It was well received by several of the series' future crew members. Producer and writer Glen Morgan felt that the episode's "merging of "Silence of the Lambs" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"" was impressive; he also felt that it was the only truly scary series on television at the time. Writer Howard Gordon stated that "the pilot set the tone of the show really successfully", noting the difficulty inherent in introducing both a series' premise and its main cast in "forty-eight minutes" and finding that the episode had achieved both, being "a tremendous synthesis of all the parts". Chris Carter also recounted that the episode's test screening for Rupert Murdoch and other Fox executives was met with "spontaneous applause".