“Beyond the Sea” was the twelfth episode of Season 1, written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, the same pair who would go on to write “Home,” and “One Breath” among many others, and the accomplished pair envisioned Brad Dourif as the central villain. Chris Carter agreed, and after Fox rejected them the first time, Carter called up the president of Fox Entertainment on Thanksgiving to make his pitch.
As Carter explained in a later interview, “This is the guy we need for this episode.’ There was a money issue. He was the person who signed off on that. I pulled him away from the Thanksgiving table and he said, ‘Just cast him,’ and that was it. The timing to call him was perfect, though it was inadvertent.” While he won that battle, the episode still faced an uphill battle before it went into production, and it escalated Carter’s initial conflicts with the network.
