You've got a good ear for tone. The producers brought in a ringer to write this episode -- a guy you may have heard of named Stephen King. And, actually, the tone proved to be a problem.
King volunteered to write an episode of the show while chatting with star David Duchovny during filming of a celebrity episode of "Jeopardy!" they did together.
However, neither the fact that he was a volunteer, nor the fact that King was one of the most famous and popular writers in the United States at the time, stopped "X-Files" creator Chris Carter from rejecting his first draft.
"Chris is a real gentleman," King said in a 1998 interview, shortly before the episode aired. "But, basically, he came back to me and said: 'This isn't what we wanted.'"
The episode is also a little unusual for the fact that it mostly features Gillian Anderson's Scully on her own, on a vacation, rather than running around with her partner on an official case. This allowed for the episode to be set in Maine, which, of course, is a hallmark of King's work -- nearly everything he's ever written has been set in his beloved home state.
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