Actors who move behind the camera on their own series are often given a safe hour: a contained story, a familiar set, nothing too ambitious. The X-Files gave its leads something closer to free rein, and what they made says a lot about how each of them understood the show.
The Unnatural
David Duchovny's first episode as writer and director, in season six, is a baseball story set largely in 1947. It follows Josh Exley, a Black ballplayer in the Negro leagues played by Jesse L. Martin, who is hiding a secret that makes him even more of an outsider than the segregated sport already makes him.
It's a period piece, a sports movie and a fable, and it barely involves the usual investigation. The look is warm and golden, a deliberate contrast with the show's usual cold palette, and Bill Roe's photography earned an Emmy nomination. Duchovny's interest is in longing and in the ways a person can love something that will never fully accept them. The alien premise is almost a pretext.
What's striking is how confident it is. A first-time director could easily have stayed close to the format. Duchovny instead made something that feels like a small independent film inside a network drama.
Hollywood A.D.
His second episode, in season seven, goes the other way: it's a comedy about the show itself. A Hollywood studio makes a film based on the agents' work, and Mulder and Scully watch themselves being turned into entertainment, played by Garry Shandling and Téa Leoni.
The episode is about authorship and distortion. It asks what happens when a story about the search for truth becomes a product, and it's funny about how much the movie version gets wrong. Coming from the actor who spent years playing Mulder, it reads as an affectionate, slightly rueful comment on fame and on the gap between a character and the person who plays him.
all things
Gillian Anderson's only episode as writer and director, also in season seven, is the quietest hour in the series. The lowercase title is deliberate. The episode follows Scully through a chain of chance encounters that lead her to reconsider a choice she made years earlier. It's interested in coincidence, attention, and whether events connect in ways we can't see.
It's slow by the show's standards, and it was not universally loved when it aired. But its pace is the point. Anderson builds the episode out of lingering shots and small moments, letting the camera stay with Scully when nothing dramatic is happening. It's an episode about the things a procedural usually cuts out.
What they reveal
Put side by side, the three episodes show two different instincts. Duchovny's work is playful and fond of genre: period films, Hollywood satire, stories about performance. Anderson's is inward and contemplative, more concerned with the private experience of her character than with the show's machinery.
Both of them, notably, chose to make episodes that step away from the mythology and even from the standard case structure. When the people who knew the characters best were handed the camera, neither of them used it to tell a conventional X-File. They used it to show what else the format could hold.