Episode 37 - "Trust of the Fallen"

I don't know that The X-Files has really remained in the modern media diet. Certainly it was still well known when I was in school, but it fell off quickly and I don't think it has the draw to successive generations for some reason. Like a good wine with no finish, it has dissipated in the culture.

X-Files is a very good example, however, for looking at the juggle between ongoing narrative and single-episode stories. One episode is a monster of the week. Another is a mythology episode, furthering the series backstory. This was our direct idea for the Agency re-boot – propel some long-range backstory gradually, while solving a case or monster of the week in the meantime. The problem is that you need a backstory that can survive without tying it to the cast, which we knew would change frequently. Episode 36 is a monster story that introduces the setup, just like “Rose” was with Doctor Who in 2005. Exact same mechanics.

Episode 37 is the mythology episode. The lengthy teaser was meant to lead into a scene that is now missing. You see in the chase the back alley behind Warren Towers, a brilliant bit of Retro Ugly architecture. Fortunately nobody saw our fake guns.

Throughout the episode you can see that we are still not quite in command of the PD-150's, our f-stops are all over the place, and our color temperatures are not deliberate enough. Sometimes monkeying with the white balance produces some nice results. But its not replicable to do that.

The filing cabinet in the Agency was an old COM discard. I found it in a junk pile and hauled it back up to Studio East.

The story begins to fall apart right away. The lost tape meant that we had a big hole that we could never quite work around, and trouble with casting meant that we couldn't get the actor in to patch up that problem. We also ran out of time and didn't get another scene, which went at the end of the episode, where we're supposed to demonstrate that the Parasites have infiltrated our society. Ok, perhaps a bit ambitious. But we planned on getting some shots to make that happen. I remember Kendal Stavros and I standing at the top of the stairs at Government Center, shivering in pain, on the coldest day in the history of reality, hoping that the next person who came through the doors would be one of our craigslist extras. Alas, none of them showed. So we went home with almost nothing.

I talk about the Parasite backstory elsewhere, so let me just say this: we either should have established it more or established it less and metered more out over time. I think that was a mistake on my part. Because of the technical difficulties with losing footage, losing cast members, losing our director (Sam had serious commitments to school projects, and justly had to focus on them), with me stepping in to finish the shooting on the episode, we were never able to achieve what the show needed to achieve. And I didn't want to scrap the episode even though it would probably be better that way, because we needed content. A show that produces no content is not a show, and with butv10 just starting up at that point, we needed content more than quality. We needed to prove to the world that we existed.

There are some moments that I am very proud of in “Trust of the Fallen.” It was a new Shadows out in the real world, going for a spin around the block, and experiencing the necessary growing pains.

The long term impact of the episode is that I decided that I needed to not be onscreen, so the next episode obviously had to establish the precedent for re-casting Jakob. I had the idea that Jakob could be a different actor in each episode, but it didn't turn out that way. The episode also cost us some mythology. By muddling it, we didn't establish what we needed to in order to support a pillar in the story structure. After a sour experience working on this episode of Parasites, we all wanted to do something different. But the best thing that happened is that our crew – Marcus, Darcy, Kendal, Julie, and the rest – got a really great crash course in how things can go wrong. And I think that we learned those lessons as an organization, which is why the next episode was so good.

As a post-script, “Trust of the Fallen” is not on the butv web site. I have no idea why. It was on there at one time, and then disappeared, which screwed up the episode numbers. “The Agency” is listed as Episode 37, when it's actually 36. “Trust of the Fallen” fits in between “The Agency” and “Salesman”.

- Justin K. Rivers