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By Mary Kaye Schilling
Mary Kaye Schilling
Mary Kaye Schilling is an assistant managing editor at EW

X-Files' actors live in mortal fear of it: the big kiss-off from series creator Chris Carter. The bell doesn't toll often for regular characters (among the unlucky few: Deep Throat, X, and Bill Mulder), but the possibility hovers, like an alien spaceship, over the cast. For one actor, the phone rang days before shooting began on a momentous two-parter (airing Feb. 7 and 14), a sweeps event that Fox is trumpeting as ''The X-Files conspiracy...exposed!''

Divulging the identity of this doomed player would, of course, ruin the second episode's penultimate shocker (there are two humdingers). Let us instead relive the actor's bittersweet moment of (you know) truth: ''Just before I got the script I got a message to call Carter's office. He was very calm. He said, 'I've got something to tell you about the episode.' And I said, 'Are you going to fire me?' And he said, `No, but I am going to shoot you.' He said to trust him, it was going to be a very noble death. I said, 'I do trust you, implicitly.'''

The victim pauses here for comic effect. Not only because the nature of a character's death is the least concern of a soon-to-be-unemployed actor (one who relocated from Vancouver to L.A. when the show did the same last summer). But because of the inevitable punchline: ''And Carter said, 'Trust no one.'''

Trust is to The X-Files what Nothing was to Seinfeld. For just as Jerry's sitcom was a whole lot of something, Carter's drama is very much about finding the people you can trust, the few who do speak the truth. In the case of FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), that person is his partner, Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson).

But in the case of X-Files fans, whom can they trust about this latest claim that the conspiracy -- Carter's ongoing plotline involving aliens, government deception, deadly black oil, and killer bees -- will be explained? After all, similar promises went unfulfilled last summer with the release of the franchise's first film, The X-Files -- a visually stunning movie that nonetheless created more questions than it answered. ''I think people were frustrated because the studio's ads ['The Truth Is Revealed'] implied that everything was going to be tied up,'' says Duchovny. ''And then it wasn't.''

''I never claimed to be revealing more than I did,'' insists Carter. And believes X-Files executive producer Frank Spotnitz, ''the truth meant something different to everyone who walked into the show.'' Spotnitz, who developed the movie with Carter, is one of the few writers at Ten Thirteen (Carter's production company) who can make heads or tails of the conspiracy, or what Carter calls the Mythology. And in his mind, ''the movie did reveal very explicitly a lot of things. But other people might have been expecting the truth to be about something else, like Samantha.''

For the uninitiated, Samantha is Mulder's sister, abducted by aliens when she was 8 and he was 12. His search to find her has led to his and Scully's series-long quest to learn the truth about extraterrestrial life on Earth. From that simple concept has evolved the most brazenly complex arc ever attempted by a television drama. Indeed, it is a veritable Machiavellian maze, so tangled with intrigue and betrayal that even dedicated fans find themselves scratching their heads bloody. Duchovny acknowledges that this is ''hard on people who just tune in occasionally.'' And it makes attracting new fans nearly impossible -- a problem illuminated by the movie, which focused exclusively on the conspiracy rather than showcasing one of the series' other specialties, the more accessible stand-alone stories featuring creepy genetic mutants and the like.


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