Historic X-Files Episode Features Oscar-Winner With Hardly Any Lines

The X-Files isn’t the only show created by Chris Carter. In 1996, Carter’s Millennium premiered, starring Lance Henriksen as a former FBI agent with psychic abilities. The thriller series didn’t enjoy the same success as X-Files, and Millennium‘s final episode aired in May 1999 with a lot in the story left unresolved.

So Carter used his more popular series to tie off what he could. The Season 7 X-Files episode finds Mulder and Scully investigating a case involving the Millennium’s group final attempt to bring about the End of Days–the raising of four FBI agents from the grave as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Whatever fans expected from the first meeting between the stars of The X-Files and Millennium, it was probably more friendly than what we get. When Frank Black (Henriksen) first appears in the episode, he’s checked himself into a psychiatric hospital in an attempt to win back custody of his daughter.

Afraid that getting involved in the case will hurt his chances of seeing his daughter, Black refuses to even look at the files Mulder and Scully bring him. By the end of their first meeting, Mulder expresses as much disrespect for Black as he can muster.

Of course, any ire between Black and Mulder is gone by the end of The X-Files episode after Black risks everything to not only put a stop to the end of the world, but to save Mulder.

Frank Black’s decision to stop hiding is where future Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer comes–very briefly–into the story. Credited simply as “Nurse,” Spencer is only in two scenes and we can only actually see her face in one of them. Her only speaking part is when she responds to Frank, who tells her he needs to check out.

Thirteen years after appearing so briefly in The X-Files, Octavia Spencer won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the role of Minny Jackson in the period drama The Help. She’s since been nominated twice more for the same award–first for Hidden Figures, and the following year for The Shape of Water.

Spencer’s most recent screen appearance was in a Season 7 episode of Young Sheldon. Among her more high profile upcoming projects is the comedy sci-fi film Nobody Nothing Nowhere in which she’ll share the screen with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lucy Liu (another X-Files guest star early in her career).

Along with tying up loose threads from another Carter series and the early appearance of Octavia Spencer, “Millennium” remains a landmark X-Files episode because of the first on-screen kiss between David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson‘s Dana Scully.

Airing in November 1999, “Millennium” is set a month in the future–midnight on New Year’s 2000. The episode ends with Mulder and Scully watching the ball drop as 1999 becomes 2000, and the pair finally deciding to give fans of the series what they’d been begging for since the beginning.