had originally been cast to play Emily had severe nosocomephobia, which necessitated the show's producers recasting the role and reshooting all footage featuring Emily in the previous episode "Christmas Carol". Director Kim Manners recalls, "I called Bob Goodwin and said, 'We're dead in the water here, pal. This little actress is not cooperating at all'. We recast that role and started up again the next day." The show's casting crew eventually replaced her with Lauren Diewold, who had previously appeared on an episode of Millennium. The building used for the nursing home in this episode was occupied by squatters "a few days before shooting" in protest, as the building was slated to be converted into a condominium high-rise. While these squatters eventually left, anti-redevelopment protesters soon arrived and began picketing. The producers of The X-Files did not want to let the activists know they were filming, so they kept a "low profile" by removing any information from their clothing that would indicate that they worked on The X-Files. Although the crew hoped that the activists would disperse on their own, a few were still protesting when production on this episode began, resulting in the police getting involved. Reception "Emily" premiered on the Fox network on December 14, 1997. This episode earned a Nielsen rating of 12.4, with a 19 share, meaning that roughly 12.4 percent of all television-equipped households, and 19 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode. It was viewed by 20.94 million viewers. The episode received mixed reviews from television critics; many were more critical of the episode than "Christmas Carol". Emily VanDerWerff from The A.V. Club gave the episode a B and wrote that she did not "totally buy “Emily” […] even though I like large portions of" the episode. VanDerWerff wrote positively of "most of the Scully scenes", noting that Anderson "found some of the raw sense of hope and loss" that the shots required. However, she was critical of the episode's plot, arguing that it only "goes through the motions" and "is about everybody getting really worked up over a little girl we’ve just met." She concluded that "two-parter is strongest when it grabs hold of this notion. But it’s at its weakest when it turns into just another episode of The X-Files." Other reviews were decidedly more mixed to negative. Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to