MELVIN FROHIKE

PLAYED BY TOM BRAINWOOD

Short, unshaven and clad in combat boots, Frohike is the Frog Prince of ‘The Lone Gunman’ editorial board. Next to Langly and Byers, he looks like the proverbial dirty old man. From his first leering appearance in ‘E.B.E.’ he has made no secret of his attraction to Agent Dana Scully. The photographic and surveillance specialist in the group, he once loaned Mulder a pair of night-vision goggles only after extracting Scully's phone number from him. Yet he has shown a tender side as well, being the only person to bring Scully flowers when she lay dying in ‘One Breath’. Not a great talker, Frohike grows loquacious only when Mulder teases him; he succinctly summarized the atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia in Mulder's apartment during ‘Anasazi’ with one bon mot: ‘weirdness’. In ‘Unusual Suspects’ we learn that prior to meeting Langly and Byers, he ran a small business selling dubious cable decoders. ‘Kill Switch’ reveals that he not only deems Dana Scully to be ‘hot’, but is also quite taken by the software wizard Esther Nairn, revealing an obvious preference for ‘brainy beauties’ on his side. In 'Three of a Kind' he 'rescues' a drugged Scully in a Las Vegas hotel bar and helps Byers to uncover the mystery surrounding the reappeared Susan Modeski.

JOHN BYERS

PLAYED BY BRUCE HARDWOOD

The military and information systems expert of "The Lone Gunman" cabal, Byers looks like a professor who has wandered into a CIA rendezvous by mistake. His neat beard and dapper suits seem out of place among his grungier colleagues, but his sharp mind and no-nonsense demeanor attest to an encyclopedic knowledge of conspiracy theory and current speculation on everything from the Kennedy assassination to the latest in DNA research. In ‘One Breath’, Byers unerringly recognizes and describes the bizarre recombinant chemistry that lies at the heart of Dana Scully's disease, and quietly expresses sympathy to Mulder. He occasionally indulges in a wit as sardonic as Mulder's, as when he tells him, ‘That's why we like you, Mulder: Your ideas are weirder than ours.’ Unlike co conspirators Langly and Frohike, he is the least liable to crack a joke or even a smile, but his calm intelligence lends authority and believability to the unlikely trio's offices. In ‘Fight the Future’, he readily gives Mulder his clothes in order to allow him to flee from the hospital disguised as Byers. In ‘Unusual Suspects’ we learn that prior to meeting Langly and Frohike he was working for the FCC. In 'Three of a Kind' he meets Susan Modeski whose abduction he could not prevent 10 years earlier ('Unusual Suspects') and who he is still in love with. He saves her from shady government researchers threatening her very life, but when she asks him to start a new life with him, he realizes his duty is to stay and continue to uncover the truth for the public. But maybe someday....

RINGO LANGLY

PLAYED BY DEAN HAGLUND

One wonders just how much of life this man takes seriously. Sporting black-rimmed glasses, long blond hair and T-shirts from a dozen hard-rock bands, he is not the picture of a conventional conspirator. Langly is the communications expert of ‘The Lone Gunman’ editorial collective, the one most likely to joke with Mulder or invite him to ‘hop on the Internet to nitpick the scientific inaccuracies’ of a new science-fiction show. From ‘Unusual Suspects’ we know that prior to the formation of ‘The Lone Gunmen’ Langly was a computer hacker who also played ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ for money. He's also a little bent; in ‘Fearful Symmetry’ his colleague Byers explains Langly's absence in a meeting as a philosophical aversion to having his image bounced off a satellite. He automatically records every incoming phone call, and is evidently as conversant with current conspiracy theory as his two comrades. But he is ready with a laugh any time Mulder's theories get a little ‘out there’, such as the idea that UFOs caused the Gulf War Syndrome. Nevertheless, when Mulder insists that Langly turn off the recording device in ‘E.B.E.’, Langly does not hesitate to lie to him. However, the Lone Gunmen are always ready to help whenever Mulder and Scully are in trouble, as they demonstrate on numerous occasions, e.g. in ‘Redux’, ‘Redux II’, ‘Fight the Future’, ‘Triangle’ or ‘Dreamland’. In 'Three of a Kind' they call upon Scully to help them uncover the mystery surrounding Susan Modeski and Langly plays a vital role in saving Susan's life.

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