don't think I'd ever done an episode where I was the lead character. But I felt like the lead because it was my story about falling in love with this woman and then dragging these other two schmucks into the disaster that followed." Vince Gilligan was particularly happy with Byers's characterization in this episode, later admitting, "I just loved the idea of Byers working for the government and being this very gung-ho pro-government guy. That's just a fundamental drama where you take a character on a journey and the journey take him 180 degrees from who he original[ly] was." Gilligan went to great lengths to make the story—set in 1989—as accurate as possible. Purportedly, he tasked Ken Hawryliw, who worked on props for the show, to find "the biggest cell phone you can find"—a search that yielded the Motorola featured in the episode. Gilligan also met with a group of hackers who ran a seasonal publication called 2600 in order to learn correct hacker terminology. Casting and directing When writing the episode, Gilligan lobbied for it to be a crossover with the NBC show Homicide: Life on the Street, which also takes place in Baltimore. He later recalled, "I realized that the whole episode was framed around Byers telling his story to a Baltimore homicide detective. So I figured 'what the heck? Homicide'''s a great show, so why not try to get Richard Belzer to play his Detective [John Munch] character?'" Despite some hesitancy from Fox's lawyers, NBC's executive producer Tom Fontana was eventually contacted, and he was more than willing to allow the use of Belzer. Gilligan later described Fontana as a "great guy" for assistance in the matter. The episode features the first reappearance of X, who had been murdered in the season four opener "Herrenvolk". This idea was proposed by executive producer John Shiban, who also helped Gilligan storyboard the episode. He explained, "We had the board set up and ... and there was a piece missing and we just couldn't come up with a how to get out of this situation, why doesn't this assassin just kill The Lone Gunmen? It was a flashback story and it was in 1989 and we were pacing around in my backyard, and ... I just turned to him and said, 'X! ... X has another agenda! X is the assassin, it's not some other character, it's our X. ...