Sounds a lot like what happened here in Massachusetts last year. Everyone in the Bay State remembers how Massachusetts Turnpike Authority chairman James Kerasiotes muzzled word that the Big Dig was $1.4 billion over budget. But that story line also fits the description of “Medusa,” an episode of The X-Files that aired February 11. (The Boston Globe’s Names & Faces column noted the Hub setting for the episode, but failed to pick up on the Big Dig angle.)

On the show, FBI agents Dana Scully and John Doggett find themselves tearing through the Boston subway system in search of a dangerous killer. Somehow, Big Dig–related construction has unleashed a bioluminescent organism that causes human beings to burst into flames. The agents are stymied in their quest for the truth by Deputy Chief Karras (sound familiar?), who claims that his only goal is to get the trains working on time.

Not only does Karras have a name that sounds remarkably similar to Kerasiotes’s (as the Herald noted on February 18), but he has the bulldog personality to match. When Karras stonewalls Scully and orders the search cut short, he sounds suspiciously like You Know Who. When she raises her voice and makes her case for the search to continue, Karras shouts at her that she is being “irrational.” Remember when Kerasiotes told a Wall Street Journal reporter that an adviser to Governor Paul Cellucci was a “moron” and that the head of the Massachusetts Port Authority was a “reptile”?

Did real-life events inspire the X-Files episode? Yes and no, says X-Files executive producer Frank Spotnitz, who wrote the episode. Spotnitz has Boston roots, and his father’s family lived for many years in South Boston. The allure of a Big Dig story line hit him when he visited Boston for his aunt’s funeral last spring.

“The cab ride in and the cab ride out, I got an earful from my cab drivers on the Big Dig,” recalls Spotnitz. “It was all Big Dig: what a hassle it was, how it was never going to end, how it was a nightmare going to and from the airport.”

Later, when Spotnitz came up with an idea for a show that featured a deadly glow-in-the dark sea creature, the visual-effects producer — himself from Boston — suggested a Big Dig tie-in. During preparations for the show, Spotnitz tried to make the Boston setting as realistic as possible — though it wasn’t quite perfect. He had to come up with a fictitious subway station, Clay Street, and to make do with a different door-closing sound than the one we hear every day on the T. But, all in all, much of it seemed all too familiar to anyone who’s had to put up with Boston’s traffic-choked downtown or delay-happy MBTA.

Especially, the character of Karras. But here’s where Spotnitz says he wasn’t inspired by the Big Dig. Before joining the Hollywood high life, Spotnitz was once an ink-stained wretch covering New York’s subway system for United Press International.

“I wish I could say [the character of Karras] was based upon a real person.” he says. “It wasn’t. I frequently covered the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the transit police, so it seemed correct to me.” He disavows any knowledge of the real-life Kerasiotes.

So what about the Karras/Kerasiotes mystery? We guess the truth is out there.