11th: Now, Kristen's gotten some interesting stuff to perform in your work, and oftentimes, she either gets killed (as she did in Space: Above and Beyond and The X-Files) or goes crazy (as she did in Millennium). Is this some kind of [marital] catharsis for you, Glen?

Morgan: Well, I think we put Gillian [Anderson] through some stuff too, but in Kristen's case, she had a lot of circumstance.

Kristen Cloke: [Glen] would just experiment with what everyone would do, but wasn't able to try it because he wouldn't find an actor who would actually do it. A lot of that stuff was experimental, like with Lara Means, or [the X-Files episode] "The Field Where I Died." He'd do it because, basically, he knew that I wasn't going to quit. But it's fun. It's fun to try new stuff with someone that you really trust. I've gotten the biggest chances as an actor with Glen and Jim.

Morgan: And that thing on Millennium with Kristen... when I was in college, I was sitting around in my dorm room [listening to Patti Smith's "Horses", which was later featured in the Millennium episode "The Time is Now"] thinking, "Oh wouldn't it be great if someone went crazy to this?" And you just remember that after a while. In that case, we had [the director] Tom Wright and we had Kristen, going out in a big way. In Space: Above and Beyond, Vansen wasn't meant to die. [Originally] when McQueen got off the stretcher and asks "Vansen? Damphousse?", Commodore Ross shakes his head and says "They're organizing a search party. It doesn't look good."

Cloke: And in between the editing time and the filming time, we somehow got a feeling like it wasn't going to happen.

Glen: Well, I knew the show was cancelled.

Cloke: We felt like it was, but it wasn't official.

Morgan: I had a feeling. Yeah, it wasn't official, but when we were writing it, going into that two-parter, we thought it was over.

Cloke: By the time you were editing it, you pretty much knew.

Morgan: In any case, we're editing with Jim Coblentz, and we said to take out the line, "We've organized a search party." So now all Commodore Ross says is "It doesn't look good." I went home and said to Kristen, "We're gonna get cancelled, and Vansen could give her life for her friends." So then we just cut that second line out as well. Now Ross just shakes his head. I watched that in the editing room, and I was like, "Oh my God, I just killed this character that I loved so much!"

11th: In regards to you two as writers, I think that more than anything you care about character, which makes your stuff all the stronger and more interesting. I heard Kristen once say in an interview, when someone asked about the strength of female characters in your work, that it's not so much about a strong female role but that a strong, interesting character will do. It doesn't have to be made clear that she's a woman.

Morgan: You have to have somebody willing to have that something. It's two-fold -- you can have some actresses who just don't want to do that. But in our case we were fortunate enough to have Gillian and Kristen. And Megan [Gallagher] was a real sport on that last Millennium. But just because you're a female doesn't mean that you can't have a psychological vice or something. So that's another key. You have other women along the way, or male actors too, that will just go, "No way."

Cloke: Or actors not willing to be seen as alienating. I guess I kind of disagree, I don't think that Glen and Jim are that character driven. I think that their characters come out in story and plot. And working with them, I find that their characters evolve through the story. It's always fascinating to me to find out that you can get so attached to an idea about a character that doesn't allow a story to evolve. But I think their stories evolve. They're so great, the way they execute them. Someone facilitating character has to be open to story.

11th: Which is what's great about Space, where you start off with the pilot and you introduce all these characters. Then by the end of the series, they're all completely different people.

Cloke: That's what I thought was great; that in war, you would. You're in war with all these people… [long pause] You know, this isn't even my interview, I'm such a loudmouth!

11th: Talk as much as you want! That's fine!

Cloke: I was watching 60 Minutes the other night about women and men in the Navy. And having done that and gotten critical letters from someone going, "You know I don't think that's right" or other letters from people saying "Oh, I think that's great" -- all of those circumstances would change you as a person, and how you really watch these characters grew up. Like how Nathan's character started out with one goal and ended up with something completely different.

Morgan: We got this letter one time, postmarked from New Jersey, that said: "The fact that your lead character is a strong woman points out and clearly states that you are obvious homosexuals."

11th: Okay, here's a question about antagonistic viewers, in regards to Darin [Morgan, Glen's brother and Emmy-award winning writer]'s Millennium episode, "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense". What exactly were the Scientologists' "issues" with the episode?

Morgan: All I can say about that is that they thought Darin was attacking their theology and Darin felt, and we felt, that he had the right to comment on other people's viewpoints on life.

11th: And they didn't agree with that.

Morgan: They did not.

11th: You must enjoy doing these experimental shows. Like Space's "Who Monitors the Birds", which has unconventional chronology and very little dialogue, or the Millennium season finale, "The Time Is Now" where you did a whole act like a music video, or even "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man", which didn't even have the two stars of The X-Files in it. Before you write something like that, do you want to make sure then that you have an actor who you think can do it, before you even bother to try?

Morgan: On TV, I liked those episodes of M*A*S*H, like with the "real time" clock. I liked those shows that were trying to mess with the format. And we just like to do that to keep the show from getting boring. I don't know why, I don't even remember why "Who Monitors the Birds" came up, but we kept that quiet [from TV executives]. The Cancer Man thing, I never thought it was really that big a deal that Gillian and David weren't in it.

11th: Oftentimes in your work we will see characters die, like on Space for example. Not a necessarily the lead character...

Morgan: Like Tasia!

11th: Yeah, like Lt. Winslow [actress Tasia Valenzia] on Space. I feel that we, as the viewers, care enough about them, or see the other characters' reactions to death often enough that the consequences of the violence are clearly shown. Now recently, with all these high school shootings, I've been reading a lot about how entertainment is to blame for all of this. I read an article in Time magazine saying that one of the reasons that those kids in Littleton did what they did was because they'd just gone and seen The Matrix, but... when you watch The Matrix, the movie is so fantastical, that I don't see any reality in it at all. Or if anything, the point of that movie is to question reality.

Morgan: Right. Well, this is my strong feeling about it for what it's worth. When I was a kid, I went to the theatre with my dad and saw The Wild Bunch, Deliverance, Dirty Harry, Bullitt... all that shit. And my dad and I had talks that, one, it was a movie, that it was pretend, that this is how they did it. And second, we had talks about what it was about. I mean, a movie like Goodfellas is pretty violent. But the point of that movie was that's how you're going live and die. You live a violent life, you're going to die a violent death. It's just a road to nowhere. Nowadays there's no sort of discussion about that. And a lot of times the violence is in there for violence sake. But like you said, we killed a lot of people on Space, but you felt bad about it. So many movies now, you kill somebody, or a car goes off a bridge and you're already moving on. They never talk about that person again. And that's how I feel about it.