Production
The episode's gulag scenes were inspired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (left), while its tagline is a reference to Galileo Galilei (right)The episode's title refers to terma, a set of Buddhist teachings hidden from the world. Series creator Chris Carter felt these represented the secrets kept by the Syndicate. The opening credits of the episode saw the series' usual tagline of "The truth is out there" replaced with "E pur si muove". The phrase, Italian for "and yet, it moves", is attributed to astronomer Galileo Galilei, when forced by the Roman Inquisition to denounce his belief in heliocentrism. The episode's gulag scenes were inspired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novels The Gulag Archipelago (1973) and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963).
Shots of the oil refinery seen in the episode were filmed at a thermal energy station situated in Port Moody, British Columbia. The climactic oil-well explosion was achieved through physical effects, with crew member Dave Gauthier building a replica wellhead in a disused rock quarry, through which liquid was piped at pressures of 250 pounds per square inch (1,700,000 Pa) to create a plume 300 feet (91 m) high. This wellhead was rigged to spray oil-colored water for shots of the plume itself, which was switched with a remote control to a stream of kerosene and liquid propane for the shots involving the oil catching fire.
Actor Nicholas Lea, who plays recurring character Alex Krycek, worked with a Russian-speaking vocal coach to ensure that his dialogue was delivered with the correct accent and stresses. Malcolm Stewart, who portrayed NASA scientist Dr. Sacks in the episode, had previously appeared in several earlier episodes of the series, including "Pilot", the second season episode "3", and the third season's "Avatar". Carter has called "Terma", along with its companion piece "Tunguska", "an action piece from beginning to end".
Read more about this topic: Terma (The X-Files)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)