We just wanted to write and say how thrilled we are at the news of another "The X-Files" feature. We are best friends who cannot begin to express our gratitude for the entire creative team who brought the series to fruition all those years ago. Why? We are Caileigh & Morgan, and we met nine years ago thanks to our love of the series — at just 13 and 14 years of age.
The "edited" version of our first meeting is that we got to talking at the mall in the spring of 1998 (as eighth and ninth graders) while purchasing magazines with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson on the covers. Now, that is not exactly a lie, but the actual story? We met in a chatroom for the show, and both being Shippers who understood punctuation, grammar, and larger vocabulary words, we soon began to private message each other. The catch to this? Neither one of us had the Internet in our homes — Caileigh was on the phone with a friend, instructing her what to type; Morgan was using the computer at a friend's house. (Timing is everything, and we cannot imagine our lives if fate had not intervened on that one.) This chatroom discussion led to emailing, and a few weeks went by before we accidentally realized we lived just 45 minutes apart from one another. Our schools were football rivals, we shopped at the same mall, we were about the same age!! So, obviously, despite all of Oprah's warnings about such an idea, we decided to meet our online friend in person. Where? At the mall, of course.
It was clear from that first day (May 8th, 1998) outside the candy shop in the mall in a tiny town in Pennsylvania, that we had found a clandestine "soulmate" friendship. Without yourself, Chris Carter, Kim Manners, Rob Bowman, Vince Gilligan, Morgan & Wong, the dearly departed Randy Stone, and of course Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny … we would never have met. We are still the greatest of friends, almost nine years later. Naturally our friendship transcends "The X-Files," but it is what brought us together and remains at the heart and core of us as a unit. Caileigh lives in New York now, Morgan lives in Maine. We see each other as much as possible, and due to our distance, it is ironic that much of our communication has reverted back to its earliest of incarnations — through the Internet.
We still obsess about "The X-Files" as if it were still in production. We cannot watch the Pilot or "Squeeze" or "Tooms" or "Duane Barry"/"Ascension"/"One Breath" or "Nisei" or "Piper Maru" or "Pusher" or "Tunguska"/"Terma" or "Detour" or "Emily" or "Bad Blood" or "Kitsunegari" or "The End" or "The Beginning" or "Triangle" or both "Dreamland"s or "The Sixth Extinction" or "TSE: Amor Fati" or "Milagro" or "Millennium" or "all things" or "Hollywood AD" or "Requiem" or "Within" or "Per Manum" or "Alone" or "Essence" or "Existence" or "Trust No 1" or "The Truth" … and all of the other ones in between … without hyperventilating, hugging, jumping about, and crying. We constantly react to an episode as if we are viewing it for the first time — which speaks volumes, we think, in terms of the show's production value and integrity. It is truly, truly impossible for us to express to you how deeply the show affected us, impacted us, and helped to change and grow and shape us as adolescents. It may seem trivial to credit a television show for forming us into the people we are today, but for us, it is the truth. We pity the poor men who enter our lives, for it must be difficult to live up to a standard as high as a boy going to friggin' Antarctica to rescue a girl out of green goo in a spaceship under the ice.
We spent the summer of 1998 in a darkened movie theatre, watching "The X-Files" film (and perhaps you can clear up a nagging question for us — was "Fight The Future" the actual title, or was it the tagline?), often twice per day. Prior to its release, we begged and bothered the manager of the local movie theatre so much that he decided to show it, as he had actually initially decided not to. One of our favourite moves was asking him loudly in the presence of throngs of other movie-goers, prompting them to query him about showing the film upon its release date, as well. We won. He not only ran the film for most of the summer, but upon closing it gave us the promotional poster used in his display. Being the silly young teenagers that we were, we squealed and hugged him and ran out to our ride pumping the rolled up poster high in the air — like athletes who had won a trophy.
It didn't end there, for us. We persuaded our parents to let us skip school on 10.13.1998, and then drive us to the mall, so that we could be together at 10:13 a.m. and attempt to purchase the film on VHS at that exact time. We spent the entire day geeked out in front of the television, watching the film in its entirety twice and then spending a good two hours fixated on The Hallway Scene, before viewing the movie in whole again several more times. Then, of course, got out our respective stacks of tapes to watch our favourite episodes. It was a beautiful marathon only a true X-Phile could ever understand, complete with us surrounding ourselves with our treasured memorabilia.
"The X-Files" introduced us to and presented us with scientific, philosophical, and religious concepts in a way that reached us. Ultimately, to us it wasn't about aliens or conspiracies or viruses or garbage monsters … it was about hope, and faith, and believing in something. Through the beautiful acting, storytelling, writing, directing, and editing … we were then, and remain so to this day, so strongly drawn to the series. We continue to quote lines from the show, and they are so intrinsically a part of us and so ingrained in our brains that we even do it by accident, on occasion. We can still walk into a room with an episode on and, in a split nondescript moment of a scene, identify the episode by title and season. We actually have witnesses to this. As we mature and gain life experience, we continue to see various episodes and plotlines in a whole new light. We identify with things that we undoubtedly understood on an intellectual plane when we were younger, though have now actually experienced on some level. We see certain stories so much more profoundly now. What was always too amazing for words suddenly becomes breathtaking. As we grow up, we get to watch episodes anew and analyze them all over again, with more depth and complexity.
This ended up being a much longer email than we had intended — such is our love for the show and our appreciation of your work. We're also just a little verbose and (characteristically) exuberant. We know that you are busy, not only with your own projects but, of course, you have a certain special something we cannot wait for you to start working on. Thank you for reading our novel of a letter, if you managed to get this far. Thank you for being an instrumental part of the very entity that brought our friendship together. Thank you for being the prolific writer that you are.
Thank you so very much for your incredible words and dedication over the years.
Caileigh & Morgan
New York, NY & York, ME
