The X-Files Episode Nearly Shut Down By College Students

For this weird X-Files tale of college shenanigans to make sense, we need to first do a quick recap of “Fallen Angel.” This is the episode where Mulder gets in hot water while investigating a crashed UFO before getting arrested by the military and very nearly fired by the FBI. He meets a new ally, Max Fenig, but it’s clear this nerdy alien abduction survivor won’t be much help against the invisible alien menace stalking our heroes.

However, the X-Files crew working on “Fallen Angel” had something scarier than an invisible alien to worry about. The final scene of the episode was shot on location at Simon Fraser University. The mountaintop campus made for a great location for this spooky episode, but it also had very little parking available even on a good day, and this made things infinitely more difficult during filming.

The X-Files location manager Todd Pittson later described how bad things got when filming “Fallen Angel.” According to him, “It became a real military exercise when parking generators, worktrucks and trailers near access points to locations.” As you might imagine, simply finding room for all these vehicles, generators, and trailers on a crowded campus was bad enough, but (as in the show) it was the human element that really made everything worse.

Pittson also claimed that he faced a major challenge “ensuring that crew members did not become lost between circus parking and location in the throng of student activity and the vast maze of concrete ‘ambiguity.” He didn’t elaborate on what “concrete ‘ambiguity’” meant (it makes for a heck of a post-punk band name), but it sounds like many of the crew had trouble finding their way from Point A to Point B on campus.

That makes perfect sense: it often takes full-time students weeks to learn the lay of the land, so first-time visitors to the campus were always destined to get more than a bit turned around.

Fortunately, Pittson’s time working on The X-Files had given him a good sense of humor, and he ended up finding the “Fallen Angel” production difficulties quite ironic. As he later said of these difficulties, they made Deep Throat’s advice “Keep your friends close, your enemies closer” downright “prophetic.” After all, once a TV production crew set up in a very crowded campus in the middle of the semester, nobody had any choice but to keep friends, enemies, and everyone in between very close.

As usual, The X-Files crew powered through these difficulties and shot the final scene despite difficulties with everything from student parking to students themselves. That scene was just one crucial element in an excellent early episode that established the series’ reputation for cool characters and creepy situations. And we can only assume the campus setting felt familiar to series star David Duchovny, who earned a Master’s degree and began working on a PhD before trading academia for life as a Hollywood star.