Thumbin' Through the Darin Morgan Files with Bradley Plaisier and Robert Skvarla

AP Strange:

Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. But there is nothing else. Life is an obscure oboe bumming a ride on the omnibus of art. Among the misty corridors of pine, and in those corridors I see figures, strange figures. Welcome back, my friends, to the AP Strange show.

AP Strange:

I am your host, AP Strange, and as you might have guessed, this is my show. Tonight's show is brought to you by the Hepcat Helm Memorial Tabernacle of Terror. It's a fun house. Hepcat insisted that it not be called a fun house, but he's no longer here having been killed by the Fiji Mermaid. So the Memorial Tabernacle Of Terror still exists for your pleasure.

AP Strange:

Just watch out for all the broken glass. Tonight on the show, we're thumbing through the Darren Morgan files by which I mean, if if you're an X file fan, an X file file, I guess, you're you already know who Darren Morgan is. And because his episodes are among the most popular, and we're gonna talk about some of those just because it's something I wanted to do for quite a while, and I'm a big fan of The X Files and those ones particularly because they have that kind of sense of humor to them. So for this show, I had I had I already been talking to my my friend Bradley Pleasure about Darren Morgan. So who better to have on the show to talk to this talk on the subject about than, paranormal Bon Vivant, tennis instructor and t shirt designer Bradley Pleasure, Mr.

AP Strange:

B. Pleases himself, and he suggested you gotta bring my friend Robert Scavarla on because your show will be much better for it. So freelance freelance writer Robert Skivarla, an internet personality of sorts. Anytime he retweeted me on Twitter when I was still there for some reason, I just got a ton more attention, mostly positive. So welcome to the show both of you.

Robert Skvarla:

Hey, how you doing?

AP Strange:

Good. Good. Good. I appreciate you both joining me here tonight because I I mean, I know you both have been on shows together where you where you've talked X Files. Right what was that show Bradley?

Bradley Plaisier:

Well the first time we did it we did a watch along on ghost stories for the end of the world for the Jose Chungs episode

AP Strange:

Okay.

Bradley Plaisier:

With just like us commentating and stuff and then we went on another show called Wet Wired to talk X Files in general.

AP Strange:

Yeah so X Files in general is a pretty broad subject. I wanted to focus on Morgan because I'm a fan and because I know you both are.

Bradley Plaisier:

I mean we can also do the other Morgan too, Glenn Morgan. Big role in the show too.

AP Strange:

Well right, yeah just as a little background, Glenn Morgan was a writer producer for the show and that's how Darren Morgan ended up on the writing staff was he had been in a couple episodes and kind of helped with the story for a few and then you know got on permanently. So

Robert Skvarla:

they're brothers right?

Bradley Plaisier:

Yep.

AP Strange:

Yeah, yep. So I mean Glenn was on the staff and productive for the whole series I think. I

Bradley Plaisier:

think he wrote like a little over a dozen episodes but like was a story editor and a shit ton.

AP Strange:

Right, he was also a producer and right so yeah and I mean that's kind of I don't know how you guys feel about it but I think one of the magical things about Darren Morgan is that he would have like one golden episode per season after that first one. It kind of seemed that way where like every once in a while one would come around and it was like was like a was like Christmas coming early every time.

Bradley Plaisier:

Well, were you can I ask if you were watching X Files when it was airing?

AP Strange:

I was. Yeah. I understand you're younger than me.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. Probably not. I mean, I was just because I was very young at the time. I think one of my first memories of watching TV is my parents not realizing they were letting me watch the episode at home as it was happening.

AP Strange:

Oh, no.

Robert Skvarla:

So I'm there, like, terrified out of my mind. I forget how old I was, but, you know, watching underneath the pillow, going back and keep going back and forth. And I think my dad after that was like, yeah, we're not gonna let you watch The X Files for a little while anymore.

AP Strange:

Wow. Yeah, my dad was oblivious because the thing was, my mom was in a bowling league. Every Sunday night she would be bowling. My dad would watch his shows and me and my brother would go up to his bedroom and watch the crappy little TV with the bunny ears on it in his room. Watch the Simpsons and then the X Files, know.

AP Strange:

So I saw pretty much all of these when they first aired.

Bradley Plaisier:

Nice.

AP Strange:

Yeah.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. My parents watched it with me, which was an odd experience, certainly for home, because it was one of those episodes you'd never forget.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah. Yeah. Indeed. The I

AP Strange:

have to wonder

Bradley Plaisier:

Go ahead. Go ahead.

AP Strange:

I have to wonder how different my experience would be if I was watching it with an adult in the room. It was like just me and my brother, like in a dark room too. So and it didn't have a remote control on the TV. You had to use the dial. So when you turned it off, you just had that little singular point of light in the TV screen and the rest of the room was dark as you're trying to scramble out of there right after watching The X Files.

Robert Skvarla:

It's gotta be terrifying.

AP Strange:

It was.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah. I I started watching X Files because my dad had them all on DVD, like, all those seasons, and I, like, would watch a lot of them with him. And then also I'd skip school sometimes to watch X Files in middle school, fake sick. But yeah, the one that there were a couple episodes I didn't watch like for eight, nine years after that because they scared me so bad. One was Elegy from the bowling one and then Badla from season eight with the Indian mystic on a little handcart.

AP Strange:

Oh, man. That one was weird. Yeah.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah. That was rough.

AP Strange:

Think that guy I think that actor died recently. Didn't he?

Bradley Plaisier:

Oh, really?

AP Strange:

Or two ago.

Bradley Plaisier:

Oh, no. That's too bad.

AP Strange:

Mark Mark Snow Oh, yeah. RIP Mark Snow.

Bradley Plaisier:

For real.

AP Strange:

Classic soundtrack.

Bradley Plaisier:

But can I ask, did you guys watch Millennium?

Robert Skvarla:

We were talking about it just before we got on here. I watched some of it in the original run. I didn't remember a lot of it. A mutual friend of us, you and me Bradley, Robbie Martin, talked to me a little while back about it. So I tried watching it again.

Robert Skvarla:

It's a difficult show because it's, I guess, what, you know, people would call now grimdark. Like it's something so relentlessly dark, it's hard to get into.

Bradley Plaisier:

I see.

Robert Skvarla:

But our subject today, Darren Morgan, wrote two really funny episodes, a continuation of Jose Jung's and another one about four demons who sit down at a donut shop to reminisce about all the evil deeds that they've done, and they all end up talking about their encounters with the antihero of the show, Frank Black, played by Lance Henriksen. Probably the funniest episodes in the series.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah. He's so cool. That sounds great.

Robert Skvarla:

Lance Henriksen?

Bradley Plaisier:

Oh, no. Darren Morgan.

Robert Skvarla:

Oh, okay.

AP Strange:

Well, Lance Henriksen's pretty cool too.

Robert Skvarla:

He is too. Yeah. He's great about he's great in the show. My issue with the show is it's difficult from, like, a mental standpoint for me to get into. The first season is very, like, late nineties.

Robert Skvarla:

Every cliche you can think of. I think, like, the opening episode has white zombie and gravity kills and all the music you would expect from something from that period. But then like the show is disconnected without any like overarching narrative until you get to season two. And you get into the secret society stuff, the Millennium Group and all of that. It gets a little better from there on.

AP Strange:

See, that's what I didn't like because, you know, in this era of streaming, you can binge watch stuff or you can go back and you can call up on demand whatever's happening or even just look at Wikipedia and say like what happened in the last episode. But watching them in real time in the 90s, it's like I didn't even like on The X Files when there was a story arc.

Bradley Plaisier:

Oh,

AP Strange:

really? If I missed one, I'm just like, man, I don't know what happened. Know, like how do I miss that one. I don't know how they got here. You know, I liked monster of the week.

Robert Skvarla:

See, I like both. I'm one those sickos that loves the Myth Arc episodes almost as much as the Monster of the Week episodes. I have to watch them separately because I now want to binge all of like the narrative episodes back to back. But the Monster of the Week episodes you can just throw on all the time and they're great.

AP Strange:

Yeah. Well, would argue that there is an arc to the monster of the weeks in like a weird synchronicity kind of way that's tied directly to the Darren Morgan episodes.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah. Interesting.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. No, can see that totally.

AP Strange:

Right. Well, I mean to lay it out a little bit more because it ventures into some of the ones that aren't, Clyde Bruckman's final repose is a really important one because it introduces Queequeg who appears in a later episode that wasn't written by Morgan but he helped out with like a whole speech that Scully gives about Mulder being like Captain Ahab.

Robert Skvarla:

Yep.

AP Strange:

Which is you know it's like one of those classic dialogue that's between the two of them as far as the whole show goes. But you know Clyde Bruckman also tells Scully that she's immortal.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah you don't know

AP Strange:

yeah. Right.

Bradley Plaisier:

Probably the best episode of the show, right?

AP Strange:

Clyde Bruckman's. Yeah. Probably.

Robert Skvarla:

I would say yes but like everyone has their favorite.

Bradley Plaisier:

Right.

AP Strange:

Well, it's hard to beat. It really is and from this interview with Morgan that I read it seems like it was a very personal one for Morgan too. But I'll get back to that in just a moment because I got to lay out this arc thing because Bruckman sees Mulder get killed. He sees the vision of Mulder getting his throat slit although he also implies that Mulder is going to die from auto erotic asphyxiation. Yes.

AP Strange:

So by telling him about the pie, he alters the timeline and Mulder ends up in a different timeline. Then later when you have Dreamland parts one and two you have him switch places with Michael McKeon's MIB character that's how you end up getting the waterbed involved. The waterbed leaks later in the Groundhog Day episode which sets off the series of events that has the same day repeating where Mulder and Skelly both died during the bank robbery

Bradley Plaisier:

over Yeah.

AP Strange:

So there's like this other arc going on and there's a lot more. I mean like the there's an episode that the title's in German as many of them are and I try to pronounce it but what it means is the hand that wounds it's with the satanic cult in New Hampshire.

Robert Skvarla:

Oh, that's a great episode.

AP Strange:

Yeah, yeah. Right, and you have the substitute teacher that's essentially either a demon or the devil himself in the form of the substitute teacher woman, you know, and she says nice working with you. So there's like entities on the other side. It's implied all the time in the monster of the weeks that are either out to get Mulder or out to help him and it's not really sure. You're never really sure which one it is.

Robert Skvarla:

So I thought you were just talking about regular character growth in their interactions or even Queequeg pops up in Clive Bruckman's Final Repose, but he makes a cameo in the coprophages and other episodes as well with Scully.

AP Strange:

Right. It became this cumbersome thing where Scully couldn't go with Mulder sometimes because she had the dog. So they had to do away with the dog. Spoiler alert if you never saw the Lake Monster episode.

Bradley Plaisier:

It's a great one. Yeah,

AP Strange:

that's Quagmire, that's what it is yeah. So that's an important part of War of the Copperphages is that she's staying home she's like giving Queequeg a bath and Mulder is just off on his own I think in Cape Cod with all the the cockroaches and everything. Oh Miller's

Robert Skvarla:

Grove is the name of the town I believe Nice play on the Orson Welles' War of the Worlds.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he said in that interview that Should I call you Matt or AP?

AP Strange:

Either way. I mean, AP generally because that's the name of the show. All right. We'll go.

Bradley Plaisier:

What AP said earlier about the interview with Darren Morgan, the very rare interview with Darren Morgan, he says that he based that episode on The War of the Worlds.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. I mean, can see it in the episode where it's like, is it a hysteria? Is it an actual attack? What's going on? It's a really fun episode.

Robert Skvarla:

I mean, all of the episodes he does have this humor to it where it's something beyond just what you're seeing in the episode itself. It's very literate, referencing things outside the actual text. So references from all of these different sources abound in every episode you see with them.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah. Also in War of the Cobra pages, really funny and fast but it's also really personal in a weird way because I'm thinking about Bambi and Scully thinks Mulder's crazy this whole time. And then as soon as he mentions Bambi, she's like, maybe there's something going on. And then she has to go see him.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. I mean, it's one of those Monster of the Week episodes where it's as much about advancing their characters and their relationship as it is just the episode itself. Yeah.

AP Strange:

Yeah. And I mean, to your point, Robert, of what you were just saying is like, not only does he do all the stuff you alluded to, but he's playing with reality in a way where you're never really sure what's real and what's not.

Robert Skvarla:

And he would do that quite literally in one of the later seasons. Exactly.

Bradley Plaisier:

And like in that interview with Darren Morgan that we were just talking about, he talks about Vladimir Dubokov, his favorite writer, and his like naming Lord Kinboats and Jose Chung's after Cambodia or Kinboats in Pale Fire which I just read by the way. It's super fucking good. And Morgan says in that interview that Vladimir Bukov said in an interview that anytime anybody writes the word reality it should have quotes around it.

AP Strange:

Awesome.

Bradley Plaisier:

I think it's very good. Naming him in Cambodia is great too because he's sort of the inner earth monster because like he's the one who puts the wrench in the whole narrative and fucks it all up. And all of Pale Fire is about narrative framing. Like it's a possibly psychotic guy like commentating trying to frame a story about a guy that he knows in a certain way when really there's no real indication that's like anything that he's talking about is how it worked out in real life.

AP Strange:

Yeah because Kimbo is kind of the bridge too far for the that's where it gets really into the high strangeness side of it and that's what I think is great about all the Morgan episodes but especially Jose Chung is that it's the best and most accurate, I think, representation of what high strangeness events are that's ever been on TV.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah, Twin Peaks the Return, but you're right, it's second place, yeah. Twin Peaks: Return

AP Strange:

is number one. We'll agree to disagree. They're at least kind of on the same level and I mean there is overlap between Twin Peaks

Bradley Plaisier:

and Indeed. Right.

AP Strange:

Of course David Duchovny, that's the obvious one, but in Humbug, the first of the Darren Morgan full episodes, you have the man from another place as the trailer park owner.

Bradley Plaisier:

He's so good in that episode too.

AP Strange:

Yeah. And it was the Gulf Breeze Trailer Court.

Bradley Plaisier:

Oh was it? Yeah. I never caught that. That's funny.

AP Strange:

I didn't until last night and that's what's great is you rewatch these and you're still picking up Yep. On like I watched Humbug and Jose Chung last night and caught two easter eggs that I never noticed before.

Bradley Plaisier:

What were the Jose Chung's ones?

AP Strange:

At the very beginning it says it takes place in Klas County. K L A S S and I'm like oh, Philip J. Klaas. Got it.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah. When we when we Robert and I did the watch along for that episode, I noticed for the first time that after the pilot, when they're in the diner, he's doing the fucking Close Encounters thing with the potatoes on the plate in the diner. I never noticed that.

AP Strange:

Oh, right. Right. Making the shape with the mashed potatoes.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah, least doing like Devil's Tower.

Robert Skvarla:

I mean, I think that's one of the things that's great about I mean, not just Morgan episodes, X Files in general. They very clearly understood their source material to a level that a lot of other shows that deal with the supernatural paranormal, it feels like they're outsiders just messing around with the subject. I could absolutely believe if I knew nothing about Darren Morgan that he was probably someone who researched ufology or the paranormal at some point in his life just out of his own curiosity.

Bradley Plaisier:

It's actually the opposite. He didn't get into it at all until he started on The X Files.

Robert Skvarla:

He has a level of, like, understanding that betrays, like, the fact that

Bradley Plaisier:

He's he was an truly special, he says in that same interview we were talking about. What what magazine was this this in this

AP Strange:

Cine it's Cinefantastique, which is kind of a unwieldy name I think. It's from the 90s and like we said before, it's October 1996 and I found a copy on eBay and then I scanned it and sent it over to Bradley because it's too good to not share you know so but yeah there aren't that many interviews with them like it's really hard to find interviews online so I had to go buy this physical magazine from 1996 to get it and that was before

Bradley Plaisier:

yeah in that interview he says that like he didn't know anything about the UFO subject or any of this stuff. Then he started reading when he got onto The X Files. Yeah, maybe it's like the thing where when I went to basic training for the Army, I'd never shot a gun before. So I was very fresh and I was relatively bright. So I just followed instruction and it worked and I could do critical thinking.

Bradley Plaisier:

My point is that he is a smart guy who it wasn't part of him going into it. So he was able to read it as a mature person and I guess appreciate it for what it is.

Robert Skvarla:

That kind of makes the Jose Chung's episode funny because he is Jose Chung in that sense. He's that character who's going around as an outsider learning about the subject and then turning it into something. I think that also makes the Jose Chung's episode he does for Millennium, which ends in a very Clyde Bruckman sort of way, even more interesting. Seems like many of the characters may be self inserts for him.

Bradley Plaisier:

Is that where level he's like, he's really frustrated that his book's not selling?

AP Strange:

Yeah. Yeah. So and as Charles Nelson Reilly comes back?

Robert Skvarla:

He comes back. Yes. Fantastic performance. I don't think it's as good as the original Jose Chunks, but it has its moments.

AP Strange:

Alright. Here's something I wanted to ask you both. Do you have any thoughts on that name? Because it's a bizarre name, Jose Chung. Is he making a reference to something?

Robert Skvarla:

I've always wondered. I've never looked into it too deeply.

AP Strange:

I feel like it's a play on, like, CJ Young.

Robert Skvarla:

That's fine. Yeah. Could be.

AP Strange:

But it's such a bizarre, you know, Jose Chung. I was like, where did he come up with that name? It's just a bizarre name.

Bradley Plaisier:

It really is. Yeah. Because I like I was they never really yeah. I I have no idea. It is a bizarre name.

Bradley Plaisier:

Maybe it's a pen name.

AP Strange:

Oh, yeah.

Robert Skvarla:

Mean, I don't think it's Charles Nelson Reilly's character's actual name. It's his yeah. It's his pen name from what I took from the episode, if I remember right.

AP Strange:

Okay. That makes sense.

Robert Skvarla:

I believe he writes under a pseudonym as a character. I forget if they even reveal his real name in the episode, but I always took it to be a pen name.

AP Strange:

Gotcha. Yeah. I think it's funny that Skelly's, like, a big fan of his.

Bradley Plaisier:

I I always thought that was funny too.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. The very rational character who loves the, you know,

Bradley Plaisier:

the airport novels. Yeah.

AP Strange:

And he's got these great names for his fake books, which are just references to other things like the Caligarian Candidate.

Robert Skvarla:

Well, it's funny you say that about Scully because in Where the Coprophages, they have her reading Breakfast at Tiffany's, which is, I guess, a reference to when David Duchovny was on some game show and a question was asked about it. But it's like, as her character, it's not something I would expect her to be just sitting there reading on her own.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, was busy most of her life. I guess she didn't really have much time to develop a taste in media that's very sophisticated.

AP Strange:

Yeah, she must have been, right? That's one thing that irritates me about the show continuity wise, like broadly, is just like, okay, wait, so Skelly is a medical doctor and a quantum physicist and an FBI agent who was also in the Navy at one point or something, right? And she's like what, 26? Like how?

Robert Skvarla:

Mean, it's I also just funny, like the different ways they contrast their personalities and their kind of media consumption. Scully has that, whereas like Mulder likes really bad B movies and pornography.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah.

Robert Skvarla:

Like those are his two character traits. If you like actually see him watching anything.

AP Strange:

And he's kind of a perv too. Because like at the end of Bozetang, he's basically beating it to the Patty film.

Robert Skvarla:

Well, there is the Patty he drew with the boobs, the famous image It's that turned into a

Bradley Plaisier:

actually funny in the same interview with Darren Morgan. He says that the Patterson Gimlin film is as phony as the alien autopsy, which made me mad.

Robert Skvarla:

I mean, the sense I got from Jose Chung is probably even if he studied it, he wasn't someone who probably was a believer because it's not necessarily an episode that just the various things, the way they play out and Charles Nelson Reilly's character throughout the episode, I never took it to mean Morgan would be someone who believed.

AP Strange:

Well, mean, I think he just took the assignments really seriously. Like he was kind of he was in the sphere and he got onto the writing staff and he took the job seriously enough that he really wanted to do his homework and he found humor everywhere, right? Yeah. And to get it to talk about like how seriously he took it, what I alluded to earlier with Clyde Bruckman being a personal story for him was he talked about how unhappy he was with how Humbug came out. I guess, you know, they had really gone out on a limb for that first full script that he did because it was so unlike anything they did before.

AP Strange:

I remember I had it on VHS and there was like a little part at the end where Chris Carter's giving a few words for whatever reason that VHS release had Chris Carter's like commentary at the end and he was just like yeah I mean we weren't really sure about that script because it seemed kind of weird and it seemed kind of goofy but we ran it and fans loved it so you know and he hated it. Yeah I guess there were like a bunch of gags he wanted to do that didn't make the cut and he was really depressed about how it came out so he wanted to write a serious script with a depressed character at the front that he named after a Hollywood writer Clyde Bruckman. I caught this reference when I was a kid because I was a freakish kid that watched comedies from the 1920s. I loved the Three Stooges and I loved Laurel and Hardy and W. C.

AP Strange:

Fields and things like that and Clyde Bruckman wrote for them all you know but he ended up he was one of the top comedy writers and then at some point he became an alcoholic, he started recycling gags, getting less work and a lot of criticism and he ended up killing himself. So it's like he identified with this Clyde Brooklyn character that he wrote which identified directly with the suicidal Hollywood writer because he was very depressed about how humbug went and it's like wow that's for such a funny but moving episode that's wild to think about right?

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah truly he really is like a special a very sensitive guy Like he also talks about how like he never wrote like when that interview came out in the 90s, like he said that he'd only written four episodes and wasn't going to come back because it just took too much out of him, like emotionally which like it's not a normal TV writer.

AP Strange:

Yeah, it's almost like he landed the dream job but he put too much heart into it so he

Bradley Plaisier:

just Yeah and it shows though, it shows.

AP Strange:

It does. I mean we're all better for it and I feel like it's a shame that there aren't more Morgan episodes, but on the other hand it's like the man put everything he had into the ones that he did and it shows and it's you can see it in there. Feel the heart when you watch it. Definitely.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. I mean, when you watch those, it even feels, though, like there's a running theme. I mean, all of the episodes generally have this common idea, philosophy of absurdism, like the idea that existence itself is fundamentally pointless, like Clyde Bruckman, essentially like his ending. The other episodes, what am I trying to think of? Oh yeah, Jose Chung's is an episode which is fundamentally absurd.

Robert Skvarla:

Nothing really gets resolved by the end. And then Jose Chung, Charles Nelson Reilly's character's ending in the Millennium episode kind of reinforces that. But then you get to the later season when he does the were monster episode. And literally, the were monster character at the end of the episode is just like, I don't understand any of this. You humans are insane.

Robert Skvarla:

I just want to go back to being a monster and leave this world behind. So like there's this running theme of absurdism through everything that he does. Yeah. Is uncommon when you yeah, it's uncommon when you see someone committing to that across all of the episodes that they write in just one series.

Bradley Plaisier:

He said he tried hard to write with an episode. I can't remember if it was Clyde Bruckman's or He wanted to write an episode with no jokes and just said he couldn't He tried and couldn't do it. Just.

AP Strange:

Well, because when when you're getting to that kind of existential level of absurdity and questioning reality, like you kind of have to crack a joke. I don't really see any way of that.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah, yeah, it's the it's just too heavy handed and cringe otherwise.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. Which Millennium did sometimes lapse into, but he found a way to actually make it work within that series where he cut through the dark elements to actually find humor in this really kind of dour, hard to watch series sometimes.

AP Strange:

Yeah. Well, feel like the X Files suffered for it too early on. When they'd always have the end of the episode where they're writing the report, whether it was Skelly or Mulder, sometimes they'd get deep in the weeds and philosophical in their like FBI report, and it's like, I don't know, come on, somebody throw a pie. Like, you need someone you need somebody to lighten it up a little bit because it got a little bit I don't know. You say cringe.

AP Strange:

I guess that's the right word.

Bradley Plaisier:

Well, actually speaking of that, Darren Morgan tackled that brilliantly in more of the COBRA pages where Mulder sees a little cockroach on his desk and isn't sure It looks like a normal cockroach and not robot alien, and he's still just whack.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. But I think there's an even better version of that in Humbunger's first episode, where it's obviously about this carnival freak show essentially. And at the end, they flip it by they're looking at Mulder and they're like, he's the future, isn't he? And they're like, what what the hell is going on with this world? And Mulder's off in the background just doing whatever he's doing.

Bradley Plaisier:

Just standing

Robert Skvarla:

like a GQ poster.

AP Strange:

Yeah. That that is still one of the funniest moments in the whole series where he goes, I've seen the future, and it looks just like him. Yep. And, like, if Mulder Mulder's got one leg up on the trailer step, like, posing. It's just as funny as, like, the Simpsons episode with Mulder and Skelly where it's just like agent Mulder FBI.

AP Strange:

He's got like he's a mosquito. But to me that spoke to me as an angsty misguided teenager where that whole speech that Doctor. Blockhead gives in that where he's like you know we're the self made freaks it's up to us to keep things weird. Yep, you know.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah, there's a great character.

AP Strange:

Yeah, played by Jim Rose. Who I don't really know that much about, but. It seemed like he would cause trouble on Twitter sometimes. Did you heard of this?

Robert Skvarla:

I never knew he was on Twitter.

AP Strange:

There was like a Jim Rose Circus account on Twitter and he would share like vaguely paranormal stuff that was really hoax y and stuff and then people would get all upset about it. Because then it gets carried around in like paranormal circles and people are like this is fake you know.

Bradley Plaisier:

That's so funny.

AP Strange:

But I mean he's a circus guy like what do you want? He is very much I guess in real life the character he was on the show you

Bradley Plaisier:

It's perfect, I love that.

AP Strange:

Yeah, yeah.

Robert Skvarla:

No, great casting choice.

AP Strange:

Yeah and I mean it's inspired me to wanna become a blockhead at various points in my life. I've thought about trying to like

Bradley Plaisier:

Is that not like a freak thing that you're born with? Can learn how to do it?

AP Strange:

Well, like the nail in the nose. Oh, like, okay.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. Yeah. Believe that's a skill you pick up, right?

Bradley Plaisier:

Gotcha.

AP Strange:

It's just learning how not to hurt yourself doing it, yeah. Anybody can do it if you got the guts. I've attempted it a few times but been dissuade by either my wife or my son. Kindly ask me not to, so someday someday I'll do it. I'm just worried you'd sneeze when you do it, Yeah.

AP Strange:

That would be my biggest concern.

Bradley Plaisier:

You just need a good teacher.

AP Strange:

You just need a good pair of nose hair trimmers I think for you. Well I knew a guy that could do it you know I knew a magician that would do that. They would do like walking on broken glass and like all this other stuff you know. Hell yeah. Yeah it's all stuff you can learn.

Bradley Plaisier:

I was not aware Well

Robert Skvarla:

there you go Bradley you can learn all of that if you would like.

Bradley Plaisier:

I do have a friend who's a magician. I knew him when I was a kid. He used to do like just his name's Trino Italian last name. He would just like do like the tables at Culver's or whatever when he was like a teenager. Now he's like pretty fucking good and does show still.

Bradley Plaisier:

I thought of him when I was scanning stuff from Marcelo Trezzi's thing archive at Eastern Michigan University and because I scanned all of his correspondence with Ricky Jay and

AP Strange:

That's amazing.

Bradley Plaisier:

And I was like, I think you might like this and we've been talking a lot again and I want him to teach me some magic tricks.

AP Strange:

Yeah, yeah. I think pretty much anybody that's interested in the paranormal would do well to learn a little bit about sleight of hand and I

Bradley Plaisier:

totally agree.

AP Strange:

It really does show you how easily manipulated perception is.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah, I was reading, I constantly come across ufologists who write books or whatever and they have slight of hand as a hobby or magic as a hobby, Keel, George Hansen, all these different people and it also just like fucking sounds fun.

AP Strange:

Yeah, oh yeah, it is, but it's a young man's game. There's still time for you Bradley. I mean, I know how a lot of it works, but I don't have the time or patience to to practice it enough.

Robert Skvarla:

Mean, even the CIA was interested in magic, I believe I believe, what is it, the manual of trickery and deception that they funded? John Mulholland. Yeah.

AP Strange:

John Mulholland was brought in ostensibly to teach people how to like slip people in Mickey without being noticed but he was also sent to investigate the Kelly Hopkinsville case.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yes.

AP Strange:

By Sydney Gottlieb and there is mention of this from a few sources but nothing in detail about it which frustrates me to no end. Bradley, if you come across any more detail on what John Mulholland is.

Bradley Plaisier:

I'm definitely trying to get interested in him. I've been asking around if anybody's read like his book or the more recent book about him and nobody has.

AP Strange:

The Mulholland book?

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah, he wrote like a book about himself and his life not just like the manual and then somebody else more recently wrote a biography about him and I haven't come across anybody who's read them yet but I plan to they sound really interesting.

AP Strange:

Yeah I don't know I mean I've been meaning to do another show on Joseph Dunninger who is like similarly kind of I think he has some spooky ties as well and he proceeds Mulholland a little bit but they all knew each other

Bradley Plaisier:

what was his name

AP Strange:

Joseph Dunninger.

Bradley Plaisier:

Who's that?

AP Strange:

He was a friend of Houdini's he was a really well known magician and meddlers. Yeah, gotcha. So I have his book on thought reading which seems to suggest that he actually believed in telepathy and that it wasn't just like cold reading and things like that for him.

Bradley Plaisier:

That's cool.

AP Strange:

But yeah, we're way off on a tangent now but I mean the magic trick does play into humbug because there's that whole sleight of hand where it appears that that Scully ate the bug.

Bradley Plaisier:

No yeah yeah

AP Strange:

yeah and then she still has it in her hand she goes you know my uncle was an amateur magician and Mulder says everybody's uncle was an amateur magician because he stole the nail you know. It's just great stuff like the timing and because comedy is really all about timing and the way that Darren Morgan wrote those lines was always pulled off perfectly by whoever was in the cast, but I mean, by Duchovny and Anderson in their repartee with that he wrote out. Mean, think every little joke that Morgan wrote landed, you know. I laugh a lot during those.

Bradley Plaisier:

Me too.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. It's just crazy to me thinking about, like, the level of detail of some of those episodes like Jose Chung's and just thinking the fact that he was coming into the paranormal subject matter from

Bradley Plaisier:

I know

Robert Skvarla:

as an outsider because Jose Chung's in particular with everything, like the references to John Mack and, like, Bud Hopkins that are clearly in there with the interviews, all of the stuff about false memories, all of that stuff. It's you may have known it if you read about it, but the way it's laid out, it feels like so it feels like he there's a level of detail to it that's it's amazing to me that he was not familiar with the subject matter before coming to the series.

Bradley Plaisier:

He said that like he's having problems writing the episode and he added the hypnosis thing and was like, oh, the whole episode is about hypnosis now. Yeah.

Robert Skvarla:

I mean, it works so well.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah, it works perfect and it's accurate.

AP Strange:

It's a master class in illustrating high strangeness I guess is really the only way I can think of it which yeah it's astounding that he was able to synthesize that coming from an outside perspective although maybe that's the key to it is looking at it from the outside in and Exactly.

Robert Skvarla:

Fresh set of eyes.

AP Strange:

Right. Yep. I mean, the men in black, the way they're portrayed is

Bradley Plaisier:

It's the best.

AP Strange:

Great. You know? Jesse The Body Ventura is the leader.

Robert Skvarla:

Had to check. Man. Good.

Bradley Plaisier:

For president James Carter.

Robert Skvarla:

Alistrabec, you're right. I'm fixing them up.

AP Strange:

Yeah. Sorry, Bradley. We cut you off there with your I

Bradley Plaisier:

love his lines where he's like, he keeps saying like your scientists or like your president James Earl Carter Junior.

AP Strange:

Yeah, yeah. You have the audacity to say seeing is believing like so threatening. I guess Alex Trebek was a substitution and originally they wanted to have Johnny Cash.

Robert Skvarla:

I think it almost works better, right?

AP Strange:

Yeah. Well it would have been I think it would have been a little on the nose because Johnny

Bradley Plaisier:

Cash in was black

AP Strange:

right. And I think that was the joke but then for whatever reason I think he was like touring or just not in great health or something.

Bradley Plaisier:

They had the same problem with Cher in the postmodern Prometheus. It's a shame.

AP Strange:

Right. Maybe Johnny Cash isn't allowed in Canada. I don't know.

Bradley Plaisier:

That could be. I mean, I have a friend who's not allowed in Canada, so it's very possible.

AP Strange:

Because I mean, that's where they shot them all, I think, right?

Bradley Plaisier:

At least through season six, yeah. Yeah. Which is crazy they like in Anasazi they painted that whole cliffside red it literally yeah

AP Strange:

yeah I mean the Men in Black I mean Alex Trebek I think was a brilliant choice just because it's so out there and it's exactly the kind of thing where like if you told somebody well the Men in Black showed up and one of them was Alex Trebek like nobody's gonna believe you.

Bradley Plaisier:

And the way he says you were getting very sleepy, very relaxed, it's just so perfect. Just like feels like a hypnotist.

AP Strange:

Right and that's the running theme and then the repeating line in the episode is how the hell should I know? I love that.

Bradley Plaisier:

It's a great reaction image, the alien costume face, how the hell should I know?

AP Strange:

I mean at the end of the episode Jose Chung asks Mulder what really happened and that's what he says is how the hell should I Yeah

Bradley Plaisier:

I use that quite a bit actually.

AP Strange:

It's great and I mean when I watched it last night it turned to my wife I'm like when I was however old I was watching this when it first aired just like that opening scene where with the one gray alien turning to the other and just saying what how the what the hell is what the hell is that? And he goes, I love that. I love how the hell should I know? I I just remember, like, laughing. It went because it goes to commercial.

AP Strange:

I me and my brother, we're both, like, losing our minds. We're like, what? What's that?

Bradley Plaisier:

It's it's so funny because it goes from, like, the shot of the two aliens from the back who are actually Air Force guys in alien costumes, then Lord Kim Boat in front of them in stop motion animation style going roar. And then it cuts to the one alien's face and he's goes like, he's like what the hell is that thing and the other guy goes how the hell should I know? It like pans over it's so funny.

AP Strange:

It's just perfect yeah I mean because I didn't see that coming out at all and I mean I definitely caught it was basically supposed to be like a Ray Harryhausen type monster. Yeah absolutely. And I loved Harryhausen stuff like I was obsessed with Jason and the Argonauts and those movies when I was a kid.

Bradley Plaisier:

We just had a Harryhausen exhibit at the museum in Kalamazoo.

AP Strange:

Oh that's awesome.

Bradley Plaisier:

It was so cool.

Robert Skvarla:

Lucky.

Bradley Plaisier:

Got to see all the little skeletons.

AP Strange:

Yeah great, did they have the flying saucers from Earth-fifteen? Flying saucers, nice. Yeah that's great but yeah so many different elements that are really good. The scene that really cracked me up last night too is proprietors account of Mulder County. Just ordering a piece of pie and asking one question and eating it and then ordering another piece it's like he ate an entire pie in this fashion.

AP Strange:

That had Twin Peaks vibes to it for me Definitely.

Robert Skvarla:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

AP Strange:

So damn good stuff. So we do need to mention also that Morgan is an actor and appears in a couple of the episodes. I'm not sure if this is still true, but for the longest time his IMDB account was a picture of the flukewarm man because he plays the

Bradley Plaisier:

It's not anymore, but yeah, it was. Right.

AP Strange:

For the longest time it was the flukewarm man monster, which I think is one of the most terrifying looking things that's ever appeared on TV.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

AP Strange:

That that that was one that was nightmare fuel for me, and that was I feel like that was pretty early on. So the second season

Bradley Plaisier:

beginning of season two yeah

Robert Skvarla:

yeah was I think it may have even been one of the first episode first one or two episodes of the season

AP Strange:

yeah yeah that one that one in particular scared the shit out of me.

Robert Skvarla:

It's just funny to think that's like that was how he got his in for the show. He got cast as the fluke man, and he spun that into writing, humbug and then Clyde Bruckman's.

Bradley Plaisier:

Right.

AP Strange:

Right.

Bradley Plaisier:

And then bowing out entirely.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. Well, no, not necessarily. Like he skipped a couple of seasons, but then he came back.

Bradley Plaisier:

He did some story editing and stuff too.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. I think he contributed to some of the episodes like Blood, if I remember right. He has some story credits.

Bradley Plaisier:

That was his first writing one where he like fixed the problems with Blood basically.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah.

AP Strange:

And he wrote the, as I said with, I just already lost the name again, the Lake Monster one Quagmire. He helped write that whole dialogue about Moby Dick and Ahab because Moby Dick is another I feel like there were a couple like inside jokes with the writer's room They all loved referencing Moby Dick and comedies from the 1930s and '20s.

Robert Skvarla:

Mean, feels like that was common in the '90s. The Simpsons had a lot of gags like that too. A lot of the writers rooms in that period just feels like that was the end of that era where you had these on a mass scale. You can still find it in some niche streaming shows, but on a mass scale where you had these hyper literate writing rooms where you'd be mashing up weird 1930s references alongside current pop culture trends and things like that. X Files would throw that stuff in there all the time.

AP Strange:

Like postmodern literature.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah, exactly.

AP Strange:

It's just like, because I wrote about the X Files around one of the anniversary years and kind of like talked about that speech in Quagmire as being a perfect encapsulation of kind of what Mulder's all about where Skelly compares him to Ahab and his only takeaway from that is like, I always kind of wanted to have a peg leg. But I think that's an important thing to point out because and I think that goes over people's heads is that Mulder himself is sort of he is a monomaniacal lunatic in a lot of ways. He's on this quest and it doesn't really matter how many bodies pile up or how many times Scully's in peril and needs to be rescued, which always kind of irked me that she had to be like a damsel in distress so many times. Yeah. Because she's she's a stronger character than that, but they definitely fell into that trope a couple times at least in the early seasons, but I think that's a cautionary tale where for anyone into UFOs that you can't be monomaniacal single single-minded in your pursuit of the truth whatever that means to you, especially if it's hurting people along the way.

AP Strange:

Right. Know?

Bradley Plaisier:

No, definitely. Like when I it's not a great example. Never mind. I was going to talk about my own UFO experience, but I don't think it's a good example. It's just like you got to be able to be normal.

Bradley Plaisier:

You got to think about other things.

Robert Skvarla:

Are you like Mulder and you've thrown a lot of bodies out over the side to get to what you need to get to?

Bradley Plaisier:

No, I just got obsessed for a while and then stopped being obsessed. Basically it destroyed my lifestyle habits and I lost all my social skills. I couldn't be a normal person.

Robert Skvarla:

So you're like Mulder.

Bradley Plaisier:

I don't want to say that. Everybody says that.

AP Strange:

Well, I mean, died, I don't think, because of Bradley.

Bradley Plaisier:

Not to my knowledge.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah.

Bradley Plaisier:

I mean it's not like there's many people around me. It's a very lonely time which All

AP Strange:

I wanna you know, all I'm getting at is if you find yourself driving to Martha's Vineyard in the middle of the night to wake your mom up to go after what what your dad did, like, thirty or forty years ago. Like, you might have a problem. You might have a

Bradley Plaisier:

UFO. Definitely. Definitely.

Robert Skvarla:

On the other hand, you might meet a scientist named Bambi.

AP Strange:

You might. You know? But I mean

Bradley Plaisier:

She might not be into you either.

AP Strange:

Well, She there's likes the Doctor. Ivanov in the wheelchair.

Robert Skvarla:

Stephen Hawking, I guess, analog, right?

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah. He said he based the insect robots on a real guy at MIT who was making insect robots because they just makes more sense. Having a biped type robot, like a human like robot is pretty stupid considering the way it works, like you need a human brain kind of to like make it practical. So just like insects are just completely reflexive. They're purpose built like billions of years of evolution to get to the perfect form.

Bradley Plaisier:

And it's just like, it seems like aliens would be the giant praying mantis or whatever.

AP Strange:

Yeah, yeah and I mean I guess you see that in execution in real life with like the robot dogs that are made by that company like Boston Dynamics or whatever.

Robert Skvarla:

Ghost Robotics is another one.

AP Strange:

Yeah, quadrupedal robots instead of bipedal.

Bradley Plaisier:

Know DARPA's made some tiny flying robots too that are like bugs.

Robert Skvarla:

The CIA was working on one in the sixties or seventies, the Insecta Hopter. Yep. One of their journalists. I

AP Strange:

mean, we all we all know that all the birds were replaced with flying drone robots too. So, I mean. I disagree.

Bradley Plaisier:

I love birds.

AP Strange:

Bradley birds aren't real. Just accept it, you know? I

Bradley Plaisier:

actually decided recently that I think that birdsong is the only thing keeping us sane. That without it, everybody would just go insane. I decided that's thing I believe recently.

Robert Skvarla:

I mean, isn't that sorry, go ahead.

AP Strange:

No, I'm just agreeing.

Robert Skvarla:

I was just saying, isn't that one of the tropes in science fiction or writing where if you walk into the woods and you don't hear sounds of birds singing, you know something's wrong?

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah, definitely. But if you were just walking around daily life, if there were no birds singing anywhere, I think we would all lose our minds.

AP Strange:

Yeah.

Bradley Plaisier:

Whales, I think, keep the moon in place. It keeps it in synchronous orbit, whale song.

AP Strange:

Okay.

Bradley Plaisier:

Something I decided recently too.

AP Strange:

How do clouds play into this? Stupid of yours.

Robert Skvarla:

M. Trals?

Bradley Plaisier:

Clouds were actually my new obsession after UFOs. I needed a replacement. So I started looking at clouds and looking at ants. Getting Okay. Yeah, sorry, off topic.

AP Strange:

No, it's all right. Yeah, I mean, it's all connected, I think.

Bradley Plaisier:

It's all connected.

AP Strange:

Because I forgot to mention this as well Morgan's in another episode Small Potatoes.

Bradley Plaisier:

Oh Oh you're right I forgot about that.

AP Strange:

Where you actually see his face so that one might be yeah the multiple faces of his character in that. What was it like Van Blunt or something? Yeah Van Blunt. Yeah

Bradley Plaisier:

DT yeah.

AP Strange:

So I like that episode, but that's one where like the monster of the week doesn't really make sense to me.

Bradley Plaisier:

That's the one?

AP Strange:

Well, no, I mean, it seems a little bit more far fetched in ways that I don't like as much because I mean essentially he impersonates people by moving the musculature of his face to look like their face.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah, yeah, it is a little Which bit

AP Strange:

is fine if he's just changing his face but how does he change his hair or his height?

Bradley Plaisier:

And the whole thing is with like his epidermis was the whole thing like he had special epidermis not special bones.

AP Strange:

Right, so he couldn't change his height or his voice one would think or his hair.

Bradley Plaisier:

He must not have written that one.

AP Strange:

No, he didn't write that one. He's just in it. But it's great to actually see his face in that one because you're just like you know in the rubber suit you know in the rubber boot pantsuit. I mean it's pretty great to make your entrance in a rubber monster suit because I think that's one of those uncelebrated joys in life is just watching guys run around in rubber monster suits.

Bradley Plaisier:

Totally agree.

Robert Skvarla:

Right there with you.

Bradley Plaisier:

Did you ever have you not have either you been to the X Files Museum?

Robert Skvarla:

Have not had a chance, no.

Bradley Plaisier:

I would love to someday.

Robert Skvarla:

Is it?

Bradley Plaisier:

I don't know. I just perused the store online. They got a bunch of great memorabilia and stuff.

Robert Skvarla:

You always send me the picture of Duchovny from the episode he directed, The Unnatural.

AP Strange:

Wrote wrote

Robert Skvarla:

wrote yeah

Bradley Plaisier:

yeah I wish they would let him write more episodes because that one and Hollywood AD are both so good.

AP Strange:

Baseball one too.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah. That's the one we're talking about. Yeah.

AP Strange:

Oh, okay.

Bradley Plaisier:

There's like a set photo where it's like Mulder's like with all the black baseball players and he's got like his sunglasses on and he's like swimming baseball bat. So good. But yeah, the X Files Museum store, highly recommend checking it out if you are listening to this and like the X Files.

Robert Skvarla:

I always check it out periodically because I wanna find every now and then they'll sell a copy of

Bradley Plaisier:

Lung gunman.

Robert Skvarla:

Lung gunman, their newsletter. I'm looking for one of those, and you can never find them. They're one of the only places you can get it.

Bradley Plaisier:

And they're so funny. Like, I wish I didn't pass up that one from a few months ago.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. Same.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah. Anyways, it is in you can get tours and stuff and it's in

Robert Skvarla:

I'm gonna guess somewhere in Maine or like the Northeast even though

AP Strange:

I thought it was New York or

Robert Skvarla:

Oh, New York.

Bradley Plaisier:

Saratoga Springs, New York.

Robert Skvarla:

Okay. So it's a little farther north.

AP Strange:

I've been to Saratoga Springs.

Bradley Plaisier:

Really? Is it noteworthy?

AP Strange:

It's noteworthy. I think there's like a racetrack there. That's what saying to say. But they had a really nice walkable downtown area where you could bring a dog.

Bradley Plaisier:

It looks really pretty.

AP Strange:

Because me and Bernie and my wife were all walking around with and we got to eat at a restaurant where Bernie was allowed on the patio and he was allowed in the bookstore. They have a bookstore there that went viral at one point because it's like this weird labyrinth of a bookstore. You walk in and it's like a normal sized bookstore and you go into the back and it splits off down two hallways and there's a staircase that goes down, but this store just keeps going. Like you keep walking and you're like, man, there's still more store. How does it keep going down?

AP Strange:

Don't understand. There's a bookstore

Bradley Plaisier:

near me that's kind of like that. They had to put like fluorescence tape leading people back out. It's very disorienting. Yeah,

AP Strange:

think some influencer had taken pictures along the way and so it turned into this thread on Twitter that went super viral at one point and I was like, I've been there. It wasn't that story. Wish I took pictures. Yeah. And they actually had some good weird books when I finally found the weird book section.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah. Always takes forever.

Robert Skvarla:

Unfortunately, don't have a lot of weird books where I'm at. I did recently go to APOR books, which was wonderful, but that's like the closest thing I have to anything where I can find any weird books.

AP Strange:

Yeah. Now, aren't you closer to Philadelphia?

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. There's no

AP Strange:

weird books there?

Robert Skvarla:

Not bookstores. Like a couple of them are really good bookstores, but not like, you know, paranormal, supernatural, anything like that. We had one over a decade ago, Germ Books, which was very weird. But it closed, I think, in like 2012, 2013.

Bradley Plaisier:

Damn.

Robert Skvarla:

There's still some like New Age stores around, but you have to get further out from the city before you can find anything. New York still has a ton of them.

AP Strange:

Cool.

Bradley Plaisier:

You'd think Pennsylvania would have more with all the weird sort of Christian Dutch shit. You know what I mean? There's a lot of fucking weird places in Pennsylvania.

Robert Skvarla:

I mean, there's a lot of Christian bookstores where you can stop in and find strange stuff if you're looking for, like, weird Fundy literature, which I do every now and then, but not, like, anything that puts you in league with the devil.

AP Strange:

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean up here I just I just hunt all the used bookstores and then it's a game for me to find that one shelf that's gonna have a bunch of weird books in it.

AP Strange:

And I mean sometimes I never find it but sometimes I score big. Mean, I have a box over here that I think is, like, 50 issues of Fate Magazine.

Bradley Plaisier:

What?

AP Strange:

That I found once, and I was at work, and it was a place that only accepted cash. So I bought, like, three or four. And then a couple days later, I just showed up with, like, a $100. I'm like, how much for that? The guy gave me a deal on it.

AP Strange:

I'm like, alright. Here you go.

Bradley Plaisier:

That's so cool. I I I just recently came across up there on the top. It's just like a bunch of the rainbow up there. That's all Overlook editions of PG Wodehouse books that I came across.

Robert Skvarla:

Oh yeah, you were telling me about those.

Bradley Plaisier:

Dollars 1 each. I thought it was like going to be somewhere near like a complete set. It's less than a third. There's 99 of them.

AP Strange:

Wow. He wrote so much.

Robert Skvarla:

Can't say I have a great collection like that. Closest to have is sort of like your Fate magazines. I found a place that had a ton of old UFO magazines, the American UFO magazine. So I bought, I think, like, from '89 through '93 or '94. I wanna collect the whole run of it, but it's fun going through those because you can see all of the bickering and fighting in the UFO community.

Robert Skvarla:

Love Well, are versus the I forget the guy who ran the magazine. Bill Burns? No. It's Don Ecker.

Bradley Plaisier:

Sorry. Oh, Don Ecker. Yeah.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. Alright. So they had a long running feud where it would just be the Eckers attacking Bill Cooper repeatedly in issue after issue after issue. And then you'd have the other UFO writers doing their stuff.

AP Strange:

Well, you had the other Cooper too, like Vicky or whatever.

Robert Skvarla:

She was Wasn't she? Well, I believe she married Don Eckers, so I think that's Right. Yeah.

Bradley Plaisier:

We need another saucer smear or, like, we need another forum for shit like that that isn't Twitter.

Robert Skvarla:

Gotta start a substack, Bradley, so you can be that guy. That is pretty funny.

AP Strange:

You see it in fate too though. I mean, there is an editorial section at the back of fate and you'd see like Adams key taking shots at Orfeo Angelucci early on. It's pretty great. I have a couple issues from the early 50s and they're just taking shots at each other.

Bradley Plaisier:

That's been my favorite thing about scanning correspondence from like Marcello Trezzi and a few other people is that they're so bitchy with each other. It is so funny.

Robert Skvarla:

I mean, that's half the fun of reading any old magazine. You can go through old rock magazines. I forget the guy's name. But in the 70s, he was doing really weird, vaguely it would be considered today what people on Twitter would be the esoteric right, but he was doing that within rock criticism. So there's always these letters to the editor in Boston publications from the seventies, if you go through them, where it's like Lester Bangs, though he was based out of Detroit, he would write and be like, this guy sucks.

Robert Skvarla:

Why do you print him? And you get all of these writers for the magazines all just attacking this one guy who nobody knew who he was except for other rock writers. Fantastic when you can find that stuff.

AP Strange:

Yeah, mean those flame wars have existed as long as publishing has I'm pretty sure because I mean I came across this researching Alistair Crowley at one point and he was having a flame war with GK Chesterton in the pages of like a literary review paper. I'm just like Chesterton versus Crowley this is phenomenal.

Bradley Plaisier:

Gotta look that up that's awesome. Yeah

AP Strange:

it's in a book called The Legend of Alastair Crowley. It's a book about his books I think.

Bradley Plaisier:

Oh the one you were telling me about yeah.

AP Strange:

Yeah yeah that's good stuff. Yeah. While we again got off topic, don't know that Morgan was would have been involved in any kind of flame war like that. He seemed to like to keep a low profile. As we said, he didn't do very many interviews.

AP Strange:

Yeah. Mr. Morgan if you're listening and you'd like to come on this show.

Robert Skvarla:

You can make fun of whoever you want.

AP Strange:

Yeah. I think he did in a way with some of the characters. Mean like the stupendous yappy character.

Bradley Plaisier:

Oh yeah.

Robert Skvarla:

Oh my god.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah he said that was Yuri Geller and

AP Strange:

what's the other guy? Was a magician.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah the really famous.

AP Strange:

Hold on, I have the interview handy, so I'll just

Robert Skvarla:

I mean, so if psych amazing there you go. Yeah, I was gonna say if psych wasn't a show about a fake psychic, should have given Yappy his own show.

Bradley Plaisier:

He was a great character.

Robert Skvarla:

He was.

AP Strange:

I mean, yeah, according to the interview, Morgan said that's just how that guy talks and acts anyway.

Bradley Plaisier:

Like, he will just talk like that's how he talks in real life and he Right. He was talking.

Robert Skvarla:

He was a stunt coordinator on the show or something like that, right? Did

Bradley Plaisier:

Double, hit some yeah.

Robert Skvarla:

Double, there you go.

AP Strange:

Yeah. Yeah, his name was Jaap Brokker. It looks like a Finnish name. J A A P, some kind of Scandinavian. Yeah.

AP Strange:

Yeah. But I guess that's I guess that's just how he looked and acted and behaved in real life.

Robert Skvarla:

That's awesome.

AP Strange:

That's good. And he he he reappears in a few episodes, I think. Yeah. He comes back later. Oh he's the host of the Alien Autopsy.

AP Strange:

Yep. Stand up and Jose Yeah. And that's kind of good because it's like the same actors appear in the Morgan episodes too and I don't know, not sure if they appear in other ones but the hypnotist in Jose Chung is also the tour guide in Humbug for that Freak Museum.

Bradley Plaisier:

Oh the guy who looks like G. Gordon Liddy?

AP Strange:

I guess. I can't conjure in my mind what G Gordon Liddy looks

Bradley Plaisier:

like. Bald mustache?

AP Strange:

No. No. Okay. I'm sorry. There's multiple hypnotists in those the one that's shown along with Mulder and Scully but

Bradley Plaisier:

Okay gotcha.

AP Strange:

Yeah that guy I realized watching both back to back last night I was like I recognized his voice and I was like oh yeah it's the same guy.

Bradley Plaisier:

Cool.

AP Strange:

Sorry, the other Morgan through line with these episodes is like the kids doing weird drugs.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah, I love that. I love that when they showed up in the werey lizard episode, I was so happy.

AP Strange:

They're like licking frogs or something.

Robert Skvarla:

But he makes those callbacks across both, like, just the episodes he writes in X Files and even into other series. Because one of the Millennium episodes he does, which is titled, I believe, Somehow Satan Got Behind Me, it's the one about the demons. He throws in a reference to Jose Chung's in The Alien Autopsy. Midway through, there's a demon who is harassing a network TV sensor to drive him crazy. And at some point, it culminates in him running onto the set of a series that is clearly The X Files where they're filming it, what is probably Jose Chung's, and he just begins shooting the aliens.

Robert Skvarla:

So it's like this weird callback to, like, a bunch of other stuff Morgan's already written before.

Bradley Plaisier:

That's awesome.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. I mean, that may have been, like, his most that episode in particular, I think, is really funny because it may be, like, his meanest episode of any of the ones that he's done across either series.

Bradley Plaisier:

Really?

AP Strange:

Yeah. Yeah. I I wouldn't really gonna have to check that out now.

Robert Skvarla:

That episode alone, definitely check it out.

Bradley Plaisier:

Because it does it, like, stand up on its own? Like, do have to watch all the ones before it?

Robert Skvarla:

No. I watched it again, like, a few months ago, like, on its own, just out of the blue. If you know a little about Millennium, it helps. But if you don't know anything, it's a standalone. It's basically a monster of the week episode for Millennium.

Bradley Plaisier:

Gotcha.

AP Strange:

Did he write any of the Lone Gunman episodes?

Bradley Plaisier:

Don't believe so. I think Glenn did.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. Right.

AP Strange:

Yeah. Well, fantastic guy and I mean we didn't mention the Mandela effect one but so we can talk about that for a minute but that does seem like there's a continuity with all the things he did, know, so you can make an argument that there's a there's like a separate Aaron Morgan verse within the X Files universe.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah yeah.

AP Strange:

Where a lot of this stuff takes place but yeah I mean in the newer series which includes the Mulder and Scully meet the were monster which we mentioned briefly you had the lost art of forehead sweat where he tackles the mandala effect and I mean nobody else could have done that as well you know. I think it was before we were recording that I was saying that I wasn't thrilled with the return to the x files after so long. No. The episodes didn't sit well with me but when during Mulder and Scully versus the meet the were monster I think was one of the best things I'd ever seen and then the last heart of forehead sweat and I'm like nope I mean these two together that's all I ever need out of a return to this show. Know, that that's that that's good good watching, you know, so

Bradley Plaisier:

Robert, you have some good takes on the Mandela effect.

Robert Skvarla:

I mean, I think the Mandela effect itself was just like something that was a phenomenon that probably occurred naturally, but may have played some role in the mainstreaming of conspiracy culture. People had to have been paying attention to what was happening with some of the weird Mandela effect stuff that was happening in the early twenty tens. Obviously, the Mandela one itself, which makes no sense to anyone who was even alive during the last 25 of his life. But even beyond that, the one that always stands out to me is the James Bond one, Dolly Embraces. I don't understand why that is still a thing, and it was big on the Internet in the early 2010s.

Robert Skvarla:

There was also the Sinbad movie that everyone talked about. It's just I think the Mandela effect showed that you could have these self reinforcing communities that would never be wrong. It's that Festinger book When Prophecy Fails. You have this community who just keeps reinforcing this idea and reinforcing a commitment to the idea. So someone, maybe people who were in the Trump campaign elsewhere, realized that can be exploited.

Robert Skvarla:

I didn't really explain it as well as I could because it's

AP Strange:

just The all the time Mandela effect is a psy op then.

Robert Skvarla:

No, I don't think it's a psy op. Think it was one

AP Strange:

of those

Robert Skvarla:

things where it naturally occurred that people recognized there was this phenomenon where you can exploit certain features of the Internet to, I guess, create psyops. I mean, look at stuff that happened all of last year, all of the panics we dealt with, the UFO drone stuff over Jersey, where all of it was just like planes and actual drones but not like secret government drones.

AP Strange:

Well see I felt that way about flat eartherism like I want when the flat earth stuff started picking up I was like this has got to be I think it grew up organically a bit and it's not the first time in history that the idea has caught on but I felt like it was there was some guiding hand there prodding it along, know, and I'm like, for to what end? I mean, just to see how extreme you could push, like, absurd beliefs,

Robert Skvarla:

you know. Well, and some of it, I mean, like, some of those communities were definitely, I don't know if this happened with Mandela Effect, but I know Flat Earth, a lot of people that those communities were infiltrated by various white nationalist groups and other people who could be like, here is this wild belief, but they're hiding something from you and who's doing that? Well, let me tell you, You know? So a lot of people like that would infiltrate those communities, specifically Flat Earth and other conspiracy theories adjacent to it.

AP Strange:

Mean

Bradley Plaisier:

Flat Earth's one of those ones that never really like I asked Tim Benal about this because I know he wasn't hanging out with the Flat Earth people for a while. I just don't, like, I get why people, and this also ties into what Robert was talking about. Like, I get why people believe in QAnon. Like, I get it. But I don't get why people believe in Flat Earth.

Bradley Plaisier:

Don't see what the appeal is. I don't know what are the stakes here? What is the big secret that's being kept? And it feels like it's one of those things. I'm in a couple of flat earth groups on Facebook.

Bradley Plaisier:

I keep check up on them sometimes. And I don't see it's just spinning. They're just all spinning their wheels and it's all like choose your own adventure like there's no consensus on like what the big secret really it's it's really strange to me like I don't get why people believe in it

AP Strange:

well it's a particularly pointless one for sure. I think it's just kind of if your entree to any weird idea comes at the wrong time,

Robert Skvarla:

then

AP Strange:

then it's almost like a very mild subliminal form of ontological shock where you're just like, well, nothing is real then. I've been lied to my entire life. I'm stripping it all down to the studs and rebuilding my reality the way I want to.

Bradley Plaisier:

I just said that. I just said I don't get why people believe in it, but then I remembered what Robert just said literally just said.

Robert Skvarla:

Right. I I mean, yeah. Mean, there's a religiosity to it where it's like people need stuff to fill the void in their life. So in some sense that helps do that if you've been lied to you, this is your, you found the answer, you know?

AP Strange:

Yeah, and somebody's responsible for it. Yeah, exactly. You can point to.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah. Doctor. They.

AP Strange:

Doctor. They, he's absolutely Doctor. They? The Yep. Yeah.

AP Strange:

So that was beautiful, Doctor. They.

Robert Skvarla:

Great way of pulling that back.

AP Strange:

Thank you for pulling us back to reality Bradley. But yeah, I mean, and they reference like the the Genie movie and everything in that. Yeah. Doctor. They was in the Genie movie.

Robert Skvarla:

Well, again, it speaks to Morgan's he clearly probably was not someone who was obsessed with the Mandela effect for coming to this, but it shows his ability to synthesize material that he might be unfamiliar with, but that still has some relevance in that period among a community of people that, you know, like with Uphology, what he did with Jose Chungs, it's very similar.

AP Strange:

Yeah, and I mean, I feel like there's overlap between Mandela effect belief and like simulation theory. Yeah. People think that everything's like a simulation it's kind of a similar and Flat Earth for that matter they all feel like just kind of upending reality with a new specific paradigm that makes less sense or more sense, but probably the same amount of sense. I don't know.

Bradley Plaisier:

Same amount of sense and same amount of like doesn't change anything. I still got to go to work.

AP Strange:

The same amount of guardrails. Yeah, exactly. You still need to go to work and you still need to pay your rent and all this other stuff. I mean, yeah,

Robert Skvarla:

but like what you were saying with Flat Earth, I mean, the Mandela effect is the one where it to me, it doesn't make sense. Like I can sort of get how people end up in Flat Earth just because it's like it's a conspiracy theory that's always been there. So it has this level of attraction. But Mandela effect is this new one where literally at some point in the 2010s, people decided the people who don't believe in the false memory stuff, they were like, Okay, so someone's actually going back and changing history. And it's like, well, what does that accomplish?

Robert Skvarla:

I understand if you change history, you control the future. I understand that part of it. But it's like, what do we gain out of saying a Sinbad movie doesn't exist? Like, what does anyone gain politically or culturally from that? The Mandela effect, that one has never made sense to me.

AP Strange:

Well, as a conspiracy theory, it doesn't make any sense to me. I always assumed it was bifurcating timelines and some people get kicked from one timeline over to the other one and have memories of the other reality that there's no conspiracy, there's no controlling hand behind it, it's just some people are unfortunately slipping through the cracks.

Bradley Plaisier:

It's so annoying.

Robert Skvarla:

I have

Bradley Plaisier:

no patience for that.

AP Strange:

Yeah. Well, it's actually That appeals to me a lot more. I mean, you're a big Art Bell guy, right, Robert? Yeah. Yeah.

AP Strange:

I mean, I think like the Mandela effect first appeared on the Art Bell show. He was one of those original guys that remembered Mandela dying in prison badly Yeah.

Robert Skvarla:

But I mean, feel like Art definitely played stuff up even if he didn't believe in it too. Like there'd be stuff you'd get into just for the sake of it. It's just it's one of those things where it seems like there's gradations to it too, where there's people who believe that it's like, oh, they're saying this stuff didn't happen because they're trying to gaslight us. But then there's also people who believe literally there's some kind of overarching force that has changed the past. Doctor.

Robert Skvarla:

They, you know, something like that. And it's just it's such a bizarre one because there's no real consensus with it. And I've been caught up in it a few times where it's like, I remember someone sent something to me a while back. I had posted about the clown panic in 2016. Do you guys remember that?

Bradley Plaisier:

Yes. My first day as a tennis coach, we had school canceled because somebody called in a clown themed bomb threat.

Robert Skvarla:

Well, so someone sent me a Reddit thread once where a post I made posted on Twitter, someone posted what was the group? It's not the main Mandela one. I think it was something like retconned, where there's a similar theory, like retcon theory, where someone has gone into the past and changed the past. And they thought either maybe I did it or I was somehow involved with it, where someone had posted about the clown panic in this subreddit a week or two before. And then I posted about it and had a viral tweet.

Robert Skvarla:

So they're like, he has to be a part of this. So I just don't understand the Mandela thing. And it's such an annoying one to me for some reason. Maybe it's just because I'm a pet ant. And I can't explain your take

Bradley Plaisier:

on the clown thing? Because I think it's excellent.

Robert Skvarla:

I mean, again, so, like, a lot of the a lot of the stuff that I'm into I I'm a big psychological warfare guy.

Bradley Plaisier:

I Mhmm.

Robert Skvarla:

Am a materialist, so I don't necessarily believe in UFOs in the way most people do. Think maybe there's intelligent life, but we haven't interacted with it. But like with UFOs, I think that whatever happened in 1947 may have been just some normal event that got mixed up, then something spawned out of it. And then the intelligence community and other groups understood it could be used for various reasons. Mandela effect, I think that probably happened there.

Robert Skvarla:

The clown thing, I actually think that was probably some kind of normal scare because there were prior clown panics, I think, in 'eighty, 'eighty three in places like Kansas City. I think it was just something that happened, and it got picked up and inflated by the if you guys remember in 2015, 2016, there were a lot of Facebook groups that would pop up, and there would be viral news stories about what I'm thinking of was actually a Pizza Gate precursor where was a Chuck E. Cheese. There was a dungeon found beneath the Chuck E. Cheese.

Robert Skvarla:

And that blew up because it was some fake news site that posted So about the clown panic kind of dovetailed into that where it was like this natural thing where there were a couple of fake clowns, Gags the Clown, and a couple of others that were working on movies or whatever, and they went viral. But I think at some point that got exploited and people understood it could be used for other purposes, for like, they learned how to game the system for virality. So they were able to essentially, like, learn how to generate fake panics, and we see politically how that has worked over the last few years. What was the one last year? Migrant families eating dogs or cats or something.

Robert Skvarla:

No evidence of it, but they could generate this news panic. And then that moved into the drone panic, and that moved into another panic. So our news cycles for a decade or more have been just all of these weird viral panics. And I think the clown thing was one of the ones they'd learned how to do that, just watching how it played out.

Bradley Plaisier:

Definitely. The Haitians eating dogs thing was so annoying because there's a cop in the Detroit police department that's shot over 40 dogs. That's a lot of dogs. It's 40 more than have been eaten by Asians that we know of.

Robert Skvarla:

But it's like a lot of the paranormal stuff, that's how it works. It's like you have this viral moment. I mean, obviously, there was nothing viral in 1947. But you have these flaps where lots of reports happen in a short amount of time, and it's self perpetuating. The first one happens.

Robert Skvarla:

People see reports about it. They then see it, and reports continue.

AP Strange:

Mhmm.

Robert Skvarla:

So from that, you get this phenomenon that just appears out of nowhere. Mandela effect, clown panic, whatever.

AP Strange:

Well, the original clown panic in the eighties was interesting because they didn't seem connected, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Started in Boston.

Bradley Plaisier:

I'm not familiar with this at all.

AP Strange:

Oh, really?

Bradley Plaisier:

No.

AP Strange:

Okay. Lauren Coleman was the first one to write about it back because he would have it he was part of a news clipping service and he would noticed that he got multiple clown ones from different places. So it started in Boston and then I think there was one in Rhode Island and then a little while later like somewhere in Pennsylvania and then Kansas City and these were all like local papers reporting it so it wasn't national news. So they were all kind of isolated events that happened in that order like starting in Massachusetts working its way south into Pennsylvania and then nothing for a while and then appearing again in Kansas City.

Bradley Plaisier:

I think it was

Robert Skvarla:

also prior to the Stephen King book.

Bradley Plaisier:

I was just gonna ask.

AP Strange:

It was before it came out and I think around the same time John Wayne Gacy was being tried. So he was like the serial killer clown.

Robert Skvarla:

There was another one in the early nineties after Homie the Clown appeared on In Living Color. Yep. I forget what year that happened, but there were a couple of reports nationally about people seeing Homie popping up, like kids would report it. So there have been intermittent clown panics. It's just they weren't as connected as the one in 2016 because that one went on for a couple of months.

Robert Skvarla:

And then you would see it pop up again once or twice a year, 2017, 2018, and forward.

Bradley Plaisier:

Was the 2016 I saw at the library recently a DVD for a documentary about Giggles the clown.

Robert Skvarla:

That was another one, yeah. Well, there were a couple of fake clowns in that period. I think Giggles was like a phone number. It was like a performance artist that you call.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah, it was like some what the back of the DVD said is that like some parents hired him to scare their kid as punishment for something.

Robert Skvarla:

He set up a service where he would do that for people. Like you could call him and he'd scare the kids.

AP Strange:

Terrible, terrible yeah I mean and that goes against everything that real clowns

Bradley Plaisier:

stand for

AP Strange:

yeah exactly well there's I didn't expect a clown conversation this is great because that's like one of my areas of expertise for better or worse. Oh, nice. Well, I mean, I looked into it at one point and then it just kept coming back to haunt me. I was overwhelmed with cloud synchronicities and eventually just had to accept that it's my lot in life to be with clowns.

Robert Skvarla:

I think my favorite piece of ephemera from that period was when that happened, there were local news outlets that would interview clowns. And some of them would be like, no clown will ever scare a child. This is not real. And then there was some station, I think, in Santa Clara, California. They interviewed this group, the Cali Killer Clowns.

Robert Skvarla:

And it was all scary clowns. And they're like, yeah, we're killer clowns, and

AP Strange:

we're coming for you. Well, I mean, there is a clown code. Like as far as circuses go, yeah, yeah, there's like a clown code. If you become a clown, there's like a serious thing that you're supposed to do. It's very regimented.

AP Strange:

There's like four different kinds of professional clown you can be and like trained to be in a circus or a performing arts troop and they take it very seriously and then part

Robert Skvarla:

of the

AP Strange:

clown code is like you never want to scare children like you always keep it clean you know.

Robert Skvarla:

Except for the Cali Killer clowns.

AP Strange:

Well arguably they're not real clowns No,

Robert Skvarla:

yeah yeah yeah.

AP Strange:

And actually Warren Coleman has a classification system for as much like the hyenex scale of close encounters, he has a classification system for Clown encounters? Clown encounters yeah there's phantom clowns, stalking clowns, and killer clowns.

Robert Skvarla:

I'm gonna have to look this up. Do you

Bradley Plaisier:

remember the American chillers like children's books? They're my generation. Was just like kids books. They were chapter books. Chapter books.

Bradley Plaisier:

And there was like one for every state and then the guy was from Michigan. So he wrote one for cities in Michigan. And the one for Kalamazoo was called Killer Clowns of Kalamazoo. And the way that we got rid of them, the way that that characters got rid of them was by killing them all.

AP Strange:

Oh, there you go. Good children. Reminds me of a joke that's way too long to tell right now.

Bradley Plaisier:

Is it about Pagliacci? Because he's so funny.

AP Strange:

Well you know what the funny thing about that is, is the word Pagliacci just means clowns.

Bradley Plaisier:

Is it really?

AP Strange:

Yeah it's not a name. It was the name of the play, the play was called Clowns.

Bradley Plaisier:

Learning Oh. So much to it.

AP Strange:

Yeah. I've written about clowns way too much I think. Didn't know too much about them. I'll check those posts then. I think we now need a X Files script by Darren Morgan about Phantom Clowns.

AP Strange:

That would be good.

Bradley Plaisier:

That would be great.

AP Strange:

So again, Mr. Morgan, if you're listening. Man, have a nice

Bradley Plaisier:

way to him.

AP Strange:

Yeah. I've often thought about writing a script for a Phantom Clown story with like Tim Bunnell being the clown hunter.

Bradley Plaisier:

I think that would be awesome. That's such a good idea.

AP Strange:

Yeah. But back in 2036 I think or maybe 2018 we had a hashtag that was clown watch. We did it in 2020. It was like clownwatch2020 and we're sharing back and forth on Twitter like any and all clown stories that we came across and we kind of like, I hope Lauren Coleman doesn't listen to this, we kind of stopped including it because he would take it really seriously and he would keep referring back to his cloud class ifications. Like, well, this is

Bradley Plaisier:

more of a

AP Strange:

knock on cloud than a fan of cloud. That's really funny. We're like, we're doing this for fun, man. Man.

Bradley Plaisier:

So So I mean, that was that's Tim's job though, isn't it? Like just finding news stories like that?

AP Strange:

Yeah, it is. I mean, has a news alert for clowns, I'm sure, but I mean he writes for coast to coast AM, so he has to find weird stories every day. That's awesome.

Robert Skvarla:

He congratulated me when I found the Catholic Yeti cult story. Like, I know. Oh, you're

AP Strange:

the one that found that.

Robert Skvarla:

He was like, you're the only other person who saw this. I have to congratulate you for that. I was like, well, ex Catholic, sometimes I get this stuff.

AP Strange:

Yeah, that is great. That was a weird story.

Robert Skvarla:

Very much yes.

AP Strange:

Yeah, I like that one a lot. Yeah, all right. So as we wind down here do we have any do we have any other thoughts about Darren Morgan that we want to say before we start closing out?

Bradley Plaisier:

Other than thanking him for his writing what other writing credits does he have? It's very few, right?

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah, I don't believe he's ever done anything for film if I remember correctly.

Bradley Plaisier:

Because at the end of that interview, one we were talking about from the film magazine, he says that he wants to do romantic comedy. But I don't know if that he was joking or not. But that does seem really up his alley.

Robert Skvarla:

I mean, yeah, absolutely.

Bradley Plaisier:

But I don't think he's never done one.

Robert Skvarla:

Or the Coprophages sort of has that weird. Yeah

AP Strange:

yeah I mean it was Kelly getting kind of jealous it's it's yeah and funny and weird he played with that sexual tension dynamic between the two of them pretty well

Bradley Plaisier:

Amazingly, like season seven before they get their first kiss, and that's also the Millennium crossover episode.

Robert Skvarla:

Yep. I guess for Morgan, what I would say is a lot of the characters he wrote, oddly, I don't wanna say they, like, humanized the paranormal elements that come with The X Files because that was something they were always trying to do. But if you look at, like, five Bruckman's final repose, that's one of those weird ones where you get one of the more human characters in Peter Boyle's character, where you get this interpretation of a psychic, to my mind, that would be more realistic than anything that we normally get. Someone who has this ability but doesn't know how to use it, or rather can't use it in any way that would make him financially successful. And it drives him crazy.

Robert Skvarla:

Just the way he's kind of learned to live with that and accept it despite the fact that it's ultimately gonna be his downfall is this weirdly human character where you wouldn't normally expect to find that in a comedy about a psychic. Know?

Bradley Plaisier:

For more on this, see John Tenney's Realm of the Weird season three, two episode three where he like meets a guy who seems to be psychic and is super depressed and poor and is really down and it's just like him he doesn't know he says it comes and goes the knowing.

AP Strange:

Wasn't that guy the guy that was in the hospital that he had to keep coming to visit?

Bradley Plaisier:

No. That that was a different guy.

AP Strange:

Alright.

Bradley Plaisier:

But yeah. Yeah. Great great fucking show. Realm of the weird.

AP Strange:

Yeah. I mean, I I think you're right though Robert, mean it's this guy sees his abilities as more of a burden and it's something interestingly enough he came to by accident just thinking about causality, thinking about all the little things that have to happen for something to happen that allowed him to have glimpses of how people were gonna die. It's just like a really cool concept, which

Robert Skvarla:

Like becoming an actuary makes you a psychic. You're right. Yeah.

AP Strange:

And being a bigger fan of the big bopper he was a bunch of other than

Bradley Plaisier:

that not really. Man, the Glenn Morgan wrote like a ton of good episodes but we didn't even get into him.

AP Strange:

Right. Oh,

Robert Skvarla:

So update, neither Morgan wrote anything for the Lone Gunman. It was primarily Vince Gilligan and Frank Spotnitz.

Bradley Plaisier:

Okay.

AP Strange:

Yeah. And those guys weren't slouches either. They were pretty great. No absolutely definitely. I feel like Gilligan wrote Dreamland parts one and two I think but some of those episodes felt like they were trying to do the Derek Rican thing.

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah definitely.

AP Strange:

Yeah.

Bradley Plaisier:

It's all lost a little fun fact. The guy who directed Jose Chung's, whose name I can't remember just like I couldn't when we did the Jose Chung's watch along, directed Reign of Fire with Christian Bale.

AP Strange:

Oh wow. Interesting.

Bradley Plaisier:

Not a good movie.

Robert Skvarla:

He had probably better material to work with on Jose Jones. Yeah.

AP Strange:

Yeah and he got a great cast to work with too.

Bradley Plaisier:

Rob Bowman.

AP Strange:

Oh right, I know that name. He did a lot of the X Files episodes I think.

Bradley Plaisier:

I think so too. Oh he wrote Reign of Fire.

AP Strange:

Oh there you go.

Bradley Plaisier:

What about all time, not best, but personal favorite X Files episode?

AP Strange:

Personal favorite?

Bradley Plaisier:

Whatever that whatever you want that to mean. It can be different tomorrow. Yeah.

AP Strange:

I mean, I I I really think the ones I tend to go back to most, think, are Clyde Bruckman and one that's not Darren Morgan is Unusual Suspects where it's kind of the origin story of The Lone Gunman. I love that one.

Bradley Plaisier:

That's a great one.

AP Strange:

And then there's one that kind of continues that thread later with the lone gunman and Scully. They like trick Scully into coming out to the

Robert Skvarla:

That's great.

Bradley Plaisier:

She she gets drugs and everything. That one's great.

AP Strange:

Yeah. Right.

Bradley Plaisier:

I love the I'm gonna my answer is gonna be different next time I watch an episode, for now, just watched the one with Burt Reynolds in season nine where he's he's god and he That's okay. Goes to play checkers.

AP Strange:

Okay. I never saw that one. I don't know if I'll look that one up. Yeah. I think I kinda just dipped out in the last two seasons.

Bradley Plaisier:

It's mostly a Scully Ray's episode, but it's fantastic.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah. Yeah. You might be the only person, though, Bradley, that's ever said your favorite episode is from season nine of The X Files.

Bradley Plaisier:

My favorite episode is probably personal favorite Arcadia.

Robert Skvarla:

Okay, that's a good one.

Bradley Plaisier:

Like a comfort episode, I guess. But, yeah, the Burt Reynolds one, I was so stoked on it last night when I was watching it.

Robert Skvarla:

I do like oh, sorry. Go ahead.

AP Strange:

I do like the guest stars they got in some of the later seasons. Like, you mentioned Ricky Jay Ricky Jay.

Bradley Plaisier:

Ricky Jay.

AP Strange:

Amazing. Molini in one of them. That was really good.

Bradley Plaisier:

Did I did I send you the correspond the stuff with Ricky j?

AP Strange:

You did. Think it's

Bradley Plaisier:

really cool. His handwriting looks like Dostoyevsky's handwriting or something. It's so cool.

AP Strange:

I have to do a whole episode about Ricky Jay sometime. That would be great.

Bradley Plaisier:

That would be amazing. I would love to. Robert,

AP Strange:

so I'm sorry I cut you off because I think you were gonna say your favorite episode.

Robert Skvarla:

Oh yeah, was gonna say either Clyde Bruckman or Drive Vince Gilligan episode. Oh, fuck. Yeah. With Bryan Cranston.

Bradley Plaisier:

Bryan Cranston. So good.

AP Strange:

Oh. Oh, yeah. That one.

Robert Skvarla:

Essentially Havana syndrome before Havana syndrome.

AP Strange:

Damn. You

Robert Skvarla:

get like Operation Seestead. You get all the fun references in there. And it has such a down and depressing episode because no matter what Mulder does, he can't save Cranston's character. It's just it's a great encapsulation of the darker elements of the episode.

Bradley Plaisier:

It's also funny because there's a realm of the weird episode that's also a very similar thing to Drive that Kenny investigated.

Robert Skvarla:

Oh, Okay. What was it like ELF type stuff?

Bradley Plaisier:

Yeah. It was some people went camping in the woods in the UP and Michigan and then they like thought they were abducted. They kept getting nosebleeds and headaches and bad dreams and there was just this government building in the middle of the woods that was there and then next time Kenny came back to check it out it was gone.

Robert Skvarla:

Yeah, essentially drive. Wow. Although I guess they don't have to drive less than 60 miles an hour.

Bradley Plaisier:

That's right. It's such a funny like plot device or

Robert Skvarla:

it wasn't the recreation of speed.

AP Strange:

Yeah The the movie. I think it was called the bus that couldn't slow down. I had to get the Simpsons reference in there. Okay, gentlemen. So before we go, what you guys up to?

AP Strange:

You got any projects you're working on currently? I heard Robert that you were writing a book.

Robert Skvarla:

I mean, I'm always in the process of writing something, probably a book at some point in the future, but I have something I reached out to Bradley just the other day about that I hoped to have before then. Can't say much about it now. It does involve UFOs and other weird stuff. So I hope to have I wanna get the ball rolling on that as soon as I can.

AP Strange:

Cool. But so if people wanna find you online, where would they go do that?

Robert Skvarla:

Right now, Twitter is the best place. Hopefully, I will have a sub stack or something in the near future, maybe a podcast.

AP Strange:

Awesome. Alright. And Bradley, what do you got going on?

Bradley Plaisier:

The Robert's assignment.

AP Strange:

Yeah. And

Bradley Plaisier:

I'm making gnome shirts again, which isn't gonna be a thing for It's not real scholarly work, but that's what I got going on.

AP Strange:

Well, I love the gnomes. It's really good stuff. That's at bwp.threadlist.com.

Bradley Plaisier:

That's correct thank you very much and then also on Twitter. Yeah, ease.

AP Strange:

All right well thanks so much gentlemen The truth is out there somewhere, and the truth for tonight is Darren Morgan is awesome. So alright. Thanks. Thanks for coming on.

Robert Skvarla:

Yep. Thanks.