Production
The icy caverns featured in the episode were constructed inside a warehouse which had previously been used for cold storage; and required the use of truckloads of lumber and 10,000 square feet (930 m2) of Styrofoam. The set would become one of the most expensive and elaborate built during the series' history. The set required a constant temperature of −21 °F (−29 °C) in order to maintain the real snow and ice used to decorate it. This refrigeration allowed the actors' breath to visibly fog up, and allowed the cast to "have a place that feels real" to aid their acting.
The outdoor scenes were filmed around Vancouver's Mount Seymour, with weather conditions making shooting difficult enough to require an extra day of work. The episode's production took place just a week before David Duchovny's wedding, with his fiancée Téa Leoni visiting the set during filming. The first cut of the episode was twelve minutes too long, resulting in some of the scenes in the mountains being removed. Series creator Chris Carter re-edited the entire episode two days before it aired.
Carter has described "Gethsemane" as a "big ideas episode", noting that its main concern is debating "the existence of God". The title of the episode is an allusion to the biblical garden of Gethsemane where Jesus was betrayed by Judas Iscariot. The character Michael Kritschgau was named after a former drama teacher of Gillian Anderson. The tagline for this episode is "Believe the lie", changed from the usual "The truth is out there". This episode marks the first appearance of one of Scully's brothers since a flashback in the season two episode "One Breath". Section Chief Scott Blevins makes his first appearance since the fourth episode of the first season, "Conduit".
Read more about this topic: Gethsemane (The X-Files)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“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 development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)