Having predicted everything from the Trump presidency to Disney’s purchase of Fox, The Simpsons has gained a reputation for prognosticating the future. Yet 25 years ago, another Fox series featured a plotline that foretold one of the most significant moments in American history just six months before it actually happened.
That series was The Lone Gunmen, a spinoff of The X-Files which focused on the adventures of Byers (Bruce Harwood), Langly (Dean Haglund), and Frohike (Tom Braidwood), the three publishers of a conspiracy-centric supermarket tabloid named The Lone Gunman. In the show’s pilot episode, which aired on Mar. 4, 2001, the trio investigates a plot where evildoers within the government plan to hijack a passenger plane via remote control and fly it into the World Trade Center. The script even contains the haunting line, “They’re going to crash the plane into the World Trade Center.”
“Except in our version, the good guys won,” showrunner Vince Gilligan tells Polygon.
By Sep. 11, 2001 however, The Lone Gunmen was already a distant memory for most. After a 13-episode run, the series had been canceled due to low ratings, and its cliffhanger ending wouldn’t be resolved until April 2002, in an episode of The X-Files which killed off the trio. Yet the show still holds a soft spot for X-Files fans and those who worked on it, including Gilligan, who went on to create Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and Pluribus.
For the 25th anniversary of The Lone Gunmen’s eerily predictive pilot, Polygon speaks to Gilligan about the true-to-life similarities of that episode, his favorite memories from the series and his honest feelings about the death of The Lone Gunmen in season 9 of The X-Files.
Polygon: To start, how did a TV show for the Lone Gunmen come about?
Vince Gilligan: Gosh, I don’t remember exactly when. I loved writing for them. They were created originally by Glen Morgan and Jim Wong, and I love the guys as a fan of the show before I was even involved with writing for The X-Files. I’d love to give credit where credit is due, but I honestly don’t remember whose idea it was.
My idea of guys hacking on computers was to click wildly on a keyboard and then suddenly they were into the Pentagon or whatever.
Once we got going on it in earnest, I was very excited. I think we all were, because it was fun writing for those guys. I know nothing about computers, and that’s probably apparent when you watch the show 25 years later. My idea of guys hacking on computers was to click wildly on a keyboard and then suddenly they were into the Pentagon or whatever. So I knew nothing and I did not even educate myself as I should have. That’s one thing I would do different now. But I just know I loved writing for these guys. I would’ve wanted to be a fly on the wall in the editorial offices of The Lone Gunman.
For those three actors — Bruce Harwood, Tom Braidwood, and Dean Haglund — how does each of them compare to their respective characters?
I’m sad to say, I don’t feel like I really got to know the guys as well as I wish I had. I was always in my office in my little cubby hole in West Los Angeles, writing or rewriting. We really had to divide and conquer on that show. I’m happy to take a whack at that though, as I got to be on the set with them playing their characters more on particular X-Files episodes that I wrote.
Bruce Harwood is kind of a quiet, soft-spoken gentleman who seems very thoughtful and serious, and I mean that in the best possible way. He fit his character to a “T” in that respect. He was a guy you took seriously, a serious person full of serious thoughts.
We need to hire somebody really sleazy, like Braidwood.
Tom Braidwood was our first assistant director on The X-Files. I remember him running a tight ship. He didn’t consider himself a performer, but I believe it was Glen and Jim who were trying to cast the character of Melvin Frohike in whatever episode those guys first appeared in. I was not there, but the story I heard was Tom Braidwood had walked past their office door to tell them something was needed on the set or something and they had just said, “We need to hire somebody really sleazy, like Braidwood.” It started off as a joke, but then Tom suddenly was doing double duty. He was first AD on The X-Files, then he was playing Frohike. I remember him being kind of a tough, no-nonsense guy, but with a sense of humor.
I love Dean Haglund, who was a very funny guy. He’d done a lot of stand-up and probably still does. He’s a little more thoughtful than his character, and not nearly as ostentatiously cocky as Langly was. They were three grownups playing three arrested adolescents, but whose saving grace was that they were always trying to save the world.
What do you remember of the pilot and the crafting of that story? I think you know where this is going.
Yeah, I know where this is going. It’s the damnedest thing. John and Frank and I came up with that pilot episode. It was a lot of hard work, but we had fun coming up with it. We had to reintroduce the Lone Gunmen because, while a certain percentage of the audience has seen them on The X-Files, you want to attract the audience who hasn’t, so you’ve got all these balls you’ve got to juggle story-wise. We had to come up with a really interesting plot. And lo and behold, the plot we came up with, as you well know, was bad guys in the United States government trying to crash remote-controlled jumbo jets into the World Trade Center. Six months later, it happened for real.
I suddenly thought to myself: We wrote this!
I remember that day. I mean, anyone who lived through it is never going to forget September 11th, but there’s that haze, that brain fog you get into. I recall that I was going to work out. I was bad about oversleeping and the phone rang on September 11th. I was supposed to work out with Fred. I picked up the phone, pretty sure it was him, and I said, “Fred, I’m sorry to oversleep again.” He said, “I don’t think we’re working out today. Have you been watching the TV?” I said, “No.” He said, “Turn on the TV.” And he hung up and I turned it on just in time to see a replay of the second tower being hit.
Everyone was in a daze. The first thing you think is, This isn’t really happening. And I have to admit, within a minute or two, I suddenly thought to myself, We wrote this!
Except in our version, the good guys won. The bad guys lost. The good guys saved the world. They saved the Twin Towers. I don’t think for a minute the people who did that got the idea from our show, but it was sobering.
Do you have any thoughts on why The Lone Gunmen didn’t last?
If The Lone Gunmen was on the air now and it had the same number of viewers it did then, it’d be the biggest show on TV. For the pilot, we had more viewers than we ever had on Breaking Bad. The TV world has changed so fundamentally, but I guess it was low viewership, or so Fox thought, and it probably was. And every week it was declining a bit, and that’s not what you want to see. The weird thing is, I was so bummed out when Lone Gunmen was canceled, but if we had been renewed, I don’t know how the hell we would’ve done it because we’re still doing The X-Files. I think we would’ve all died.
I like to think of them still being out there.
God, I do have a memory. I haven’t mentioned this in years.
We had to go through audience testing for The Lone Gunmen and it’s the last time I ever did that and, right hand to God, it’s the last time I’ll ever do it. I will quit the business before I ever go through that again.
Fox hired this company to audience test the pilot episode of Lone Gunmen, and there was this woman who was in charge and she was just so self-important. She was just telling us all the things that were wrong with our pilot based on the reactions of a bunch of frat boys they had corralled off the street in Universal City or wherever it was. God, that was miserable.
So we’re watching the first episode, and they have these people in a room, and they’ve got a handheld controller that looks like a controller from the old video game Pong. It had a rotating dial and if you don’t like what’s happening, put it to the left. If you like what’s happening, you put it to the right. We had a scene in the first episode where Langly gets sick and he throws up into a golf bag and all the little dials got pinned hard to the left. Then this woman afterwards was like, “People really don’t like vomiting.” And I’m like, “Okay, thanks. Thanks for that. Boy, do I wish you were my boss, telling me how to write my show.” God, she was smarmy. It was so unpleasant.
Afterward, they broke it down into this focus group. And we’re like cops watching an interrogation, looking through two-way glass at these people and they’re asking, “What’d you think of the pilot?” This one woman said, “It’s no Will and Grace.” I was like, “No, it’s really not.”
So, the show ends, and you get to do kind of a makeshift finale in The X-Files where the three characters die. I’m curious, do you know why the decision was made to kill them off?
Well, I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus, but what I will say is, that was really, really, really not my idea. I hated that idea and I fought against it and I lost. I got out-voted. I’m not going to cast any aspersions, but that was not a moment that I enjoyed on The X-Files and I enjoyed seven wonderful years on The X-Files.
That was not our finest hour as a show and that was not my favorite moment because, with the Lone Gunmen, I like to think of them still being out there. This sounds corny, but I don’t think of them as being dead. I think of them still being out there. I don’t do that with every show I love, but I kind of do that with Mulder and Scully, and I do that with the Lone Gunmen. I kind of wonder what they’re doing now.
