The first thing The X-Files ever showed anyone was a title card. "The following story is inspired by actual documented accounts," it read, and Keith Phipps, rewatching the pilot for The A.V. Club in 2008, answered it: "Uh-huh." Then a woman stumbles through the woods at night and meets a blinding light from above. Something shaped like a man comes out of it. The next day she is dead, with marks on her body. Only after that does Dana Scully get called into an office and told about her new partner.
Chris Carter has said on the Strange Arrivals podcast, in an interview summarized by the fan archive EatTheCorn, that the network asked for the disclaimer. Whoever wanted it, the show never opened with a claim again. From the third episode onward it mostly opened with a body, or with the three minutes that produce one.
A segment that sets up the show
The teaser was a network convention before it was an X-Files convention. An Associated Press reporter who sat in on a story meeting in March 1996 described a bulletin board of index cards laying out the plot points of an episode's four acts, separated by commercial breaks, plus the opening "teaser" scene. When Carter revived the show in 2015 he told The Canadian Press, in an interview run by iNFOnews, that Fox had since done away with the format and the production needed special dispensation to restore "a little two or three minute segment in the beginning that sets up the show."
The segment put the viewer somewhere the protagonists could not go. In Squeeze, the first monster-of-the-week hour, written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, a Baltimore businessman is dead on his office floor, the door jammed behind him and a hand still in the air vent, before either agent has been mentioned. We were in the room before it was a case.
Ice, six weeks later, is the purest version. Meghan Deans at Reactor describes it: a shirtless, bloodied man sets up a video camera and rasps "We're not who we are," says it again, a second man attacks him, they draw guns on each other, and then each slowly lowers his weapon and turns it on himself. Two shots. The agents are sent north to find out what happened. We already know the station is poisoned and that whatever is in those men makes them kill themselves rather than each other, and for forty minutes the dread is in watching intelligent people reason their way toward a fact we were handed before the credits.
The length of the gap
The show's genre gets misdescribed here. An X-File was almost never a whodunit. The teaser disposed of the "who" and often the "how" before the credits, so the hour that followed could not be a puzzle. It was dramatic irony, Hitchcock's bomb under the table stretched to four acts. The audience is ahead, the characters are behind, and the suspense is the length of the gap.
Darin Morgan described the mechanism plainly when he told Cinefantastique in 1996 that the writers got into the habit of saying "Okay, here's a dead body," cut to commercial. He was proudest of Jose Chung's From Outer Space because "only two people died, and I didn't have a death on an act-out." The teaser was the first and most important of those act-outs, the one the opening credits sealed. Zack Handlen's recap of Monday at The A.V. Club renders the beat: the SWAT team comes through the doors, the robber has a bomb, "KABOOM. Opening credits."
Vince Gilligan was the best at it. Pusher, his second script, directed by Rob Bowman, opens with the FBI already catching its man. Robert Modell is arrested in the first minutes and put in the back of a police car, where he talks to the deputy about cerulean blue until the deputy turns the car into traffic, straight into a truck marked, as Deans noted, "Cerulean Hauling." The method is handed to the audience whole, and the agents spend the hour catching up to it. Drive, in the fall of 1998, starts with what Handlen called a phony news bulletin from a Fox affiliate: a chase that looks like a hostage situation, a woman put safely in a cop car, and then her head against the window until "her skull bursts." Handlen added that "this series has done some of the best cold opens ever." Bryan Cranston spends the episode trying to outrun what we have already watched happen to his wife.
The device worked for pure horror too. Home, from Morgan and Wong with Kim Manners directing, begins, in Deans's summary, with a baby born and buried in a rainstorm by three men. Fangoria reports that Fox asked for the audio to be altered so the infant would sound sick, and that the hour remains the only episode of the series to carry a TV-MA rating. Carter had told the Chicago Sun-Times in August 1993 that the show would "show the results of violence, not the act." The four acts mostly kept that promise. The first three minutes are where it was spent.
The thumb on the scale
The show sold itself as an argument between a believer and a skeptic, and Scully's position has often been praised as the honest one. Structurally she never had a chance. The viewer was in the room at the ice station. Scully's rationalism arrives in act one as an opinion about events the audience has already witnessed, and so it plays as the thing a smart person says before she knows better. The teaser is a thumb on the scale for Mulder. He holds the position the audience was placed in before either of them appeared.
Even Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, an hour about whether anyone can see death coming, opens by letting us see it. A fortune teller is attacked by a man with large, beady eyes who wants to know why he keeps "doing things" that seem "out of character." We know his face before the agents know there is a case. Bruckman can foresee every death and we can foresee the killer, and neither of us can do anything with the knowledge.
The hard cut
What made the teaser's knowledge official was the title sequence. Castle/Bryant/Johnsen designed it in a couple of months, according to a 2013 Empire interview excerpted at EatTheCorn, with Mark Snow's theme arriving midway through the job. It won the show its first Emmy, the 1994 award for graphic design and title sequences. It functioned as a cliff edge. A body hits the floor, the whistle starts, and "The Truth Is Out There" appears over footage the viewer has just been shown to be true. The card was a receipt for the teaser. When The Erlenmeyer Flask swapped it for "Trust No One" in May 1994, Deans registered the change as a loss of hope, because the tagline had always been reporting on what we had just seen.
The exceptions
The exceptions map onto the show's most unusual hours. Beyond the Sea opens on Scully and her parents; Morgan and Wong, who wanted a "Scully episode," decided according to Cinefantastique to have her father die before the teaser ended. Little Green Men opens on Mulder's voice, narrating the Voyager launch over the shuttered control room at Arecibo, and its one secret is a bank of machines waking up on their own. Bad Blood opens with Mulder chasing a pizza delivery boy into the woods and staking him, then Scully pulling out the kid's fake teeth. Monday puts the agents in the bank before the bomb. Triangle begins with Mulder face down in the ocean. The audience is more or less level with the agents in all of them, and each turns out to be about the agents, their grief or their vanity. When the show wanted to look inward, it gave up its head start.
Mythology hours kept the head start but changed what it bought. The Erlenmeyer Flask opens on a police chase, a man who fights too well and bleeds green, a leap into the water. We are ahead again, but this knowledge will be taken from the agents by the end of the hour rather than reached. The gap that closes in a monster episode only widens here.
Then there is Jose Chung's, where the teaser teaches you to distrust the teaser: the camera glides past what Emily St. James likened to a Star Destroyer until it resolves into the undercarriage of a crane lift.
Carter's "special dispensation" in 2015 says more than he probably meant it to. By then the pre-credits segment was something a network had to be talked into, and the streaming hour has largely abandoned the cut it depended on. Without a title card there is no cliff, and without a cliff the three minutes of advance knowledge are just the first three minutes.