It was written by Howard Gordon and series creator Chris Carter, directed by Michael Lange, and featured guest appearances by R. D. Call and Scott Bairstow.
The show centers on FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files.
Ten years later, Dana Scully shows Fox Mulder a videotape of a religious service led by the now-grown Samuel (Scott Bairstow), who has become an evangelical faith healer for a ministry run by Calvin.
The agents travel to Clarksville, Tennessee, where they attend a service featuring an enthusiastic sermon by Leonard Vance, the man whom Samuel raised from the dead a decade earlier.
An autopsy reveals the woman died of cyanide poisoning, while Mulder and Scully find evidence that the swarm of locusts, which were actually common grasshoppers, was guided by someone to the courtroom through the building's ventilation system.
As the agents prepare to finish work on the case, they receive a phone call and learn that Samuel's body has gone missing from the morgue, and witnesses have seen him walking around, badly bruised.
Series creator Chris Carter recalls being asked to collaborate on the episode, saying, "Howard came to my house, and said, 'Help me out,' so we went to my living room and put up this bulletin board and in a matter of hours we came up with this story".
[6] Originally the script had called for more overt religious imagery, though censors at the Fox network objected to depictions of faith healer Samuel being beaten to death whilst in a cruciform pose, leading to scenes being cut.
Producer R. W. Goodwin felt that the greatest difficulty in creating the episode was the challenge in finding enough actors in the Vancouver area who could portray a convincing Southern United States accent, leading to the hiring of a dialect coach to prevent the cast from sounding "like they were coming from fifteen different parts of the South".
Scott Bairstow's guest role was praised, though it was noted that "an ultimately contrived plot and a stereotypical Bible-thumping Southern milieu make for a case more suited to Jessica Fletcher than Mulder and Scully".