The X-Files’ Forgotten Spinoff Is An Artifact Of Another Time
Twenty-five years later, The Lone Gunmen is eerily prescient.
The conspiracy theories of decades past seem downright quaint in 2026. Case in point: The pilot episode of Fox’s X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen, which begins with Richard Langly (Dean Haglund) bringing a tech-world cocktail party to a halt by making the shocking accusation that the company’s new microchip is secretly…collecting data on its users. Twenty-five years later, not only are tech companies blatantly doing exactly that, but the public doesn't seem to be worried about it at all. Still, the scene seems prescient in retrospect — although it wasn’t the series’ most stunning prediction, as we’ll see.
Hackers, conspiracy theorists, and the publishers of the newsletter of the same name, The Lone Gunmen — uptight former federal official Byers (Bruce Harwood), aging ‘60s radical Frohike (Tom Braidwood), and paranoid Gen-X hacker Langly —were first introduced in Season 1 of The X-Files. (Specifically, they first appeared in episode 17, “E.B.E.,” in which Byers delivers the fan-favorite line, “that's why we like you, Mulder. Your ideas are weirder than ours.”) When the Gunmen showed up, you knew you were about to get a lore episode: Their expertise with computers came in handy whenever Mulder and Scully needed to tap into an encrypted database, and their open-minded views made them ideal co-conspirators in Mulder’s ongoing search for the capital-T Truth about alien life on Earth.
That being said, conspiracies of the “deep state” variety were more the Gunmen’s thing. And although they were stereotypical ‘90s nerds — think Dungeons & Dragons, LAN parties, and jokes about their lack of experience with women — just as often, the Gunmen were depicted as smart and resourceful. On The X-Files, they were comic sidekicks who became ironic mascots for fans who saw themselves in these obsessive dorks. The Lone Gunmen attempted to harness this goodwill by making the nerds the heroes.
Everything about The Lone Gunmen is very of its time, from the Mission: Impossible tribute in the pilot episode, to the techno soundtrack, to the touch of Gen-X sarcasm that runs throughout the first season. The series’ belief in exposing corruption and protecting civil liberties feels especially old-fashioned: On The Lone Gunmen, all the trio has to do is threaten to “tell the world” about whatever sinister scheme they’re investigating that week, and whoever’s behind it will cooperate, terrified of the American public’s response to learning “the truth.” In a world where even the U.S. government coming out and confirming the existence of UFOs failed to move the cultural needle, it’s nice to immerse yourself in a world where the government actually cares about what the people think.
The Lone Gunmen make an appearance in The X-Files.
The Lone Gunmen debuted on March 4, 2001, eight months before the premiere of the ninth and final season of The X-Files. It was written by a team led by X-Files’ creator Chris Carter, backed by fan favorites John Shiban, Frank Spotnitz, and future Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. Critics were enthusiastic about early episodes, but its monotonous tone — The Lone Gunmen was more consistently comedic than The X-Files, which could shift from silly to scary in a single episode — and lack of supernatural elements made it difficult for the series to sustain its momentum. (The lack of sexual tension between the leads didn’t help.)
Ratings dropped after the pilot episode, and the first (and only) season of The Lone Gunmen was finished by June of that year. It was not renewed, and has never been made available on streaming. It lives on as a quirky artifact of its era on YouTube, albeit with one jaw-dropping asterisk: Although it didn’t get all of the details right, The Lone Gunmen predicted 9/11.
You heard that right. In the series premiere, which aired six months before 9/11, Byers is investigating the death of his father when he uncovers a false-flag conspiracy to crash a commercial airliner into the World Trade Center, using a piece of top-secret government technology to override the computers of a Boeing 727 and fly it into the Twin Towers. Why would the government do this? As an excuse to start a war that will increase arms sales and enrich weapons manufacturers, of course.
On the show, Byers and his dad (who, spoiler alert, is not dead) are able to override the override, allowing the pilot to regain control and steer away from the World Trade Center at the last minute. In real life, of course, it didn’t go down like that at all, and nearly 3,000 people died and 6,000 were injured on September 11, 2001. Perhaps it’s for the best that The Lone Gunmen was off the air by the time its most dramatic fictional scenario became frighteningly real.
