The Lone Gunmen
Australian Conne-X-ion
Episode Guide
"Like Water For Octane"

• Tom Braidwood as Frohike
• Dean Haglund as Langly
• Bruce Harwood as Byers
• Stephen Snedden as Jimmy Bond
• Zuleikha Robinson as Yves Adele Harlow

• Shareen Mitchell as Shelley Mizer
• Timothy Webber as Jason Guthrie
• Mark Valley as Henry Farst
• Michael Eklund as Clerk
• Eric Pospisil as Young Ringo
• Gordie Giroux as Young Frohike
• Billy Mitchell as Farmer
• Jay Kirby as Football Player
• Matthew Munn as Boy in Suit
• Lauren Kennedy as Pigtail Girl
• Ben Libbiter as Freckle Face Boy
• Katlyn Alexandra Ducharne as Snooty Girl
• Danny McKinnon as Towhead Boy

The guys get wind of a revolutionary car that runs on water and race to find its secret location before anyone else does.

Winnipeggers get shot at in Lone Gunmen

There seems to be some kind of Winnipeg conspiracy at play in The X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen, which debuts Sunday on Fox.

Star Dean Haglund, who plays lanky, long-haired Gunman Ringo Langly, is a hometown actor who got his career start at Prairie Theatre Exchange. Writer Collin Friesen is a Winnipeg-ger, and an upcoming episode was inspired by a made-in-Manitoba yarn.

"It's actually based on an urban myth that I traced back to Winnipeg," says Friesen, who wrote the episode titled Like Water for Octane.

Tentatively scheduled to air March 18, Water has Langly and fellow Gunmen Melvin Frohike (Tom Braidwood) and John Fitzgerald Byers (Bruce Harwood), following leads to North Dakota when they learn a man who invented a car that will run on water was silenced by powerful forces of the corporate kind.

Friesen, 36, says that unlike The X-Files' alien mythology, The Lone Gunmen will stick to down-to-earth conspiracies.

"It's become less X-Files and more humour-based. The other thing you won't see is we don't do supernatural stuff," he says. "The pilot serves as a nice kind of bridge out of traditional X-Files conspiracy and that whole sort of mood thing."

In the opener, viewers meet the Gunmen's arch-rival, an campy beauty named Yves Adele Harlow (Zuleikha Robinson) -- whose name is, for reasons that will be explained later on, an anagram of Lee Harvey Oswald -- when they investigate the apparent murder of Byers' father.

A friendlier foil in the person of happy dullard Jimmy Bond (Stephen Snedden) arrives in the second episode, when the show's comic aspects really kick in. The trio meet up with Bond, Jimmy Bond while working the case of a computer hacker who vanished under eerie circumstances. Bond is using computer technology to coach a team of blind football players and dreams of forming a blind league.

The upshot is, Bond eventually helps the Gunmen keep their struggling conspiracy newspaper afloat. Friesen says he serves a practical purpose script-wise, too, giving the trio an excuse to explain their actions to a fourth party.

"You've got the three Lone Gunmen who are very smart ... and so what possible need would there be for these guys to talk to each other at a level the audience would understand?"

Billed as a comedic Mission: Impossible, the show itself has a hurdle to overcome in its infancy. Some fans may be alienated when they find The Lone Gunmen airing in place of The X-Files on Fox and Global for the first three Sundays in March before its settles into a Friday-night timeslot.

But Friesen says it's a calculated risk. Creator Chris Carter's Ten Thirteen Productions tracks fan message boards on the Internet, and so far, X-philes are excited about the spinoff.

A former journalist in Winnipeg -- "I worked for every TV station there, honestly, I think I worked for every media outlet in town" -- Friesen moved to L.A. in 1996 to attend the American Film Institute. He graduated three years ago, got an agent, and landed the writing job at Ten Thirteen Productions last year.

By Pat St. Germain, Winnipeg Sun, Thursday, March 1, 2001.