The X-Files: Howard Gordon & Vince Gilligan Retrospective

How Howard Gordon’s Use of Informants on The X-Files Foreshadowed His Use of Moles On 24 and Homeland

I remembering watching the Pilot of 24 in November 2001. Jack Bauer is called in by his superior Bob Walsh with the rest of his team and is told that in they have credible intel that in the next 24 hours there will be an attempt on the life of David Palmer, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for President. Walsh calls Jack back at the end of it and informs him that he believes that there are people within the government working with those assassins. He tells Jack: “Don’t trust anyone. Not even your own people.”

By the end of the second episode Walsh himself has been killed by those forces, sacrificing himself to give a keycard which he is certain has the dirty agent. Jack will learn by the end of the episode that agent is Nina Myers, his closest assistant — and former lover. While the evidence is proven false by the very next episode the cruel irony is that Nina is the mole at CTU and by the time Jack accepts this fact, multiple people will have died — including most heartbreakingly his wife, Terri.

Jack pays the price for his disbelief.

When I began to watch 24 I was starting to take TV more seriously — perhaps not professionally but definitely more than someone who wouldn’t graduate college until the season finale of 24 aired. I was starting to pay attention to details very few people would have, such as the writing staff of a show. 24 was the first series I recall watching where I was far more impressed by the writers working for it then any of the actors because even at that point I recognized many of them from other shows that even then I’d watched and enjoyed. Two of them were Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, who had started collaborating against after Gordon had left The X-Files in 1997.

I recognized the two of them from The X-Files, which gave them credibility when they wrote for this show. As you’d expect the fact that they created Homeland was a big reason I watched that show as well. By that point I’d done my first rewatch and (amateurish) episod4e reviews for The X-Files in a now defunct site where I no longer have any of the reviews. I do know that by that time I’d come to the realization that Gordon had not done his best work for The X-Files. But as I wrote in my first article on him that doesn’t mean the experience didn’t prepare him for it in multiple ways. The one I’ll discuss here is the one that was a factor in the first half of the series run (when Gordon was working for the show): the shadowy government informant.

We (and Mulder) actually meet the first informant before there’s anything resembling a mythology in Deep Throat. In it Mulder meets a man in his sixties (Jerry Hardin) who says he has ‘an interest in Mulder’s work. At the end of the episode Mulder meets the man and talks about the case. Mulder asks him: “They’re here, aren’t they?” His informant tells him: “Mr. Mulder, they’ve been here for a very, very long time.”

Mulder’s informant is referred to as Deep Throat in the episode after what was the most famous informant in history: the mysterious figure that told Woodward and Bernstein to ‘follow the money’ in All The President’s Men. (We would not learn his true identity or his links to the FBI until Mark Felt chose to do so in 2005, long after The X-Files left the air.) Tellingly he is only referred to as Deep Throat in the script and the only time he’s called that name is in what will be his last appearance when Scully refers to him by this in what is almost certainly a slur. That appearance is in the first season finale (and what Carter considered might well be a series finale when he wrote it) when he tells Mulder that “they’re closer then they’ve ever been.” We then see the conspiracy (who even now we still don’t know the true shape of) in its most brutal form, killing off anyone connected to what Mulder and Scully have uncovered and holding Mulder hostage.

Deep Throat says he can come up with a way to get Mulder back by telling Scully where to find ‘the wellspring’. She gets access to a government facility and finds an alien fetus. Deep Throat insists on making the trade for Mulder, basically insisting that he do so against Scully’s wishes. Watching Hardin’s performance you get the very clear feeling he knows what’s coming and is trying to save Scully’s life as well as Mulder’s.

With his last breath….

In fact that’s what happens as Deep Throat is shockingly killed in front of Scully. His last words appeared in the opening credits as a replacement for ‘The Truth Is Out There’ and could just as easily serve as an alternate catch phrase: ‘Trust no one.”

That’s basically the same message that Walsh gives Jack in the Pilot of 24, though Jack never quite takes it to heart in Day 1. (After that, he will have learned his lesson the hard way.) Because of how The X-Files worked Gordon and Gansa would write an episode and be able to include Deep Throat as part of it, ironically in what is largely agreed to be one of the worst episodes in the first season if not the entire series Ghost in the Machine. After the action Mulder meets Deep Throat in a bar. He’s trying to find out what happened to the man who designed the early model of artificial intelligence they found and Deep Throat informs him that the government has managed to get to him. When Mulder asks how this is possible, Deep Throat tells him: “They can get to anyone, Agent Mulder.”

I’ve mentioned Mulder’s next informant played by Steven Williams in my previous article on Gordon. He is referred to in the script as X but no one in the cast ever does while he is alive and its not until the series finale that Mulder even acknowledges that’s what he called him. The reason we refer to him that way is Mulder’s way of summoning him: creating an X with masking tape, putting it on his apartment window and shining a light on it. This would seem to imply X has surveillance on Mulder’s apartment. However X makes it very clear the first time Mulder does this (in One Breath) “You’re my tool! I come to you when I need something!” Considering that X’s appearances seem to come more on his schedule then Mulder’s I’m inclined to believe him.

Gordon wrote three scripts in which X makes an appearance and in all of them we sense both the threat in his voice and how genuinely unwilling he is to do this. “You think I want to be here?” he tells Mulder when they first meet in ‘Sleepless’ “I don’t want to be here.” Indeed from this episode until his ultimate death we learn far less about X’s connection to the Syndicate then any other informants. We eventually learn Deep Throat had ties to the Smoking Man — and by extension William Mulder — and its clear X at least knew Deep Throat and is carrying on his work out of some kind of obligation to ‘his predecessor’. But the show never makes it clear where in the totem pole he is. When we finally see him at the end of Wetwired reporting to the CSM, we’re not sure if he’s an underling or whether the two are on equal footing. (By this time we’ve met the Syndicate and are aware that Smoking Man may not be as high up on the totem pole as we believe.)

X saved Mulder’s life. He never knew it.

What is clear and is just as clear in all of the episodes Gordon writes or co-writes with X is that he’s essentially one of their enforcers and has no reluctance to use violence on anyone, even our heroes. He and Skinner get in a brawl for information on Mulder in End Game (and Skinner really comes up on the short end) and by the end of Nisei when he makes an appearance in Scully’s apartment building we know he’s dangerous. He warns Scully to tell Mulder not to get on a train and when she tries to walk away from him into her apartment, he grabs her and pretty much forces her to. When the threat doesn’t work X walks away and Scully tries to turn the tables at gunpoint. X retaliates by grabbing the gun from her and telling her to back off. The fact that he ends up saving Mulder’s life at the end of the episode (something the viewer knows but critically Mulder never does) does little to redeem his dark nature.

I’ve long felt X was by far the best of the three informants Mulder had, partly because of the brilliant combination of violence and warning Williams gave in every aspect of his performance and in a larger context how he demonstrated better than any character we’d met to this point how not even Mulder’s allies could be trusted when it came to helping him. This was implied with Deep Throat a few times but in the case of X it meant not only was Mulder almost certainly not going to get enough answers to his questions but people were going to die getting them. In X’s case it was taken more literally then usually: X was more than willing to kill people in Mulder’s presence and he was more than willing to do the same to Mulder if his life was in danger.

When X walked out too far on a limb and was discovered in Herrenvolk one of the Elders said: “We have an information leak.” He basically orders Smoking Man to plant a rumor that Teena Mulder, who had a stroke in the Season 3 finale, is in danger in order to flush the informant out. (Smoking Man, I should mention, is clearly uncomfortable doing so but nevertheless goes along with it.) At the end of the episode X is led into a trap and is killed by one of the Syndicate’s assassins but not before he manages to write SRSG in his own blood before he dies — a reference that leads Mulder to his next informant, Marita Covarrubias (Laurie Holden)

It takes very little effort to see X’s death in particular as a lesson that Gordon will take to heart in both 24 and Homeland when it comes to so many of the informants that we see CTU or the CIA trying to use in order to catch terrorists. And interestingly X’s death is one of the more ambiguous ones we had on TV to that point, certainly the show. Usually when a character is killed off they’re either clearly a villain or someone who is an ally. X never fit comfortably into either mold: he was always dangerous; he always treated Mulder with disdain throughout their meetings and we never had a clear insight into his motives for anything. Throughout 24 and Homeland Gordon would put us into this position when so many characters who did bad things for good reasons were killed off and the viewer’s sympathies were tested.

And in Gordon’s final season with The X-Files there’s a very good chance he was sending an even bigger message to the viewer with Marita Covarrubias. Gordon is the credited writer or co-writer of three of the episode Martia shows up in Season 4. During this period he more than anyone is working to get her into a position where Mulder is trying to trust her. (The fact that she’s a female around his own age implies a certain sexual tendency as well.) And that makes her final appearance in Season Four all the more shocking.

‘Zero Sum’, the last episode Gordon would write for The X-Files (collaborating with Chris Carter) is a myth-arc adjacent episode that focuses its attention on Skinner more than anything else. (Because I intend to cover it in another entry on Gordon I’ll remain vague on this part of the story and only refer to Covarrubias’s appearance in it.) Covarrubias shows up in the episode after an attack by a swarm of bees leaves several children hospitalized. She informs Mulder that she’s working with him and seems to be questioning Skinner. In the final scene of the episode the phone rings in Smoking Man’s home and when he answers he tells the person on the other line that Mulder will be contacting him on what he’s seen.

Covarrubias is on the other line. “I’ll tell him what you want to tell me,” she says.

CSM says (and this is the last line Gordon is credited with) “Tell him what he wants to hear.”

In the context of the fact that Covarrubias is working with Smoking Man some might consider this somewhat squishy. But they miss the bigger point. We’ve had signs throughout the series that anyone who tells Mulder anything, whatever their connection to the conspiracy, is using him to an extent but the show has been relative subtle this. When its revealed that Mulder’s latest informant is taking orders from his worst enemy we can no longer hide from that reality. Mulder is as much a pawn as anyone else we’ve seen the conspiracy use and throw away over the years; he’s as much a dupe as anything else. And indeed this theme will play out in the Season 4 finale and will follow Mulder (in a very fuzzy way) throughout much of Season 5.

When Gordon moved on to 24 its very easy to see how little he had to adjust his own writing for the series. Jack Bauer learns by the end of Season 1 that he himself is a pawn for bigger forces in the government far above him. He learns that no one can be trusted, no one is as they appear to me, not even his own friends and loved ones. And while the context has clearly changed from the 1990s to the post 9/11 era, there’s a fundamental principles about selling out the powers that be and the penalties of it. Mulder’s informants may have their doubts about what their colleagues are doing but they care as much about keeping their identities preserved as any of the moles who end employed by CTU over eight seasons and are just as willing to kill to protect it. X killing people to keep his cover is just the flip side of what Nina Meyers and her later descendants will do.

The fact that the characters on The X-Files are informants on the shadow government and our considered allies and that a few years later we consider those moles traitors on 24 and Homeland might seem like a sign of the changing times. And indeed the informants appear to be acting out some greater good then those on 24 who most of the time are doing so for money more than anything else. But in a funny way Gordon seems to be making an argument that nothing’s really changed between the two series and that the Syndicate actually has a more effective way of dealing with traitors. When Deep Throat and X are found out, they are executed with no problem. When Nina Myers’ betrayal is learned she ends up going to prison but when its learned she has more information that can help the government because of her dealings she’s able to negotiate a Presidential pardon that essentially allows her to walk away from the government free as a bird one year later. (She does pay for it in the end but only after she’s gotten away with far worse things.)

Nina gets away with murder…for a while.

This plays out quite a few times on Homeland as well when people who’ve spent years betraying the government are caught but are still able to leverage their actions for continued freedom and usefulness. This plays out most cynically in Season 7 when Dar Adal, who essentially tried to overthrow the government of the President-elect the previous year and has been sentenced to prison is used by one of her political adversaries to get information that could bring her down. To be clear by this point the political polarization that had only begun to surface during The X-Files was now everyday life (though much of what we would learn in the following years was still relatively little known even in 2018) Still it’s not very far to go from here to how the shadow government operates to see it is as a parallel — and The X-Files had more than implied it in a non-sci-fi context even then.

Gordon learned many lessons when he was writing for The X-Files that he has carried on in 24 and Homeland and its clear ‘Trust No One’ was one of the biggest. And the real difference between what happened on those informants and the moles in 24 was far more simple. On The X-Files Mulder had to work to find his informants because he didn’t know how to find them. On 24, the call was coming from inside the house.