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LoneGunmen

From left: Melvin Frohike, John Fitzgerald Byers, Richard "Ringo" Langly

Short-lived spinoff of The X-Files featuring the adventures of Mulder's conspiracy-crazy friends the Lone Gunmen. The series lasted from March to June, 2001.

The show focused on small-time conspiracies rather than mythological beasts and alien invasions, but while it was more plausible than The X-Files it was also more lighthearted. Attempts to create a serious Myth Arc were thwarted when the series was cancelled after only thirteen episodes. The X-Files episode "Jump the Shark" was a Fully-Absorbed Finale for the show.

If for nothing else, the show is notable in that its pilot episode "predicted" the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Also noted for predicting what happened after that, too.

Tropes used in The Lone Gunmen include:
One character refers to the Gunmen as a "little mongoloid Girl Scout troop".
  • Fully-Absorbed Finale (which doesn't end well for the trio.)
  • Genius Ditz: Jimmy, who appears to have zero common sense and the personality of a golden retriever, yet will inevitably shock everyone with a brilliant suggestion.
  • Government Conspiracy
  • Hello, Nurse!: Yves.
  • Heterosexual Life Partners: The Lone Gunmen seem to do everything together, including living together.
  • Hollywood Spelling No one ever asks Yves Adele Harlow just how that's spelled. The Gunmen discovered it was an alias, because it's an anagram of Lee Harvey Oswald. Her name was never spelled out until they made the connection, despite there being at least four different ways to spell the names involved. For one thing, 'Yves' is usually a men's name, and is pronounced exactly like the women's name 'Eve'.
  • Iron Butt Monkey: Jimmy takes a whole lotta crap, both from the writers and the other characters. He never complains.
  • Jail Bake: Yves smuggles Jimmy an earpiece in prison inside a bag of Cheetos.
  • Information Wants to Be Free: Inverted in the episode "Like Water for Octane". The Gunmen are trying to find an experimental prototype water-powered car before an agent of an oil company, who presumably intends to destroy it. It turns out that the agent wants to see it mass-manufactured, and its original creator hid it away because he realized that freedom from oil would ultimately mean more cars and more consumption--his "miracle" would accelerate corporate devastation of the environment rather than stop it.
    • However, in every other case it's played straight and Up to Eleven. They are hackers and underground journalists who seek to expose "mundane" conspiracies and wrongdoings.
  • Latex Perfection
  • "Mission Impossible" Cable Drop
  • Mistaken for Gay: Tends to be a Running Gag.
  • Myth Arc
  • Prison Episode: "Maximum Byers," where Byers and Jimmy go undercover as prisoners for a case. The Fridge Logic of this approach was acknowledged In-Universe, as Eve asks why they didn't just dress up as prison guards.
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 Langley: (sheepishly) That's not how they did it on The A-Team.

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