"all things" is the seventeenth episode of the seventh season of the American science fiction television series The X-Files. Written and directed by lead actress Gillian Anderson, it first aired on April 9, 2000, on the Fox network. The episode is unconnected to the wider mythology of The X-Files and functions as a "Monster-of-the-Week" story. Watched by 12.18 million people, the initial broadcast had a Nielsen household rating of 7.1. The episode received mixed reviews from critics; many called the dialogue pretentious and criticized the characterization of Scully. However, viewer response was generally positive.
The series centers on Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Anderson) who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called "X-Files". Mulder is a believer in the paranormal. The skeptical Scully was initially assigned to debunk his work, but the two have developed a deep friendship. In this episode, a series of coincidences lead Scully to meet Dr. Daniel Waterston (Nicolas Surovy), a married man with whom she had an affair while at medical school. After Waterston slips into a coma, Scully puts aside her skepticism and seeks out alternative medicine to save Waterston.
"all things" is the only episode of the series written and directed by Anderson, as well as the first episode of The X-Files to be directed by a woman. The episode makes heavy use of "The Sky Is Broken", a song from Moby's 1999 album Play, as well as a gong. The episode has been analyzed for its themes of pragmatism and feminist philosophy.
Plot FBI special agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is getting dressed in front of a mirror. As she leaves, her colleague Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) lies in his bed, half of his body covered by bedsheets. The narrative flashes back to a few days earlier: Scully arrives at a hospital and, after a series of coincidences, meets her former professor, Daniel Waterston (Nicolas Surovy), with whom she had an affair while attending medical school. He is ill and suffering from an undiagnosed heart condition. She questions whether she made the right decision to leave him and abandon her medical career to pursue a career in the FBI. She meets Waterston's daughter, Maggie (Stacy Haiduk), who is extremely resentful of Scully for the effect she had on Waterston's family.
Mulder—on his way to England investigating heart chakra-shaped crop circles—calls Scully and asks her to meet a contact of his, Colleen Azar (Colleen Flynn), to obtain some information. As Scully speaks to Mulder on her cellphone while driving her car, a woman appears on a crosswalk. Scully brakes hard to avoid hitting the woman. As she does so, she narrowly avoids colliding with a semi-truck. She realizes that, had the woman not stepped in her path, the truck would have killed her. When she later arrives at the house of Azar, she observes that Scully is going through a personal crisis and tries to offer her guidance, but Scully is dismissive.
Later, Scully returns to apologize to Azar and agrees to listen to her ideas. Azar shares her knowledge of Buddhism, the concept of the collective unconscious, and the idea of personal auras. Azar believes these concepts might explain these strange occurrences. While visiting Waterston, he nearly dies but Scully saves him using a defibrillator; however, this also puts him in a coma. After a confrontation with Maggie at the hospital over what happened to her father, Scully walks through Chinatown. Seeing the woman who appeared earlier at the crosswalk, she follows her to a small Buddhist temple before the mysterious woman seemingly vanishes. Inside the temple, Scully has a vision of what is ailing Waterston. She returns to the hospital with Azar to visit Waterston.
Azar and a healer provide alternative treatment for Waterston, who fully recovers. He announces that he still wants a relationship with Scully, but she realizes she is no longer the same person she was those many years ago and rejects him. As she sits outside the hospital on a bench, Scully thinks that she sees the mysterious woman again, but it turns out to be Mulder. Later, the two agents sit in Mulder's apartment talking about the events of the last few days. Mulder begins to speak more existentially about what transpired, implying that fate has brought them together but, when he turns to look at Scully, he sees that she has fallen asleep.
Production
Conception and writing
Sometime during the sixth season of The X-Files, Anderson approached series creator Chris Carter and asked if she could write a script for an episode that explored her own interest in "Buddhism and the power of spiritual healing"; ultimately, she wanted to write a script in which Scully pursued a "deeply personal X-File, one in which [she] is taken down a spiritual path when logic fails her".Shapiro (2000), p. 214. She wrote the basic outline of what became "all things" in one sitting, which Carter approved due to the "personal and quiet" nature of the story. Anderson's first draft of "all things" was 15 pages too long, and it did not feature a concluding fourth act.Anderson (2003), 15:05–15:15. Carter and executive producer Frank Spotnitz thus began to work with Anderson to finish the episode, although Carter and Spotnitz later acknowledged that the majority of the script "was all Gillian".
Despite her satisfaction with the final version, Anderson regrets a handful of the "necessary" script changes, most notably, the addition that Scully and Waterston's affair was intimate. In the original script, the two came "close to having an affair", but Scully ended the relationship when she discovered that Waterston was married.Anderson (2003), 14:02–14:47.Shapiro (2000), p. 215. In the commentary for the episode, Anderson elaborated on Scully and Waterston's original backstory: after Scully and Waterston came close to having an affair, Scully left to study at Quantico to become an FBI agent. After she left, Waterston become depressed, and his family began to suspect the affair. The emotional turmoil was too much for Waterston's wife, who killed herself, which made Waterston's daughter, Maggie, resent Scully, as shown in the finished episode.Anderson (2003), 14:25–16:18. Anderson believed that the removal of this backstory made it hard for the audience to understand Maggie's disgust with Scully.Anderson (2003), 16:19–16:47.
When Anderson first wrote the episode, she did not intend to imply that Mulder and Scully had had sex; Spotnitz and the production crew, however, felt it was natural to suggest that their relationship had evolved into a romantic one.Anderson (2003), 0:15–040. The idea of heart chakra crop circles was included because Anderson wanted "whatever Mulder was involved in that took him away from me, away from Washington, to somehow tie into what it was that I was going through—the journey that I was going through".Anderson (2003), 2:45–3:14. As such, Anderson dedicated much of her time researching both crop circles and heart chakras, but she later gave additional credit to Spotnitz, who aided her in the research process.Anderson (2003), 3:20–3:35.
Directing and music
Around the same time that she approached Carter about writing an episode, Anderson was being solicited by television networks, who were interested in having her direct shows. She, however, had never directed before and decided that she would first helm an episode of The X-Files before working on other series. Consequently, when Anderson pitched her initial script idea, she also expressed her desire to direct the episode. Carter accepted her story, but did not appoint her as director until all the revisions and rewrites had been completed. Anderson worked with series director Kim Manners for the majority of the episode, and he assigned Anderson directing exercisessuch as making a list of shots for every sceneto get her familiar with the demands of directing. This episode of The X-Files was the first to be directed by a woman.
Anderson's directing helped to energize the production, and the crew worked harder than usual to ensure that everything was in order for her: Production designer Corey Kaplan went out of his way to find a Buddhist temple at Anderson's request, and casting director Rick Millikan helped Anderson choose the appropriate actors. Millikan later said that he particularly enjoyed working with Anderson, because "it was fun for [him] to watch her go through the casting process because it was all new to her." On set, Anderson's directing style was described as "right on the money" by Marc Shapiro in his book all things: The Official Guide to The X-Files, Volume 6. He later wrote that "Anderson wielded a deft hand in her directorial debut, prodding the actors to her will, making decisions on the fly, and handling the complex special effects sequences". Fans of the show later wrote to express their appreciation of Anderson's directing abilities. Anderson was also involved in post-production editing, during which she was forced to cut the final conversation scene between Scully and Daniel Waterston down by about 10 minutes.Anderson (2003), 13:50–14:01.
The meditation scene required clips from previous episodes to appear in flashback. Initially, Paul Rabwin and the special effects crew arranged the necessary scenes and placed them in animated bubbles. However, the crew was unhappy with the bubbles and felt that they were too "hokey", so they adopted a more standard slit-scan effect. In order to create the sequence of Scully visualizing Waterston's heart condition, Nicolas Surovy had to lie naked on a platform surrounded by a blue screen. A shot of a prosthetic beating heart was then crafted and filmed separately, and via motion control, the two shots were combined into a composite whole.
Anderson wanted to include "The Sky Is Broken", a song from Moby's 1999 album Play in the episode, as she felt that the song's lyrics "fit with [the] idea that was unfolding for the script".Anderson (2003), 2:07–2:35. Anderson crafted the first shot after the opening credits, which involved Scully getting ready while water dripped from a sink, to create a "continuation of sound, rhythmic sound", because it was important to the show's musical aspect.Anderson (2003), 1:27–1:40. Anderson and series composer Mark Snow worked together in post-production; after filming, she sent Snow several CDs of music and asked him for compositions that were similar in style and feel.Anderson (2003), 8:50–9:05. A certain melody that the two worked on later became "Scully's Theme", which was not broadcast until the eighth season episode "Within".Anderson (2003), 9:40–9:50. "all things" also featured the use of the gong, an instrument that Anderson called "very Tibetan" and "appropriate for this episode".Anderson (2003), 11:55–12:00.
Themes In the chapter "Scully as a Pragmatist Feminist" of the book The Philosophy of The X-Files, Erin McKenna argues that "all things" represents an "important shift" in Scully's approach to science, knowledge acquisition, and the pursuit of the truth. She reasons that the events of the episode open Scully's mind to new ways of knowing, specifically citing "auras, chakras, visions ... and the importance of coincidence".McKenna (2007), p. 126. McKenna notes that Scully's shift in perspective is a shift to American pragmatism, a belief that reality is ever-changing. Pragmatists believe "the truth is out there"—the motto of the series—in a manner similar to Mulder's. In "all things", Scully begins to embrace pragmatism, although she still clings to her skeptic roots. Mixing the two, Scully evolves from a mere skeptic who demands proof to validate a truth, to an empiricist who wants proof, but is open to other perspectives.McKenna (2007), p. 127.