The X Files 113 Beyond the Sea Facts, Trivia, Goofs & Description

 Scully believes that the psychic predictions of a death row inmate are the only hope in the kidnapping of two college students.

Trivia

• One of Gillian Anderson's favorite episodes.
• Chris Carter's favorite episode of the first season.
• In the scene where he appears as a vision to his on-screen daughter, Don S. Davis is mouthing The Lord's Prayer.
• Chris Carter had to lobby hard for the casting of Brad Dourif as serial killer Luther Lee Boggs. Dourif was more expensive than the usual guest star but Carter knew he would be perfect for the role. He rang Fox president Peter Roth at his home on Thanksgiving to plead his case. Roth agreed to it, mainly because he wanted to get back to his dinner.
• Mulder addresses Scully as "Dana" while inquiring as to her well-being in their first scene. Presumably, because he heard of her father's death. She hesitates and mouths her name to herself before responding "fine". The agents had been exclusively on "last name basis" up until this point.
• The network was opposed to even doing this episode, one of the high watermarks of the first season, as they felt it traded too much in the shadow of The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
• One of the killers is named Lucas Henry. There was a real-life American serial killer named Henry Lee Lucas (subject of the movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)).
• While the series is known for its alien story lines and mutant stand-alone stories, it has also dealt extensively in the area of seemingly ordinary serial killers. "Beyond the Sea" is the first episode to reflect that.
• Brad Dourif is the second Academy Award nominated actor to guest star in the show's first season, following Carrie Snodgress in the fourth episode, Conduit (1993).
• First appearance of Scully's parents.
• This is the first episode in which either Mulder or Scully appears in the teaser. The opening scene depicts Scully with her parents William and Margaret.
• Interestingly, the character beliefs of Mulder and Scully are switched this episode. Mulder is skeptical and Scully believes. Mulder does believe in psychics but not in Boggs case.
• Second utterance of the line "I want to believe". The first was nine episodes earlier Conduit (1993).
• Don S. Davis and David Duchovny acted together in Twin Peaks (1990).
• Part of this episode was filmed in Vancouver, Canada. After her first meeting with Boggs, Scully is driving back to the hotel and sees the "angel of stone." This is a WWI memorial piece called the "Angel of Victory" located at Waterfront Station. However, most of the episodes during The X-Files entire run were filmed in Vancouver.
• After writing Humbug, Darin Morgan seemed to be dissatisfied with his work, so, in order to write his next script, Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, he reviewed Beyond the Sea in order to catch up with what the series was about.
• The version of Beyond the Sea that we can listen to in this episode is Bobby Darin's. Glen Morgan's parents were huge fans of him and named Glen's brother, possibly the best writer of The X Files, after him.
• Brad Dourif, Don S. Davis and David Duchovny all had previously worked with director David Lynch on various projects.
• In front of the window Scully is looking at when she wakes up and seems to see her father, there appears to be a pair of wayang golek puppets, used in traditional Indonesian shadow puppet theatre.
• Brad Dourif voices another serial killer with three names (with the middle name being Lee) in the Chucky movies and tv series. In those, he plays Charles Lee Ray.
• This episode is included in The X-Files Revelations compilation DVD set, released in 2008.
• Brad Dourif plays a serial killer on death row in this episode. He played a similar role as a serial killer in three episodes of Star Trek Voyager.

spoilers

• This is the first time that Mulder is shot in the series.
• This could be the only time in the entire series in which can see Scully's little brother, Charles, and probably his kids and wife. In the funeral Maggie Scully says that her father only wanted his family there and can see besides them two men, two women, and two kids, who could be Bill, Melissa, Charles and his family. Despite being a major character, this is the third time Charles Scully has been played by an uncredited actor. His second appearance was in "One Breath" and the third is a voice-over in "Home Again".
• The first of many episodes which sees Mulder end up in hospital.

Goofs

• When Mulder tells Scully he is sorry about her father's death, he puts a hand on her shoulder and moves it up towards her cheek. In the following shot, his hand is moving down towards her cheek from her temple.
• During her father's funeral, Scully tells her mother "As a Captain he was eligible for burial at Arlington." Rank has nothing to do with eligibility at Arlington Cemetery.
• Mulder sarcastically tells Scully that he had Boggs channel Jimi Hendrix, and mentions Hendrix having been dead for 20 years; Jimi Hendrix in fact died approximately 23 years prior to this production.
• When Scully swiftly leaves Boggs' interrogation room, the elbow of a crew member trying to hide against the wall is briefly visible as she rounds the corner.
• When the police officer assisting Scully in the investigation of Mulder's shooter gives a history of the suspect he completely mispronounces the name of the prison where the suspect had been incarcerated. This is very odd as "Angola" the prison name, is the same name as a nation in Southwest Africa. It's as if the speaker had never heard of either of them and had never spoken the word prior reading it from the script.