By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
The X-Files is full of some of the most quotable lines in television history, which is why countless fans still love to utter phrases like, “the truth is out there” and “I want to believe.” There are so many great lines, in fact, that it’s far too easy to overlook what might be the most important line of them all. In the Season 1 episode “E.B.E,” the fan-favorite character Deep Throat says “a lie… is most convincingly hidden between two truths,” and writer Glen Morgan later said that this line represented the writers’ entire creative process of blending real facts with the show’s trademark fantastic fiction.
The Perfect X-Files Quote
It’s a catchy line, obviously, but it may need some context, especially if you haven’t seen this episode in many years (or at all). “E.B.E.” is an episode where Mulder and Scully investigate a UFO that was shot down by an Iraqi fighter jet, and they are both helped and hindered by Deep Throat, Mulder’s mysterious government informant. Mulder eventually questions why the informant intermixed real intel (the Iraqi pilot’s transcript) with a fake photo, causing Deep Throat to admit that “a lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths.”
“E.B.E.” was written by fan-favorite X-Files writers Glen Morgan and James Wong, and they thought Deep Throat’s line was key to the entire story. Morgan, slightly misremembering his own dialogue, later said of the script, “The whole thing was written to get to the line, ‘A lie is best hidden between two truths.’ We worked the whole thing to get to that.”
As for why this line was so important to these X-Files writers, Morgan later pointed out that it basically described the creative process of the show. Many of the show’s episodes were based at least partly on some kind of genuine spooky phenomenon that a writer, producer, or even showrunner Chris Carter had read about in legitimate scientific magazines or other authoritative texts. Of course, the show would add its own fictional elements to the mix, but everything was more compelling because… a lie is most convincingly hidden between two truths.
How The Quote Influences The Series
Examples of episodes that followed this formula include “The Jersey Devil,” which is built off a popular urban legend whose roots go back to alleged eyewitness accounts of a strange creature tangling with citizens and even police officers (who tried to shoot it) in 1909 New Jersey. Meanwhile, the comedic episode “Humbug” was inspired by the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow in Seattle, a 1991 attraction that loaned some of its performers out to appear in the episode. And the gruesome, controversial episode “Home” was based on the Ward family, a real group of Syracuse siblings who allegedly engaged in incest and murder within the family.
Each episode had an X-Files twist, of course…the real Circus Sideshow didn’t have any murderous monsters attached to the body, and the real Ward brothers didn’t live with a creepy matriarch or ever battle local and government law enforcement. However, the authentic details these episodes (and so many more) were built on helped make these creepy tales both compelling and convincing. It turns out Deep Throat could have been a screenwriter himself because “a lie is most convincingly hidden between two truths” is perfect advice for anyone writing their own genre show.
