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, 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.''
Add your comment
The rules: Keep it clean, and stay on the subject or we might delete your comment. If you see inappropriate language, e-mail us. An asterisk * indicates a required field.