It's A Zen Thing
The X-Files self-destructs in Part III of our ongoing series, "The Carter Conundrum."
      by pisher

When Morgan and Wong took over in the second season, they seized on the lead provided them by Carter's chilling "Lamentations" (his last really outstanding teleplay to date), and the somehow forgotten theme of millennial forebodings, which certainly had some resonance given the point in history we had reached. As they had previously done on X-Files, they gave it a story to follow and characters to like. And along with these little perks came stylish tour de forces like the Halloween classic, "The Curse of Frank Black" -- a darkly foreboding episode with almost no dialogue. A few years later, when Buffy The Vampire Slayer did an episode called "Hush", in which there was no dialogue for most of the hour, people raved -- somehow it was forgotten Morgan and Wong had been there done that already, using the Japanese film Kwaidan as a jumping off point. I have little doubt that Joss Whedon & Co. were paying attention -- but their take on the concept was both clever and original. And more palatable to the critics, who had written Millennium off a long time before Morgan and Wong took over.

Late-season X-Files wasn't exactly David Duchovny's cup of tea.

We also had some wonderful scripts from a group of up and coming writers. Morgan and Wong chose their staff extremely well, and gave them both effective guidance and the freedom to do their best. The Wongs even gave us Darin Morgan for two more blessed hours, including a devilishly funny melding of The Screwtape Letters and The Canterbury Tales -- and before that he gave us Jose Chung back -- then snatched him away forever, the sadistic bastard. But let's not be dark.

It wasn't long before Millennium became my favorite show, and I wasn't the only one who felt that way. Many other people tuned out. But most people had made their minds up before the pilot finished airing. This was not the next big thing. And if this had been Carter's first show for Fox, it would have been canceled quicker than you could say "Who Cares"? But Carter's stock was so high at the network that it was renewed twice -- and people assumed that it would actually make it to the change of the century. Certainly nobody thought it was all leading up to a convenient excuse for Mulder and Scully to kiss at the end of an X-Files episode. And zombies who die when you shoot them in the head. The great ones keep you guessing, eh?

But it was a typically great Carter setup for a show, anyhow. At least we assumed it was typically great. It was only the second Carter show we had seen. The man could write a great pilot, admit it. And that little unpleasantness about Profiler blew over quickly enough.

Yeah, did you hear about Profiler and Millennium? There were quite a few stories in the press at the time. People were saying it was the biggest coincidence since The Addams Family and The Munsters premiered in the Fall of 1964. But both Chris Carter and the Profiler people professed ignorance of how this could have happened. Nobody pointed any fingers of blame. So it blew over.

Truth to tell, this kind of thing happens all the time. Ideas make their way through Hollywood quicker than a bad flu bug. Serial Killers were hot (it depresses me to write that). Silence of the Lambs (an admitted influence on Carter), Seven, and other films and novels had brought this dark corner of the human experience into the media limelight. Now TV was ready to take a crack at it. It wasn't at all strange that two serial killer serials turned up at the same time. Besides, everybody was copying Chris Carter.

Only not this time, they weren't. Security on the Millennium pilot was the tightest in industry memory. Cynthia Saunders, the creator of Profiler, was a divorced Laguna Beach mom who wrote screenplays in her house, in between driving her kids to and from school. She had only a few produced scripts to her credit. She did not have the clout or the connections to get her hands on Carter's script, and anyway -- why steal an idea you know is going to make it to the air, from a guy everybody knows is a genius?

A rare shot from Carter's long-lost sequel to "Fire": "Disco Inferno".

It wasn't the idea so much as the treatment of it that had people talking. Sam Waters, the heroine of Profiler, is a retired FBI investigator who experiences strange flashes of insight, and left the Bureau because of a serial killer stalking her and her family. She relocates and joins a new outfit. The bright haven of her home life with her adorable daughter is contrasted with the horrific things she experiences working with a group that specializes in catching serial killers. And the fiend who murdered her husband is still out there, constantly sending reminders of his presence.

Frank Black, the hero of Millennium, is a retired FBI investigator who experiences strange flashes on insight, and left the bureau because of a serial killer stalking him and his family. He relocates and joins a new outfit. The bright haven of his home life with his patient long suffering wife and adorable daughter is contrasted with the horrific things he experiences working with a group that specializes in catching serial killers. And the fiend who wants to murder his wife is still out there, constantly sending reminders of his presence.

Well, given that Carter's and Saunders' lives and work experiences were so similar -- hmmm. Actually about the only thing they had in common was living in California and working in television. Which I guess could make one inclined to morbidity. But let's mention that Saunders is a single mom, like her heroine. Carter did have a wife who may well be just as patient and long suffering as Catherine Black -- but he was no family man. I do tend to think Frank's bleakness may have expressed something deep inside Carter. I'm not entirely sure I want to know what that is.

This is rather more eerie a coincidence than The Addams Family and The Munsters -- since as we all know, the first Addams Family episode dealt with Pugsley's teacher visiting the mansion, and the first Munsters episode dealt with Marilyn's boyfriend's family having the Munsters over to dinner. Completely different! And the Addams' oddities were upper crust, while the Munsters' vampire capes were strictly blue collar.

In other words, having the same basic concept is no big deal. Having almost the same plot and character situation laid out in two different pilots based on the same concept is a very big deal, which is why so many people commented on it then. Carter said he started fleshing out the idea for Millennium (inspired somewhat by the success of his creepy script for "Irresistible" in the second season) in the late fall of 1995. Saunders had her idea well before that, and had already finished her pilot script by the time that Carter was looking for something a tad more specific than "Good guy tries to catch evil guys". Actually, judging by what I read, she would have finished it and sent it out to be vetted just a short time before Carter says he started seriously working on his own pilot. Do I think Carter deliberately took plot elements from an upcoming NBC series? Hell no. That would have been supremely stupid. Oh and morally wrong. That too.

But as I said, ideas have a tendency to float around over there. Pilot scripts circulate, as do the treatments that often proceed them, ideas get bounced around, and there's always plain old industry gossip. Even if Carter never read anyone else's script, he was in a position where ideas would constantly be thrown at him -- he wouldn't necessarily know where they came from. And if he did happen across some version of Saunders' pilot -- let's look at the situation. NBC commissioned over 80 pilot scripts that year. 20 were actually produced. Seven actually made it onto the Fall schedule. And at the time Carter said Millennium began to become clear in his mind, the chances of a single mom with eight produced scripts to her credit, who had never created a show of her own -- well. You figure the odds.

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