love the way that this scene,

Scully and Skinner's search of the movie theater, was handled.

The danger in television, and in any dramatic art, movie-making, et cetera,

you don 't want it so graphic your audience is turned off,

but you want it to be graphic enough that it's scary and impactful.

And one of the things Rob did well here was covered the bodies in plastic,

then used the famous Xenons. There 's a specific Xenon flashlight

that, sort of, The X-Files made famous, and you see it a lot in the show.

With that piercing light that cuts through the smoke.

I thought that the way that was handled really played, not only the scare,

but also allowed us to show it on television.

Standards and Practices prevent you from showing things that are too graphic,

although we often argue with them about what that means.

Now, here, toward the end of act two,

again, we’re hoping to turn the tables on the audience.

And instead of just ending on this nice Mulder and Scully scene

where they actually come together

and Mulder, in a way, admits what’s going on

because Scully has been informed...

But instead of letting the act end there and the audience think

"OK, things are going to be better

"because Mulder and Scully at least are talking now",

you take it away from the audience by showing that August Bremmer is listening.

And we know our characters are in danger, even though they’re in concert now.

The X on the wall is a reference to earlier in the year, when Mulder removed the X

they used to put up whenever he would want to speak to Deep Throat orX

So that tape residue, which, in retrospect, probably looks a little too obvious,

was our little nod to that moment.

Here you see that the bad guy knows what’s going on.

The cigar was the actor's idea, and I think it worked,

although it never occurred to me.

But he said "Can I smoke a cigar in this scene?" And Rob said "Sure

You just saw a legend go by there that said "FBI Headquarters, 3.14am."

There 's another big thing we debate,

what’s the right time to put on these legends.

Sometimes they mean something. Sometimes they’re birthdays.

Other times it just sounds right. And 3.14, for some reason, sounds better than 3.15.

It's really a taste thing, but it's another writer thing we debate about.

This scene, part of the purpose of it is not only to drive the plot fon/vard,

to learn what the terrorists intend to do, which is rob a bank,

but it also plants a seed in Skinner. And you can see it right there.

He begins to question Leamas' plan here.

He 's protective of his agents. That's one of the great things about Skinner.

Even if he disagrees with Mulder and Scully, he's very protective of them.

Even though it's not his jurisdiction to alter this,

he lets them know that he's wary about it.

And this is not only...

It's a writer's way of planting a seed that will pay off at the end of the show.

And this nice ending shot of Mitch Pileggi as Skinner

lets you know what's going on in his head.

This is our patented Scully science-lab scene,

which we do, actually, less and less over the years,

again, to mix up the show and do things differently.

But she is a scientist and this is her specialty.

It's why she's on The X-Files in a lot of ways.

And Gillian is very, very good at playing these scientific mumbo-jumbo talk scenes.

Not only just for clarity, but emotionally, Scully is really concerned with this.

Cos to her, this is the key.

This is how you're gonna solve an X-File, is by the science.

A couple of shots where there are things on the monitors,

we did what we call a burn-in.

Because when the scene was shot by Rob Bowman,

they didn’t have the playback,

which is what goes on the monitors. They didn’t have the materials,

the cells dividing, et cetera. So they project a little blue onto the screen,

and then later, in postproduction,

we burn in or rotoscope in the image on that screen.

That's one great change, as digital technology gets better and better,

it makes it easier and easier to solve problems and fix errors,

and do things on a television show that you never could do before.

So you feel like you're watching a movie.

And it's a challenge and a lot of fun for all of us to do a new movie every week.

Jacob Haley, Dan Von Bargen's bad guy, says a very important line here

which is another subtle clue that something else is going on in this show,

where he talks about lies within lies. And that was kind of the heart of the episode.

"What's the truth? Who do you believe? Who knows what?"

And, in a way, everybody in this episode is lying.

Mulder's lying, because he's not a sympathizer with these terrorists.

And this character, Jacob Haley, is lying

because he suspects his leader, August Bremmer,

to be actually a government agent.

And August Bremmer is lying in a way that unfolds at the very end.

So it's. ..

We were afraid the audience might have trouble following the lies within the lies,

but I think because we plotted it so carefully and it was shot so well,

I do believe that you're taking on the experience with our characters

rather than running behind them and not understanding what’s going on.

Here, too. Skinner, also.

His suspicions mount, because he keeps some information from Leamas.

He has his lies as well.

It's a very paranoid...

It's a very paranoid story, and it's taking the paranoia that is inherent in The X-Files,

the "trust no one"

that has been sort of behind the show for years.

What I like about this episode is that it makes it just about that.

You can’t trust anyone in this episode.

Even though it's a stand-alone episode, "stand-alones" versus "mythology"...

Mythology episodes deal with Samantha's abduction

and the conspiracy in the government, Cigarette-Smoking Man, Deep Throat,

and then the stand-alones were the "monsters of the week", as we call them.

And even though this is a stand-alone,

it still plays on the basic themes of the show.

This location was fabulous.

It's an abandoned greenhouse outside Vancouver, near Vancouver Airport.

And Rob Bowman, when we were scouting,

the minute he saw those sheets of plastic

that are hanging from what I guess were arbors for vines, et cetera...

He saw those and it became a theme

that he had the art directors run through the show,

"Keep the hanging plastic. "

Not to sound like a film student, but it's hard to see through, it obscures.

And that's kind of what’s behind this show. And you'll see a lot of this hanging plastic.

It's used at the end with the hazmat teams, it's used right there behind Mulder.

It's used during the death-march scene, which is coming up.

So it's a way to... And it was inspired by the location.

It didn’t occur to anybody until we saw the location and how cool that looked.

The terrorists use these masks, and the Dracula mask actually was David’s request.

In the script, I wrote a Wolf Man mask.

He called us and said that Dracula was one of his favorite characters

when he was growing up, and could it be a Dracula mask?

Those masks were terrific.

You'll see more of them shortly as the bank is robbed.

But it was a notion that was kind of inspired from a couple of sources.

A Clockwork Orange is probably the earliest one.

Or The Killing, even before that,

had masks, another Kubrick film.

And when we saw these, we were a little wary, we didn’t want it to look comical.

But these masks were just great. We went for the Christopher Lee Dracula version.

I love the Skeletor mask that this fellow has,

who was in the script as "Skin-Head Man", the man who breaks Mulder's finger.

This bank was a real depository in Vancouver

that once held, I believe, several billion dollars.

It was closed when we took over,

but all the vaults were real, the actual vaults in the place.

This is an amazing shot that Rob Bowman designed and executed.

One shot takes you from that money

all the way to bringing the terrorists out of the van.

And not only is it artistically beautiful and filled with tension,

but it also makes it producible on a television budget and schedule.

Television is very tight, and to get this kind of scale

he had to design some things that were done as what we call "oners", one shot.

And that's what that was. And it works so well

that you don 't miss that you're not getting close-ups or things to cut to.

This bank-robbery scene, in particular,

for me at least, as a writer, was inspired by Heat

and a number of other bank-robbery films.

You always try to do things your own way. You always try to bring new wrinkles to it.

And obviously Mulder being in the middle of this and having to...

What was interesting about this for us was "How far will Mulder go?"

Will he let innocent people get killed?

Will he kill an innocent person to keep his cover?

It's a great quandary.

What comes up here is a different type of act-out.

It's something we call a play-through.

When this poor teller gets shot

for trying to push the little red button there...

Actually, the button, if you'll notice, is flashing,

they added the flashing aften/vards

because you couldn't see it in the original shot.

So that was a way to help tell the story, again, through digital technology.

But here Mulder is faced with a dilemma. And what we often try to do,

but usually change our minds at the last minute, is a play-through,

which is the same piece of action, Mulder with a gun, aiming the gun at this man.

When we come back after the commercial break, which you'll see in a second,

we’re back where we left off.

Those don 't always work, to be honest, because it's sort of an old-style television,

Mission: Impossible kind of thing to do.

Part of the problem, for me at least, is that when you do those tension can go out.

It doesn’t feel real. You’ve been away from the show.

But I felt here it worked, and we all agreed that it felt like the best thing to do

because the tension was so high and you're moving so fast when you return

that I don 't think the audience feels they've missed anything.

This, of course, is Mulder's moment of truth, will he shoot this man?

And again, in a story about lies and deception,

somebody saves Mulder from that decision.

Part of the reason why we chose money as the delivery system for this biotoxin

as the centerpiece of this terrorist act is, again, what Chris always said to us,

which is "It's only as scary as it's real. " He said while we were boarding the story

"I want people to be afraid to touch their money,

"thinking 'There could be biotoxin on this.

There's actually research that shows that most of the large bills in circulation now

probably have microscopic bits of cocaine on them

just because they've passed through some drug dealer's hands.

And we wanted to play on that idea that it wouldn't take much.

Again, it's scary in that America has been attacked by terrorists.

In retrospect, it's creepy that we talked about things like that,

but, again, drama is here to deal with our fears

and to help the audience deal with their fears.

Here August Bremmer is burning the money

that they apparently robbed the place for.

And this is where Mulder figures out

that the whole idea of the heist was a deception.

It seemed we were working toward that,

that's what the FBI and government thought,

but, no, it's to put the biotoxin on the money,

to facilitate a larger terrorist act.

Then another deception is revealed here.

This was a very hard scene to write, actually,

because of the twists and turns in it.

Jacob Haley saves Mulder from being executed by Bremmer,

then he levels his accusations at Bremmer.

Then Bremmer counters with the tape of Mulder

that he took from Mulder's apartment.

So it's a back-and-forth that can be convoluted.

And, luckily, when you're a writer on the show, it's quite collaborative.

We always give notes, help each other to make each other's scripts better.

And I can recall doing a lot of drafts of this one

and getting a lot of notes trying to make this scene

and this moment as strong as possible.

And this is the moment when...

Now Haley realizes that Mulder has set him up,

and both of them are going to die.

This is the moment I spoke about earlier,

"How does Scully recognize Mulder? He 's in a Dracula mask, she can’t know that. "

And that's where the inspiration of the broken finger came to us,

at just about the last minute before they were gonna shoot.

This is another example of the efficient shooting of Rob Bowman.

That first shot that shows you all the screens

and brings Scully in, it's just wonderful.

And now the deceptions are beginning to unravel and be exposed.

And what we want the audience to think is "Now Mulder's in danger."

And we didn't have her find the finger yet. We save it.

So you leave the audience hanging, "She doesn’t know. Will she know?"

This scene and the scene that follows,

what we call "Mulder's death march what Rob Bowman kept saying,

we talked a lot about and were all, in a weird way, excited to do.

Because it's very hard in a returning TV series

to put the audience in the frame of mind

that they think a main character might get killed.

Cos they know this is David Duchovny, he's gonna be back next week.

So the trick is to make it as tension-filled as possible

to solve that problem.

Cos the audience knows you're gonna save Mulder

because the show is coming back.

This long dolly shot, I think, was the longest section of dolly track

ever set up by The X-Files before or since.

All the coverage was done from this dolly, but it's beautiful that it tracks through

these haunting layers of plastic.

This was done with the Steadicam, which is different than the dolly.

We try to use all of the tools of filmmaking that we can on The X-Files.

The trick here, and I think it worked pretty well,

is to make the tension in the audience be "How will they solve this?

"How will they get Mulder out of this?" Things look worse and worse and worse.

And hopefully you have no suspicion by this point in the story

that Bremmer has a secret too.

And that's the heart of the show, and that's kind of what was at the heart,

and what excited me about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,

my original inspiration for this episode.

In that, it was the spy that Richard Burton is trying to catch

actually turns out to be working for us. He's a bad man, but he's working for us.

It's a moral dilemma that every country has to face.

I mean, do you work with these types of people who swim in these dark waters

in order to try to stop others?

And it's kind of what Mulder has to face here.

So August Bremmer has saved Mulder.

The very man that he started the show to thwart, the leader,

is actually, Mulder realizes, working undercover for the government.

But, again, there's still layers here that have yet to be uncovered.

I like that shot that leads Mulder away and I wish...

One of the restraints is you're limited to about 43 minutes,

and in movies you can be more flexible. That shot went on for much longer.

I wish we could have kept it, but the networks won 't let you do that.

Again, the plastic that I talked about, just as a design element.

Here 's something coming up

that is always a joy to write and to see for Scully’s character.

Cos Scully’s always been reasonable, scientific, a very, very smart character.

And then every once in a while in the show we've allowed her to get angry.

And when she does. and Gillian is so good at it, it's shocking for us,

as audience members who love Scully, to see her, as we say, "Scully takin' names".

She gets in there and she goes off on the government lawyer here.

And it's always nice to see that in her.

You don 't want to see that every week,

it's not Scully’s personality, she's the rational one,

but it's great when it happens.

Here we leave, and what we like to do often on The X-Files

is not answer all the questions for the audience and not...

There she is takin' names.

We don 't always wanna tie the loose ends.

And we left the audience with a moral dilemma here, and a question for Mulder,

"What are you trying to do, Mr. Mulder, with your quest for the truth?

"And if your quest for the truth means exposing this government operation

"that is trying, ostensibly, in theory, to stop terrorists,

"are you gonna actually help terrorists?"

It's a very interesting quandary for Mulder. It's something for the audience to consider.

And, to me, the best of The X-Files is that you can do that

in the context of a fantasy, science fiction, whatever you want to call it, show.

You can actually deal with real-world dilemmas.

How do you fight these people, and do you fight them using their own weapons?

And our little denouement here is the demise of Jacob Haley.

As you recall, August Bremmer gave him car keys that were...

We hope the audience gets, I think they do, the car keys were tainted with the biotoxin.

We have a wonderful... We’ve always had great make-up departments on the show.

And once again you get a hint of what you know is there, the eaten-away flesh.

And the last lie is supposedly exposed.

But hopefully the audience is left with

some questions to ponder.

I was very, very happy with this episode.

Not only in the directing and the acting and the art direction,

but also in where it fit in the grand scheme of The X-Files.

I felt it was a nice twist, a nice change of pace for Mulder and Scully.

And a nice place to step off for next week, when, hopefully, the audience came back.

Thank you for watching.