Across the breadth of unmade episodes of The X-Files, there are none more famous than “Flight 180." Written by a then-unknown Jeffrey Reddick, the script saw everyone’s favorite TV duo Mulder and Scully (the always wonderful David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, respectively) investigating the survivors of a plane crash after it emerges that one of them had a premonition of the disaster moments before it happened. The passenger is none other than Scully’s brother, Charles, but his lucky twist of fate looks set to unravel after the other survivors start getting picked off in mysterious circumstances. It’s classic monster-of-the-week stuff, but Reddick wasn’t convinced, leading him to rewrite it as a feature film without ever approaching the X-Files team about his concept. The expanded script found a home at New Line Cinema, where it ended up in the hands of Glen Morgan and James Wong, two of the most prominent writers on The X-Files during its early seasons. “Flight 180” was retitled Final Destination, and soon after it was one of the most successful teen horror films of its era.
The origin of Final Destination is just as terrifying as the film itself. The year was 1994, and Reddick was working as an intern at New Line while struggling to make a name for himself. One day he read about a woman who had received a frantic phone call from her mother, demanding she change her flight home. She did, a decision that saved her life when her original flight did indeed crash. Inspired by the story, Reddick wrote a spec script for The X-Files (his favorite show at the time) that he hoped would propel him into his dream career. However, acting on the advice of Craig Perry (an executive at New Line who would later serve as a producer on the entire franchise), Reddick reworked it as a standalone film. Following the completion of the first draft, the established duo of Morgan and Wong were brought on board for rewrites (with Wong also being hired as director), leading to a reduction in Reddick’s input. How much involvement he had with the final product is unclear, but given he was a first-time writer whose script had been rewritten by two industry veterans, it’s not a stretch to say that his role was minimal.
How Did the Script Bring in Mulder and Scully?
Doing side-by-side comparisons of Reddick’s original script (which was released online in 2015) and its eventual form as Final Destination makes for some fun analysis – namely because of how radically different they are despite sharing the same premise. Since “Flight 180” was supposed to fit seamlessly into the established X-Files formula, most of its focus was aimed at Mulder and Scully and their investigation into the crash, with the survivors (excluding Charles) appearing in only a few scenes. The relationship between Scully and her brother also played a central role in the story, which would have been interesting for fans of the show because he is the only member of the Scully family that we never got to see on-screen. At this point in The X-Files, the Scullys had lost their father and a sister in the span of just a few years, and the near death of a third member threatened to be a burden too painful for anyone to bear. It's interesting to see the effect Scully’s work has on her family in ways that she hadn’t previously been aware of, but the episode devotes so much time to this that it overshadows the central concept of death coming back to claim those who had escaped its clutches.
The representation of the villain is also a major change, with “Flight 180” revealing that the local sheriff was responsible for the murders, a stark contrast from Final Destination, where death exists in a purely abstract form (a considerably more intriguing option). Reddick did try to alleviate this by bringing in the Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis) for a last-scene twist, but that only detracted from the episode even further. It’s possible these issues would have been dealt with had the script been run through the show’s writing team, but based purely on what we have access to, it’s hard to see how “Flight 180” would have reached its true potential.
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Had the episode been made, it would hardly have been the first time The X-Files dabbled with the concept of premonitions. One of the most prominent examples came in Season 1's “Beyond the Sea,” the episode that included the death of Scully’s father and dealt with similar themes like fate and the eventuality of one’s death. The episode has since been regarded as among the show’s best, creating a high bar for “Flight 180” to reach. And, in a fun coincidence, the episode was written by Morgan and Wong, which explains why they were on New Line’s radar. Given that they had produced some of the most acclaimed episodes of the show – and aided by their tendency to write the more overtly horror-themed episodes (Season 4's “Home” being the first to carry a mature warning due to its disturbing content) – their hiring for Final Destination makes a lot of sense. This is evident in the final product, with that unmistakable mix of the paranormal, sinister visuals, and an overpowering sense of paranoia echoing throughout the film. The presence of X-Files alumni James Coblentz in the editing room and Millennium cinematographer Robert McLachlan behind the camera (the spin-off/successor to The X-Files where Morgan and Wong briefly worked as joint showrunners) also helps, resulting in Final Destination feeling like a trip down memory lane for fans of the cult series.
But that does not mean Final Destination is simply an unused episode that has been dragged out to ninety minutes. Instead, the decision to rework the project for the big screen was the best thing that could have happened to it. Television networks were known for being highly restrictive about the content they aired during this period, and being forced to neuter the violence and dismal tone that is integral to the story – while also fitting everything into a strict forty-three-minute runtime – would have worked against the narrative.
How the Change in Formats Helped the Story
Case in point, the plane crash. If Final Destination films know one thing, it’s how to make a hell of an introduction. Even if the Rube Goldberg-esque mechanisms in future entries are more technically impressive, there’s a tangibility to how the deaths are constructed in the original that cements it as the most frighteningly real in the series. From the moment Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) steps into JFK airport you can practically feel the timer ticking down on him and his classmates, and that anxiety only gets worse the longer things go on. The music, the rain, the ominous sound design that gives the impression of the plane being held together by string and duct tape – it's terrific stuff, and the explosive finale that sees everyone being blown to smithereens, only for the rug to be pulled out from the audience's feet when it’s revealed this is just a premonition, combines to make one of the most effective horror openings ever. It’s a clear improvement from its X-Files counterpart, which skipped the dramatic build-up to start with Charles already freaking out onboard the plane, with the revelation that it does indeed crash being delivered via a simple phone call. The practicalities of television mean it would have been impossible to do the sequence any other way, but having such an important event happen offscreen gravely lessens its impact.
The move between formats helped in other ways too. The elaborate death sequences that have become the selling point of the whole franchise are but a shadow of their potential in the original script, with the first survivor being killed simply by being pushed in front of a moving train. In comparison, Final Destination uses its extended running time to construct some of the greatest kills in the genre, carefully arranging its pieces with the care of someone playing chess before waging a full-fledged assault on its unfortunate victim. The death of Tod Waggner (Chad Donella), for example, is a masterclass in creating tension, and his blissful ignorance that has him walking straight into his own murder will have the viewer screaming at their screens. The build-up is what makes it so engrossing, and it's hard to imagine “Flight 180” replicating its effectiveness when adhering to a much stricter runtime.
Recontextualizing the narrative around the survivors rather than the people investigating it also proved beneficial. Alex spends much of Final Destination feeling like the only sane person in a mental institution, his failed attempts to save his fellow survivors only increasing the wedge between himself and everyone else (while also making himself more suspicious in the process). It ties into the film’s unsung strength about whether death really is out to get them or if this is nothing more than a bunch of weird coincidences, and it would have been hard to replicate this debate in a show where supernatural shenanigans happen every week. But even while large chunks of the narrative were altered, a few elements from “Flight 180” stuck around. The agents Weine and Schreck (Daniel Roebuck and Roger Guenveur Smith, respectively) are one of the more obvious carryovers from The X-Files, with their respective roles of diehard skeptic and moderate believer being a not-too-subtle call-back to the FBI’s most famous agents. But their antagonistic role due to their investigation into Alex prevents them from feeling like mere copies, allowing them to fulfill their roles without the viewer constantly thinking about what could have been.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy had “Flight 180” remained an X-Files episode is that we would never have gotten sequels that followed after the film’s success. The Final Destination franchise is far from perfect, but the devilish joy in seeing people getting killed in the most contrived and convoluted scenarios possible is a pleasure that never gets old. It’s clear the team behind the films understands this, hence why the runtimes are kept to a tight ninety minutes to keep the focus on what we’re all here for. While Jeffery Reddick’s influence on the series was diminishing even before the first one started filming (and only receiving the obligatory creator credit for the last three installments), he was the one who put the wheels of this intricate death trap into motion, first by creating the idea and then by reworking it for the big screen. Reading through the original script makes it impossible to watch Final Destination without imagining how Mulder and Scully would have fared against such an unstoppable enemy, but the downgrades needed to achieve this would have hurt the final product. Final Destination is one of the highest-grossing horror franchises for a reason, and allowing it to breathe as a standalone series was exactly what it needed.
