unconvincing denial — "I heard it was a lone gunman" — becomes the origin of the trio's name. X leaves, just as the police arrive and arrest the Lone Gunmen. Detective Munch does not believe Byers's story, but it is soon corroborated by Mulder. After the Lone Gunmen are released, they encounter Susanne after she has failed to get the press to believe her story. She tells them to reveal the truth to as many people as possible. Susanne is then captured by X, who leers at the Lone Gunmen as he departs with her. Later, the three of them meet Mulder in the convention center and explain what happened to him. Production Writing The idea for "Unusual Suspects" arose when the show's producers were faced with a dilemma in August 1997: Fox demanded that they begin production on the fifth season of the show, but series co-stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were still working on The X-Files movie in Los Angeles, and would be unavailable until the start of the next month. To solve this problem, the producers decided to write an episode focusing on The Lone Gunmen. Staff writer Vince Gilligan was assigned to pen the episode, and he initially drafted a story involving nanotechnology, which series creator Chris Carter vetoed for fear that it would squander possibly the show's one chance to showcase the Gunmen. Carter then proposed an episode about how The Lone Gunmen came to be. Soon after, Gilligan developed the script, setting it in Baltimore. Duchovny is featured in a few of the episode's scenes, which were shot weeks after the majority of the episode. The episode began to clearly delineate the personalities of The Lone Gunmen. Executive producer Frank Spotnitz explained, "Up [until 'Unusual Suspects'], they were sort of interchangeable in the information they delivered. But then Vince, who loved the characters and really wanted a chance to dig more deeply into them, created a back story and they became a lot more interesting." Actor Dean Haglund, who played Langly, said of the episode, "What we read in the script wasn't really our origins as we'd imagined it. I'd thought we were all in a university garage band together or something. Bruce [Harwood] thought he was a photocopier repair man." Much of the episode's action focused on Byers, played by Bruce Harwood. This experience was new for him, and he noted, "I