By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
X-Files Finally became a very mixed bag of a franchise, but he managed to give us two surprisingly solid films. These films have raised the challenges of the usual episodic rate while providing both paranoid chills (as in Fight the future) and monstrous sensations (as in I want to believe) Fans expected it. However, long before one or the other film, the killer X-Files The episode “Little Green Men” gave an excitement on the big screen on the small screen … not surprising, really, because it was adapted from a script of film not produced by the co-author Glen Morgan.
If you need a refreshment, “Little Green Men” was the X-Files Episode in which Mulder is sent to Puerto Rico by one of his political patron and is closer to the extraterrestrials (where are they?) that he has never been before. This episode of season 2 Premiere is a favorite of fans for how he examines the Mulder agent and adds frightening credibility to his plots on alien. It turns out that one of the reasons why this story seems polite is that Glen Morgan had already written a large part like a film.
According to the writer, “I wrote a script a long time ago entitled” Little Green Men “who spoke of a guy who had descended into a telescope in Chile.” Unfortunately, this scenario has undergone the fate of so many potential films in Hollywood: “It has never been done.” Despite this, Morgan said: “There were many elements that I liked”, and he was able to integrate them into this remarkable X-Files episode.
Beyond wanting to just want to see his script on the screen, Morgan had a particular motivation to make this episode: “We loved the idea so much that we decided to do it for Mulder.” At that time, David Duchovny had expressed interest in making an episode that focused on his character in the way that “Beyond the Sea” focused on the scully by Gillian Anderson. Morgan planned to focus on “the most important” Duchovny in this story and wrote this episode for the actor because “I loved him, he deserved it”.
He really succeeds on this front, giving us an episode centered on Mulder which develops the motivations of the character and how far he will go in his quest to find the truth. It is also very fun to obtain a new Mulder tradition, including the fact that he has rich customers who secretly finance his work. Unfortunately, the show would never really come back to the idea that there can be so many government personalities who want to help Mulder as who want to kill him.
The final motivation of Glen Morgan for the creation of “little green men” was to write a story in SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), the real institute focusing on stranger life. “I was upset by the fact that the government closed the SETI project and I wanted to remedy it.” In this way, the writer transformed the fictitious quest of Mulder for the extraterrestrials in plea for a very real and very important project.
Retrospectively, one of the things that makes “little green men” so special is that Morgan has integrated the plaid Seti into an episode that simply shoots all cylinders. It never looks like an afternoon full of preaching homilies. On the contrary, the real fate of legitimate government research on extraterrestrial life was used to tell one of the best autonomous episodes of X-Files ever made.
“Little Green Men” remains one of the best X-Files The episodes have ever achieved, the one who succeeds both as a provocative study of Mulder and as a kind of second pilot. Knowing that it has been adapted from a film not produced makes us appreciate this episode even more. He finally introduced cinematographic quality to the show that helped make X-Files One of the best shows in television history.
