Teso Dos Bichos - Production

Production

"Teso Dos Bichos" was taken by John Shiban, the episode's writer, from an ancient chant. The words translate into archaic Portuguese as "Burial Mound of Small Animals," although other translations have been proposed. In Colombia and Venezuela, the word "bichos" is a euphemism for testicles, something Shiban was unaware of when writing the script. Shiban later joked that this "controversy" would be good for ratings.

The production of the episode was plagued with issues. At the last minute the ending of the episode had to be rewritten; originally, the script called for "hordes" of common house cats to attack Mulder and Scully. Unfortunately, the cats refused to attack under direction and did "pretty much nothing". To further complicate matters, Gillian Anderson revealed to the producers that she was severely allergic to cats. Thus, the whole sequence was nixed. Director Kim Manners called the first three acts of the episode "the best three acts of televisions I ever directed", whereas he referred to the fourth act was as "an absolute disaster." Manners later revealed that he asked series creator Chris Carter for permission to focus on a leopard during the fourth act instead of the cats, saying "I begged Carter 'Please let's revisit the leopard in the teaser because I'm never going to make these cats scary.'"

"Teso Dos Bichos" was strongly disliked by the cast and crew of The X-Files, including both by David Duchovny and Manners. Manners, most notably, was not pleased with the plot and felt "pussycats are not scary." He later made T-shirts and gave them to the cast and crew that read "Teso Dos Bichos Survivor." The episode earned two distinctive nicknames courtesy of Manners. The first, "Second Salmon," referred to the number of re-writes the episode went through. Every time an episode was re-written, the color of the script changed accordingly. "Teso Dos Bichos" went through so many re-writes that the cast ended up with two salmon colored copies. The second nickname, again, courtesy of Manners, was "Teso Dos Bitches."