X-Files Retrospective: The Work of Glen Morgan & James Wong
Part 3: Their Return In Season Four And Their Work As Deconstructionists
If you’ll allow a bit of a poetic license:
In the beginning, there was the X-Files. Then came Glen and James. And they brought forth monster of the week. And they created the Lone Gunmen and Skinner and Margaret Scully. They gave voice to the Smoking Man and menace to X. And it was great.
Then Glen and James said unto to Chris: we want to create our own series. And Chris said, Yea, for he now had Vince and Darin.
So Glen and James brought forth Space: Above and Beyond and it was very good, but it was expensive and the bean counters at Fox destroyed it. And Chris said unto his old friends, please return to Ten-Thirteen.
And in their absence, The X-Files fanbase had grown ten-fold. And Darin had utterly deconstructed the series fourfold and many cried for more and bemoaned his departure. And the mythology looked like it might make sense and then the black oil came, and it became confusing. But few cared because the series had millions of viewers and had been nominated for numerous awards and won many. The cult show was now a masterpiece.
And Glen did look unto James and say: “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
When Morgan & Wong came back to Ten-Thirteen, they spent much of the next two years beginning to tear down the foundation of the series that Chris Carter had built. They would also be part of Millennium, essentially staff writers and would eventually take over as show-runners in that series second season. There’s an argument that their work in both Season Four of the X-Files and the second season of Millennium is of the same ilk: in both cases, they are tearing down the foundation of the series that Carter had spent so much time building.
It’s not part of this series, but it’s worth noting that in the case of Millennium they were far more of a destructive force. The foundation of Season One — the most consistent of the show’s three-year run — is that for all the horrors Frank Black faces on the job, he is always able to return to the sanctuary of the ‘yellow house’ where his faithful wife and six year old daughter live. However, in the odd Morgan & Wong script, you can see them poking at this idea. In an early episode, they showed the instability of a fellow profiler who ends up losing himself in the job and losing his family as a result — something that happens to Frank at the beginning of Season Two. In another episode, after Frank is in a situation where he is on the verge of killing a man, Catherine assures him in the final minutes that he is no more capable of hurting a monster than he is Catherine or Jordan. In the second season premiere, when a man abducts Catherine, he ends up beating her abductor to death.
Morgan & Wong’s acts of deconstruction are not of the same type in the four scripts they ended up writing during the X-Files fourth season. They don’t attack the foundation of the series so much as they do the format. And nowhere is the more apparent in the first episode they wrote: ‘Home.’
(This article is not officially part of my month-long tribute to horror, but considering the nature of this episode, you might consider it such.)
‘Home’ is the most infamous episode of The X-Files which is interesting since its been seen far less than any episode in the original run in syndication since its debut in October of 1996. It was the first episode that was aired with a ‘Parental Discretion Advised’ warning, which did nothing to allay the outrage when it aired. Fox immediately took out of circulation and it did not air again, even in syndication, until the fall of 1999. It was in syndication for a while afterwards and (at least as far the network that airs in concerned) has been removed from rotation. (I assume you can still find it on streaming; it is available on both DVD and one of the original series of VHS recordings that were released in the immediate aftermath of The X-Files success.)
What is perhaps the most interesting thing about ‘Home’ in hindsight is that, in the strictest sense of the word, it isn’t an X-File. It has some of the most unforgettable monsters-of-the-week in the show’s run, but they are still human beings. The Peacock family have lived in the outskirts of Home, Pennsylvania for generations and the only reason Mulder and Scully are called in to begin with is because a dead baby has been found on buried in the ground.
You can’t exactly pretend it doesn’t deserve the reputation it has it is one of the bloodiest and goriest episodes The X-Files would ever do. Once you see them, they will etch themselves in your nightmares. (I acknowledge this is a masterpiece but it’s a very hard one to rewatch.) The teaser involves a gory home birth in which we see the umbilical cord of the child being clipped with pinking shears. The baby’s body is found when a little leaguer digs in at the plate and uncovers a pool of blood. The autopsy of the child shows some of the most horrific birth defects imaginable. The climax of the episode reveals that one of the characters has been living under the bed with even more hideous defects and is a quadruple amputee.
And one of the most unforgettable sequences in series history occurs when the Peacocks gets out of their car, syphon gasoline with their mouths and begin to drive into down to the sound of Johnny Mathis’ ‘Wonderful, Wonderful’. We see an intercut between the road and Sheriff Taylor. (In a dark in joke, the sheriff’s full name is Andy Taylor. However Tucker Smallwood — who had a leading role on Space Above and Beyond is African-American.) When the Peacocks arrive at the house, the sheriff tells his wife to ‘hide under the bed” and he’s going for the gun. He never makes it as the Peacock brothers beat him to death with clubs. This horrific sequence climaxed with the sheriff’s terrified wife watching as her husband’s blood trickles towards her. She tries to hold back a gasp but the Peacocks hear it and yank the bed away. The scene ends with her screaming over the sounds of Mathis’ lyrics.
This was strong stuff for viewers in 1996; I wonder now if even the viewer accustomed to Game of Thrones and American Horror Story could handle it. Most of the gore and violence those shows indulge in take place in a slightly difference universe. ‘Home’ makes it very clear that this kind of ugliness is going on right in small town America. The Peacock family, you see, has been isolated from the rest of the world for decades. Their house has no running water or electricity, they have an outhouse and they don’t come into town that often. The deeper meaning about them comes clear when the Sheriff says: “they breed their own stock, if you catch my meaning.” And in the climax it becomes horribly clear to the viewer just how extensive that is.
Mulder and Scully spend the entire episode dealing with the horrors they see and deflecting them with their own versions of humor. Much of the discussion they have during the episode is either reminiscence of childhood, having families or just how idyllic this town is. This was derided at the time given the darkness of this subject matter but you get the feeling their banter is about trying to deal with a horror that can’t be explained away as the traditional monster. ‘Home’ is an ugly episode, but it also looks back at the world of isolated towns that even in the late 1990s was quickly disappearing. And it does bring up the question of what we consider home and what we would do to protect it. The last thing Taylor says before the attack that will kill him is that he’s taking a look ‘before it all changes.’ He wants to keep his standard of living the same — and so, in their twisted way, do the Peacock family. In a sense, the darkest part of this episode is not the murders that take place but both Taylor and the Peacocks have completely lost their sense of what home means.
‘Home’ was the most extreme example of how Morgan and Wong were going to tweak the format, but the three episodes that followed were just as willing to twist it. For a long time, I actually found their next episode ‘The Field Where I Died’ far harder to watch then Home and in away, this episode is far more polarizing than Home is among fans.
Ostensibly this episode is about Mulder and Scully’s involvement when the FBI is called into prevent what they assume is a cult massacre in Tennessee. When Mulder and Scully arrive they have just prevented what was nearly a mass suicide and they are trying to find a weapons cache to lock up the cult leader (played by the notorious Michael Massee). That’s what the plot of the episode but you could be forgiven for forgetting it.
The lion’s share of the episode involves Mulder’s interactions with a woman named Melissa, one of the cult leader’s wives. Melissa is played by Kristen Cloke. Like Smallwood (and indeed, there was a guest star from Space Above and Beyond in every episode Morgan and Wong wrote) Cloke had a critical role on the previous series but her connection to Ten-Thirteen is deeper. The next year, she had the critical role of Lara Means on the second season of Millennium and later on she and Glen Morgan would get married. This isn’t entirely favoritism: Cloke is a gifted actress. That said, the performances that both she and David Duchovny give in this episode has caused a lot of gnashing of teeth among fans of the show.
An initial interview reveals that Melissa seems to believe she as a Hassidic Jew named Sidney who lived into the 1950s. Scully thinks it’s another personality; Mulder thinks it’s a past life. As the episode unfolds Melissa goes through hypnosis and believes herself as a Confederate nurse in the Civil War. In a trance she leads Mulder and Scully into a field which was a battlefield and tells Mulder that ‘this is the field where I saw you die.”
Mulder in an effort to prove that Melissa is not deluded undergoes hypnosis himself and remembers back to this past life as well as being a Jewish man during the Holocaust. They have a long conversation in which he keeps remembering that he and Melissa are always together in their past lives as are the Smoking Man as a destructive force and Scully as a friend.
Now when this episode aired, understandably, the ‘shippers’ were outraged that Mulder and the guest star of the week and soulmates and not the beloved Dana Scully. This was the least of my problems with the episode then and for a good long time. Cloke and Duchovny give the kind of performances that are either seen as great histrionics or incredible over-acting; in trances they take on different voices and sometimes different accents. Even the most generous interpretation of their work says both actors are good but not nearly good enough. For years, hearing Duchovny in this episode could see my teeth on edge and it was one of the episodes at the bottom of the barrel.
The larger problem I have is that Mulder and Melissa spend so much time dealing with past lives that the viewer forgets the crisis that brought them here. The end of the episode is one of the grimmest in series history — the FBI is standing over the bodies of the mass suicide they were unable to prevent. But because we’ve spent so much time away from it, the impact is minimalized. And it doesn’t help matters that given the show’s already bad track record with voiceovers, that when Mulder reads a poem by Robert Browning at the beginning and end of the show, we’re inclined to dismiss as more of the purple prose Carter has given us (and will keep giving us, unfortunately). I don’t hate this episode as much as I once did and you’ve got to admire Morgan and Wong’s decision to complete throw caution to the wind and say, “Mulder and Scully are not meant to end up together at the end of this.” (Of course, the show never took that idea seriously.)
‘Musings of A Cigarette-Smoking Man’ is one of the series great episodes. Morgan and Wong didn’t approach it the same way they had any of their prior collaborations. Morgan is the sole author of the script, while Wong makes his directorial debut. (He deservedly received an Emmy nomination for it.)
In a way, this episode may be the most subversive thing the X-Files ever tried. The adverts and the opening teaser make us think we are going to learn the truth about the show’s most notorious villain — and then tells us anything but that. It unfolds in four acts.
In the first act, the young smoking man is a man in the military in 1962 and a friend of William Mulder, whose son has just said his first word. He goes into a meeting with shadowy figures, who offer him a cigarette. “No thanks, never touch them,” he said. They then ask him about his previous activities and he offers a series of non-denial denials. (This scene is taken straight out of the opening of Apocalypse Now.) He is called in to carry out the assassination of “an American civilian, aged 46. Former PT-Boat Commander. Married, father of two.” (We already know what’s coming because there are subtitles for every act. Act 1 is: “Things really did go well in Dealey Plaza.”)
The next scene takes place in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and this man, calling himself Mr. Hunt has a meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald about leaving ‘curtain rods on the second floor of the Texas Book Depository.” (Oswald is played by Morgan Weisser another Space: Above & Beyond veteran.) The assassination is carried out in a way telegraphed far more like one we saw Oliver Stone do five years earlier in JFK. Oswald learns of the assassinations, kills a cop and is arrested in a movie theater where the smoking man lights his first cigarette.
In this sequence, though we don’t believe, the show takes itself seriously. I’m also inclined to believe in the mood of the next one filmed entirely in black and white. The Smoking Man is writing a spy novel, and while he finished it up he hears Martin Luther King giving a famous speech warning against involvement in Vietnam. He hears and says: “No, no. Why’d you have to say that?” He then has a conversation with J. Edgar Hoover, who is clearly uncomfortable when he tells him he dropped the ball. He respects King, but the idea of convincing black men not to fight in Vietnam will lead them to lose “and then the first domino will have fallen.” There is discussion about discrediting him and the Smoking Man the solution must be more final — something that Hoover and Tolson seem uncomfortable with. They discuss having the killing in the South by a ‘cracker patsy’ but the Smoking Man says he’ll do it himself. “I have too much respect for the man.”
The scene unfolds majestically as we see him meet with James Earl Ray, go to the sight in Memphis where he has his last speech, and over the voiceover pulls the trigger on King. Back in his apartment, he hears Robert F. Kennedy give another famous speech and as he recites the words of Aeschylus, the Smoking Man mouths along. We know in our hearts what’s coming next.
So far the episode has been taking itself seriously. The rest of the way it is pure satire. The next meeting takes place in Christmas in 1991 and a group of men are quietly discussing every conspiracy theory you can imagine from the series (“the Rodney King trial has been moved to Sarajevo) to the ridiculous (“What I don’t want to see is the Bills winning the Super Bowl. As long as I’m alive that doesn’t happen.) He dismisses Saddam Hussein’s phone calls, takes credit for the American Ice Hockey gold in 1980 and witnesses news that Gorbachev has resigned, all while fingering a nicotine patch and being shy about what he’ll do over the holidays. That night, while working on another spy novel he gets a call from Deep Throat (Jerry Hardin): “You’ll never guess what we got for Christmas.”
The conversation these two men, who we know are knee deep in the mythology, is hysterical because they speak as if aliens are a myth and they have not spent their lives covering it up. Their alarm is based on having to kill this alien in order to ensure domestic tranquility. The two men debate doing so: “I’m the liar. You’re the killer.” Deep Throat says. “I’ve never killed anybody.” CSM recites. “Now who’s the liar?” Deep Throat counters. The only reason we think this episode might have a grain of truth is because of a monologue that Deep Throat gave of being one of only three living men to kill an extra-terrestrial. However, given everything else.
The final act involves the Pilot and Mulder’s first meeting with Scully where CSM listens in, implying the X-Files is bugged. But there’s another scene in which it seems the Smoking Man has finally gotten one of his novels published after decades of frustration. There’s a childish delight in William B. Davis’s voice when he accepts and dashed off his resignation later as well as horrible gloom when he sees the first chapter in a magazine. “This isn’t the ending I wrote. It’s all wrong.” I won’t reveal his final reaction and what he says afterwards because it needs to be heard and seen.
What’s hysterical about the episode that even though it’s made clear in the last moments that all of this based on a story that Frohike read that ‘rang some bells’, so many fans were sure it was gospel. Hell, I thought it myself for a long time after seeing this episode. Indeed Morgan and Wong couldn’t agree on which parts of the story were real, something that deeply frustrated Davis during the process. And that helps with the mood. In a sense, I don’t think anything we see in ‘Musings’ is true. In another, everything is. We know just watching the episode that some of the dates don’t line up with the flashbacks we’ve seen in some of the mytharc. But what matters is the mood. It’s highly unlikely that the Smoking Man did any single one of the things we see him do in this episode. But you could see him, Zelig like, being in the room when all of them happened. This episode doesn’t deconstruct the character of the Smoking Man because there isn’t a character to study. And it also argues, perhaps in the clearest sense, that the show’s catchphrase — the truth is out there — may be fundamentally a lie.
There’s a part of me that truly believes none of the episode took place because so much of it seems to be the trappings of the conspiracy ridden mind of the X-Files fan. (Hell, his cigarette lighter has ‘Trust No One’ on it! You really think he’d be dumb enough something like that?) But it is a riot to watch from start to finish.
The fourth and final episode Morgan & Wong wrote is as controversial as the other three. ‘Never Again’ has been argued about since it first aired. It was originally scheduled to air before ‘Leonard Betts’ , the episode in which we learned Scully had cancer. Instead it aired the week after. For the last quarter of a century, fans have been eternally divided as to whether Scully’s behavior in this episode is because of her recent diagnosis or has nothing to do with it. I’ve leaned in both directions, but I think the main reason people want to believe (heh heh) in the former is because it would explain to them why Scully acts in such a reckless fashion in this episode. In their minds, it would no doubt justify the fact that so much of what we see in ‘Never Again’ tears deeply at the foundation of the show we’ve been watching.
The episode shows Scully listening to a conversation between Mulder and a Russian informant with a bored expression on her face. We never see either of them as Scully wanders off and picks up a rose petal that has been left near the Vietnam War Memorial.
In the next sequence with them, Mulder is manic because he’s about to go on a vacation he doesn’t want to go on. His attitude in this entire episode is really horrible. One reviewer says that they don’t think they’d ever hated Mulder so much as they do in Never Again, and there’s a reason to feel that way. Mulder has acted childish, reckless and usually with no concern for his partner so many times over the years; as this reviewer reminds us, Scully is the grownup in this relationship. But at least most of the time he treats his partner with respect. Here he is callous and bullying, utterly dismissive of her needs, and mocking some of her own problems. He mocks her for ditching him at the meeting, dismisses her idea that the informant is relating a plot from Rocky and Bullwinkle and basically orders her to follow up on something.
Scully spends much of the episode in a state where she seems to be drifting which leads her to interact with the first man who thinks she cute. It may be the first time in a long time she’s allowed herself to interact with a man socially. Unfortunately, it’s the worst man possible.
Ed Jerse (Rodney Rowland, who starred on you know what) just got through an ugly divorce and in the drunken aftermath gets a tattoo with a girl that says Never Again on it. That tattoo begins talking to him in the voice of Jodie Foster. We hear eventually that there’s something in the dye of the tattoo that causes some kind of mental poisoning but we also learn Jerse didn’t have enough of it in his system to affect him. It’s just as likely the divorce has led him to indulge in his toxic masculinity impulses, which by the time he meets Scully have already led him to kill his upstairs neighbor.
It is the fact that Scully is herself in drift that she allows herself to go on a date with him, get a tattoo of her own, and go back to his apartment. (We never learn if they have sex, but it’s implied.) In the aftermath, Scully learns both about the tattoo’s effects and Jerse’s murder and when Jerse realizes it, he nearly kills Scully.
Yet even this behavior pales in comparison to the final five minutes which somehow are worse. Mulder opens it by saying: “Congratulations on your second appearance in The X-Files. A record.” The moment he does this, the gap between them seems almost irreparable. Mulder tries to make everything that happened all about him, and Scully who is still adrift says: “Not everything is about you, Mulder. This is my life.” Mulder answers: “Yes, but its…” He trails off.
The last moment of the episode is one of the most unsettling The X-Files would ever do, not because its terrifying but because the two leads of our series just sit there unable to say anything. There’s a gulf between them, a few feet on the screen, miles in real life. The viewer knows they’ll move on — this is 1990s TV after all — but Morgan and Wong make it very clear in this scene that in a way, these two allies are human and capable of being awful to each other, recklessly stupid and sometimes feel trapped by their partnership. In their last script for The X-Files during its original run, Morgan & Wong question whether the key relationship we’ve spent four years loving is as perfect as network TV demands. That’s pretty radical.
Though they stayed on for the rest of the year, Morgan and Wong never wrote another script during the season. They left the show to take over Millennium from Chris Carter in Season Two (I wrote an earlier article on the series if you’d like to know what they did when they were in charge) then left the show after it was renewed for Season Three. In TV the two were connected with The Others and Final Destination series, The One and the remake of Willard in film.
Final Destination 3 was the last project they worked on together as a team, though both men have been active in film and TV, though too far less success. Morgan’s work included the remake of Bionic Woman, which may have been a victim of the 2007 writers strike, The River which died quickly in 2014 and two different projects in 2014 Those Who Kill and Intruders (the latter connected with BBC America is most notable for a performance by Millie Bobby Brown before she became Eleven). He wrote several episodes for the Jordan Peele version of The Twilight Zone and the horror anthology Lore for Amazon. James Wong’s track record is similarly hit or miss. He was a producer and writer on the NBC series The Event and has written episodes for American Horror Story (fourteen episodes over eight years). He also consulted on the Fox Show Next which had the misfortune of airing during the pandemic.
When The X-Files returned in 2016 and again 2018, both Morgan and Wong wrote scripts for the show on their own, each of which they directed. Morgan’s wife Kristin Cloke has since become a writer herself, writing a script for the eleventh season of The X-Files. The two collaborated on a script for Almost Paradise, a series currently airing on Freevee. James Wong also wrote an episode.
I might eventually deal with the scripts that Morgan and Wong individually wrote for the revival of the series but that will wait for a separate article. What can not be questioned is that, as collaborators, the two men did more than anyone — perhaps more than Carter himself — to put The X-Files on the map and on their return, showed that the show could not rest on its laurels. They are the originators of The Lone Gunmen, Walter Skinner, X and gave the Smoking Man his voice as well as some of William B. Davis’s finest moments. It is possible The X-Files could have existed without them,. It’s impossible to imagine it becoming the success it was without them being there at the start.