Production
Co-writer Frank Spotnitz described the episode as a "fortunate accident". Late in the fourth season of the show Gillian Anderson left the show for a week to film her part in the film The Mighty. The producers, knowing that they would have to write an episode without Dana Scully, decided it was not fair to have David Duchovny carry the same workload as in a normal episode considering her absence. As such, a story was devised in which his involvement would be light. This resulted in the decision to write, for the second year in a row, an episode focused on Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi). Howard Gordon, having written the previous Skinner-centric episode, "Avatar" joined Spotnitz and the two wrote the episode over a weekend while another Gordon written episode, "Synchrony" was in production. The writers felt that this was the perfect time to bring in Skinner's deal with The Smoking Man (William B. Davis) to cure Scully's cancer, made in the episode "Memento Mori". Frank Spotnitz said of Skinner's deal, "The hard thing for Skinner was that we had to keep him in the middle. We had him tell Mulder not to bargain with The Smoking Man in order to save Scully's life. And then he himself struck a Faustian bargain with the Cigarette Smoking Man and was in his debt for some kind."
The writing staff felt that "Zero Sum" was a logical place to bring back the bees that were used in the season premiere, "Herrenvolk", feeling it was important to not have something paranormal happen to Skinner in this episode considering that had been done in the previous season. Live bees were used for filming, but showed up poorly in the footage; visual effects technician Laurie Kallsen-George then spent nine days digitally enhancing the footage to improve upon this. The virus-carrying bees would later form a central plot point in the series' 1998 feature film adaptation.
Director Kim Manners noted that the episode "was a really good show for me, because I had not got a chance to work with Mitch. And they wrote a great script, you know? It was really something he could sink his teeth into and he just did a great job. Bill Davis was fabulous in that show too". This was the second episode of the series to not feature Scully, the first being the second season episode "3". Guest actor Morris Panych, portraying the Syndicate assassin The Grey-Haired Man, makes his last appearance in the series in this episode. Panych had previously appeared in "Piper Maru", "Avatar", "Herrenvolk" and "Memento Mori".
Read more about this topic: Zero Sum (The X-Files)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“... this dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the earth.”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)
“The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, nor is it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“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)