Miracle Man (The X-Files)
Encyclopedia
"Miracle Man" is the eighteenth episode of the first season
of the American science fiction
television series The X-Files
. It premiered on the Fox network
on March 18, 1994. It was written by Howard Gordon
and series creator Chris Carter
, directed by Michael Lange
, and featured guest appearances by R. D. Call
and Scott Bairstow
. The episode is a "Monster-of-the-Week" story, unconnected to the series' wider mythology
. "Miracle Man" earned a Nielsen household rating of 7.5, being watched by 7.1 million people in its initial broadcast; and received mixed reviews from critics.
When FBI
special agents Dana Scully
(Gillian Anderson
) and Fox Mulder
(David Duchovny
) receive a video tape of a faith healer
whose latest patient died mysteriously, the agents come to believe the healer's ministry may be covering up several murders.
Ten years later, Dana Scully
shows Fox Mulder
a videotape of a religious service led by the now-grown Hartley, who has become an evangelical faith healer
for a ministry run by Calvin. The video shows the second of two supposed healings which later left the patient dead. The agents arrive at Tennessee
to find Samuel missing, though he later turns up drunk at a bar, his faith shaken by what has happened. The agents doubt his ability, but he is able to convince Mulder that he knows the latter has lost a sister—Samantha
—at a young age. Mulder has been seeing visions of Samantha, and continues to see them. Samuel is arrested, but at his bail hearing the courtroom fills with a swarm of locusts, allowing him to escape.
Once freed, Samuel returns to his ministry and attempts to heal a woman in a wheelchair. However, she begins to suffer a seizure and dies, leading to Samuel being rearrested. An autopsy reveals the woman died of cyanide poisoning, whilst Mulder and Scully find evidence that the swarm of locusts, which were actually grasshoppers common to the area, was guided by someone to the courtroom through the building's ventilation system. Mulder believes Samuel to be innocent, though before he can convince Maurice Daniels, the town sheriff, of this, the sheriff allows two men to beat Samuel to death.
At his home, Leonard Vance—the burnt man who had been revived in the prologue, and who has become a vocal member of the ministry—sees a ghostly vision of Samuel, who accuses him of betraying the church and being guilty of the murders. Vance confesses and blames his bitterness at having been resurrected with such a scarred and deformed visage. Mulder and Scully, who have been able to trace a large purchase of grasshoppers to Vance, arrive to find the man dying of cyanide poisoning from his own glass of water. He confesses to the agents before falling dead.
As the agents prepare to finish work on the case, they receive a phone call to say that Samuel's body has gone missing from the morgue, and witnesses have seen him walking around, badly bruised. Meanwhile, Sheriff Daniels is visited by a deputy, who arrests him for questioning by the district attorney over Samuel's death. As Mulder and Scully leave Tennessee, the Miracle Ministry is being closed down, and Mulder sees one last vision of his missing sister before he gets into his car.
without the aid of his long-term collaborator Alex Gansa
. The pair had worked on several other series before The X-Files, and had also contributed the episodes "Conduit
", "Ghost in the Machine", "Fallen Angel" and "Lazarus" to the series so far. Series creator Chris Carter
recalls being asked to collaborate on the episode, saying "Howard came to my house, and said, 'Help me out,' so we went to my living room and put up this bulletin board and in a matter of hours we came up with this story". Originally the script had called for more overt religious imagery, though censors at Fox objected to depictions of faith healer Samuel being beaten to death whilst in a cruciform pose, leading to scenes being cut.
Exterior shots of the town were filmed on location in Steveston, British Columbia
—a location which had previously been used in the earlier first season episode "Gender Bender". Scenes set in the home of Reverend Hartley were shot in a mansion in the Langley
area, with the crew taking advantage of an old filled-in swimming pool in the building to set up the necessary equipment. All of the scenes set in the faith healer's tent were filmed in one day, and involved over three hundred extras
. Producer R. W. Goodwin
felt that the greatest difficulty in creating the episode was the challenge in finding enough actors in the Vancouver area who could portray a convincing Southern United States accent, leading to the hiring of a dialect coach to prevent the cast from sounding "like they were coming from fifteen different parts of the South".
on March 18, 1994, and was first broadcast in the United Kingdom
on BBC Two
on January 26, 1995. The episode earned a Nielsen household rating of 7.5 with a 13 share, meaning that roughly 7.5 percent of all television-equipped households, and 13 percent of households watching TV, were tuned in to the episode. A total of 7.1 million households watched this episode during its original airing.
In a retrospective of the first season in Entertainment Weekly
, the episode was rated a B-. Scott Bairstow's guest role was praised, though it was noted that "an ultimately contrived plot and a stereotypical Bible-thumping Southern milieu make for a case more suited to Jessica Fletcher
than Mulder and Scully". Zack Handlen, writing for The A.V. Club
, described it as "a largely predictable story that hits all the middle-of-the-road marks", finding the religious imagery to have been used to little effect. Matt Haigh, writing for Den of Geek, felt that the identity of the killer was one of the few endings amongst first season episodes that he had found genuinely surprising, though he attributed this to the episode's focus on Mulder's personal history. The use of Mulder's visions of his sister Samantha as a motivation for his actions in this episode has been seen as "opening up" the overarching search for the truth about her through the series. The plot for "Miracle Man" was also adapted as a novel for young adults in 2000 by Terry Bisson
.
The X-Files (season 1)
The first season of the science fiction television series The X-Files commenced airing on the Fox network in the United States on September 10, 1993 and concluded on the same channel on May 13, 1994 after airing all 24 episodes....
of the American science fiction
Science fiction on television
Science fiction first appeared on a television program during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Special effects and other production techniques allow creators to present a living visual image of an imaginary world not limited by the constraints of reality; this makes television an excellent medium...
television series The X-Files
The X-Files
The X-Files is an American science fiction television series and a part of The X-Files franchise, created by screenwriter Chris Carter. The program originally aired from to . The show was a hit for the Fox network, and its characters and slogans became popular culture touchstones in the 1990s...
. It premiered on the Fox network
Fox Broadcasting Company
Fox Broadcasting Company, commonly referred to as Fox Network or simply Fox , is an American commercial broadcasting television network owned by Fox Entertainment Group, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Launched on October 9, 1986, Fox was the highest-rated broadcast network in the...
on March 18, 1994. It was written by Howard Gordon
Howard Gordon
Howard Gordon is an American screenwriter and producer.-Life and career:Gordon was born in Queens, New York, New York. After graduating from Princeton in 1984, Gordon came to Los Angeles with fellow filmmaker Alex Gansa to pursue a career in writing for television. Both broke into the industry...
and series creator Chris Carter
Chris Carter (screenwriter)
Christopher Carl Carter is an American screenwriter, film director and producer. He is the creator of The X-Files and Millennium.- Ten Thirteen Productions :...
, directed by Michael Lange
Michael Lange
Michael Lange is an American television director and record producer.-Early life:Born and raised just outside New York City, in Mamaroneck, New York and attending Mamaroneck High School where he was heavily involved in music and a bit in drama, Michael Lange first developed a taste for drama in...
, and featured guest appearances by R. D. Call
R. D. Call
R. D. Call is an American film and television actor.-Biography:R. D. Call was raised in Utah. He began his acting career in college while attending Utah State University and Weber State University....
and Scott Bairstow
Scott Bairstow
Scott Hamilton Bairstow is a Canadian-born American actor known for his roles as "Newt Call" on the Lonesome Dove series in Canada and as "Ned Grayson" on the American television drama series, Party of Five...
. The episode is a "Monster-of-the-Week" story, unconnected to the series' wider mythology
Mythology of The X-Files
The mythology of The X-Files, sometimes referred to as its mytharc by the show's staff and fans, follows the quest of FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder , a believer in supernatural phenomena, and Dana Scully , his skeptical partner. Their boss, FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner was also often...
. "Miracle Man" earned a Nielsen household rating of 7.5, being watched by 7.1 million people in its initial broadcast; and received mixed reviews from critics.
When FBI
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
special agents Dana Scully
Dana Scully
FBI Special Agent Dana Katherine Scully, M.D. is a fictional character and protagonist on the Fox television series The X-Files , played by Gillian Anderson. She also appeared in two theatrical films based on the series...
(Gillian Anderson
Gillian Anderson
Gillian Leigh Anderson is an American actress.After beginning her career in theatre, Anderson achieved international recognition for her role as Special Agent Dana Scully on the American television series The X-Files. During the show's nine seasons, Anderson won Emmy, Golden Globe, and Screen...
) and Fox Mulder
Fox Mulder
FBI Special Agent Fox William Mulder is a fictional character and protagonist in the American Fox television shows The X-Files and The Lone Gunmen, two science fiction shows about a government conspiracy to hide or deny the truth of Alien existence. Mulder's peers consider his theories on...
(David Duchovny
David Duchovny
David William Duchovny is an American actor, writer and director. He has won Golden Globe awards for his work as FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder on The X-Files and as Hank Moody on Californication.-Early life:...
) receive a video tape of a faith healer
Faith healing
Faith healing is healing through spiritual means. The healing of a person is brought about by religious faith through prayer and/or rituals that, according to adherents, stimulate a divine presence and power toward correcting disease and disability. Belief in divine intervention in illness or...
whose latest patient died mysteriously, the agents come to believe the healer's ministry may be covering up several murders.
Plot
In 1983, a young boy pushes his way past an emergency crew to open a body bag, before telling the severely-burnt body to "rise up and heal". He is reprimanded by one crew member, but the boy's father convinces those present to allow him to continue. As he does so, the body inside the bag begins to revive.Ten years later, Dana Scully
Dana Scully
FBI Special Agent Dana Katherine Scully, M.D. is a fictional character and protagonist on the Fox television series The X-Files , played by Gillian Anderson. She also appeared in two theatrical films based on the series...
shows Fox Mulder
Fox Mulder
FBI Special Agent Fox William Mulder is a fictional character and protagonist in the American Fox television shows The X-Files and The Lone Gunmen, two science fiction shows about a government conspiracy to hide or deny the truth of Alien existence. Mulder's peers consider his theories on...
a videotape of a religious service led by the now-grown Hartley, who has become an evangelical faith healer
Faith healing
Faith healing is healing through spiritual means. The healing of a person is brought about by religious faith through prayer and/or rituals that, according to adherents, stimulate a divine presence and power toward correcting disease and disability. Belief in divine intervention in illness or...
for a ministry run by Calvin. The video shows the second of two supposed healings which later left the patient dead. The agents arrive at Tennessee
Tennessee
Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...
to find Samuel missing, though he later turns up drunk at a bar, his faith shaken by what has happened. The agents doubt his ability, but he is able to convince Mulder that he knows the latter has lost a sister—Samantha
Samantha Mulder
Samantha Ann Mulder is a fictional character in the television series The X-Files. She is the sister of FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder and the daughter of Teena and Bill Mulder. As a child, Samantha was abducted, ostensibly by aliens, and was never recovered...
—at a young age. Mulder has been seeing visions of Samantha, and continues to see them. Samuel is arrested, but at his bail hearing the courtroom fills with a swarm of locusts, allowing him to escape.
Once freed, Samuel returns to his ministry and attempts to heal a woman in a wheelchair. However, she begins to suffer a seizure and dies, leading to Samuel being rearrested. An autopsy reveals the woman died of cyanide poisoning, whilst Mulder and Scully find evidence that the swarm of locusts, which were actually grasshoppers common to the area, was guided by someone to the courtroom through the building's ventilation system. Mulder believes Samuel to be innocent, though before he can convince Maurice Daniels, the town sheriff, of this, the sheriff allows two men to beat Samuel to death.
At his home, Leonard Vance—the burnt man who had been revived in the prologue, and who has become a vocal member of the ministry—sees a ghostly vision of Samuel, who accuses him of betraying the church and being guilty of the murders. Vance confesses and blames his bitterness at having been resurrected with such a scarred and deformed visage. Mulder and Scully, who have been able to trace a large purchase of grasshoppers to Vance, arrive to find the man dying of cyanide poisoning from his own glass of water. He confesses to the agents before falling dead.
As the agents prepare to finish work on the case, they receive a phone call to say that Samuel's body has gone missing from the morgue, and witnesses have seen him walking around, badly bruised. Meanwhile, Sheriff Daniels is visited by a deputy, who arrests him for questioning by the district attorney over Samuel's death. As Mulder and Scully leave Tennessee, the Miracle Ministry is being closed down, and Mulder sees one last vision of his missing sister before he gets into his car.
Production
"Miracle Man" was the first episode of The X-Files written by Howard GordonHoward Gordon
Howard Gordon is an American screenwriter and producer.-Life and career:Gordon was born in Queens, New York, New York. After graduating from Princeton in 1984, Gordon came to Los Angeles with fellow filmmaker Alex Gansa to pursue a career in writing for television. Both broke into the industry...
without the aid of his long-term collaborator Alex Gansa
Alex Gansa
Alex Gansa is a screenwriter and producer.He produced and wrote a number of scripts for the Beauty and the Beast television series. He later worked as a writer and supervising producer on The X-Files in its first two seasons, and on Dawson's Creek in its third season...
. The pair had worked on several other series before The X-Files, and had also contributed the episodes "Conduit
Conduit (The X-Files)
"Conduit" is the fourth episode of the first season of the American science fiction television series The X-Files. It premiered on the Fox network on October 1, 1993. It was written by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, directed by Daniel Sackheim, and featured a guest appearance by Carrie Snodgress as...
", "Ghost in the Machine", "Fallen Angel" and "Lazarus" to the series so far. Series creator Chris Carter
Chris Carter (screenwriter)
Christopher Carl Carter is an American screenwriter, film director and producer. He is the creator of The X-Files and Millennium.- Ten Thirteen Productions :...
recalls being asked to collaborate on the episode, saying "Howard came to my house, and said, 'Help me out,' so we went to my living room and put up this bulletin board and in a matter of hours we came up with this story". Originally the script had called for more overt religious imagery, though censors at Fox objected to depictions of faith healer Samuel being beaten to death whilst in a cruciform pose, leading to scenes being cut.
Exterior shots of the town were filmed on location in Steveston, British Columbia
Steveston, British Columbia
Steveston was originally a small town near Vancouver, British Columbia, but has since been absorbed into the city of Richmond, British Columbia....
—a location which had previously been used in the earlier first season episode "Gender Bender". Scenes set in the home of Reverend Hartley were shot in a mansion in the Langley
Langley, British Columbia (city)
The City of Langley is a municipality in Metro Vancouver. It lies directly east of the City of Surrey, adjacent to Cloverdale, and surrounded on the north, east and south by Township of Langley.-History:...
area, with the crew taking advantage of an old filled-in swimming pool in the building to set up the necessary equipment. All of the scenes set in the faith healer's tent were filmed in one day, and involved over three hundred extras
Extra (actor)
A background actor or extra is a performer in a film, television show, stage, musical, opera or ballet production, who appears in a nonspeaking, nonsinging or nondancing capacity, usually in the background...
. Producer R. W. Goodwin
R. W. Goodwin
Robert W. "Bob" Goodwin, billed as R. W. Goodwin, is an American television producer and director best known for his work as senior executive producer of The X-Files...
felt that the greatest difficulty in creating the episode was the challenge in finding enough actors in the Vancouver area who could portray a convincing Southern United States accent, leading to the hiring of a dialect coach to prevent the cast from sounding "like they were coming from fifteen different parts of the South".
Broadcast and reception
"Miracle Man" premiered on the Fox networkFox Broadcasting Company
Fox Broadcasting Company, commonly referred to as Fox Network or simply Fox , is an American commercial broadcasting television network owned by Fox Entertainment Group, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Launched on October 9, 1986, Fox was the highest-rated broadcast network in the...
on March 18, 1994, and was first broadcast in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
on BBC Two
BBC Two
BBC Two is the second television channel operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It covers a wide range of subject matter, but tending towards more 'highbrow' programmes than the more mainstream and popular BBC One. Like the BBC's other domestic TV and radio...
on January 26, 1995. The episode earned a Nielsen household rating of 7.5 with a 13 share, meaning that roughly 7.5 percent of all television-equipped households, and 13 percent of households watching TV, were tuned in to the episode. A total of 7.1 million households watched this episode during its original airing.
In a retrospective of the first season in Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
, the episode was rated a B-. Scott Bairstow's guest role was praised, though it was noted that "an ultimately contrived plot and a stereotypical Bible-thumping Southern milieu make for a case more suited to Jessica Fletcher
Jessica Fletcher
Jessica Fletcher is a fictional character portrayed by veteran Tony-winning actress Angela Lansbury on the American television series Murder, She Wrote...
than Mulder and Scully". Zack Handlen, writing for The A.V. Club
The A.V. Club
The A.V. Club is an entertainment newspaper and website published by The Onion. Its features include reviews of new films, music, television, books, games and DVDs, as well as interviews and other regular offerings examining both new and classic media and other elements of pop culture. Unlike its...
, described it as "a largely predictable story that hits all the middle-of-the-road marks", finding the religious imagery to have been used to little effect. Matt Haigh, writing for Den of Geek, felt that the identity of the killer was one of the few endings amongst first season episodes that he had found genuinely surprising, though he attributed this to the episode's focus on Mulder's personal history. The use of Mulder's visions of his sister Samantha as a motivation for his actions in this episode has been seen as "opening up" the overarching search for the truth about her through the series. The plot for "Miracle Man" was also adapted as a novel for young adults in 2000 by Terry Bisson
Terry Bisson
Terry Ballantine Bisson is an American science fiction and fantasy author best known for his short stories...
.