The Lone Gunmen strikes me as a show that the writers thought would be fun only for them to soon realise they had absolutely no idea how to make it work. It’s a shock that it was actually commissioned, a spin-off to The X-Files when that show was in its waning years, one season away from ending, poorly, itself. The three nerdy characters, publishers of The Lone Gunman magazine which seeks to expose truth and conspiracy, may have been able to support a couple of novelty episodes of The X-Files but not their own series. The pilot is fairly po-faced but most plots conceived by the writers quickly become too thin to support the 42-minute episodes and the show becomes increasingly wacky as it shifts much more into a comedy.
The series aired in 2001 yet its storytelling structure is stuck in the nineties. The X-Files itself struggled to evolve until it was forced to in its eighth season and in a television landscape radically shifting I’m sure The Lone Gunmen felt dated as it was airing, making it seem ancient when watching today. The bland plots are told incredibly formulaically, speaking of tired writers trying to pen scripts while still juggling the sister show instead of energetic scribes upbeat about their new series. Despite the technology and music, the show isn’t fit for 2001. Cancelled after just thirteen episodes, it’s a surprise The Lone Gunmen lasted that long and the series is now best remembered for it ‘predicting’ 9/11 in its opening episode. Of course, that was just a big coincidence and to prove the show didn’t inspire the event, all one has to do is look at the viewing figures: no one was watching.
The Lone Gunmen is an espionage comedy series, where the laughs are broad and sparse. It feels very odd to have an X-Files spin-off with no supernatural elements whatsoever. I kind of wanted them to for an episode, the gang taking on a Mulder & Scully case, but the show acts as if none of that stuff exists. It’s very strange that this low stakes comedy series is happening while an alien takeover of Earth is in the works. In fact, the Gunmen meet a guy who thinks he’s been abducted by aliens and they immediately believe him to be crazy. These characters were introduced in an alien episode of The X-Files and support Mulder’s ravings. Where did their belief in the supernatural go? The only sci-fi elements to appear are tech-based, including the masks from Mission: Impossible.
Mark Snow scores the show with a mixture of his goofy twee music for the comedy scenes and some cool tracks for the espionage scenes. There’s a great track he composed that is just enough notes away from the Peter Gunn theme to not get sued. The title theme is great and has been stuck in my head for days… except when it’s played on electric guitar. The show was released in 2001 and the sensibilities of the time permeates every cell of film. What was deemed ‘cool’ in that year has now aged incredibly poorly, from the music choices to the costumes. Not to mention the technology. The opening episodes are dominated by technobabble. The way hackers are portrayed in this era never fails to make me cringe. The show has all the cliches: cracking knuckles before intense typing sessions, lots of random loading bars, and shouting things like “they’ve compromised our cookie!”
The Lone Gunmen is a hard show to get hold off legally and I watched an out-of-print DVD, old enough to have that much parodied anti-piracy film at the start. Visually it’s poor quality and made me miss the remastered X-Files Blu-rays, but I guess I’m not missing much. As far as I can tell, it’s not a good looking show. The series may have been shot in Vancouver but times have changed and it lacks the great lighting and cinematography of the first five seasons of The X-Files. It’s a comedy so why bother to make it look good, I guess? The only visually interesting scene is the opening to Tango de los Pistoleros, one of the show’s best episodes, but overall the visuals match the show: flat and bland.
The three core protagonists are not classic leading men. Nor are they very good actors, which wasn’t an issue in their supporting capacity on The X-Files but is when they are expected to star in their own series. The characters also lack character conflict: there’s no ingrained disagreement like Mulder & Scully. They’re three nerds who know the same things and think the same way; the only arguments they have are the humorous variety. The second episode attempts to differentiate the characters but doesn’t come up with much so introduces another lead character in Jimmy Bond. In contrast to the three geniuses he’s an absolute doofus. His heart is in the right place but his brain is non-existent, allowing him to be a comedic foil and an audience surrogate who can have everything explained to him for expositional purposes. It works for a few episodes but he’s useless when the series starts doing ‘fish out of water’ stories because then the nerds are out of their element and engaging themselves, making Jimmy an unnecessary tagalong.
Rounding out the main cast is Yves Adele Harlow, the mysterious and beautiful hacker who is both friend and foe to the Gunmen. Outside of some post-Matrix cliches like the leather, high kicks, and a ‘girl fight’ where she utters the phrase “kapow, bitch”, I think Yves works well for a couple of episodes but her characterisation isn’t sustainable. These types of characters work on not knowing whether you can ever fully trust them or not but after a couple of low-stakes betrayals, Yves just hangs around to help the Gunmen out. The formula soon becomes that she turns up in act 2 to offer assistance. I like actress Zuleikha Robinson but the show would have benefited by not having the character jammed into every episode. She acts too selfless and friendly in some episodes that it’s hard for the show to then pivot and ask the audience not to trust her in other episodes.
Best Character: Frohike
Langly had the potential to be the show’s best character yet ends up being the worst. The second episode has him talk about leaving the group and becoming a hacker for hire, that he’s too talented to waste his life for the magazine, and I thought ‘fantastic, actual character conflict!’ But the show never commits to this as a genuine grievance. We learn he grew up on a farm, the complete opposite of his current tech savvy lifestyle, but when he returns to a farm all the writers do with the concept is a cheap gag. Langly could have been an interesting character but ends up extraneous in most episodes. He’s the hacker of group yet for big jobs they bring in another hacker, Kimmy, so what is Langly bringing to this show? One episode begins with a fake out which shows him getting stabbed to death and, honestly, the show might have benefitted if it was real.
Meanwhile Byers is a necessary character for the plot but brings little in the way of personality. He holds very moral ideals about truth and justice, the driving force for the group, getting scoops, yet is very, very dry for a character in a comedy show. His situation is also perhaps too close to Mulder’s: his father is also part of a government conspiracy that Byers wants to expose. I do like how the series recentres the magazine and exposing corruption as the Gunmen’s main focus, which became absent from their appearances in The X-Files, and Byers is the heart of that.
But if the other characters are one-dimensional, Frohike is at least two-dimensional. On one hand he’s used for comedy. The slapstick guy. Actor Tom Braidwood is naturally funny and if someone needs to fall facedown in some mud or get hung up by some wires it’ll be him. But Frohike is also self-aware that he’s the butt of the joke and tired of that fact. He speaks a lot of sense and has an experienced outlook on most dilemmas. If he was an idiot like Jimmy it would get tiring but this dichotomy between physical comedy and worldly wisdom makes him the best character on the show. He has two tones, compared to everyone else’s one. Frohike can get into a fight with a child and then can be the voice of reason in the very next scene and I believe it.
Biggest Disappointment: Madam, I’m Adam (E6)
Never has there been such a great premise for an episode only for it to be completely squandered by the end. Madam, I’m Adam has the best cold open of the series: two men arriving home after work to the same house, not realising the other is there until they both climb into bed together. The brilliant Stephen Tobolowsky (who is excellent in Deadwood and co-wrote one of my favourite films, True Stories) guest stars as a man who claims he must have been abducted by aliens or is from a parallel dimension because another man is living his life. I wish this could have been an X-Files episode with an actual paranormal explanation because the bizarre story it morphs into is such a disappointment. It becomes a painfully unfunny mixture of bizarre elements, from little people wrestling to Matrix-style false realities.
The ‘What the Hell Did I Just Watch?’ Award: Planet of the Frohikes (E7)
A super intelligent chimp who knows English uses the Gunmen to escape captivity and live with his lost lover at a zoo. Oh, and he speaks with the voice of Edward Woodward. Yes, Planet of the Frohikes is absolutely crazy. But what makes it work, just about, is Vince Gilligan’s script. One of the best writers of The X-Files, this is his only solo script of the series and it’s a shame he couldn’t deliver more. The episode is baffling in many respects but is thankfully funny enough throughout that the jokes support the concept for its runtime. Too often the series feels like it’s written by a chimp at a typewriter but ironically not this one. Somehow Gilligan makes Simon the chimpanzee a more engaging and relatable character than most of the humans on the show.
Biggest Missed Opportunity: The character of Alberta from Maximum Byers (E8)
Alberta is a character who only gets one proper scene but I feel could have supported an entire episode. She turns up at Gunmen HQ with a job for the gang: to get her ‘wrongly convicted’ son off of death row. A fairly standard plot device character but what makes her unique is that she’s a devout reader of their magazine. She’s the only character in the series who is actually a fan of the publication. She already knows the guys from their stories. It would have been fun to spend more time with a fan of the Gunmen, like the meta fan of Mulder & Scully who appears in a couple of episodes of The X-Files. The geeks have their own obsessed geek, who prefers them to Mulder & Scully and doesn’t think they get enough credit. It would be an interesting dynamic, especially with how it reflects the gunmen going from supporting characters to the stars of their own series.
Best Guest Star: Mitch Pileggi as Walter Skinner in The Lying Game (E11)
Stephen Tobolowsky; Ruth Manning; Edward Woodward; Michael McKean. Across its 13 episodes The Lone Gunmen has some great guest stars but the best has to be Mitch Pileggi. He reprises his X-Files role as FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner but finally gets to stretch his acting muscles beyond the three types of scene he has to play over and over again in that show. In The Lying Game he gets to be an antagonist to the Gunmen, not wanting these civilians snooping around his cases, which adds some genuine conflict to the show. But then Pileggi gets to play totally against type when Jimmy goes undercover as Skinner wearing a lifelike Mission: Impossible mask. The brooding character suddenly gets to be funny and outrageous. The writers chose to keep the connections to The X-Files to a minimum so as not to ostracise new viewers, which meant the show had no viewers at all. Using Pileggi in this new way was a great crossover.
Worst Episode: Three Men and a Smoking Diaper (E5)
The broader the comedy, the more embarrassing when it falls flat. Three Men and a Smoking Diaper tries so hard to be funny and none of it lands. Fart jokes, pee jokes, nipple jokes, the episode’s got them all, apart from the actual joke part. The only script by X-Files creator Chris Carter, it’s about as successful as his comedy episode for that show, Fight Club. Someone needed to tell him that he’s just not funny. While the Gunmen look after a baby, Jimmy Bond infiltrates a political campaign office and the episode has no idea how to write its side characters effectively. Jimmy is just too stupid and his ignorance isn’t used for plot exposition reasons but rather he says something dumb every thirty seconds that’s supposed to be funny (but isn’t), everyone rolls their eyes, and rinse and repeat for forty minutes. Meanwhile Yves’ characterisation is completely destroyed as she takes on the stereotypical female mothering role, helping out for no personal gain.
But Three Men and a Smoking Diaper also highlights a much greater issue that damages both The Lone Gunmen and The X-Files: the shows are stuck in the nineties. Chris Carter refuses to evolve as a writer. The episode revolves around a political candidate having an affair who is a clear parody of Bill Clinton. Carter, a former Clinton supporter, is using the episode to work through his issues with the man in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But this episode is from 2001. Not only has television changed, thanks to The Sopranos, but the world is changing, too. 9/11 is mere weeks away and how people react to conspiracies and the government is completely different to when The X-Files first premiered. Yet the shows never update to match the new paradigm and this episode shows just how stuck in the nineties they were. That’s why it fails. But also the fart jokes.
Best Episode: All About Yves (E13)
The Lone Gunmen’s finest hour is its final hour: the series finale. Michael McKean reprises his X-Files role as sleazy ‘man in black’ Morris Fletcher and is great fun. The show is in desperate need of a good villain and Fletcher perhaps should have been a recurring antagonist. He dangles Romeo 61 in front of the Gunmen, the holy grail of conspiracies, containing information on every major conspiracy, including JFK. It gives the episode the stakes lacking from the rest of the season and is so alluring that the three of them act in a more entertaining way, being both excitable and argumentative. Jimmy gets to play against type and be the voice of reason while the episode also makes good use of Yves, playing with her past and reigniting the question of whether she can be trusted. There’s even a good 2000/2001 song, Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice, after a season of terrible choices. Every element of the show works much better here.
All About Yves is also notable for having a cameo from Fox Mulder himself. Duchovny won’t appear in The X-Files but bafflingly agreed to show up in this spin-off. It’s a brief comedy scene that somehow makes more of his alien abduction than his own show did, and he’s accompanied by the goofiest version of The X-Files theme tune I’ve ever heard. It took until the finale for the show to figure out the best balance of comedy and drama and this episode strives for something greater than most Lone Gunmen episodes so even if it doesn’t quite reach it I appreciate the attempt. The plot with Romeo 61 is all a lie, a ruse for something or other, and the show often lacks any forward momentum because every conspiracy discovered is always a trick which levels the characters back to their starting point, if not two steps back, but at least here there is the sense of something greater, something bigger, and the overall conspiracy is tangible if not yet in reach. The writers give the episode the weight of a finale, which puts it ahead of the usual farce plots, even if the actual consequences, or even what is actually going in, remains unclear.
Episode Ranking:
13. Three Men and a Smoking Diaper (E5)
12. Bond, Jimmy Bond (E2)
11. Madam, I’m Adam (E6)
10. The ‘Cap’n Toby’ Show (E12)
9. Diagnosis: Jimmy (E9)
8. Maximum Byers (E8)
7. Like Water for Octane (E4)
6. Ein Kleine Frohike (E3)
5. Planet of the Frohikes (E7)
4. The Lying Game (E11)
3. Pilot (E1)
2. Tango de los Pistoleros (E10)
1. All About Yves (E13)
With this brief and strange diversion complete, which the completionist in me enjoyed more than the television fan, I’ll be diving back into The X-Files proper for the next article in the series, covering the ninth, and once final, season of the series, which will include an episode wrapping up The Lone Gunmen’s cliffhanger ending.
