Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D
Speaker 1: audio for full exposure listen with Headphiles. In November, I
Speaker 1: spoke with Glenn Morgan. Glenn is a prolific screenwriter and
Speaker 1: producer involved in writing and producing, among many many others,
Speaker 1: the Lord television show, the Twilight Zone reboot, and, most
Speaker 1: notably for Strange Arrivals, The X Files. I talked to
Speaker 1: Glenn about the genesis of the show, how episodes were written,
Speaker 1: and much more. Why don't you start by introducing yourself.
Speaker 1: I'm Glenn Morgan, was one of the exact producers of
Speaker 1: The X Files and the M one two for and
Speaker 1: then the Last Time And how did you you know,
Speaker 1: how did you become involved in The X Files? How
Speaker 1: did that start? Well? I worked with my partner Jim Loong,
Speaker 1: who are high school buddies from alcohol in California. Um,
Speaker 1: we're probably many people have been abducted, and um, we
Speaker 1: were gonna go on some other show, a romantic comedy
Speaker 1: that was the hit pilot of that season. And Peter Roth,
Speaker 1: who was the head of Fox TV, had said, you know,
Speaker 1: he had he had helped us out a lot when
Speaker 1: we worked on twenty one Jump Street at Stephen Kettle
Speaker 1: and he was like, you gotta watch his pilot. I
Speaker 1: demand that you watch his pilot, and so kind of
Speaker 1: sort of career politics. We go, well, we'll watch this
Speaker 1: pilot the X Files and tell Peter thanks for thinking
Speaker 1: of us, but we're gonna go do this other hot show.
Speaker 1: And Jim and I watch Exiles pilot and we're like,
Speaker 1: whoa and I want to do this show. And everybody
Speaker 1: said we were insane because we left the other show,
Speaker 1: and um, but it was just something that I really liked,
Speaker 1: and we met Chris and we hit it off. And
Speaker 1: we're all coming from the same place from which I
Speaker 1: expect we're about to talk about. So, so were you
Speaker 1: interested in in sort of the paranormal and and UFO
Speaker 1: stuff before working on the show. I was really not
Speaker 1: trying to make this about me, but I think that
Speaker 1: in what we're talking about, I feel I come from
Speaker 1: a place where probably a lot of Americans or representative
Speaker 1: the kind of mil America. I grew up in Syracuse,
Speaker 1: New York, which is upstate New York. I grew up
Speaker 1: in Manlis. Oh okay, well I was there till it
Speaker 1: was fifteen. And you know that this digressing. But I've
Speaker 1: read that they call that it's like a highway. It's
Speaker 1: a mile swath from Albany wide three hud a mile
Speaker 1: long from Albany to you know, basically not Buffalo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there you had like the Shakers, the Fox Sisters,
Speaker 1: the Mormon uh Origins kind of, and so there's a
Speaker 1: lot of that haunted places. And my family, my great
Speaker 1: grandparents were mediums and all that, so there was always
Speaker 1: like having seances and stuff. My brother and I are
Speaker 1: like watching TV, but we're familiar with that. I was
Speaker 1: always interested in that. I you know, I can't remember
Speaker 1: if I knew about the Hills before um, Sharings to
Speaker 1: the Gods. I almost had Food of the Gods, just
Speaker 1: a great movie. But Charings to the Gods, it was
Speaker 1: like reading all that, you know, and I was into that.
Speaker 1: And as a kid whose family was doing that, there
Speaker 1: was no skeptics, so I just like bought into it totally.
Speaker 1: All that stuff, I just bought into it, and um,
Speaker 1: it has always been interesting. However as a kid too,
Speaker 1: my great love was you know, Nasa Apollo while they
Speaker 1: asked your nots and so the true science of that,
Speaker 1: and I felt that they both merged the goal to
Speaker 1: go to the moon, to go to space, the poetry
Speaker 1: of that match the wonder of what else is out
Speaker 1: there and that kind of you know, UFO paranormal area,
Speaker 1: they have something in common. And then you know, going
Speaker 1: getting older, you know it's an horror movie and everything.
Speaker 1: But just like just life changing was Close Encounters, which
Speaker 1: is like the greatest thing I went to when it
Speaker 1: came out, you know, as I was just starting to drive,
Speaker 1: and my dad was like, don't you go to that movie.
Speaker 1: You can't go drive on the freeway to see that movie.
Speaker 1: And I did. I was driving home on the freeway.
Speaker 1: My dad was exted me Mike busted, that's how much
Speaker 1: I needed to see that movie for the second time,
Speaker 1: and so all that stuff. I just loved it. Um Now,
Speaker 1: when I get older and you start getting introduced to
Speaker 1: some skepticism, and certainly working on the X Files, the
Speaker 1: need to be Scully is the first time that I
Speaker 1: started looking at what's the other side of this story?
Speaker 1: Because you always had to have Mauler's explanation, you have
Speaker 1: to have Scullies explanation, and many times you'd have to
Speaker 1: have an explanation was down the middle. So it was
Speaker 1: the X Files and having to write for Scully that
Speaker 1: I started getting a little more ground, a little more skeptical.
Speaker 1: So I hope that makes sense that I think that's
Speaker 1: where it comes from. But I think you can see
Speaker 1: this sort of mirrors what was going on a lot
Speaker 1: with the culture. I was taking look at some suffarious
Speaker 1: people have written and it's like the Monster of the
Speaker 1: Week episodes and then their Mythology episodes. So was the mythology?
Speaker 1: Was that thought of as being sort of a multi
Speaker 1: seasoned thing to start off with? How how what was
Speaker 1: the genesis of that? Like the pilot was UFO and
Speaker 1: the second episode is UFO, and I think it introduced
Speaker 1: the deep throat, deep background and the conspiracy part of it,
Speaker 1: and the network being the network, they're a big goal
Speaker 1: was modern Scully should help people, you know, every week
Speaker 1: they should help people, which is like as lame as
Speaker 1: it gainst. And but also they did not want UFO
Speaker 1: every week? What else could it be? And so sitting down, um,
Speaker 1: the first year was Chris jim and I, Howard Gordon,
Speaker 1: Alex Gonza who went on to do Homeland, and Marilyn
Speaker 1: Osborne was there as a sort of junior writer, and
Speaker 1: we would get together in the room and go what
Speaker 1: can we do? And I think Alex and Howard became
Speaker 1: more comfortable with doing sort of weird science and you know,
Speaker 1: I just I grew up on universal monsters, and you know,
Speaker 1: I love monster movies, and so Jim and I fell
Speaker 1: into that not all the time, but for the most part.
Speaker 1: And so if you look at it the first year,
Speaker 1: there wasn't a lot of mythology. I think on the
Speaker 1: twenty two episodes five maybe it wasn't a conscious thing.
Speaker 1: And first it really wasn't a couple of things. What
Speaker 1: happened was and January of the first season, Jillian became pregnant,
Speaker 1: and so she was going to have her baby in September,
Speaker 1: and so there was like, well, she wasn't gonna be
Speaker 1: able to work on the first few episodes that we
Speaker 1: were filming for a year two, and so we all
Speaker 1: came up with like Scully's gonna disappear, and that really
Speaker 1: began the mythology, the need to tell multiple stories near
Speaker 1: the end of the first year. So I don't believe
Speaker 1: my memory is not that we set out to go
Speaker 1: from the beginning, We're gonna be this groundbreaking serialized because
Speaker 1: that wasn't around then. A little bit maybe, but um,
Speaker 1: we never set out to be the serialized show. There
Speaker 1: was necessity due to Julian's Julian's pregnancy that we sort
Speaker 1: of shaped it in the end of the first year
Speaker 1: to go into her disappearing for the first few episodes
Speaker 1: in the second year. So can you talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about about the mythology through story you know that
Speaker 1: was established by Chris. You know that Maulder's sister had
Speaker 1: been abducted, and what the background was with Maulder, you know,
Speaker 1: And I think those are things that you you have
Speaker 1: and when you're selling a pilot, especially back in those days,
Speaker 1: it's just kind of red meat for executives. And and
Speaker 1: then you get in the room. Nowadays you have to
Speaker 1: have the whole show figured out for five years. Back then,
Speaker 1: you gave a piece of paper and this is what
Speaker 1: six episodes we could do, and they okay. So it
Speaker 1: just becomes a process of sitting down and go on,
Speaker 1: what can it be? Um, who's you know? Well, we're
Speaker 1: gonna introduce a government conspiracy deep background. So you bring
Speaker 1: a deep throat and you bring up more UFO stuff.
Speaker 1: Say I'm struggling here, because that stuff doesn't kick into
Speaker 1: gear really until the end of the year one, year two,
Speaker 1: where the beginning of year two we did this episode
Speaker 1: Little Green Men, I think shows his sister's abduction. Right,
Speaker 1: So it wasn't really if you look at that series,
Speaker 1: it wasn't until again necessity brought it up and it
Speaker 1: really kicks into gear in the second year. Okay, and
Speaker 1: so you just go, well, what happens we do we
Speaker 1: bring Maler's mother back to we is she alive? And
Speaker 1: she didn't? You know, it's just like a bunch of
Speaker 1: writers getting together trying to figure it out. But again,
Speaker 1: for the most part, nowadays they'll talk about a writer's room.
Speaker 1: We didn't have that. You know. We would come in
Speaker 1: and go, hey, I got an idea, what if there's
Speaker 1: a stretchy serial killer of the crawls to the event,
Speaker 1: Oh oh, all right, you do that. You know, we
Speaker 1: weren't really sitting in a writer's room working things out together.
Speaker 1: We're very much a team. Nowadays, you would say, okay,
Speaker 1: episode one, we talked about mauler sister. Episode six, we're
Speaker 1: gonna show that she's abducted. Now, I guess skipping forward
Speaker 1: and you know, how is she gonna be abducted? I
Speaker 1: think we start with a lot of what the accepted
Speaker 1: myth wise that it was at night, that there was
Speaker 1: a bright light you know, um, you know it's it's
Speaker 1: real monster movie stuff, really the mythology, and then you go, well,
Speaker 1: people know what it is by now because of the
Speaker 1: Hills story that you know that was a movie the
Speaker 1: week right, I think with James Earl Jones and the
Speaker 1: closing owners is like so huge everybody knew, you know,
Speaker 1: the the Barry being abducted is just one of the
Speaker 1: great scenes and sham and what can we do different?
Speaker 1: You know? And you had read some things where people
Speaker 1: had been taken out their window or um, so well
Speaker 1: let's do that, or let's make something up. How can
Speaker 1: we make it fresh? And I think actually that's where
Speaker 1: the damage to the mythology, because you made stuff up
Speaker 1: because you needed to have something different for a TV
Speaker 1: show that makes sense? Yeah, yeah, was there you know,
Speaker 1: were you reading like UFO books or or doing other
Speaker 1: kinds of research into you know cases, Oh I had
Speaker 1: I had done that. I knew the Hill books. Your
Speaker 1: first season brought back a lot of childhood memories. Um
Speaker 1: of reading the book, not being abducted, just to make
Speaker 1: that clear. But what happened. What I didn't know was
Speaker 1: the community of uthology and so, and we didn't have
Speaker 1: the Internet like we do now. I think it was
Speaker 1: all and you know, but I still when I wrote scripts,
Speaker 1: I had to write stuff down and go to the
Speaker 1: Beverly Hills Library and or U C l A and
Speaker 1: look it up. It wasn't like when I'm writing I
Speaker 1: just pull up Google or so. I was not aware
Speaker 1: of that. I became aware of it. I went to
Speaker 1: a UFO show L A X with Marilyn Osborne on
Speaker 1: the show, and it was just like, blew my mind
Speaker 1: what was going on there? Um, you know, the lectures,
Speaker 1: the level of what the Hill experience had turned into
Speaker 1: basically have you know communication, you know, we're in community
Speaker 1: ation with being storm everywhere it was it was WOA
Speaker 1: was is way beyond what I thought. I remember there
Speaker 1: was a table and they'd have like color coded papers
Speaker 1: and this was abductions. This was and I don't know,
Speaker 1: this is State Orange with space Shuttle Green was abductions.
Speaker 1: Was like an entire conference table of different pieces of
Speaker 1: paper with conspiracy and all kinds of stuff for every
Speaker 1: topic you can imagine. And the three guys behind there.
Speaker 1: One guy had a suit, one guy was kind of
Speaker 1: slobby guy with a rock and roll shirt, and another
Speaker 1: guy he just kind of somewhere in between. There was
Speaker 1: exactly alone gunman, which you know, becomes part of the myth.
Speaker 1: There exactly the guy, the guy with a suit. There's
Speaker 1: all these people around him. He's like, give me. He's
Speaker 1: he's lecturing people. He said, give me, give me a
Speaker 1: twenty dollar bill. We're while watching he's like. This guy
Speaker 1: gives the guy his toy dollar bill out of his
Speaker 1: bucket and he holds it up to the light and
Speaker 1: he goes, look at that magnetic strip. And I think
Speaker 1: none of us knew about him, this magnetic strip in
Speaker 1: a twenty dollar bill. And everybody's like, oh, this is
Speaker 1: how a track you through the airport. This is how
Speaker 1: they do. This is how do you do that? Man?
Speaker 1: He rips it, He rips the guy's twenty and pulls
Speaker 1: the strip out. You know, the guy's bummed out because
Speaker 1: this twenty dollar bill he's gone. But all of us
Speaker 1: are like whoa. And so that was just mind blowing
Speaker 1: to me what an industry was out there, and so
Speaker 1: I just like started taking from that, and Jim and
Speaker 1: Howard and Chris and everybody became introduced to that. I
Speaker 1: would go to like a hotel and motel out in
Speaker 1: Burbank and I sat there for presentation on UFO ideas
Speaker 1: and stuff, and I gotta say a lot of it
Speaker 1: I felt was just too far out from what we
Speaker 1: were doing. We're there s secific things that you ended
Speaker 1: up served going deeper on, uh as, you know, research
Speaker 1: or inspiration or whatever for the X Files. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of I think that would be a lot
Speaker 1: would be Chris because as the creator and exact producer
Speaker 1: of the show, people would reach out to him and
Speaker 1: he might get some info on stuff, or he might
Speaker 1: interview people that we're deeper into these things than my
Speaker 1: I like to research by sitting amongst all this stuff
Speaker 1: and watching it, you know, just like observing what's going on.
Speaker 1: I would get um a publication every Monday. It was
Speaker 1: called Science News. It was really a pamphlet no more
Speaker 1: than ten pages of findings in the world of science.
Speaker 1: That week there might be a bigger article and just
Speaker 1: like go through and so for example, one week I
Speaker 1: saw they had an article that I think they've broken
Speaker 1: the record for drilling into the Greenland ice core. I
Speaker 1: don't know, want to remember a mile or whatever. And
Speaker 1: they pulled out this stuff that had not seen the
Speaker 1: light of day for two fifty thousand years. You know
Speaker 1: that had just happened. That was a fact. And then
Speaker 1: I go, well, what could be in there? What could
Speaker 1: be in that two? It's like, okay, it's a creepy show.
Speaker 1: What's creepy? Like? I find worms, creepy worms, snakes, they
Speaker 1: don't have arms, they have too many arms, like a millipede.
Speaker 1: Forget it. I don't want to near me. And so
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, oh, there's these worms. And then without
Speaker 1: two D year's evolution, what would that do to us?
Speaker 1: And then that part I would make up. I don't
Speaker 1: remember what it was. It gets into your brain and
Speaker 1: makes you paranoid or some stuff like that. So that's
Speaker 1: how you make the next while. You take that science
Speaker 1: truth and another truth and you try to fit them
Speaker 1: together by making stuff up. Inevitably, people would go I
Speaker 1: read about worms and make it crazy, and I'd say, no, no,
Speaker 1: I made that up, and think, oh no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I read that in the natro Geographic. I'm like, I
Speaker 1: know you didn't because I made it up. It isn't
Speaker 1: even a thing. It lodged in my head. I just
Speaker 1: flat out made it up. And it always fascinated me
Speaker 1: how often people would say not I read about the
Speaker 1: ice core from Greenland, or the evolutionary traits of these worms.
Speaker 1: I heard about the stuff you made up, and it's true.
Speaker 1: And so when I look at these abduction myths where
Speaker 1: some of the conspiracy theories are floating around, now you
Speaker 1: can see where are there's bullshit that our people are believing.
Speaker 1: And in fact, there's an X files where a deep
Speaker 1: throat specifically says a lie is the best delivered sandwich
Speaker 1: between two truths, and I just you know that. I
Speaker 1: you know, um, I'm sure I didn't make that up,
Speaker 1: but that's to me. I always thought the best way
Speaker 1: to go about the mythology. So if you know that
Speaker 1: aliens come at night, and you might take some other
Speaker 1: scientific fact the position of the moon or something, then
Speaker 1: make something up. That's that's how you did it. That's
Speaker 1: how I went about it. And I see that approach
Speaker 1: and other myths contemporary. That's really interesting. Your your point
Speaker 1: about people coming up to you and saying that they've
Speaker 1: read about stuff that you've made up. Um and it
Speaker 1: it reminds me a little bit of a Season one
Speaker 1: talking to Elizabeth Loftus where she was talking about experiments
Speaker 1: that she did where you know, just by mentioning something
Speaker 1: to somebody, they incorporate that into their memory so if
Speaker 1: they talk to them again. I saw. I don't think
Speaker 1: it was one that she did, but there was a
Speaker 1: special on PBS where they interview college kids and they
Speaker 1: and they would bring up this incident. I think it
Speaker 1: was something about like you got, you know, arrested at
Speaker 1: the mall or something, and and they'd be like, no,
Speaker 1: you know, no we did. She's like, oh yeah, and
Speaker 1: then they kind of give some details and that the
Speaker 1: college kids would say now, but then when they talk
Speaker 1: to them, you know, six months eight or and would
Speaker 1: bring it up. I guess it wasn't It wasn't quite
Speaker 1: getting arrested. It wasn't like that big, but it was
Speaker 1: it was some like you know, you spilled you spilled
Speaker 1: a drink on a police officer or something. It was something.
Speaker 1: It was something like that. And then when the when
Speaker 1: they talked to them again, the the a certain percentage
Speaker 1: of the college students would talk about that episode it
Speaker 1: actually happened, right, so it didn't It didn't even take much.
Speaker 1: You don't have to really convince people. You can just
Speaker 1: sort of tell them and then they kind of internalized it.
Speaker 1: It becomes, you know, part of their their lived memory
Speaker 1: without actually having experienced it. And I think it becomes
Speaker 1: you're absolutely right. And there's been some good My brother
Speaker 1: did it an excellent X Files in the last season.
Speaker 1: It was called the Lost Start of Forehead Sweat, which
Speaker 1: is all about memory and a lot of them Indela
Speaker 1: effect and and I know, you know glad Well had
Speaker 1: that thing on visionist history about memory, and um, I
Speaker 1: think with the bulk of information particles, with the Internet,
Speaker 1: with crossing cable news, with Twitter, you just get particles
Speaker 1: and they all get jammed together, and I think, like, Babe,
Speaker 1: weeks later you're like, oh, yeah, I know I heard something.
Speaker 1: It's just a mess. It's just really colliding and we've
Speaker 1: lost the ability to go and what's your source or no,
Speaker 1: that was debunked. Here's how it was debunked. And you
Speaker 1: know a lot of the skeptics are debunkers become like
Speaker 1: the party poopers because going back prior to my writing
Speaker 1: for the X Files, if you were saying the hills
Speaker 1: you know saw the ski lift, don't you just don't
Speaker 1: want to believe it, you know kind of thing. But
Speaker 1: it may be a thing we were never taught, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think that's the that's the big
Speaker 1: problem is that we're not coming from a rational How
Speaker 1: do you think about the X Files as sort of
Speaker 1: a cultural influence or or or the X Files lasting
Speaker 1: cultural influence and and how people think about things, Because
Speaker 1: I do feel like more than of shows, like I
Speaker 1: think the X Files, um, you know, can can kind
Speaker 1: of change the way you look at things that are
Speaker 1: happening around you. Um, And I think and part of it,
Speaker 1: I think it's a conspiracy stuff, But I think there's
Speaker 1: also you know that the interactions between Molder and Scully
Speaker 1: I think kind of model a way of thinking about
Speaker 1: about things in some ways that I think affects the
Speaker 1: way people. Uh, I mean I wish it would affect
Speaker 1: them more, but but affects the way people sort of
Speaker 1: evaluate things. Um. Have you have you thought about that
Speaker 1: at all? Have you have you experienced moments where where
Speaker 1: that's become sort of clear? Um, that's that's I think
Speaker 1: it's beyond all of us that worked on that show.
Speaker 1: You know, I text a lot with David Coomny, and
Speaker 1: that's like, we're still trying to figure it out in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. You know, we're the last to
Speaker 1: be able to figure it out because you weren't trying
Speaker 1: to be this thing. You're just let's be cool, you know.
Speaker 1: But for me, there's a couple of things that would answer.
Speaker 1: I think the most brilliant thing that Chris did was
Speaker 1: I want to believe, even you know, Carl Sagan, very rational,
Speaker 1: science based, I think you'd want to believe there's other life,
Speaker 1: And so that answers both sides of the coin. Everybody
Speaker 1: wants to believe, and they can find the answer of
Speaker 1: what special relativity is out what's the next whereas in
Speaker 1: all that, you know, there's the other dimensions and all
Speaker 1: that stuff. And so if you're that was the brilliance
Speaker 1: and why this show could be so popular because it
Speaker 1: appeals to everybody. I think everybody wants to believe. My
Speaker 1: feeling about the whole you know, it's it's twofold for me.
Speaker 1: One I grew up, you know, Love and the Monster
Speaker 1: Moise and Psycho and The Exorcists, and Alan Bicola, paranoid
Speaker 1: movies of Clute and all the President's Men, Parallax View
Speaker 1: and certainly Close Encounters, and so all those came before us.
Speaker 1: You know, It's like you can say, oh Nex sounds great,
Speaker 1: you have it. All those Twilight Zone, oh Man, all
Speaker 1: came before us. So when Doug Hudgson, who played Eugene
Speaker 1: Tunes in the first season, who's the notorious serial killer,
Speaker 1: and Dougs not too far off from that character, he
Speaker 1: said that he was in a like a department store
Speaker 1: bathroom in New York City and he was washing his
Speaker 1: hands and he looked over and there was a dad
Speaker 1: and a little kid, and the little kid was just
Speaker 1: locked in on Doug. And when they're going out, the
Speaker 1: kid grabbed the father and goes, hey, dad, it's the
Speaker 1: creepy guy. And the dad looked at him and they
Speaker 1: both just leave. And so I feel like, okay, for
Speaker 1: all those Hitchcocks and Spielberg's that got me. I you know,
Speaker 1: that was you know, playing forward. However, the second thing
Speaker 1: is more disturbing that if we played any part in
Speaker 1: the proliferation of this conspiracy stuff, I'd have great regrets
Speaker 1: because I think it's like ridiculously out of hand. You know,
Speaker 1: when we're doing that show, it was primarily for entertainment.
Speaker 1: You know that town. You know, there had been conspiracies,
Speaker 1: it's a skegeek experiments and Watergate, I guess, But for
Speaker 1: the X Files is for the most part of entertainment.
Speaker 1: And if you've opened up the door to acceptance of
Speaker 1: things that are going around now, I'd really feel horrible.
Speaker 1: I that saddens me. Well. I think that was what
Speaker 1: when I said before about Mold and Scully sort of modeling,
Speaker 1: and that I wish people would sort of internalize that
Speaker 1: a little bit more because I think, I mean, I
Speaker 1: thought that was what was so great about the show
Speaker 1: as being coming from sort of the skeptical side myself,
Speaker 1: was was that there was I mean, it was like
Speaker 1: this this constant sort of evaluation. I think of them
Speaker 1: as sort of like Kirk and Spock. It's sort of
Speaker 1: these iconic two sides of the argument, uh type of people.
Speaker 1: So I guess I'm just saying that because from from
Speaker 1: my point of view, like if you only had you know,
Speaker 1: Boulder running around, you know, buying into everything that he's
Speaker 1: that he saw her ran into her or seeing seeing
Speaker 1: the worst possibilities would be one thing. But but I
Speaker 1: think what made the show so great is that is
Speaker 1: that you see both sides and and it's you know,
Speaker 1: thinking critically and even when things seem to be real.
Speaker 1: It's the reason why that's coming forth is because they're
Speaker 1: sort of interrogating it in a way that I don't
Speaker 1: think people do. So what are the things that we
Speaker 1: haven't talked about that you think are sort of important
Speaker 1: for people to to know? Just sort of based on
Speaker 1: what you know about what I'm what I'm doing. And
Speaker 1: in this season, you know, I I think you know,
Speaker 1: I really I think there's you know, I think you
Speaker 1: go into what you said a minute ago. The interesting thing,
Speaker 1: you know, Scully after a while was not you know
Speaker 1: when we started the show, No, Scully never sees an alien. Ever,
Speaker 1: by show twelve, she was seeing the ghost of her
Speaker 1: father because human nature or American nature, whoever may be.
Speaker 1: It's like she's just person, says no, male, there's more fun, Well,
Speaker 1: there's more interesting. Male, there's see and weirder stuff. And
Speaker 1: so as the show goes on for ultimately eleven years,
Speaker 1: Scully bends towards him, you know, because otherwise the show
Speaker 1: becomes Scooby Doo, right whether that you know, just like
Speaker 1: you know, you just pull off the mayor the mask
Speaker 1: on the monster or the mayor whatever. So that's the
Speaker 1: thing that you forgot, is that she did experience these
Speaker 1: things and leans more towards mall. There's experience, you know,
Speaker 1: And I think that's the benefit of the necessity of
Speaker 1: a TV series who keeping conflict and the momentum going.
Speaker 1: But you know, I wish that people the fun of
Speaker 1: being Scully going. You know, that's just that's great. Those
Speaker 1: guys that you had it said, oh is the ski lift.
Speaker 1: I'm recreating the position of Venus. All that stuff is
Speaker 1: fun too to go. You know. It's like you're not
Speaker 1: trying to prove anyone's That's the great part about the
Speaker 1: Hills as well. And I think a lot of the
Speaker 1: characters are trying to do X files. Was they didn't
Speaker 1: ask for it. They were going out in mind in
Speaker 1: their own business and and this thing happened to them,
Speaker 1: and they love an explanation whatever it may be, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: And so you know, the the fun of trying to
Speaker 1: be Scully. In the first two seasons. And also I
Speaker 1: think you asked, you know, that show to really try
Speaker 1: to find out to think about, you know, where we
Speaker 1: are now. You look at the mythology and therties because
Speaker 1: that's what I grew up. Frankenstein was a scientist. He's bad.
Speaker 1: The villagers burned him down, burned down the castle, and
Speaker 1: they got the monsters. Scientists bad, invisible man. He died.
Speaker 1: You know, they always come back, but that was like
Speaker 1: he's bad. Um in the fifties, the scientist is creating
Speaker 1: the trouble, but he was also solving the problem, usually
Speaker 1: by going to the military, because that's what the fifties
Speaker 1: was like, your trust and government. The sixties, you know,
Speaker 1: you start getting into Andromeda strain and you had Vietnam
Speaker 1: and so then it's bad. And then in the end
Speaker 1: of the seventies science becomes close encounters and you made
Speaker 1: nice communication with aliens and you had star wars and stuff,
Speaker 1: and like where are we now? Where what's our own
Speaker 1: mythology that we were creating a myth about this pandemic?
Speaker 1: Its storytelling wise, wherever you stand, storytelling wines. If you're
Speaker 1: doing a pandemic, you had never come up with the
Speaker 1: head of a country is obstructing it. So what is
Speaker 1: it about science and conspiracy and everything we're at now?
Speaker 1: What is it telling us? You know? And I think
Speaker 1: if if you can use exiles as engaged as to
Speaker 1: try to where were we? Then what does that type
Speaker 1: of show tell us where we are now? Strange Arrivals
Speaker 1: is a production of I Heeart, three D Audio and
Speaker 1: Grimm and Mild from Aaron Monkey. This episode was written
Speaker 1: and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins
Speaker 1: and Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick
Speaker 1: and Aaron Mankey. Learn more about Strange Rivals over at
Speaker 1: Grimm and Mild dot com, and find more podcasts from
Speaker 1: my Heart Radio by visiting the i Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: H