He added, “Some places bought it.” (For the record, it’s not.)

Mr. Morgan and Mr. Wong recently looked back on “Home” in a joint phone call. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q. Where did the story come from?

A. Morgan: My wife, Kristen, had shown me “Brother’s Keeper” [a 1992 documentary about an illiterate rural man’s suspected murder of his brother], which was about this family close to where my brother and I grew up. The other major thing was, in college I had read Charlie Chaplin’s biography. Before he was famous he was traveling in musical theater, and he rented a room in a tenement with a family that took a liking to him. They said, “Hey, we got something to show you.” And they take him up to a room with a cot, and under the cot was a man on a platform, and he was wheeled out and they stood him up and they clapped and danced and the guy did tricks. It just seemed like such a horrifying situation, and I’d been trying to use it. So we had been working out the story where there was another brother under the bed, and Jim Wong one day goes: “It’s the mother! The mother’s under the bed!” And I felt Freud and Joseph Campbell do back flips, and that was that.

Q. Did you have any sense that what you were doing might be controversial?

A. Wong: We were obligated to do four episodes that season, and we thought this was the most down-the-middle, straightforward “X-Files” of all of them. As it turns out it, it was one they never repeated until several years later.

Q. What was the rationale?

A. Wong: I think it had to do with the incest.

Q. There was also the buried baby in the opening scene.

A. Wong: Originally it was obviously alive when they buried it, but we changed it a little bit because it was too harsh. It was inspired by this book called “Dark Nature.”