As this issue's letters column will surely attest, The X-Files may be the most furiously-debated series on television, but throughout all the discussion over the Mulder/Scully relationship, the black oil conspiracy, and the disappearance of Samantha, the Syndicate, and several major storylines, one constant remains: the incredible production values of the first five, Vancouver-based seasons. Whether transforming the Canadian city into the desert of the Anasazi, a Siberian gulag or 1960s downtown Dallas, the crew behind the series achieved a level of technical and aesthetic prowess essentially unrivaled in the television industry. "X-Files was feature-film quality at a television pace, as far as the production goes," recalls ex-X-Files crew member Patrick Stark. "The craftsmanship of the production design was just unbelievable."

Initially hired as a production assistant and later made an assistant director, Stark worked with the series during its fourth and fifth seasons, the last two situated in his native Vancouver. "I loved it," says Stark, who cites "Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man" and "Post-Modern Prometheus" as his favorite episodes to shoot. "I absolutely loved it. Even though the hours were extremely long, and the conditions were extremely harsh. We would be working in a muddy field in the middle of the night with the rain blowing horizontally, but even still, you felt like you were part of television history, basically."

According to Stark, it was not only the professional aspect of the series but its communal atmosphere that made The X-Files such a unique working experience. "Wives would bring their kids to the set to visit their husbands, husbands to visit wives," he recalls. "The actors had their kids there, their dogs there; everyone knew everybody's families." This sense of synergy also extended to the relationship between the crew itself. "The people who were working on the show were all working together for a reason," affirms Stark, "Everything gelled. It was like a well-oiled machine, you know?" A machine which came to a grinding halt following an announcement at the end of the fifth season that the series was going to relocate to Los Angeles after five years in the Vancouver area.

"There were always rumors flying," recalls Stark of the Los Angeles move that left himself as well as the majority of the Vancouver crew unemployed. "There was always something happening; you'd read it in the paper. You never really knew. It was a very touching and sad moment when Chris [Carter, the series' executive producer] announced it to us. It was so back and forth at that point," he says, adding, "It was very obvious that Chris wanted to keep it in Vancouver." Wanted to or not, the series headed south for the sixth season in more ways than one, with Los Angeles sunlight illuminating the ever-growing plotholes and Saturday Night Live has-beens playing alongside special FX that looked straight out of a GWAR video. While Stark has seen very few episodes of the last season, he does admit that, "It's certainly a lighter-looking show. It doesn't have that dark look that they did have from the start."

For the Vancouver team, however, the new look of the now-departed series was the least of their problems. The increasing popularity of The X-Files had led to an ever-growing crew, and the relocation left a numerous amount of people without employment. The question remained: what to do now?