is implied that he murders in a quest to gain eternal youth. The episode ends with a now-younger Franklin successfully applying for a position at another medical hospital. Production In the 1990s, the television industry made wide use of spec scripts, solicited from freelance writers. While The X-Files had a large staff of writers, the staff would occasionally have to take a risk on a teleplay written by an unaffiliated writer to fill out a full season order. "Sanguinarium" was such a case, being written by sisters Vivian and Valerie Mayhew. This marked their first experience with writing a one-hour network program, and they would later write several episodes in the television series Charmed. Prior to having their script picked up by the series, the sisters asked staff writers Glen Morgan and James Wong for writing suggestions. Morgan and Wong told them that "the scariest things are those which repeat every day". Soon thereafter, Vivian was paged by a number she did not recognize. She realized that pagers in their own way are scary, because an unknown person can connect to the pager's owner. The Mayhews then went from focusing on pagers to the group of people who normally use them: doctors. It was then that they realized a plot about doctors losing control and being bewitched could make for a good episode. After writing their spec script, they presented it to Morgan and Wong, who suggested they change the villain from a woman to a man as "plastic surgery is related to vanity, and everyone expects that from a woman, but not a man." After the script was submitted, it was selected to become a full episode. After the spec script was picked up, series creator Chris Carter and the show's staff reworked it into a teleplay. Carter focused much of the plot on the themes of greed and vanity, and executive producer Howard Gordon developed several graphic scenes. After Carter had the idea of placing a subtle pentagram on the reunion table, production designer Graeme Murray decided to take this further by creating rooms with five sides, and having the plastic surgery unit with five operating rooms represent an imaginary pentagram. Like previous episode "Home", Fox Standards and Practices objected to the graphical content, and Carter had to intervene to help retain some scenes. Given its subject matter, the episode features many references to witchcraft and occultism. The