Talk:The X-Files/history/Season 3

Season 3 (1995–1996)

Continuing from "Anasazi", "The Blessing Way" and "Paper Clip" opened the third season, bringing in the involvement of former Nazi scientists, formally introducing the leading conspiracy member Well-Manicured Man (John Neville), and containing revelations about both Mulder and Scully's families. Ratings-wise, "The Blessing Way" was the most successful X-Files episode thus far.

The third season confirmed the existence of extraterrestrial life within the show and suggested that a shadowy international consortium known as the Syndicate were conspiring with the aliens to colonize Earth. This would be achieved via use of the so-called black oil, introduced in the two-part "Piper Maru"/"Apocrypha." However, the season's other main mythology episodes, "Nisei" and "731", continued to call some of these conclusions into question. Chris Carter began to receive criticism for posing as many questions as answers in the mythology, while the mythology episodes were also praised for their increasingly Hollywood-like production values. "Nisei" received Emmy Awards for its sound editing and mixing. Season three was noted for its wide variety of "monster of the week" episodes. "Pusher", the second effort by writer Vince Gilligan, depicted the cold blooded Robert Patrick Modell, a man who could control people telepathically (a sequel, "Kitsunegari", came two years later in the fifth season). Simultaneously, the show continued to yield darker episodes, such as "The Walk" (a mysterious deadly force in a veterans hospital), "Oubliette" (a metaphysical connection between a recently kidnapped girl and another woman) and "Grotesque" (Mulder's descent into the world of a gargoyle-possessed killer, which received an Emmy for John Bartley's cinematography).

Behind the scenes, Darin Morgan continued his involvement with the show, becoming The X-Files' most critically acclaimed writer. Despite intense perfectionism and having been unsatisfied with his well-received "Humbug", Morgan managed to turn in three dark comedy episodes which were considered original for the show. The first of these, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose", concerned a St. Paul insurance salesman (Peter Boyle) who could predict death. It won Emmys for best writing and guest actor Boyle, and comes in very high in fan polls of favorite episodes. "War of the Coprophages" was Morgan's parody-tribute to H.G. Wells/Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, this time with an infestation of cockroaches driving a town to hysteria. It also mocked the sexual tension between Mulder and Scully by introducing the attractive female entomologist Dr. Bambi Berenbaum. A similar technique was also used in Chris Carter's own "Syzygy", only one week later, leading to what some viewers felt was a comedy overdose. Morgan's third effort of the season, and his final episode as an X-Files script writer, was "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'", which presented multiple perspectives as in Kurosawa's Rashomon, and made fun of the X-Files mythology while remaining consistent with it. Graeme Murray and Shirley Inget were nominated for an Emmy for art direction. Morgan would later write a sequel also involving the writer Jose Chung (Charles Nelson Reilly), for Chris Carter's other series, Millennium in 1998.

In the spring of 1996, The X-Files began to achieve wide recognition. In addition to its eight Emmy nominations in its third season, of which it won five, it was awarded a George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in television broadcasting. Both David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were nominated for Screen Actors Guild Awards for the first time, and Anderson won. Both actors were also nominated for Golden Globe Awards. Guest stars in season 3 included Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek (both "men in black" in "Jose Chung's"), Giovanni Ribisi and Jack Black (in "D.P.O.", about a young man who can control lightning), Lucy Liu and B.D. Wong (in "Hell Money", about mysterious and deadly occurrences in the Chinese immigrant community), JT Walsh (in "The List", about the reincarnation of a death row prisoner), and R. Lee Ermey (in "Revelations", about a stigmatic boy, played by Kevin Zegers, the first of several episodes in the series to deal directly with Scully's Catholic faith). Black, Ribisi and Liu were not widely known at the time they appeared on The X-Files. Dave Grohl also had a cameo in the "Pusher". His rock band, Foo Fighters, were fans of the show, and contributed songs to the compilation album, Songs in the Key of X, released that spring. They also contributed to The X-Files film two years later (see below for other pop culture inspirations).

The final part of the season brought the episode "Avatar" (the first episode centered around Mitch Pileggi's Assistant Director Walter Skinner, who was being punished by the Syndicate for his efforts on behalf of Mulder and Scully), "Quagmire" (about a lake monster; the famous "conversation on the rock" between Mulder and Scully was added by script editor Darin Morgan as his last contribution to The X-Files), "Wetwired" (an episode involving a conspiracy to send subliminal messages in TV reception), and season finale "Talitha Cumi", which introduced Jeremiah Smith (Roy Thinnes), an alien with healing powers. The finale had a complex plot, tying back to Mulder's mother's past with the Cigarette Smoking Man. One scene, produced by writers Chris Carter and David Duchovny, was modeled directly after "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The episode was again a cliffhanger, "to be continued" in the next season.