Over the course of 218 episodes spanning 11 seasons, the landmark TV series The X-Files explored a wide array of science fiction concepts, including a few episodes that touched on the idea of time travel. There was the season 4 episode “Synchrony,” where an elderly time traveler goes back to the 1990s to stop his younger self from inventing time travel. Then there’s the Groundhog Day-like season 6 episode “Monday,” which sees Agent Mulder (David Duchovny) and Agent Scully (Gillian Anderson) repeatedly trying to stop a bank bombing while experiencing the same day over and over again. Season 8 also had a time travel episode named “Redrum,” where a man accused of killing his wife experiences several days backwards.
Undoubtedly the best X-Files time travel episode, though, is season 6’s “Triangle.” In it, Agent Mulder gets lost in the Bermuda Triangle and finds himself on the SS Queen Anne, a British luxury cruise ship that disappeared in the same location during World War II. In this fan-favorite episode, Mulder is transported aboard the SS Queen Anne in 1939, just as the ship is being boarded by Nazis. In an even weirder twist, the people aboard resemble people Mulder knows in the 1990s — for example, the Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis) appears as a German officer and Scully is a U.S. spy. However, Mulder soon has bigger issues to deal with as he gets into trouble with the Nazis.
Meanwhile, in the present day, Agent Scully and Mulder’s conspiracy theorist friends the Lone Gunmen (Bruce Harwood, Tom Braidwood, and Dean Haglund) are searching for Mulder at sea. Eventually, they find the SS Queen Anne, but it’s a ghost ship that’s been floating empty for decades. Still, they board it in search of Mulder. The trippy episode then cuts in between the past and the present aboard two very different versions of the same ship.
Written and directed by series creator Chris Carter, “Triangle” was an inventive take on time travel. Now, 28 years later, Carter has a new project that once again takes a unique approach to the subject.
Queens for a Day
Chris Carter’s new movie is called Queens for a Day, and this is the official description for the film:
“Queens for a Day, a film that follows a controversial, hard-edged, modern day television talk show host who, after an accident, is transported back in time to the 1950s finds herself inhabiting her own mother’s body. She finds the cramped, mid-century American existence inescapable and nightmarish, particularly because she now has to raise her younger self, a child she does not even like.”
The film stars Erin Boyes, who is best known for starring in the Lifetime TV movie Death in the Cul-De-Sac, as well as Sawtooth Mountain. Boyes also appears in Longlegs and The Social Reckoning. Chris Carter is directing the film, which was written by his wife Dori Carter. Dori Carter’s screenwriting credits date back to the 1980s, when she wrote the Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin film Big Business in 1988, as well as several TV movies from the era. It is being produced by Grace Gilroy, who also produced The X-Files, as well as Alien vs. Predator, Grease: The Rise of the Pink Ladies, and Bride of Chucky.
Queens for a Day, which is a comedy, “serves as a biting satire on blind nostalgia and the classic warning of being careful what you wish for,” according to the film’s official description.
If you want to see it, though, the movie is not adopting a traditional release model via theaters or streaming. It will debut at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles starting this week, with three shows that will each be followed by a Q&A with Carter on Oct. 16th, 17th, and 22nd. Following this, the movie will be released at more venues in a similar manner. Announcements about future releases can be found on the film‘s Instagram page: @queensforadaymovie.
And if you’re waiting for Queens for a Day (and hopefully Chris Carter along with it) to come to your area, the best way to keep yourself occupied in the meantime is to check out any of the time travel episodes of The X-Files. That goes double for “Triangle,” which, along with being a great episode, features the first kiss between Mulder and Scully (even though Scully wasn’t really Scully at the time).
