Deep Throat

The X-Files: One Shot

Jul 29, 2020

(Director of Photography: John S. Bartley)

Much as I love the look of the whole series, there was something special about the work of John S. Bartley (he photographed Season 1 sans the “Pilot” and all of Seasons 2 and 3 of The X-Files). This episode—directed by the very talented Daniel Sackheim, and written by series creator Chris Carter—does a lot with reflections: in mirrors (Mulder’s “Deep Throat” informant, played by Jerry Hardin, appears to materialize in one); in metallic surfaces (Scully twinned in a polished-to-a-sheen car roof); and here, in glass-covered photos of the disappeared Colonel Robert Budahas (Andrew Johnston), which cleave the characters in eye-catching ways. Budahas’s wife, Anita, is played by Gabrielle Rose, a Canadian actress I’m always delighted to see whenever she turns up in (inevitable, it seems) supporting-to-cameo roles. Here, as well as in Darin Morgan’s despairing yet hilarious Millennium episode “Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me” (1998), her talent for barely-keeping-it-together emotional turmoil gets as much of a showcase as in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997), in which she played the guilt-ridden school bus driver Dolores Driscoll. Speaking of Millennium, the exterior of the Budahas home was later reused in The X-Files’s sister series as the luminously yellow-painted sanctuary, quick to be demonically defiled, of Lance Henriksen’s criminal profiler protagonist Frank Black.

All this and stoner Seth Green, too.