Looking Back: The Lone Gunmen

Originally posted January, 2018

The Lone Gunmen is a show I've been meaning to do an article about since I did the one about The X-Files back in 2013. Lone Gunmen was different from X-Files in that it was, by and large, more comedic than the show it was spun off from. Langly, Byers, and Frohike, collectively know as the Lone Gunmen, started off on The X-Files, as I understand it, as a one-shot contact for Mulder to get information from in an early episode. They proved to be popular enough to become recurring characters and eventually get their own spinoff, which is the topic of this piece.

This show only lasted one season, in 2001, which was really kind of too bad. There was a lot of potential, seeing these three guys trying to run their conspiracy tabloid and investigating all manner of things that could fill such a thing but not make for an episode of X-Files, since our boys were all civilians rather than government folks meant to be working for government interests.

The pilot episode, of course, was light on a lot of the things I just mentioned. The Lone Gunmen, upon hearing that Byers's dad is potentially dead as a result of being involved with a rather nasty conspiracy, drop their investigation of and attempts to steal a computer chip meant for spying on the general public and wind up just barely managing to avert a disaster that would come to pass here in the real world a few months later. The plot, it seems, was a war games sort of thing that the Department of Defense had cooked up about a passenger jet getting hijacked and flown into the Word Trade Center that they'd decided to do for real, in terms of the show, to get a war going.

The first “regular” episode had the guys going in search of a big-name hacker and wind up with a fourth member by the name of Jimmy Bond. If I recall correctly, the guys do wind up finding and saving the hacker they're looking for, and wind up making Jimmy a member of the team because they need his money to keep publishing and his idea for a football leauge for blind players wasn't working out.

Later episodes involved the likes of cars that ran on water and eco-terrorism. One that did kind of stand out for me was the “chimps on keyboards” episode they pretty much had to do. What made it stand out for me was that the super-intelegent chimp who had contacted them had given himself the surname Potentloins.

The computer chip plot point turned up in at least one other episode I kind of remember. I think it may have been something of a wrap-up to that particular plot point, first brought up in the pilot. This time, the focus was more on a rival of the main trio, a mysterious woman calling herself Yeves Adele Harlowe. We never really get to find out much about Yeves in the single season we got, though this may have been different had there been more. The one big thing we did get is that her name was supposedly an anagram for Lee Harvey Oswald. There were other hints along the way, but nothing really solid as to things like who she was really working for. By the end of the episode, Yeves had gotten the chip for herself and/or her employers, leaving our boys to run with a different story instead.

With all the interesting things we saw in this one season, it might have been interesting to see where the show might have gone if it had been given more seasons. That didn't happen, and I'm sure there are multiple reasons, as there tend to be with things like this. One I've heard relates back to the pilot having a plot that actually came to pass in the real world, to disasterous effect. Sure, 9/11 involved jet liners crashing into the World Trade Center and other locations, and while I think it's an interesting idea that this is related to the cancellation of Lone Gunmen on TV, I'm not sure if there's much to it or if it's mostly coincidence.

I'm actually more inclined to go the ratings route with this. See, Lone Gunmen was airing at a time when it seemed like a fairly significant portion of Fox's primetime lineup was in a common universe. From what I could tell, there was this other show called Millennium that was running alongside X-Files leading up to Y2K, that was part of the same universe. I never watched it simply because I had other stuff to do at the time, so I can't say too much about it. I do know, though, that there was a reference to both X-Files and Millennium in one episode, where the Gunmen see either Mulder or Skinner, from X-Files, getting some sort of information from Frank Black, the main character of Millennium. I'm not sure how much overlap there was between these three shows, but by the time Lone Gunmen was on the air, X-Files had been running for seven or eight years and Millennium may or may not have still been airing at the same time. With all that in mind, it stands to reason that whatever audience the show may have had at the time was maybe getting a little tired of the X-Files universe.

Either way, this show's cancellation after it's one and only season means it didn't get a proper conclusion, at least not on its own. The good news is that it did get something of an ending, eventually.

There was one last crossover with the main X-Files show where the guys help Dogget and Reyes go after a guy carrying something of a biological time bomb in his chest meant to release a very fast acting and 100% lethal disease, with the ground zero in a government office. Langley, Byers and Frohike eventually catch up with the guy just before he blows his load, as it were, but in order to stop the disease from infecting the building and then the populace at large, at least one of the three has to get trapped in a room with the guy. Since this means that whoever locks the door has to get the disease and die, too, all three decide to stay together and go down as the team as they always were. Just after the fire doors our heroes use as a trap lock, Jimmy, Dogget and Reyes show up, and while one of the agents goes to get the biohaz team, the others do a recreation of the end of Star Trek II.

Because the three main Gunmen gave their lives for their country, the paper wound up in Jimmy's hands, and I don't recall what happened to the paper or if X-Files ever said. It would be nice to have it touched on in the X-Files event series slated to start just as I was finishing this article, just to see what I might have forgotten over the years.

It's just too bad that Lone Gunmen is unlikely to get its own reboot or revival, in part because the three main characters the title refers to wound up dead and I seriously doubt they'd be re-cast for a new series. It would have been interesting to see what other adventures these guys might have had, what other topics they might have covered in their paper.

Some things just don't last as long as they should, and this is one of them.