The Post-Modern Prometheus of the show. To achieve his vision, he wrote a script that blurred the real world with the "X-Files" reality and that had a distinct fantasy element. Carter combined elements of the original story with fairy tales and elements of folk tales. In order to make the episode "as moving" as possible, Carter sought to echo elements of James Whale's 1931 film version of "Frankenstein". He later noted that, by "using modern science, I took an old style, which is black and white, and an old approach, which is a kind of James Whale approach to science fiction, and came
The Post-Modern Prometheus played at the end of the episode when the agents take The Great Mutato to a Cher concert. In the episode, the character watches Cher's 1985 movie "Mask", and derives comfort from the loving relationship between Cher's character and her son, who has a disfiguring genetic bone disorder. At the end of the episode, Mulder and Scully take The Great Mutato from his small town to a Cher concert, where she picks him out of the crowd to dance. The episode contains several cultural references. First, the episode's title is a reference to both the subtitle for Shelley's original novel,