Rights and Wongs
Part II of "The Carter Conundrum", our continuing look at The X-Files.
      by pisher

Carter was more than repaid for the backup he gave his collaborators, by the increasingly appreciative write-ups the show got, the beginning of an artistic credibility that this kind of show never gets in the mainstream press. He was particularly pleased by a review in The New Yorker by James Wolcott. It was full of moody intellectual ramblings about how the show gave voice to our collective "national unease".

Carter was immeasurably gratified to learn this. He reportedly gave everybody at the office a free subscription to the magazine after the piece came out. He read it aloud to anyone who would listen. He quoted from it in interviews. He was the only writer mentioned in it -- but the episode Wolcott raved about most was "Beyond the Sea". The X-Files was breaking out of its genre ghetto, without leaving it behind -- a rare trick, and one Carter probably could never have accomplished on his own. The downside was that Carter was on the verge of taking his own self-invented persona seriously. He craved intellectual respectability. He was beginning to believe his own press.

Now all that is my opinion. I make no bones about it. But humor me a moment -- let's remove all the Wong characters. No Gunmen. No Skinner. No Scully family. No CSM to speak of. No X (we get Marita Covarrubias a year early instead). Let's remove the shadings of character Morgan and Wong provided for Mulder and Scully. Let's remove oft-quoted lines of dialogue like "Mulder, you're the only one I trust", "The Truth is out there, but so are lies", and that oddly romantic beverage-based expression of friendship in the car during "Tooms". Let's axe the suspenseful and groundbreaking second season opener, "Little Green Men" -- which Carter allowed them to do when his own idea for a second season opener failed to gel properly. Let's assume that Carter wouldn't have done that if his idea had been any good. That second season kickoff was crucial -- they couldn't afford to lose momentum at that point.

Nicholas Lea as Krycek.

Let's then remove the talents of most of the major supporting actors, who were recruited by the Wongs -- except for Nick Lea, of course, who director Rob Bowman tapped for the role of Krycek after his brief guest stint in "Genderbender." Who recruited Rob Bowman? You guessed it. And David Nutter. And Kim Manners. All Wong recruits.

Let's remove all of them from the equation. And then face up to the fact that what's left is a great show idea with two intriguing, but hazily conceptualized characters, one of whom is little more than a sidekick. Some really fun episodes, but little of it with the kind of visual punch to really stand apart on its own. What's left is an interesting cult show that never broke out of the pack.

But Carter wrote some great scripts himself, you say? Damn straight he did. Now let's remove the effect that Morgan and Wong, Gordon and Gansa, had upon Carter himself. The competition. The need to try and one-up his collaborators. Carter's talent, in my estimation, was one that required a great deal of outside stimulation. That could be said of most writers, but I posit that this is more true of him than of most. He didn't need six guys who would write scripts along the lines he laid out -- he needed individuals like Morgan and Wong, with distinctive styles and preoccupations of their own -- who would challenge him, frequently outdo him, provide him with models to work with -- and against. People who would force him to be better than he was. And for a while there, he really was.

By any standard you care to name, "Deep Throat", "Fire", "Darkness Falls" and above all "The Erlenmeyer Flask", are exceptional hours of television. I give R.W. Goodwin a fair amount of credit for the stunning first season conclusion -- but even so, Carter had every reason to be proud of his best work in the first two years. And we all kind of tacitly agreed to overlook the rest of it. Particularly "Space". We just collectively agreed to write that one off as a glitch.

"Space"

Did you know "Space" was the most expensive episode produced during the first season? Apparently the mission control scenes went way over budget -- bringing shows in on budget and on schedule was a problem Carter would run into with increasing frequency as time wore on. For comparison, "Ice" was one of the cheapest. Morgan and Wong chose a claustrophobic setting to minimize costs. But Carter kept trying to be Spielberg -- he would always go for the epic panorama, the big shot, with mixed results. When he hit, he hit big. When he missed...

"Space" is one of the few early episodes that you can definitively say is Carter's and Carter's alone -- all his collaborators were off doing other episodes, and he was stuck with second string director William Graham. And the workload was getting a bit crazy, as he mentions in the official guide to the first two seasons. Temperamentally, Carter seemed to thrive on pressure. Creatively speaking, not so much. He was no David Kelley, no J. Michael Straczynski, to name two show creators who really live up to that title.

Carter could rewrite existing scripts with great skill -- Glen Morgan once said "He never rewrote anything and made it worse" -- but you will note that his solo scripts are far and few between. He was slow, and he got slower as time wore on and the pressure increased. Even his most ardent admirers call him a control freak -- if he could have written more, he would have. And nearly all of his scripts, as is well known, rest heavily on existing story ideas -- some of them quite openly and unashamedly. Some of them a bit more tacitly.

Carter freely admits "Space" didn't work out quite as he had hoped. What he obviously didn't want to admit was that:

1) He had filched the outline for the story, and some of the key scenes, and even a line of dialogue, from Nigel Kneale's BBC serial The Quatermass Experiment (oh, you all knew I would get around to that eventually)

2) His script was pompous, poorly researched, badly characterized, and in love with the sound of its own pontificating voice -- Mulder's, which is to say Carter's, since Carter always picked his masculine alter ego to be his personal mouthpiece, and

3) The main problem with the episode was that it was exactly what he wanted to do -- and nobody was around to tell him it wouldn't work. "Space" is the rather unimpressive result.

And we forgave him. Nobody's perfect. Gordon and Gansa's marvelous "Fallen Angel" was up next, and we just erased "Space" from our personal X-Files continuity -- as did Carter. What ever did happen to that Face on Mars ghost-demon thingy anyhow? Maybe the aliens had problems with budget cuts too?

Little did he -- or we -- realize that this was a preview of coming attractions. This is what you got when Carter was forced to come up with an episode on his own (well -- sort of on his own) and when he had nobody to bounce ideas off of. Or alternatively, this is what you got when Carter was given a roomful of yesmen and a pile of money, which was his fondest dream for the future. Actually, looking back at some of Carter's more recent solo efforts, we should all have been so lucky as to have "Space" be the standard of achievement. But let's not be in a hurry to leave the golden early days of X-philia. In some respects, the best was yet to come.

Wong jumps ship.

Early in the second season, Morgan and Wong, whose contributions had not gone unnoted upstairs, were given the chance to create their own show. They jumped at it, and Carter was faced with the prospect of his two best people going off and leaving him just as the show's "Mythology" was beginning to take form. Carter was losing two men who were, among other things, his best long-term story planners. I could speculate here about how Carter, with his self-confessed issues with trust perceived this -- as a betrayal? Or as an opportunity to prove he could do fine without them? The two are not mutually exclusive.

In the second season Carter's learning curve had begun to peak, with impressive results. With "Duane Barry", he showed that he could direct as well as write, a truly powerful episode -- sadly, none of his later outings in the director's chair would be nearly as impressive -- and the sterling qualities of that episode would be forever overshadowed by David Duchovny's infamous Red Speedo.

To replace his dynamic duo, Carter hired a new Lieutenant. This was a position of crucial importance. Who could take the place the multi-talented Morgan and Wong, whom Howard Gordon said -- while still on Carter's payroll, mind you -- had exercised a creative influence equal to Carter's own? Who could fill such formidable shoes?

He picked his old writing class buddy, Frank Spotnitz. A journalist, as Carter himself once was, though a rather more successful one than Carter. An aspiring screenwriter, who had sold several scripts. A man who had never produced a single minute of television, and had never had one single script actually produced, ever. Here we see Carter pulling out ahead just a bit. Which may have been the point.

Frank Spotnitz

But Spotnitz was a clever man, a hardworking man, a man who knew the industry, a man who knew how to handle the media journalists whose ranks he had recently deserted, and, above all -- a man who would owe his entire career to Chris Carter. So let it not be said he brought nothing to the table. But it's safe to assume he wasn't hired for his artistic ability.

In fairness, his first mytharc collaboration with Carter, "Colony/Endgame" went very well. It would later be pointed out that this thrilling two-parter effectively destroyed all of the ambiguity that was the show's trademark -- I'm sorry, but there is no rational scientific explanation for a man who can morph into other people and is superstrong and can't be killed except with a scary looking stiletto thingy, and goes around killing a bunch of clones who dissolve into puddles of green goo -- except to conclude that he is an alien. There were aliens. Mystery solved. Did Scully accept this, when shown unequivocal evidence? No, she did not. Too many seasons to go, and Carter was not going to mess with a winning formula. Skeptic she was, skeptic she remained. It was a beautiful story, but it should have been near the end of the alien conspiracy story, not the beginning. Now Scully was just going to look very silly. And Mulder was going to look very frustrated.

It should also be pointed out that David Duchovny actually co-wrote the first part with Carter -- as Carter said, "He has good ideas. Why not use them?" This statement just looks so... different to me now, in light of subsequent events. Back then, I figured Carter was flattering his leading man so he wouldn't bolt the show for a movie career. I'm sure all of you knew better, but I didn't.

Even one of Duchovny's rejected story ideas -- a healing alien who would be grilled in a scene recalling Doestoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" chapter from The Brothers Karamazov -- would be recycled later for "Talitha Cumi/Herrenvolk". I can't dismiss the possibility that Duchovny was a more potent factor in what was great in "Colony/Endgame" and the marvelous "Anazazi, Blessing Way, Paper Clip" trilogy than is generally assumed. But let's get back to that later.

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