By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
The X-Files eventually became a very mixed bag of a franchise, but it did manage to give us two surprisingly solid films. These movies raised the stakes from the usual episodic fare while still providing both the paranoid chills (like in Fight the Future) and monstrous thrills (like in I Want To Believe) fans had come to expect. However, long before either film, the killer X-Files episode “Little Green Men” delivered big-screen excitement on the small screen…not surprising, really, since it was adapted from an unproduced film script by co-writer Glen Morgan.
If you need a refresher, “Little Green Men” was the X-Files episode in which Mulder is sent to Puerto Rico by a political patron of his and gets closer to aliens (or are they?) than he has ever been before. This Season 2 premiere episode is a fan-favorite for how it examines Agent Mulder and adds some creepy credence to his conspiracies about aliens. As it turns out, one of the reasons this story seems polished is that Glen Morgan had already written much of it as a film.
According to the writer, “I had written a script a long time ago on my own called ‘Little Green Men’ that was about a guy who had gone down to a telescope in Chile.” Sadly, this script suffered the fate of so many would-be films in Hollywood: “It was never made.” Despite that, Morgan said “there were many elements that I liked,” and he was able to incorporate them into this stand-out X-Files episode.
Beyond simply wanting to see his script onscreen, Morgan had a special motivation for making this episode: “We liked the idea so much that we decided to do it for Mulder.” At that time, David Duchovny had expressed interest in doing an episode that focused on his character the way that “Beyond the Sea” focused on Gillian Anderson’s Scully. Morgan considered focusing on Duchovny “the most important” part of this story and wrote this episode for the actor because “I liked him, he deserved it.”
It truly succeeds on this front, giving us a Mulder-centric episode that expands on the character’s motivations and how far he will go in his quest to find the truth. It’s also great fun getting new Mulder lore, including the fact that he has wealthy patrons who secretly fund his work. Sadly, the show would never really return to the idea that there may be just as many governmental figures who want to help Mulder as there are who want to kill him.
Glen Morgan’s final motivation for creating “Little Green Men” was to write a story about SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), the real-life institute focusing on alien life. “I was irked that the government had shut down the SETI project and I wanted to address that.” In this way, the writer transformed Mulder’s fictional quest for aliens into advocacy for a very real, very important project.
In retrospect, one of the things that makes “Little Green Men” so special is that Morgan embedded the SETI advocacy into an episode that simply fires on all cylinders. It never feels like an afternoon special full of preachy homilies. Rather, the real-life plight of legitimate governmental research into extraterrestrial life was used to tell one of the best standalone X-Files episodes ever made.
“Little Green Men” remains one of the best X-Files episodes ever made, one that succeeds as both a provocative character study of Mulder and as a kind of second pilot. Knowing that it was adapted from an unproduced film makes us appreciate this episode all the more. It ultimately introduced a cinematic quality to the show that helped make The X-Files one of the best-looking shows in television history.
