List of unmade episodes of The X-Files

During the nine-year original run of the American science fiction television program The X-Files, a number of stories were proposed but, for a variety of reasons, never fully produced.

[1] For example, a fifth season episode involving an atheist hearing the voice of God was developed into "Kitsunegari", and the proposed story "Flight 180", written by Jeffrey Reddick was re-written and released as the popular 2000 horror film Final Destination.

Hutchison later explained that he envisioned Tooms as "an experiment to find out how I could remain so young and immortal; he was infused with a drug that backfired and ended up escaping the asylum.

[5] However, due to the massive amounts of rewrites the two were forced to do for "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man", both Morgan and Wong lost interest in the story.

[7] Executive producer Frank Spotnitz suggested to Minear that the "convicted atheist" should actually be Robert Modell from the third season episode "Pusher".

[7] Vince Gilligan developed a cross-over idea while writing an episode during the fifth season; the script would have involved a story being presented by Robert Stack of the NBC show Unsolved Mysteries, with unknown actors playing Mulder and Scully.

[9] David Amann, after writing his first episode "Terms of Endearment", proposed a story that involved a monster loose in an abandoned gold mine.

Frank Spotnitz, the show's executive producer, did not particularly like the idea of a gold mine, but he enjoyed the concept of a monster loose in an enclosed space.

The first was going to be a "reversal" of 1963 movie The Incredible Journey, featuring "a desperate family [that] moves three thousand miles to get away from their killer pet—who's waiting for them at their new house, really pissed".

[11] Reportedly, Stephen King, who had penned season five’s "Chinga", wished to write an episode based on George A. Romero's cult 1968 zombie film Night of the Living Dead.

[14] Chip Johannessen, who had formerly been an executive producer on the Carter-created television series Millennium, wrote a draft for The X-Files in which the episode's main antagonist was a prisoner with the ability to stop time.

Reportedly, Duchovny offered to write and direct an episode based around the concept of Mulder being trapped in the alien spaceship, as seen in the season opener "Within" and "Without".

[18] Law & Order cameraman D.W. Paone, a fan of the series from its first broadcast, wrote and submitted a freelance script during its early seasons, co-written with author Frank Scoblete.

Paone had chosen to focus on Akhenaton due to his own interest in Egyptology, and was confident that Scoblete's dialogue was true to the series' characters.

He said, "I was actually flying home to Kentucky and I read this story about a woman who was on vacation and her mom called her and said 'Don't take the flight tomorrow, I have a really bad feeling about it'.

[22] In 1998, Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz submitted a script in which an FBI agent is assassinated by a man who transforms into a mannequin, leading Mulder and Scully to follow a trail of clues to the sinister backwater town of Crampton.