Things you learn from watching reruns

I've been idly, irregularly watching reruns of the first season of The X-Files, after I happened by chance to tune in last week just as the first episode was airing on cable. I've never watched any of the seasons fully, and certainly never the pilot --- so it was something of a novelty to see Mulder and Scully right at the start of their grand adventure, back when Mulder seemed like nothing but a one-dimensional obstinate fanatic and the show hadn't quite nailed down how to portray Scully's intelligence yet.

Tonight's find: the actor Mark Sheppard, whom I first adored as Badger on Firefly and then as the excellent offbeat lawyer Romo Lampkin on the reimagined Battlestar Galactica (which I've also been rewatching on my own). It turns out one of his earliest appearances on-screen was in The X-Files (season 1 episode 11, for those of you at home taking notes), as a man with pyrokinetic abilities. He didn't have that many lines, but he already had that trademark creepy, wide-eyed stare down. And the charmin' Irish brogue, of course.

Seeing him made me think of the "Hey! It's That Guy!" section of the website Fametracker, which like many gems of the late 1990s/early 2000s Internet, is now defunct. Between that and the fact that I was watching this on cable, I feel pretty old retro right now.