One Of The X-Files’ Worst Episodes Was Written By A Sci-Fi Legend

In the “The X-Files” episode “First Person Shooter” (February 27, 2000), Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) are called to investigate a seemingly fatal virtual reality video game. The players of the game, uncreatively called “First Person Shooter,” have been encountering a sexy assassin named Maitreya (B-movie luminary Krista Allen) whom no one programmed into the game. When Maitreya kills someone in the game, they die in real life. No one knows how that’s possible. 

Mulder and Scully eventually find a woman in the real world who looks just like Maitreya, but she reveals that she is an exotic dancer named (sigh) Jade Blue Afterglow, and that she was merely hired by a computer company to scan her likeness. To raise the stakes, Mulder’s friends the Lone Gunmen (Tom Braidwood, Dean Haglund, and Bruce Harwood) find themselves doing battle with the mysterious Maitreya inside of “First Person Shooter,” and Mulder and Scully have to enter the game to help them. “X-Files” fans had the “pleasure” of seeing Duchovny and Anderson in silly-looking “Matrix”-like video game battle gear. 

It’s eventually revealed that Maitreya was created by a programmer named Phoebe (Constance Zimmer) as an antidote to the ultra-masculine realm of online video games. The character was a feminist tool of vengeance. It’s never fully explained, however, how Maitreya found ways to kill people in the real world. 

“First Person Shooter” is often considered one of the worst episodes of “The X-Files” among “X”-philes, largely because of its nonsensical premise. The episode was clearly knocking off “The Matrix,” and its attempts to understand the complex world of gamers seemed inaccurate and ill-advised. 

A baffling detail: “First Person Shooter” was co-written by William Gibson, the author of seminal sci-fi classics such as “Neuromancer” and “Mona Lisa Overdrive,” as well as multiple speculative articles about the future of technology. He even took a pass at “Alien³” once upon a time. Somehow, the ordinarily brilliant Gibson churned out this churlish, B-movie ready piece of silliness. 

“First Person Shooter” wasn’t the first episode that Gibson co-wrote. He and his writing partner, Tom Maddox (another key figure in the cyberpunk movement), had previously penned “Kill Switch” (February 15, 1998) from season 5 of “The X-Files.” That episode involved the creation of a mysterious and malevolent artificial intelligence program that would kill anyone who aimed to delete it. By the end of the episode, it’s implied that a human’s consciousness was uploaded into the A.I.’s electronic brain. This episode was written in the 1990s, when A.I. was a mysterious and uncontrollable force to be feared, and not something corporate America is thinking about using instead of paying artists and actors. 

“Kill Switch” was relatively well-received, and tapped into the “X-Files” themes of paranoia and mysterious, seemingly supernatural phenomena. The success of “Kill Switch” inspired Gibson and Maddox to reunite for “First Person Shooter,” but unfortunately, they were … less successful. The Krista Allen monster isn’t exactly scary, and the real-life Allen character is over-the-top unto herself. It’s also out of character for “The X-Files” to lean into violent cyberpunk mayhem, and it’s beyond belief that a character like Fox Mulder would be really into first-person shooters. “The X-Files” wasn’t exactly “badass,” and this episode felt like a limp attempt by unhip sci-fi writers to tap into a zeitgeist they didn’t understand. 

Fans even felt that way at the time, and many were baffled by Gibson’s credit. There are no profound ideas in “First Person Shooter.” A killer video game character would be more at home in the pages of “Goosebumps.”

The episode was liked by at least one person, however: Gillian Anderson. According to Marc Shapiro’s source book “The Official Guide to ‘The X-Files’ Volume 6: All Things,” Anderson didn’t care that “Shooter” was clunky and ultra-masculine, or that it featured scenes of Krista Allen in fetish gear. She just liked being able to tote guns, shoot bad guys, and be an action star. Anderson had a wonderful time, and considers it her favorite episode.