The X-Files Retrospective: Glen Morgan & James Wong, Part 2
Season 2: Their Continued Glory and Planned Exit
‘Little Green Men’, the first episode of Season 2, is the only season premiere that Chris Carter did not write himself. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that it’s also the best. It does not resolve a cliffhanger the same way future season premieres would. It doesn’t resolve the climax of the first season which had the X-Files being shut down and Mulder and Scully being separated. Indeed ‘Little Green Men’ plays far more like a pilot for those who might have heard of the show the previous year but never watched an episode before. Indeed, considering I never saw the Pilot until years after the fact when I eventually saw this episode I didn’t think I needed too: ‘Little Green Men’ tells you everything you need to know about Mulder and Scully before Season 1 and where they are now.
Scully is at Quantico teaching. Mulder is on wiretap duty, a true waste of his talent. The two of them haven’t spoken since the X-Files were closed down and Scully has to arrange a subterfuge because she knows that there’s no other reason Mulder will meet with her. Indeed when he does talk to her, Mulder seems broken and without direction in a way we just haven’t seen.
While Anderson nailed down Scully from the start of the series, throughout Season One Duchovny was all over the map with Mulder — which is perhaps one of the reasons Anderson was considered a better performer than Duchovny. In the hiatus between seasons Duchovny seems to have realized just what Mulder was capable of, and Little Green Men is the first time he truly seems to have seized the character’s potential. Mulder seems utterly lost in the first act and is moved forward by an invention from one of his Congressional allies — Senator Matheson, who invites him to the Hill. (One of the bigger wastes of the X-Files is that Matheson, played exceptionally by the brilliant character Raymond J. Barry, would have so few appearances in the series run.)
In a brilliant scene, Matheson is listening to Bach when Mulder comes in and brings up a fact mentioned in the opening segment that this was playing on Voyager when it left the galaxy. Mulder is initially apologetic until Matheson hands him a note saying: “They may be listening.” When he starts the recording again, he tells Mulder that a team has been dispatched the Puerto Rico to clean up evidence. When Mulder asks of what, he says one word: “Contact.’
The rest of the episode is divided between Mulder’s trek to Puerto Rico and a satellite that he feels has evidence of that contact and Scully’s subsequent search for him after Skinner tells her he missed his detail. Anderson is super throughout as she constantly threads the needle, figuring out the password to his computer: (it takes her 3 tries to come up with trustno1) and finding a way to work around two men in suits who show up. (She improvises that she came their to feed Mulder’s fish, a major prop in his apartment)
While this is going on Mulder is going through his own journey, much of which is done on a monologue of a recording he makes to Scully. Purple monologues will eventually become something X-Files fans dread, but Morgan and Wong make it sing because in this case, it speaks to Mulder’s desperation. Much of the episode he is alone save for a native who speaks Spanish but who seems to have seen an alien. Eventually Mulder — and the viewer — see an alien for the first time.
It’s worth noting that Morgan and Wong have a very different opinion of just how Mulder would react when he gets the truth — and it doesn’t make him look good. His first reaction upon seeing his holy grail is to pick up his gun and start shooting. (The gun doesn’t fire.) It’s a telling statement that shows that Mulder may be far more clueless to his goals then he thinks: he might say he’s looking for the truth, but he wouldn’t know what to do with it when he gets it. When Scully finally comes across him in the final act, Mulder is practically a raving lunatic, demanding that she help him rout the station and take the body of this native — as ‘evidence’. Scully has to frantically pull him away with just a recording that he thinks will be enough.
Mulder is dragged over the carpet in Skinner’s office but Mulder has found the power to fight back. He tells Skinner that he had more than enough evidence for prosecution of the case he was on within twelve hours and that his apartment was being surveilled. The Smoking Man (for much of the second season he will witness many of Mulder’s meetings with the FBI brass) says dismissively: “Your time is over and you leave with nothing.” Skinner pauses, then says: ‘Get out.” The Smoking Man smirks — and then Skinner makes it clear he was talking to him. He then tells Mulder to get back to work. In his second appearance Skinner takes on more of the cloak of ambiguity he will have for much of the series, still trying to walk a line that Mulder constantly flaunts.
Mulder plays the recording in front of Scully and finds it has been demagnetized. Scully consoles him saying he has nothing. Mulder shakes his head: “I still have my work. I still have you. And I still have myself.” It’s a big step forward from the man who seemed utterly broken at the start of the episode.
‘Blood’ was the next episode Morgan and Wong wrote — with a notable assist. Glen’s brother, Darin, had been cast in the previous episode as the Flukeman one of the X-Files’ most memorable monsters. Not long after Glen was having trouble coming up with an idea for his episode and Darin suggested the idea of a psychotic postal worker. He would help Glen storyboard the episode and his brother would ask him if he had an idea for a script. Darin came up with what would end up being the opening teaser for ‘Jose Chung’s From Outer Space’. Eventually the show gave Darin a nine-week contract, though Darin’s first script would not come until Glen and Wong had left the series. In addition to all their other merits, Glen Morgan deserves points for being one of the best fraternal boosts in TV history.
In its own right ‘Blood’ is a superb episode which has hints of the comedy that both Morgan brothers would be capable of. The episode takes place in a small Pennsylvania town where a series of spree killings have taken place over the last month. Mulder is called into investigate but the viewer already has a sense of what’s going on: electronic displays are showing message such as ‘Kill Em’ to people before the violence takes place.
‘Blood is a superb mix of both suspense and comedy, though some of it is in-jokes. One of the killers in this episode is a housewife who is receiving messages from her car and microwave telling her ‘He’ll rape you. He’ll kill you.” The housewife is played by Kimberly Ashlyn Gere which was one of the stage names of a famous adult film star of the era. (Gere acknowledged this was Morgan and Wong’s way of being ‘catty’)
The episode centers on a recently fired postal worker named Ed Funsch, well played by William Sanderson. Funsch has a fear of blood, which the show keeps playing on and he keeps receiving messages. In the climax of the episode, he goes to a clock tower with a rifle and begins to shoot on the populace, in a pattern not unlike Charles Whitman. Mulder, who by now has figured out what is happening, manages to track down Funsch — and in a rarity for the show, captures him without killing him. Saying that he wants to question him, the town sheriff (the rare helpful local law enforcement) tells him: “Mulder, you know more about what happened to him than he does.” Mulder is in the process of calling Scully (who has spent the episode in Quantico) when his phone beeps. A message appears: “ALL DONE. BYE-BYE” The episode ends on Mulder’s shocked face as Scully keeps repeating his name.
We learn that what is going on is a combination of spraying crops with LSD (the Lone Gunmen make their second appearance to help Mulder with this) and that the messages serve as a catalyst. But the viewer never gets a clear picture of who is doing this or why. Even at this point in the series, it’s starting to get frustrating that we never get a look behind the curtain but in this case, we don’t mind because Morgan and Wong have never given the viewer time to breath.
‘3’ would be their next episode and the only one they would write in collaboration with another writer: Chris Ruppenthal. The episode is without question the weakest one associated with Morgan & Wong, though admittedly there were outside factors. As I mentioned in a previous article, this episode was essentially written as a filler episode to deal with Anderson’s pregnancy.
There are some brave parts to it, no question. I mentioned the opening teaser where Mulder walks in to the X-Files, looking absolutely dead. The calendar is set at May of 1994. He tears off the pages to August, when Scully was abducted, and then tears off the pages to November. It’s a brilliant scene for Duchovny. And you can see how the writers were trying to do things. They wanted to show that Mulder was so utterly broken that he was unable function normally and looked utterly careless. However, they did so with a storyline that was so wretched.
Mulder is called in to investigate the latest in a series of serial killers that he says takes on the pattern of the Holy Trinity — father, son, Holy Spirit. The victims have all shown signs of bite marks and the police eventually arrest a suspect who claims to be a vampire. This is where things start to break down because Mulder doesn’t believe him, even when he spontaneously combusts at sunrise.
I can see what Morgan and Wong were trying to do — show Mulder trying to play both parts. But its done very poorly as Mulder eventually finds himself under the spell of someone who enjoys the lifestyle named Kristen. Kristen was played by Perrey Reeves, who at the time was Duchovny’s girlfriend. Kristen and Mulder seem drawn to each other, even though Mulder knows she’s a suspect and at one point, they end up spending the night together.
Again, it’s a noble idea to show how lost Mulder is, but it makes him look incredibly stupid. It doesn’t help matters that the vampires in ‘3’ are so cliched and poorly drawn that its one of the first times you really think the writers are just going through the motions. This would be poor from anyone, it’s especially uninspiring from Morgan & Wong. There are brave parts you want to admire it for, but as one writer said later on, there’s bravery and there’s just plain stupidity. ‘3’ is an example of the latter.
However Morgan & Wong more than made up for it in their next episode ‘One Breath’. I’ve talked about a bit before but it is worth noting that among the stronger features of it is that Morgan & Wong continue to give voice to many of their characters. Skinner, The Lone Gunmen and Margaret Scully are all their creations, they gave the Smoking Man his first line of dialogue (in fact, he’s only spoken in episodes they’ve written to this point) and in this episode they take Mulder’s new informant X (played by Steven Williams) and help him register with the viewer for the first time.
Mulder, as I wrote in an earlier article, spends the episode fully aware that Scully is almost certainly going to die and is immense denial. His actions vary from that of extreme depression to rage and constant motion. He tells Melissa that ‘he can’t spend his time waving his hands in the air’, and attempts to signal for X. (He tapes an X to his window and shines a light on it, which implies that his informant has some kind of surveillance on his apartment building.)
The next day Mulder sees an unknown man take a sample of Scully’s blood. In a frantic scene, he chases this man into the garage only to run into the nose of X’s gun. X has to this point seemed ominous; now he is a combination of frantic behavior and rage. “You got him (Deep Throat) killed! You got her killed! That’s not gonna happen to me!” he shouts at Mulder. “You’re my tool! I come to you when I need you!” He mocks Mulder, calling him a ‘damn schoolboy!” and that he’s not supposed to know what’s going on.
Mulder ignores X’s warnings and chase the man through the garage. He catches up to him and holds him at bay. The man attacks him and runs off, but X catches him and breaks his arm. In moments, his tone has completely changed. “Do you want to see what it takes to know what I know?” he tells Mulder and then cold-bloodedly executes the man. “I’ll attend to this,” he says as a stunned Mulder walks away.
When Skinner asks him about what happened the next day, Mulder is cold in his denial. He demands the Smoking Man’s address. Skinner is questionable: “And then what? He sleeps with the fishes?” Skinner later ends up providing Mulder with Smoking Man’s address, but not before he gets to what’s at the heart of Mulder’s desperation: he feels an immense guilt at Scully’s inevitable fate and is trying to ignore his responsibility by meting out revenge.
I’ve spent the previous article ignoring what is happening with Scully, in part because some of have found it harder to take over the years. Personally I don’t know what they’re talking about. Scully is in a hospital bed through most of the episode, and the imagery we see is among the best in the series. The X-Files will have its share of problems in future episodes when one of its leads is facing death, but ‘One Breath’ is the exception that proves the rule. Scully is shown in a rowboat that is tied to a dock in a meadow throughout the episode, incapable of reacting to the people around her. When she is taken off life support, the rope holding her to the dock snaps and she drifts away. It is in one of those moments when she is lying on a dock that her father walks up to her in an admiral’s uniform. Don Davis gives a superb monologue in which he tells his daughter how frightened he was when he knew death was coming and it meant he would never see Dana again. He tells her we’ll see each other soon Starbuck, but not yet before walking off into the void.
Scully spends most of the episode unconscious but we learn so much about her. Before the episode begins Margaret tells a heartbreaking story about how when Dana first got an air rifle, she shot a snake and then tried to bring it back to life. Melissa, the first Scully sibling we’ve met, is clearly attached to her sister (there’s some awkwardness between her and her mother; we’ll later learn that Melissa was the wild child of the Scully siblings) but she is the force of light who guides Mulder forward. And of course, there’s Nurse Owens. Was she the spirit force who helped Scully come back from oblivion? Or was it the presence of Mulder, whose chooses to be by his partner’s side rather than seek revenge? We never know, and maybe that’s for the best. To be sure Scully does recover incredibly quickly, but that’s the point of ‘One Breath’. For all the conspiracy trapping of the episode, Morgan and Wong never forget that it’s a story of humanity, as much a parallel to their classic Beyond the Sea in that regard.
What was planned to be their final episode aired January 27,1995. Morgan and Wong’s names on the credits were written GLEN ‘CHARGERS’ MORGAN and JAMES ‘BOLTS BABY’ WONG. (Morgan and Wong were natives in San Diego and the Chargers were contended for the play-offs. By the time the episode aired the Chargers had long been eliminated.) You could say that was the first sign this wasn’t going to be a typical episode — but by the time the teaser of Die Hand Die Verletzt had finished, that ship had long since sailed.
The teaser involves a school board meeting. The parents are discussing the drama teacher’s decision to put on Jesus Christ Superstar as the school play. This leads to the typical back and forth. Then one of the parents (Dan Butler, already well known from Frasier) tells them they should end the meeting with a prayer. One of the parents objects saying the games about to the start. Ausbury tells him we’ve been letting it slight. They light candles, close the door, and in a very bored way begin a prayer to Satan. To this point on the series, this is the most hysterical opener the show has yet done, and it sets a tone for one of the most remarkable episodes in the series run.
How you view Die Hand Die Verletzt may depend on your point of view. Many fans consider it one of the scariest episodes in the entire canon of the series. Many others (including myself) consider it one of the most hysterical comedies in the entire series. Both points are correct but what makes me inclined to believe the latter is that Morgan & Wong, thinking this would be their final script for The X-Files, decided to go out and utterly tear down so many of the pretension about the show they’d spent the past two years building up. Brother Darin would demonstrate he felt the same way in just a few weeks when he made his X-Files debut with ‘Humbug’ and as we shall see, when Glen and James Wong came back in Season Four, they would focus most of their energy wresting the show away from the complacency it had built up as one of the greatest series of all time.
Because so much of the dialogue and situations in the show genuinely seem to play as if someone had chosen to write a parody version of the show for SNL or Mad TV (which would debut on Fox not long after this episode aired). This is particularly clear in how Mulder and Scully portrayed. One of the criticisms of weaker episodes of The X-Files was that far too often it seemed like the monster or aliens were driving the story and our heroes were essentially powerless. ‘Die Hand Die Verletzt’ takes this to an extreme almost from the start. There are fewer exchanges that seem more ridiculous than Mulder’s deadpan: “So…lunch, followed by the incredulous Scully’s “Mulder, toads just fell from the sky!” It’s the start in a series of lines by the heroes where they seem both powerless to what’s happening around them and clueless to just how bizarre it is.
One of the most memorable moments comes when Kate Ausbury, the stepdaughter of the one school board members has a traumatic experience dissecting a fetal pig that triggers repressed memories. This monologue is considering mesmerizing by some decades later, and it is… but not for the reasons you’d think. It starts out seriously but the longer it goes on the more ridiculous it becomes and by the time Kate tells she’s given birth to three children, all of whom were sired by her stepfather and were all ritually sacrifices as babies, it can’t be seen anything but absurd. What’s just as hysterical is that Mulder and Scully, who are skeptical to any story they are told, listen to this completely straight-faced and don’t even consider how bizarre it is. When her stepfather tells Mulder that she made almost all of it up, you genuinely wonder why they never discussed it before.
But that’s the joke Morgan and Wong are telling us, though it’s worth getting as to why this episode has a somewhat deeper layer than most of Darin’s stuff. The story in a sense is an out parody of organized religion and how all but the most devout pick and choose the parts they want to observe. Mulder actually makes a direct reference to this to Ausbury when he compares their dark rituals to ‘using grape juice instead of Communion wine.” As another writer said in his review of this episode, this is a satire but its one with a valid point: “if all the things we say in church have any meaning at all, how can we dare treat them in such a cavalier fashion? If you believe Christ really died for your sins, how can he be something you regard as an optional extra for use only for Christmas & Easter? And if you believe that Satan really does exist, and is all that is evil, and has ownership of your soul, how can this not be the central focus of your life?” As the story unfolds, it’s become clear the school board (always seen in a group and always in pairs) has let their ‘faith’ lapse over the years, and now the bill has come to be paid. And it comes in the most delightful fashion as Miss Paddock (a wonderful Susan Blommaert) as the literal substitute teacher from Hell. The episode loves making fun of every aspect of Paddock, from Mulder and Scully obliviously discussing how nobody remembers hiring her, to her records miraculously appear on the screen, to the fact that late in the episode every time her name is mentioned there is a lightning strike.
That is the greatest joke of this episode: Mulder and Scully spend all of it being used as a tool, but this time its by the devil who essentially uses them to help dispose of all of her inadequate worshippers. Then there’s the fact that so much of the dialogue is utterly absurd on the face of it. When Scully tells the school board that if all of the reports of satanism were to true, there would be millions of cases across the country and the deadpan response is: “Finally you understand what we’re up against’. There is no part of this episode you can’t consider absurd.
But I do understand why so many are terrified by it because there are scary underpinnings beneath all the laughter. When Mulder confronts Ausbury on how they came to this point he asks: “Did you really think you could call upon the devil and then ask him to behave?” I find myself thinking of this line more and more often in the age of populism and talking heads where the media and partisan politics shaped the public and now they seem powerless to control what they have set into motion.
And the thing is, that is exactly what happens to everyone in Milford Haven who has been found unworthy. One by one, Miss Paddock dispatches her acolytes and some of their children as sacrifices. In a truly remarkable set piece, Ausbury is left handcuffed in his basement and is digested alive by a monstrous python. Mulder and Scully are waylaid by the school board to become sacrifices themselves but they are saved…after Paddock uses the school board to kill each other. And when Mulder and Scully emerge from the shower room to go into the science lab where Paddock taught they find a message on the black board. “Goodbye. It’s been a pleasure working with you.”
At the time, this message was rightfully seen as a loving in-joke by Morgan and Wong themselves, a message to their loyal fans as they left The X-Files for greener pastures. But there’s something far darker underneath: Mulder and Scully have spent the entire episode utterly clueless to what has happened and may never know that they have been a tool for the greatest evil of all. I don’t think Morgan and Wong could have known the larger tone for the mythology (how could they as Carter basically made it up as he went?) but one of the darker subtexts is that Mulder and Scully will far too often being used as pawns for greater forces, and that they are themselves just being used. The difference is in this episode, there’s no indication that Mulder and Scully ever knew just what force was using them and for what end. I hope they never found out.
In any case Glen Morgan and James Wong left The X-Files to create Space: Above & Beyond no doubt with no intention of never looking back. (Such would be the case of many other writers, such as Howard Gordon, when they left the show.) But when the series was cancelled, Carter invited his old friends back both to The X-Files and his new series Millennium. But Morgan & Wong were not the same writers who had helped create the show.
In the final part on Morgan & Wong, I will look at the four episodes they wrote in Season Four, their radically different approach to the series, and the common thread. (And there was actually a couple of them, especially when it came to some of the guest stars.)