Production
Co-writer Frank Spotnitz described the episode as a "fortunate accident". Late in the fourth season of the show Gillian Anderson left the show for a week to film her part in the film The Mighty. The producers, knowing that they would have to write an episode without Dana Scully, decided it was not fair to have David Duchovny carry the same workload as in a normal episode considering her absence. As such, a story was devised in which his involvement would be light. This resulted in the decision to write, for the second year in a row, an episode focused on Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi). Howard Gordon, having written the previous Skinner-centric episode, "Avatar" joined Spotnitz and the two wrote the episode over a weekend while another Gordon written episode, "Synchrony" was in production. The writers felt that this was the perfect time to bring in Skinner's deal with The Smoking Man (William B. Davis) to cure Scully's cancer, made in the episode "Memento Mori". Frank Spotnitz said of Skinner's deal, "The hard thing for Skinner was that we had to keep him in the middle. We had him tell Mulder not to bargain with The Smoking Man in order to save Scully's life. And then he himself struck a Faustian bargain with the Cigarette Smoking Man and was in his debt for some kind."
The writing staff felt that "Zero Sum" was a logical place to bring back the bees that were used in the season premiere, "Herrenvolk", feeling it was important to not have something paranormal happen to Skinner in this episode considering that had been done in the previous season. Live bees were used for filming, but showed up poorly in the footage; visual effects technician Laurie Kallsen-George then spent nine days digitally enhancing the footage to improve upon this. The virus-carrying bees would later form a central plot point in the series' 1998 feature film adaptation.
Director Kim Manners noted that the episode "was a really good show for me, because I had not got a chance to work with Mitch. And they wrote a great script, you know? It was really something he could sink his teeth into and he just did a great job. Bill Davis was fabulous in that show too". This was the second episode of the series to not feature Scully, the first being the second season episode "3". Guest actor Morris Panych, portraying the Syndicate assassin The Grey-Haired Man, makes his last appearance in the series in this episode. Panych had previously appeared in "Piper Maru", "Avatar", "Herrenvolk" and "Memento Mori".
Read more about this topic: Zero Sum (The X-Files)
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