X PLANATIONS

WHY BLOW UP A PERFECTLY GOOD BUILDING? Early in the film, the Syndicate plants a bomb in a Texas office building where the bodies of four black-oil victims are being kept. Can't the Syndies think of a way to destroy these incriminating corpses that wouldn't wipe out hundreds of bystanders? And why did they bother to phone in a bomb threat if they actually wanted the building to explode?

"If Mulder and Scully hadn't found the bomb, hundreds of people would have been killed--that's the whole idea," explains X scribe Frank Spotnitz, who cowrote and produced the movie with Carter. "Those bodies would have been lost in the group." Calling in the bomb threat was merely the Syndicate's "cover story so it would look like a terrorist fringe group did it."

Duchovny provides another explanation for the eye-grabbing kaboom: "It's kind of a big cheat to start the movie," he admits. "It gets your attention at the beginning." That it does. However, no real buildings were harmed during the making of this motion picture. Instead, X's F/X experts built a facade in front of a real office building and blew that up. "The real building wasn't touched at all," Carter swears.

! WHO CALLED THE KILLER PARAMEDICS? The fake ambulance the Syndicate sends to kidnap Scully--how did that happen? The Syndies couldn't possibly have known an errant virus-carrying bee was hiding in Scully's collar waiting to sting her and put her into a coma. Also, is the ambulance driver seriously trying to kill Mulder when he shoots him through his window--or did he deliberately just graze him?

"The ambulance driver wasn't instructed to kill Mulder--that was his own idea," thinks Spotnitz. "And Mulder's phone had been tapped, which is how the Syndicate knew he was calling for an ambulance. We had a scene explaining that, but it got cut. These sorts of questions make me nuts. Frankly, the answers weren't interesting enough to put in the film."

Here's one that's interesting enough: "Why doesn't the Syndicate just kill Mulder?" asks Duchovny. "That's always the question. There's the suspicion on the show that he's somehow helpful to them. That's possible. I think Mulder is the worst FBI agent in the world. He spends millions of dollars investigating these paranormal phenomena and never comes up with any evidence. He's the Kenneth Starr of the FBI."

WHERE HAVE ALL THE CUTE ALIENS GONE? The ones we meet in the movie are so vicious they make Sigourney Weaver's Alien nemesis look like Big Bird. What happened to the silvery big-eyed ETs from the TV show? And what about the others missing from the series? Like Alex Krycek? Or the eyes-sewn-shut zombies from last season? Or the clones of Mulder's sister? Or Mulder's sister herself, for that matter?

"There was a scene in the film about Mulder's sister, about the meaning of her abduction, but we cut it," reveals Carter. "There was just too much information. You can't fit everything into one movie." Still, Spotnitz promises there is a connection between the kill-first-abduct-later aliens on the screen and the big-eyed ones on the show. "But I can't tell you about it yet," he says, hinting that the issue will be addressed this fall in the show's sixth season.