Themes
According to Chris Carter, the "whole" idea behind the episode was about numbers and that the "significance of numbers in our lives starts here on the card table where the players are being dealt a hand each." He continued with "the idea is that we're all dealt hands, genetic hands, and maybe even numerological hands that give us basically the tools with which we deal and/or use for our lives." He further stated that the idea was that it was "free will" and "fate", continued with that fate was determined by our own genetics.
The villain in the story, Mad Wayne, had been dealt a bad hand in life. Because of his situation, he acts on his bad impulses. Carter elaborated, "Is it fate that Wayne is about, the character, this is what I was interested in exploring here. As we'll see with the introduction in a moment of a character who throws all of this into question – God – we're going to see what his place is in all of this, or at least explore what Burt Reynolds, playing God here, has to do with the character Wayne." The main idea behind the episode, was that God knows all the numbers, because they are his numbers and he is laying them down and is in "charge of the big game". Being that God is trying to show "us the game", as it was a "game" to be "won or lost", and Wayne has lost this game.
Read more about this topic: Improbable (The X-Files)
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)