speaking to. An FBI operator answers and, upon learning that Scully is an FBI agent, the tattoo forces Ed to attack her. Scully tries to escape but is overpowered by Ed, who wraps her in a bedsheet and carries her down to the basement to throw her in the furnace. At the last moment, Ed is able to overpower the impulses of the tattoo and instead thrusts his own arm into the furnace. Scully returns to Washington and is congratulated by Mulder for being the first person to make a second X-File appearance. Ed was brought to a burn center in Philadelphia where the ergot chemicals were found in his blood; it was also in Scully's blood, but not enough to cause hallucinations. Mulder wonders if this all happened because of their earlier argument, to which Scully replies that not everything is about him. Production Writing and directing "Never Again" was written by writing partners Glen Morgan and James Wong, making it their final episode of The X-Files until they returned to the show during its tenth season; following this episode, the two took over as executive producers of the Fox program Millennium (developed, like The X-Files, by Chris Carter). The initial story the two developed was a "sort of Abraham Lincoln's ghost in the White House type of thing", which would have involved Mulder and Scully investigating the haunting. Morgan explained that he had "done a lot of research and [he] had always wanted to write a feature about Lincoln's ghost". However, due to the massive amounts of rewrites the two were forced to do for "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man", both Morgan and Wong lost interest in their original story. Morgan explained, "I felt they didn't want my heart and soul anymore, so I wouldn't give [the ghost story] to them". The two later crafted "Never Again" in its place. Years later, Frank Spotnitz said that he "always wondered about" their original story and what the finished product would have been like. Gillian Anderson was particularly pleased with the episode, as it shows a different side of Scully. She said: I thought [the plot of "Never Again"] was a great idea. I personally was going through a dark period at the time, and I wanted to explore Scully's dark side. For some reason, Glen and Jim were on the same wavelength that week. Afterward, a lot of