to Mulder's apartment, Scully holds him at gunpoint, believing he is the traitor the Well-Manicured Man spoke of. Skinner tells Scully that he is in possession of the digital tape. Just then, someone steps outside the door. This distracts Scully enough for Skinner to pull his gun on her. Production Series creator Chris Carter felt this was one of his favorite episodes to write, as he found it interesting to explore how the character of Fox Mulder would react to the death of his father. Carter had recently lost a parent himself when he began work on the episode. Frank Spotnitz said of the episode "The expectations were very high coming after a summer's worth of anticipation to see how Mulder got out of the boxcar. We knew we had to answer that question and still leave an intriguing enough dilemma at the end of the show to bring viewers back for the third and final part. I also thought it was a big gamble to do all that Indian mysticism stuff. I thought a lot of people would not necessarily respond to that. So I was nervous about that, but very excited about the Scully storyline and the way all of that played out with Mulder and Skinner." Carter attended Navajo chants and rituals to ensure the accuracy of the events in this episode, after being alerted to inaccuracies in the previous episode by Navajo scholars. A sand painter was brought in to create the two sand paintings for the Blessing Way sequence, which took an entire day to create. The scenes set in New Mexico were filmed in the same Vancouver quarry that had been used as a stand-in in the previous episode, "Anasazi", the repainting of which required only minor touch-ups. Visual effects producer Mat Beck considered the sequence where Fox Mulder has a vision of Deep Throat and his father the most difficult of the season. The end of the episode reads "In Memoriam, Larry Wells, 1946 - 1995." Wells was a costume designer on the show. Mark Snow slightly changed the piano melody from the opening theme music (and the corresponding shortened theme in the credits) from the first two seasons in this episode. The music would remain unchanged for several years. The title of the episode refers to the Navajo ceremony of the Blessing Way. This is the first episode where Mitch Pileggi is