The third-season hour everyone calls the show's Rashomon has been admired for thirty years as a script. Darin Morgan wrote it, and it aired on April 12, 1996. Most of the praise lands on the dialogue and the structure. The decision I want to credit belongs to its director, Rob Bowman. Every account in the episode, from a sober Air Force cover story to a power-line worker's screenplay about a creature from the earth's core, is photographed, lit, scored and performed with the same conviction. Nothing is tipped. The viewer is handed five incompatible versions of one night and no visual cue to rank them by.
Television usually flags the lie: a different stock, a softer lens, a wink from the actor. Morgan told Cinefantastique that Bowman had to read the script fifteen times before he understood it, and the understanding shows. The hour withholds every one of those cues. It is rigorous about evidence in the only way a camera can be, by refusing to editorialize about what it is pointed at.
The crane
The teaser states the method before a word of plot. The camera drifts past a dark, angular mass that fills the frame like a spaceship. It is the underside of a utility crane, and a man in a bucket is working the power lines above a country road. Emily St. James, at The A.V. Club, read the shot as the counterpart of the closing monologue. The first image is a thing that looks like evidence and is only equipment.
Below the crane, two teenagers, Chrissy and Harold, are pulled from their car by gray aliens, and a larger creature then attacks the aliens, one of whom asks the other what that thing is. The scene has the show's usual night exterior and its usual dread. The aliens are witnesses too.
Five accounts, one lighting plan
Morgan told Cinefantastique he had first planned for Chung, the novelist researching a book on the case, to interview a different person in each act, and dropped the idea as too complicated. Scully became the main narrator, with Chung talking to the UFO enthusiast Blaine in the third act. The result is a set of stories nested inside one story. In Morgan's words, "even when Scully is telling her story, she's actually telling everyone else's account." She relays Chrissy's hypnotic regression, Harold's, Roky's, the detective's and Mulder's, and she edits as she goes. When Detective Manners swears, Scully substitutes a "bleep," so what we hear is her censorship. The evidence has been cleaned at the source, by the narrator the show has always trusted most.
Chrissy's first hypnosis session produces a spaceship, gray examiners, and a girl told it is all for the good of the planet. Her second produces Air Force men and the CIA, wiping her memory for the good of the country. Bowman stages the second as a recasting of the first: Chrissy on a glass table among aliens becomes Chrissy in a chair in a bright room, with the Air Force and CIA men standing exactly where the aliens stood. Morgan preferred altered memories to erased ones; someone changing what you remember frightened him more than abduction did. The direction honors that. Neither version is shot as the dream.
Roky Crikenson's account is where most directors would have cheated. He saw the abduction from his crane, was visited by two men in black who assured him he had seen Venus, and wrote it all up as a screenplay, with the creature from the teaser given a name, Lord Kinbote, and a mission to carry him to the center of the earth. The name is Nabokov's, from Pale Fire, and Cinefantastique described the creature as a tribute to Ray Harryhausen. There was no time or money for stop motion, so effects makeup supervisor Toby Lindala built a suit, and the footage was sped up and then slowed back down by computer to give it a jerky look. Morgan's own hope was that it "looked like stop-animation." That is a practical effect processed to resemble an older, more obviously fake effect, dropped into a scene lit and scored like any other monster reveal on the show. Morgan cited Nabokov's habit of putting "reality" in quotation marks as a direct influence. Bowman's quotation marks are a frame rate.
The body
The middle of the episode runs the show's own evidentiary machinery past the camera one piece at a time. Blaine, a UFO buff out looking for saucers, finds a dead alien in the woods, and Mulder, arriving at the body, lets out a high shriek that Meghan Deans at Reactor called glorious. When Detective Manners keeps his camcorder out of the autopsy, Blaine yells "Roswell!" twice, and again later when the men in black take his tape. Scully autopsies the corpse and finds an Air Force pilot in an alien costume. Her autopsy footage is then cut together and sold as a television special, Dead Alien! Truth or Humbug?, narrated by the Stupendous Yappi, the fake psychic from Morgan's Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose. Morgan was satirizing the alien autopsy tape that Fox, the show's own network, had put on the air, which he called a swindle. The joke has teeth because the series had spent three seasons treating an autopsy as the one scene in which Scully's method produced certainty. Here the method works, and the result is immediately repackaged as the opposite of what it proved.
The men in black who come for Blaine's tape are played by Jesse Ventura and, more or less as himself, Alex Trebek. Trebek, by Morgan's account, agreed only after being talked out of asking for a bigger part. The scene is shot like every other government visitation in the series, two men in suits and a flat threat, and the only thing that breaks it is a face you know from a game show. Recognition is the one tell the hour permits itself.
What happens to the agents
The cruelest move is what the structure does to the leads. Mulder declines to be interviewed. He goes to see Chung to ask him not to write the book, and that is his last say in the matter. In Blaine's account the agents are themselves the men in black, Mulder a "mandroid" and Scully a threat. In the account Chung got from the diner cook, which he reads back to Scully in her own interview, Mulder sits alone eating a whole sweet potato pie one slice at a time, asking UFO questions, and David Duchovny turns and flashes his badge straight into the lens. In Scully's account a pilot sat at that table and told Mulder everything. The show's hero becomes a figure in other people's testimony, and St. James suggested this may be the episode with the lowest opinion of Mulder the series ever held. Duchovny plays it with what Deans called extra pan in his deadpan.
Scully fares differently and, in the end, worse. She is the frame narrator, and the episode quietly has her praise Chung's earlier novel, The Caligarian Candidate, as one of the greatest thrillers ever written, a line Deans flagged as out of character. When the book is finished she and Mulder appear in it under altered names, and her closing assessment is that the case has more closure than some of their others. One of the two cues from this hour that La-La Land Records issued on its first X-Files set in 2011 is titled "Closure," and the music under the last montage is some of the gentlest Mark Snow wrote for the series. Asked by Soundtrack.Net in 1998 which episodes he had enjoyed scoring most, Snow would not pick one, but the first that came to mind were this one, Clyde Bruckman and Humbug, all Darin Morgan's, before he added Redux.
The montage
The ending gives every witness a last image. Roky has moved to El Cajon and preaches the inner earth and its lava men to the lost and desperate. Chrissy has decided her visitation was a message. Harold loves her and she does not love him back. Mulder lies alone in bed in his apartment watching Bigfoot footage that Morgan told Cinefantastique was phony. Chung types that evidence of extraterrestrial life remains as elusive as ever. Morgan was proud that the hour has a body count of two, with no death at an act break. He wanted the ending touching, not wacky.
The sympathy and the rigor are the same decision. By lighting every lie like the truth, Bowman and Morgan make it impossible to laugh at any one witness from a safe distance. The Television Academy, listing the hour last October among the show's scariest episodes, called it brilliantly structured and inventively directed. Scariest is an odd word for a comedy. It stops being odd once you notice that nobody in the hour, the agents included, can prove what happened to them.