The X-Files executive producer Frank Spotnitz kindly took time out from his busy schedule to reveal secrets about Season Nine.
The X-Files Magazine: Season Eight was a pretty straightforward dramatic season. Will there be any return to comedy moments this season?
Frank Spotnitz: There will be. I think the year will still be primarily dramatic, but we've found our feet with these new characters. I had a lot more anxiety about how you do this last year than I do this year. So there's a comfort level we've achieved, certainly with the Doggett character, and we're quickly finding one with the Reyes character. Once you've got that comfort level you can begin to let your guard down a little and have some fun. So I think by episode six of this season you'll see some of the humor that was so appealing in the Mulder-Scully episodes return to the series.
Can you give us a little more of a feeling for new character Brad Follmer (played by Cary Elwes) and how he's fitting in?
He's fitting in great. He's not like any character we've had on the show before. He's an antagonist, but he's not all bad. He just looks at the world from a different perspective to our heroes. He's very smart and very ambitious. He's got power within the FBI, so he can't be ignored. And, very interestingly, he's a former boyfriend of Monica Reyes, so that adds a personal dimension to the conflict he has with both Reyes and Doggett.
Since Doggett seems attracted to Scully and Reyes seems attracted to Doggett, and Follmer probably wants to get back together with Reyes, could Follmer's presence lead to some sort of romantic triangle or even quadrangle?!
That was one of the central issues we had to think about for this season. What is the basis of this relationship between Doggett and Reyes? We had the Mulder-Scully paradigm for eight seasons, and now what is the Doggett-Reyes paradigm? I think it came across pretty loud and clear in the first two episodes that Reyes has a great deal of feeling for Doggett, but I think Doggett's feelings and affections are really the question mark here and the source of tension. We learned last year that Doggett and Reyes met under tragic circumstances. At the time, he was married and his son had been kidnapped. He was a police officer in New York City and she was an FBI agent investigating that disappearance. Now he's no longer married and she clearly has feelings for him. But what are his feelings?
You introduced Lucy Lawless as Shannon McMahon in the two-part season opener. Will she be back?
We're waiting to see whether she'll be in more. There will be another possibly recurring character, that I can't talk about yet, but who will be introduced later in the season.
Will the Lone Gunmen's Zuleika Robinson and Stephen Snedden turn up in The X-Files at all?
I hope so. We're hoping to have an episode with them, the three guys and maybe even some more characters from the Longe Gunmen universe. And we hope to use Brian Spicer, who did so much of the best work on that series, to do that episode of The X-Files.
How about the prospect of doing the show without David Duchovny?
Well, we all got kind of a taste of that last year because he was gone for so much of the season. Then, when he returned, the show was a different show because now you had a third lead in Robert Patrick. you couldn't just ignore that. The show had changed. So I had a lot more anxiety about doing the show last year, because it was just so worrisome how you do the show without David for any period of time. Having actually found that we could do it, that we could find new ways to tell stories, I felt much more confident going forward this year.