John Fitzgerald Byers, Melvin Frohike, and Richard Langly (a.k.a Ringo) were the most popular side characters on The X-Files for years. They added humor and investigative context to the series and were – as Agent Scully put it in season one – the most paranoid men she had ever met. They only appeared in a few episodes in every season, but their limited recurring parts gained popularity so quickly that they ended up getting their own spinoff series that ran during season seven of The X-Files. By then, interest in The X-Files was beginning to wane and the spinoff, The Lone Gunmen, only lasted thirteen episodes. Its existence has fallen into obscurity as the DVD of the entire season is long since out of print and it isn’t streaming anywhere except for a bootleg on YouTube.
It was in season five of The X-Files that rabid fans learned how these three enigmatic characters came together and how they met Agent Mulder. The following season, the episode received a sequel set in Las Vegas. While these two episodes weren’t in the same season, they are two of the better episodes of the series and I’ll be discussing both here as well as the spinoff that I had to sit through the painfully plentiful ads on YouTube to revisit.
Unusual Suspects – Season 5, Episode 3, Aired November 2, 1997
This episode aired as the third episode in season five and came into fruition because when filming for season five was scheduled to start, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny were still in Los Angeles filming the X-Files movie that was scheduled to be released in a year after the end of season five. Producers came up with this episode to fill the gap as it only used David Duchovny in limited capacity and Gillian Anderson isn’t even in it. Interestingly enough, this episode also serves as a crossover with the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street and features Detective John Munch (actor Richard Belzer) from that series. I’ll fully admit to being unaware of that show’s existence at the time of this episode’s airing and I’ve never been interested in watching it since discovering that fact.
Anyway, this episode takes place in 1989 when Mulder first found what he believed was evidence of extraterrestrials. Byers, Frohike, and Langly are found at the scene with Mulder and interrogated. Their statements provide us with what really happened before the SWAT team found them and Mulder in a warehouse.
Flashback to the beginning of the story when Byers, working for the FCC, attends a computer convention. Frohike and Langly are there as well selling stolen cable television and both refer to Byers as a nark more than once during this episode. Byers meets a beautiful woman who says her name is Holly. She feeds him a fake story about searching for her daughter and her only clue is a piece of paper with ARPANET/WHTCORPS written on it. She convinces him to hack into this link to the Defense Department’s network. He finds a file linked to her daughter, Susanne Modeski, right as Mulder walks by. Holly convinces him that Mulder is her ex-boyfriend.
Long story short, they enlist Frohike and Langly to help them decipher the file and decide against hurting Mulder when they find out he is an FBI agent. Byers’ FCC colleague is arrested for hacking the Defense Department’s network prompting the three men look up Holly in the FBI database only to find that she is actually Susanne Modeski and that she has no daughter. She admits to being part of a government plan to test an aerosol gas that causes paranoia and anxiety on civilians in Baltimore and she is trying to stop it. They end up at the warehouse and find the gas stored in asthma inhalers. Mulder arrives to arrest them when more men arrive led by Mr. X – the man who was Mulder’s government informant in season one – who makes a comment about JFK’s assassination being a lone gunman. A great origin of a name if I ever heard one.
Modeski disappears into a van with tinted windows that also has Mr. X in it, leaving Byers, Frohike, and Langly wondering how they would ever find her. As a whole, this episode sets up how Mr. X and Mulder met and shows that Mr. X wants Mulder as an ally in the future. Through this, it unifies Langly, Frohike, and Byers because they see the depths of what the government is willing to do to cover up nefarious plans. For an X-Files episode that really isn’t an X-File, this episode is pretty great.
Three of a Kind – Season 6, Episode 20, Aired May 2, 1999
At a convention in Las Vegas, Byers sees Susanne Modeski and pursues her. The episode actually starts with Byers talking about a dream he has that his namesake, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, wasn’t assassinated and the world is at peace. He is married with kids to Susanne. And then this life disappears leaving him alone. He admits to Langly and Frohike that he still harbors feelings for Susanne Modeski even though he only knew her for a day.
I’ll discuss this episode more in depth when I go through season six. Together these two episodes give Susanne Modeski a great arc and allow us to see deeper into how Byers feels about the work they are doing. The second episode does not feature Mulder in person because he was preparing to direct X-Files episode The Unnatural, so we only hear his voice. So, for the second time, we have an episode about the Lone Gunmen because one or both of the leads for The X-Files was absent for the week of filming. I’m not complaining. These episodes increased their popularity allowing for their spinoff to be greenlit by Fox.
The Lone Gunmen – Pilot Airdate March 4, 2001
Yes, the pilot for this series aired just six months before 9/11. The plot of that pilot episode paralleled with the events of September 11 in that the plot revolved around bad government agents trying to take control of an airplane so they could crash it. Fortunately, that plot was foiled. Television often has better endings than real life.
When this series aired, it was obvious from the beginning that Chris Carter and Vince Gilligan were giving it a different tone than The X-Files. While Mulder and Scully’s adventures in the paranormal only sometimes had humorous episodes, Langly, Frohike, and Byers would end up in a show of their own with a more lighthearted tone. Earlier episodes were decidedly on the slapstick side of funny, and only some of the jokes landed the way they were supposed to. It made it hard to take them seriously until the second half of the series when their cases and the tone became a little more serious. Having Walter Skinner in an episode helped as well.
During the show, they enlisted the help of Jimmy who helped them investigate. Jimmy’s character, for me anyway, was borderline unlikable because he was so naive when he started out. Sometimes I even wondered if he was even on the right side, but he was younger than the main three characters and much better looking. I did not find the innocent but-he’s-still-learning and he’s-still-young aspect of his character at all endearing. Even upon rewatch all these years later, I still feel like Jimmy was only added to give women something nice to look at. Let’s be honest. He’s no Agent Mulder.
Speaking of nice to look at, the series also had femme fatale Yves Adele Harlow. Her name is an anagram for Lee Harvey Oswald so she fits right in the theme of the show. Sometimes she was the Lone Gunmen’s ally and sometimes she was their rival which meant she was just as enigmatic as the men she worked with. Except Jimmy. Boring, little Jimmy. Anyhoo, her real name was finally revealed in an X-Files episode in season nine and I’ll discuss that more when I get that far. I just wanted the Lone Gunmen in the forefront of my mind going forward.
The thing about The Lone Gunmen is that it worked as a spinoff, but much like Carter’s other show, Millennium, it also ended on a cliffhanger before the show was unceremoniously cancelled by Fox. Like Millennium, Carter used The X-Files to give The Lone Gunmen a real finale by doing one final crossover. And there were several crossovers between these two shows and I look forward to discussing them when I get to them.
Until next week, the Lone Gunmen are out there.
Discover more from Becky Tyler Art and Photography
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Becky Tyler Art and Photography 
John Fitzgerald Byers, Melvin Frohike, and Richard Langly (a.k.a Ringo) were the most popular side characters on The X-Files for years. They added humor and investigative context to the series and were – as Agent Scully put it in season one – the most paranoid men she had ever met. They only appeared in a few episodes in every season, but their limited recurring parts gained popularity so quickly that they ended up getting their own spinoff series that ran during season seven of The X-Files. By then, interest in The X-Files was beginning to wane and the spinoff, The Lone Gunmen, only lasted thirteen episodes. Its existence has fallen into obscurity as the DVD of the entire season is long since out of print and it isn’t streaming anywhere except for a bootleg on YouTube.
It was in season five of The X-Files that rabid fans learned how these three enigmatic characters came together and how they met Agent Mulder. The following season, the episode received a sequel set in Las Vegas. While these two episodes weren’t in the same season, they are two of the better episodes of the series and I’ll be discussing both here as well as the spinoff that I had to sit through the painfully plentiful ads on YouTube to revisit.
Unusual Suspects – Season 5, Episode 3, Aired November 2, 1997
This episode aired as the third episode in season five and came into fruition because when filming for season five was scheduled to start, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny were still in Los Angeles filming the X-Files movie that was scheduled to be released in a year after the end of season five. Producers came up with this episode to fill the gap as it only used David Duchovny in limited capacity and Gillian Anderson isn’t even in it. Interestingly enough, this episode also serves as a crossover with the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street and features Detective John Munch (actor Richard Belzer) from that series. I’ll fully admit to being unaware of that show’s existence at the time of this episode’s airing and I’ve never been interested in watching it since discovering that fact.
Anyway, this episode takes place in 1989 when Mulder first found what he believed was evidence of extraterrestrials. Byers, Frohike, and Langly are found at the scene with Mulder and interrogated. Their statements provide us with what really happened before the SWAT team found them and Mulder in a warehouse.
Flashback to the beginning of the story when Byers, working for the FCC, attends a computer convention. Frohike and Langly are there as well selling stolen cable television and both refer to Byers as a nark more than once during this episode. Byers meets a beautiful woman who says her name is Holly. She feeds him a fake story about searching for her daughter and her only clue is a piece of paper with ARPANET/WHTCORPS written on it. She convinces him to hack into this link to the Defense Department’s network. He finds a file linked to her daughter, Susanne Modeski, right as Mulder walks by. Holly convinces him that Mulder is her ex-boyfriend.
Long story short, they enlist Frohike and Langly to help them decipher the file and decide against hurting Mulder when they find out he is an FBI agent. Byers’ FCC colleague is arrested for hacking the Defense Department’s network prompting the three men look up Holly in the FBI database only to find that she is actually Susanne Modeski and that she has no daughter. She admits to being part of a government plan to test an aerosol gas that causes paranoia and anxiety on civilians in Baltimore and she is trying to stop it. They end up at the warehouse and find the gas stored in asthma inhalers. Mulder arrives to arrest them when more men arrive led by Mr. X – the man who was Mulder’s government informant in season one – who makes a comment about JFK’s assassination being a lone gunman. A great origin of a name if I ever heard one.
Modeski disappears into a van with tinted windows that also has Mr. X in it, leaving Byers, Frohike, and Langly wondering how they would ever find her. As a whole, this episode sets up how Mr. X and Mulder met and shows that Mr. X wants Mulder as an ally in the future. Through this, it unifies Langly, Frohike, and Byers because they see the depths of what the government is willing to do to cover up nefarious plans. For an X-Files episode that really isn’t an X-File, this episode is pretty great.
Three of a Kind – Season 6, Episode 20, Aired May 2, 1999
At a convention in Las Vegas, Byers sees Susanne Modeski and pursues her. The episode actually starts with Byers talking about a dream he has that his namesake, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, wasn’t assassinated and the world is at peace. He is married with kids to Susanne. And then this life disappears leaving him alone. He admits to Langly and Frohike that he still harbors feelings for Susanne Modeski even though he only knew her for a day.
I’ll discuss this episode more in depth when I go through season six. Together these two episodes give Susanne Modeski a great arc and allow us to see deeper into how Byers feels about the work they are doing. The second episode does not feature Mulder in person because he was preparing to direct X-Files episode The Unnatural, so we only hear his voice. So, for the second time, we have an episode about the Lone Gunmen because one or both of the leads for The X-Files was absent for the week of filming. I’m not complaining. These episodes increased their popularity allowing for their spinoff to be greenlit by Fox.
The Lone Gunmen – Pilot Airdate March 4, 2001
Yes, the pilot for this series aired just six months before 9/11. The plot of that pilot episode paralleled with the events of September 11 in that the plot revolved around bad government agents trying to take control of an airplane so they could crash it. Fortunately, that plot was foiled. Television often has better endings than real life.
When this series aired, it was obvious from the beginning that Chris Carter and Vince Gilligan were giving it a different tone than The X-Files. While Mulder and Scully’s adventures in the paranormal only sometimes had humorous episodes, Langly, Frohike, and Byers would end up in a show of their own with a more lighthearted tone. Earlier episodes were decidedly on the slapstick side of funny, and only some of the jokes landed the way they were supposed to. It made it hard to take them seriously until the second half of the series when their cases and the tone became a little more serious. Having Walter Skinner in an episode helped as well.
During the show, they enlisted the help of Jimmy who helped them investigate. Jimmy’s character, for me anyway, was borderline unlikable because he was so naive when he started out. Sometimes I even wondered if he was even on the right side, but he was younger than the main three characters and much better looking. I did not find the innocent but-he’s-still-learning and he’s-still-young aspect of his character at all endearing. Even upon rewatch all these years later, I still feel like Jimmy was only added to give women something nice to look at. Let’s be honest. He’s no Agent Mulder.
Speaking of nice to look at, the series also had femme fatale Yves Adele Harlow. Her name is an anagram for Lee Harvey Oswald so she fits right in the theme of the show. Sometimes she was the Lone Gunmen’s ally and sometimes she was their rival which meant she was just as enigmatic as the men she worked with. Except Jimmy. Boring, little Jimmy. Anyhoo, her real name was finally revealed in an X-Files episode in season nine and I’ll discuss that more when I get that far. I just wanted the Lone Gunmen in the forefront of my mind going forward.
The thing about The Lone Gunmen is that it worked as a spinoff, but much like Carter’s other show, Millennium, it also ended on a cliffhanger before the show was unceremoniously cancelled by Fox. Like Millennium, Carter used The X-Files to give The Lone Gunmen a real finale by doing one final crossover. And there were several crossovers between these two shows and I look forward to discussing them when I get to them.
Until next week, the Lone Gunmen are out there.
Discover more from Becky Tyler Art and Photography
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
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