Sharna Pax

I can see that. I guess part of the way I engage with the X-Files - because it's such a gloriously messy, imperfect, self-contradicting show, that's made so many bizarre choices over the years but also reached such astonishing heights - is by thinking about what I want to accept as part of my own personal X-Files canon and what I want to pretend didn't happen. So I don't personally feel the rage at Chris Carter that I think a lot of people do, because when he gets extra Chris Carter-y I just stop listening. But that means there are certain points at which I also stop fully engaging with the story, because it doesn't seem like a story so much as an unending series of very similar traumas. So although I do like to think about what fatherhood means to Mulder, I have a hard time centering that discussion around that line from the finale, because that line and the finale in general have completely and totally lost me. And I'm sorry if I spun off into a rant about how and why it lost me instead of really answering the question. In reality, though, I was completely on board by the end of Ghouli. I loved seeing Mulder suppress his feelings about William but then allow himself that little bit of dawning hope at the end. It gave me hope, too, that Mulder might someday have a relationship with William - maybe not the version of fatherhood that he envisioned, but a version that would be meaningful. And if Chris Carter had brought the level of storytelling to the finale that James Wong brought to Ghouli, and if he had been as honest and thoughtful in his portrayal of the characters - regardless of what actually happened in the episode - then I would have an easier time entering into a serious discussion of that line and what it means. But it's not really a line that I can see Mulder saying, mainly because to undercut his own parental identity is also to undercut Scully's, and I don't think the Mulder who was so self-effacing and quietly supportive in Ghouli would do that.

Here I am, spamming the thread again. Milagro is one that I rewatched fairly recently, though I'm not sure why, because I never liked it. I think in the past I always focused on the relentless purple prose voiceovers and "Agent Scully is already in love," a line which annoys me in a multitude of ways. This time through what jumped out at me is that neither Mulder nor Scully uses the word "stalker." I can't remember exactly how Scully words it, when she first tells Mulder about Padgett, but it's weirdly flowery and circuitous, even for the X-Files. And Mulder doesn't seem nearly as concerned as he should be at the idea that his next-door neighbor is stalking Scully, and I'm concerned that this show doesn't know what stalking is, any more than it knows what medical rape is. It actually seems like Mulder's response to Scully being stalked is to get suspicious of her, and I would be mad at him for that but it's all of a piece with this episode's weird, weird sexual politics. Anyway, I was thinking about the whole meta aspect of the episode, and it made me think of an episode of Classic Doctor Who called The Mind Robber, where the characters find themselves in the Land of Fiction. The great danger, in that episode, is a constantly running ticker tape that narrates the characters' adventures a moment before they happen. If the characters do exactly what is written for them - if they grab the sword and slay the dragon, or what have you - they become fictionalized and are trapped forever in the land of fiction. So it's partly about the idea that characters - real characters, like the Doctor and his companions - act in a way that their creators didn't anticipate. But it's also about the risk of letting another person's vision of you guide your actions. Now, I think Milagro is also supposed to be about both those things - it's about Mulder and Scully and their growing independence as characters, but it's also about the danger of being trapped by another person's image of you. But it's so very muddled in the way it tries to explore these ideas that it totally undercuts them both. If this is an episode about Mulder and Scully's independence from their creator, why does Scully spend the whole episode drifting around like she has no agency at all? If Scully is able to resist Padgett's hold on her because she's in love with Mulder, why do we never see her resisting it? Why does she drift into his bedroom, when she obviously doesn't feel comfortable being there? Does Scully, in fact, resist being fictionalized? Who even is she? What does she want? What draws her to Padgett, if indeed she is at all drawn to him? I can't tell. And it seems like a terrible mistake for this episode that should celebrate Scully's personality and independence to instead turn her into a zombie with nice legs. On another note, Padgett's book sounds really terrible. On top of the awful, awful prose, it sounds like the plot is just a series of identical murders intercut with sex scenes. Why would a writer that bad have any power over anyone, let alone Scully?

I don't mind Season 7 - in fact, I quite like it. Yes, it bugs me that Mulder and Scully's relationship is unacknowledged, as I think the season fundamentally ended up being about the relationship and the way it was changing Mulder and Scully's lives and priorities. And it doesn't really make any sense to have a season about a relationship that doesn't acknowledge that relationship's existence. But at least the dynamic we're shown in Season 7 feels consistent. Mulder and Scully seem to be together, in some sense, and to be happy about it, so even if we never know the details of their relationship, I still trust that they have it worked out. What bothers me about Season 6 is that Mulder and Scully aren't together, as far as I can tell, and yet there's no good reason why not. If you leave out Season 6, the arc of the Mulder-Scully relationship makes sense to me. Yes, it takes them forever to get together, but there are reasons for that. They're partners, so they're not supposed to think of each other romantically. They've been through Scully's abduction and her cancer, and Mulder's response to both of those experiences has been to try to reset their partnership to where it was before the trauma, as if there's some kind of safety and stability in keeping things exactly the same. And of course their friendship is so important to them that they don't want to jeopardize it. So it makes sense to me that they would get to the end of Season 5 before declaring their feelings for each other. But once they do that - as they do in the movie - there's no reasonable way for them to go back. If we had gone straight from the movie to the kind of dynamic we see in Rush, I think I would have loved it. For Mulder and Scully to slooowly inch their way toward a relationship, but then commit to it and enjoy it once they get there? That would have been a lovely depiction of a functional relationship between two adults who know what they want. But instead, we get an entire season of stalling. By now, Mulder and Scully know how they feel about each other, and yet they're not together, and there's no good way to explain that except by having them both act like irrational children all the time. So we get the awful Fowley love triangle, we get Mulder taking back everything he said in the movie, we get episode after episode where Mulder and Scully make some kind of connection in a dream sequence or an alternate reality or where their memories get erased. We have endless secondary characters yelling "YOU TWO LOVE EACH OTHER NOW MAKE OUT!" at Mulder and Scully to no effect. (And though I love The Unnatural with a passion, it is absolutely ridiculous to think Mulder and Scully didn't have sex after that baseball lesson. No two people who are attracted to each other AT ALL can stand like that for any length of time without at least making out. It is a scientific impossibility. Also, that's clearly why Mulder set the lesson up the way he did. A man does not teach a woman to play baseball in that particular fashion unless he's trying to get in her pants.) So to me, the problem with Season 6 is not the individual episodes - it's that the overall arc of the season asks me to believe things about the Mulder/Scully relationship that just don't make sense. I think most of the romantic-comedy episodes work just fine as stand-alones, especially if you assume that Mulder and Scully hooked up right after the credits rolled. What doesn't work is the way their relationship gets rolled right back to zero for the start of the next romantic-comedy episode, so that the episode can once again end with them just on the verge of hooking up for the first time.

I refuse to watch any episodes with My Struggle in the title, but I'm still mad about Scully giving up William in the first place. Chris Carter needs to stop adding a new dead/missing/sick kid to the show every time he wants to give the plot another turn of the screw. Samantha was the perfect backstory for Mulder; it was terribly sad and gave his character depth, but it also made us hope that one day he would find something to fill that gap in his life. But Scully finding and losing Emily, and then both Mulder and Scully losing William - that's too much. I thought for the longest time that the X-Files was going to be a story about someone losing one family and eventually finding another one. But it turns out it's just a record of loss after loss, and I'm not saying that's unrealistic, but it's very hard to watch. To me, the most heartbreaking moment of the whole damn show is Mulder's dream of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey with William in Founder's Mutation. It's partly how young he looks - the lines smoothed out of his face, the weight lifted from his shoulders. It's partly how casually he leans over and drops a kiss on William's head, like he knows how lucky he is to have this wonderful kid. That's the happiest I've ever seen Mulder, and it kills me that he never got to be that happy in real life. Taking away Mulder's last tenuous connection to William is a final pointless cruelty, but really it's all unforgivable.

I think it's a great pity this episode was so terrible, because it's overshadowed what I think was a surprisingly good season, with excellent performances by Duchovny and Anderson (Anderson's voice is a handicap, but aside from that I thought she was much better than in the previous revival season), and some nice work from new writers and directors. I felt like this season had a much stronger reason to exist than the 2016 season. Recent political developments have made The X-Files topical again, and the show ran with that, and I thought it was great. I was really invested in this season, and I deliberately avoided watching the finale because I didn't want that ruined. But I've been sorry to see that this season is generally regarded as a failure - because to me the X-Files has never really been about seasons or finales or the long-term story arc, it's been about tuning in once a week, knowing you're going to see Mulder and Scully investigating something wacky, but never knowing exactly what you're going to get. And with a few exceptions (and there are always exceptions, that's just part of The X-Files) the show delivered on that. I will be rewatching at least five of this season's episodes, and they're all very different from each other. To me, that's a success. I understand why people are so disappointed, and I understand why Anderson is angry. I'm angry on her behalf. But I don't want that to make everyone forget the wonderful job that she and Duchovny did in Ghouli, or how brilliant and bittersweet Forehead Sweat was, or the sublime absurdity of Mulder and Scully and the blobfish.

I have such mixed feelings about Season 6. I guess I think it's a great collection of episodes, but not a very good season? It has some of my very favorite episodes, including Monday and Field Trip, but there's such an uncomfortable dynamic between Mulder and Scully in all the mytharc episodes, and to me that doesn't pair well with the over-the-top romantic comedy vibe of the rest of the season. I think the reason the Mulder and Scully relationship feels so different from all the other boy-girl detective pairings on TV is that in the early seasons it really doesn't feel like the show is pushing them together. It feels like this is just something that's happening naturally between the characters. But in Season 6, all of a sudden the show is actively writing this relationship as a romance, and it's using all the cliches that shows use to manufacture sexual tension between characters who don't naturally have it - pushing them into one pseudo-date situation after another, having everyone around them tell them they should be together, writing whole episodes that are about Love with a capital L. And despite all that they don't seem to be getting together, and when I watch too many of those episodes back-to-back it all feels strange and unhappy and wrong to me. And yet I wouldn't want to skip Season 6, because it has a lot of the episodes that would go on my favorites list. Monday. Field Trip. Tithonus. The Unnatural. How the Ghosts Stole Christmas. I like Drive, too, and while the Mulder section of Triangle is a bit too cheesy for me, I adore the part where Scully is flying around the FBI like an avenging angel, threatening people's lives and kissing Skinner and generally being a badass. And Field Trip is a reminder that anything can be a catchphrase if you repeat it often enough. The line, "I think his body was stripped and then skeletonized, possibly by boiling, or the use of an acid solution," is a perfectly standard, unremarkable X-Files line, but it is now permanently embedded in my memory.

I guess the old saying is true: you can't dump your father's corpse in the same river twice.

I don't think Hank sees them that way, but I do think the show does. I just binge-watched this show, and one thing I noticed was the massive double standard in the way the actresses are filmed. The show has this endless conveyor belt of little-known actresses, most of them young, and their sex scenes are always the same - woman on top with the camera focused on her boobs. But when it comes to Hank's sex scenes with women he's serious about, it's very network TV - a tasteful nightgown or Sex Bra, closeups of their faces in profile, and then it cuts away. Given the difference, it's hard not to think that the show is treating young aspiring actresses as so much disposable meat. However, that wasn't actually what I came here to complain about. There's one specific thing that's been bothering me (well, lots of things about this show bother me, but there's one that I actually feel like going on a rant about.) The apparent suicide attempt in Season 4. It's ambiguous, but it seems to me that it should be seen as a suicide attempt, even if it's not a conscious, deliberate one. When someone takes a handful of sleeping pills, washes them down with whisky, and leaves a letter for his daughter telling her how depressed he is and how much he loves her, he's obviously not massively invested in waking up again. I think the question of what Hank meant to do is pretty much moot; at the very least, this is a serious cry for help. But Karen acts as if this is a completely black and white situation. Either Hank tried to kill himself, in which case he's a beautiful tragic hero who should be welcomed back into the bosom of his family, or he didn't, in which case he's just a toxic fuckup who doesn't deserve any sympathy. So one moment she's telling him she'll always be there for him and he can call, text, whatever, any time, and the next moment she's pushing him out the door. Nobody on the show seems to entertain the possibility that the truth is somewhere in between - that Hank is a confused, deeply depressed fuckup who's very close to the edge, and that he doesn't need googly eyes and sympathy sex but does probably need someone to talk to. And yet that seems like it should be the obvious conclusion. Now, the show obviously wants us to sympathize with Hank, because it always does. So we see Hank go up to his lonely hotel room and stare out over the ledge and think about jumping, and we understand that he's not going to do it because of Becca, and that he'll push on through and Karen will never know how much he's really struggling. It's all very sad, and David Duchovny does a very good job. But I think the show did its work too well, because at this point I'm convinced that Karen is a soul-sucking monster who doesn't understand human emotion, and that Hank needs to stay the hell away from her for his own mental health. Does anyone else have this reaction to Karen? And does anyone else have a problem with the show trying to tell us that what we saw in "Suicide Solution" was not a suicide attempt? While I'm going off about this show, I will add that to the extent that I ship Hank with anyone, I ship him with Trixie. They just seem so happy to see each other in "Perverts and Whores," and there's something so comfortably domestic about their little getting-ready-for-bed routine - him on one side of the bed, her on the other, the two of them having an open, honest conversation about their lives while they casually undress and get under the covers. They seem more like a real couple, in that little scene, than Hank and Karen ever do.

If you were going to watch more (and there's no reason you should), I'd say Season 4 is the way to go. The show pretty much treads water for the second and third seasons, but at the end of Season 3 all the Mia stuff comes back to bite Hank and his world falls apart, and that at least is a story. The scene that I really have a hard time putting into words is the one just before the dream-vision, when they go to the nurse's house and Mulder hangs back and lets Scully and Harold talk to her for him. Duchovny plays it like part of him is already on that hill with the ghost children, like he's so deep inside his own mind that talking to another person would be unbearably jarring. He's tuned to another frequency; he's listening for something that we can't hear. So that when the ghost child appears, and the music starts, it seems right.

Well, if you don't mind spoilers - I can't say I recommend it. And I'm not crazy about the show's blend of pointless crassness and maudlin sentimentality. I did find Hank's character compelling, though, which is why I kept watching in spite of myself. I'm a sucker for those stubbly substance-addicted antiheroes.

I totally agree. This is something I've been noticing too. Mulder is such a fascinating character in part because you don't see everything about him at first glance; he seems like a cool jock, but he's actually a painfully isolated weirdo. He seems like the chillest guy you'll ever meet, he has a joke for every occasion, and yet there's this core of fanaticism that drives everything he does. He's someone who could have had one life and has chosen another, and you can see those internal contradictions in the way Duchovny plays him. (This is one reason why I'm fascinated by that scene in Tempus Fugit with the birthday keychain. Mulder is trying so hard to be a normal, fun, supportive friend that he overcompensates and dials the mania way, way up, and you get a glimpse of what the show would be like if Mulder's outward energy matched his inner crazy. It's compelling to watch, but it's also slightly unsettling.) I love that moment in One Breath too. I also like the early scene where Mulder gets the call to tell him Scully's in the hospital - he looks at the ringing phone and you can feel how listless and depressed he is, like just reaching for the phone might take more energy than he has. It's such a change from that to the later scene, where he's dreading the news but he's also very present in the moment, and you see him make up his mind to take the call and face whatever is waiting for him. I love how the episode is bookended by these two silent scenes, and all you have is body language to show you how far Mulder's come over the course of the episode. I could list favorite Mulder moments till the cows come home. "I will be right there." The way he loses his voice when he's talking to Marita in Herrenvolk. The moment in the pilot when he's telling Scully about Samantha and you see the light of fanaticism in his eyes for the first time. The bit in Sein und Zeit when he says, "These parents who have lost - who have lost their children," with that little halt in the middle as if just getting through the sentence is physically painful. My favorite Duchovny performance, though, is in Closure. It's an episode that's loaded with silly plot contrivances and could so easily not work at all, but it rings true to me on an emotional level, and most of that is down to Duchovny. He plays Mulder with this eerie, unnerving quietness, like he's halfway in another dimension; he has so much to process that he's not quite all there. He doesn’t spend the episode sobbing; instead he seems like someone who’s all cried out. I find the scene where Mulder reads Samantha's journal to Scully particularly moving, the more so because Mulder never loses control. And you can see the moment – a few seconds after Samantha hugs him - when he finally accepts that this ghost child is his sister. You don’t fully appreciate how tense Mulder usually is until you see the tension leave him. And when he comes down from the hill and Scully asks him if he’s okay, and he says, “I’m fine. I’m free,” you know it’s true. My mind boggles at the thought of how good the acting has to be here, to make Mulder’s realization that Samantha suffered for six years and died at fourteen into a transcendent moment.

Having now skimmed my way through all seven seasons of Californication in about a week (easy to do if you skip everything that's gross, stupid and/or pointless), here's what I've taken away from it: David Duchovny looks great with stubble, he's really good at acting depressed, he can have chemistry with literally anyone, and he manages to get through seven seasons of misery and self-pity without once busting out the dread Mulder cryface. I wonder if it was in his contract that he wouldn't have to cry? But seriously, he's very good. There's a bit in early season 6 where Hank is in a pit of depression and doing his best to drink himself to death, and he finally talks to Karen about it and tells her, "It hurts to be awake." And that's a line that could have gone horribly wrong and maybe deserved to, but the way Duchov says it, it's so weighted with bone-deep sadness it makes me feel a little bit sick just hearing it. Californication doesn't deserve a performance that good. And honestly I'm sort of shocked. Like, I thought he was very good at playing Mulder, but watching Mulder's big emotional scenes on The X-Files is sort of like watching an Olympic figure-skater set up a jump. You know he can do it, but you're never quite sure if he will do it, and there's always the potential for a spectacular crash. On Californication, as far as I can tell, he never puts a foot wrong. Too bad the show is so terrible 95% of the time.

So to my intense shame, I just broke down and watched the first season of Californication. I hate it, and yet I can't stop watching. Goddamn you, David Duchovny. I will say, though, that he's very good in it. I was sort of expecting Hank Moody to be a sleazier version of Fox Mulder, because the accepted wisdom on DD is that he has zero range as an actor, but actually he seems totally different and I'm very rarely even reminded of Mulder.

Between this episode, Demons, and Detour, I'm starting to think that Scully diagnoses Mulder with shock whenever she wants an excuse to put her arms around him.

One thing I forgot to mention: Scully running through the park after Mulder is so Run, Lola, Run it's ridiculous. I have no idea how to post a gif so that it actually plays, but I'll try.

Yes! Rabbit hole is right. I think I'm somehow more obsessed with the show now than I was back when I first watched it. This may have something to do with the fact that I now live in Alaska and it was snowing this morning when I left my cabin. I don't think summer is ever going to come. So I rewatched "The Pine Bluff Variant," and this is one of those episodes where I can't quite believe they fit it all into 45 minutes of TV. It works, I think. The plot is convoluted and hard to follow, but it's supposed to be, and it all more or less makes sense in the end. One thing I didn't quite realize before, but that jumped out to me on rewatch, is how central Scully is to the plan to set Mulder up. They arrange for Mulder to let Haley go, ostensibly to build Haley's trust, but also to give Scully a chance to see it and become suspicious. Then they hold a fake hearing - again, ostensibly to allay suspicion on the part of the militia, but also so that Scully will think Mulder is lying and getting away with it. They set the whole thing up so that Scully won't be in on it from the beginning, and won't be able to discuss the operation with Mulder in a secure location, because they know that she'll track him down and confront him once she knows the truth. And they also know that Mulder won't be able to resist the temptation to talk to her, and thus Bremer will get the proof he needs to discredit Haley. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, this role in the plot is played by Liz, the woman Leamas falls in love with just before he goes undercover. I find it adorable that this episode just slots Scully neatly into the girlfriend role in the story. I have to assume that the government chose Mulder in part because of his relationship with Scully - they needed someone with radical views and a very close relationship with his partner, and Mulder fit the bill. But what the government didn't see coming was Scully being smart and persistent enough to bust them. The big mystery at the end of the episode is why Bremer doesn't kill Mulder, since I'm pretty sure that was the plan as originally conceived: use Mulder to discredit Haley, then kill both Mulder and Haley to consolidate Bremer's power with the militia. Pretending to execute Mulder and then letting him go makes no sense - how is Bremer going to stay in charge of the militia when he's got a dead henchman and a live FBI agent to explain away? Sure, it will probably be a while before someone checks on whether Mulder is alive or dead, but once they find out he's alive Bremer's days are numbered. The only way I can explain it is to assume that Bremer got word that Scully was onto them and decided it was better to close down the operation than to kill Mulder and have Scully blow the whistle. (And really, the government trying to rope Scully into their plans for Mulder and getting more than they bargained for is this entire show in a nutshell.) A few more thoughts: Mulder's shady motel of intrigue is the Aaron Burr Motor Court. Hee hee hee. I'm sure there's some metaphorical significance there, with the two men vying for control and all that, but mostly it just cracks me up that there's a motel named after Aaron Burr. Good job by Duchov when Mulder thinks he's about to be shot. Really, the trauma that Mulder's been put through in this episode alone is off the charts. Torture and thinking he's being executed? How is he still even remotely functional? That's a gorgeous scene, by the way - that torn-up greenhouse, with all the drifting sheets of Visqueen. I like the way Mulder just wordlessly gestures to his face when Scully says she recognized him in the video, and his little laugh when she says, "Your finger." So much nonverbal communication between these two. But what really gets me is the moment where Mulder opens the door of his apartment late at night after the Pepsi Challenge and finds Scully there. Even though I know it's all part of the setup, I'm still glad Mulder doesn't have to come home to an empty apartment when he's frightened and in pain.

Me too! It would have been really fun to have company on my rewatch. I meant to start from Season 1, but I skipped to Season 4 because that's the season I know the least. But seasons 2 and 3 are probably my favorites. It's tempting! I felt like I had to stop writing about every episode, though, because I was getting way too obsessed with it and it was taking away time from things I needed to be working on. I actually skipped ahead a bit - I'm a terrible rewatcher - and watched a few from Season 6 and then jumped to Season 7, because I love seeing Mulder and Scully together and happy. I might go back and write about some of the episodes that really stood out to me, but I don't think I can do the full rewatch. (Plus, I can't handle the mythology episodes from the end of Season 5 through the beginning of Season 7, so there's too much I would want to skip.) I really like "Pine Bluff Variant" too. It has an atmosphere that really gets me, and once I realized it was based on The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, I liked it even more. I think Shiban did a very good job of adapting the book but also making it credible as an X-Files episode. And it's one of those secretly shippy episodes, because Scully, as the person Mulder can't bring himself to lie to, is playing the part that Leamas's girlfriend plays in the book. Hmm. I might have to rewatch that one after all.

So I keep swearing to myself that I'm not rewatching Season 5 - and I'm not, honestly! But of course I had to watch Detour again, because how could I struggle through the cancer arc and not reward myself with Detour? Thank you, Frank Spotnitz, for giving us this wonderful moment after all the angst of Season 4. I think Spotnitz might low-key be my favorite X-Files writer. (I'm going to go ahead and give him credit for the birthday/keychain scene in Tempus Fugit, because I can't imagine Chris Carter was responsible for something so gorgeously nuanced.) It's so rare for Mulder and Scully to get to just hang out and talk, and it's rarer still for them to hang out and talk without angst, without drama, and without it really serving the plot at all. But those are my absolute favorite scenes to watch. My only quibble (and it's barely a quibble) with the Conversation on the Log is that it seems like a condensed version of a much longer conversation, because Mulder and Scully jump around from subject to subject so much. But who cares? It's adorable. A quick, incomplete list of things I love about Detour: The entire premise. Mulder and Scully + team-building seminar + annoyingly perky agents = comedy gold. When Mulder says that the best way to regenerate body heat is to crawl naked into a sleeping bag with someone else "who's already naked," there's something about the word "already" in that sentence that consistently makes me laugh. Duchovny says it in a really goofy way, too. Really, all the line readings in this scene and the next one are on point. Mulder's eyes when Scully says her line about it raining sleeping bags. The "I'm in pain and also really sleepy" slur to Mulder's voice while they're talking. "Chorus." The way Scully is bouncing around the next morning, waving her gun and eating berries and talking to Mulder and generally acting like she's having a GREAT TIME, and Mulder looks like he's exhausted just looking at her. No need to mention "I fell down a hOOOle," but I'll mention it anyway. STACKING CORPSES! I love you, Frank Spotnitz! The Weimaraner.

Same! I clearly remember watching it as a teenager and laugh-cringing because he was eating her hand. But watching it again, as an adult, I have more of a sense of how weird and awkward and ugly real grief can be, and the scene seems less like DD trying to cry and more like DD channeling a level of emotion that goes beyond crying. And you find out later what's in Mulder's mind during that scene - he's making up his mind to take the CSM's deal. So that's not just grief we're seeing, it's also desperation, because he knows he shouldn't take the deal but can't think of another way out of the trap he's in. And he can't wake Scully up and ask her - he has to do this for himself. I still could have done without the camera angle that makes it look like he's actually chewing on her hand, though. I love the contrast between the absolute rock-bottom misery that you see in Mulder during that scene and the composure with which he comes to visit Scully the next day, after he talks to Blevins. Mulder is lovely in all his scenes with Scully - as you say, he's being a grown-up and not burdening Scully with his pain. It's "I will be right there" all over again. But in this scene, I really get the sense that Mulder has turned a corner. He had to make this terribly important decision, and he had to do it without Scully, and he almost screwed it up and torpedoed his entire life, but ultimately he figured it out. He found his way. And he's here to tell Scully what he's going to do, because he respects her opinion, but he made his decision all on his own, and he knows it's the right one. It feels like Mulder is preparing himself for Scully's death, or at least accepting that he can't share his burdens with her anymore, and he's figuring out how to take what he's learned from her and hold onto it after she's gone. I am such a literature nerd, and this is the dumbest thing in the world to think of in relation to the X-Files, but there's this terribly sad photo of Sophia Tolstoy standing outside the train station where her husband is dying, looking in through the window because his disciples won't let her in, and that's always what comes to mind when I watch the end of this episode. It just occurred to me, though, that Mulder might be outside the hospital room in part because he can't deal with all the family stuff while he's trying to process his meeting with Samantha. It seems like he was suppressing his emotional reaction to meeting Samantha because he had more important things to worry about, and as soon as he got the news of Scully's remission it all came crashing down on him. The other weirdly sad moment that's all Bill's fault is when Mulder answers the phone, "Sorry son of a bitch speaking," and it's the CSM calling to check up on Scully. Mulder's so deeply unhappy that he just opened up to the Cigarette-Smoking Man, of all people. I mean, he didn't know it was the CSM calling, but it highlights how alone Mulder is without Scully, that he doesn't really have a better confidant than his evil dad.

So I don't plan on doing a rewatch of Season 5, but I did have to watch Redux II just to wrap up the cancer arc, and now I can't decide whether Mulder gnawing on Scully's arm is hilarious or heartbreaking. It might be objectively bad acting, or maybe just a terrible camera angle, but I kind of love it anyway? I admire Duchovny's full-on commitment to ugly-crying, though I'm not sure it always pays off. Maybe this is just me, but I wish we'd gotten one more episode before Scully's cancer was cured - not a mytharc episode, just a regular MOTW. There are a lot of episodes where Scully is living and working with cancer, but the part where she's visibly sick and in the hospital is pretty much one episode, and then she's cured right away. It seems too quick and easy for a storyline about cancer. I would like to see an episode where they're waiting to see if the chip works, and Mulder has to accept that he's done all he can and go back to work, and he's dropping by the hospital every so often to chat with Scully and get glared at by Bill.

Oh, man! That sounds awful, but I'm jealous. I got into the show at the worst possible time - right after Season 7. I watched all the good seasons in reruns, so there was never any suspense about whether Mulder and Scully were going to survive. I do remember having a bet going with my brother when we watched Scully's abduction in Season 2, over whether Scully would be back in the next episode or be missing for a while. (I said she would be missing, and I'm still pleased with myself for being right.) Obviously, watching now, there's no chance I'm actually going to believe that Mulder's dead, but do I believe that Mulder's at least thinking about suicide? Oh yes, I buy that. I think he'd be a suicide risk even if this episode didn't follow "Demons," because he's a troubled, impulsive guy who always has a gun on him, and this is the lowest point of his life. His father was murdered, he's watching his best friend die a slow, horrible death, he's been dealing with it all by throwing himself into his work - and now even that is being taken away. It's already hard to imagine Mulder coping with Scully's death, because we've seen that he really has no support system outside his work. And "Gethsemane" just kicks out those last supports and leaves Mulder with absolutely nothing. And on that note - I made it, guys! The end of the season! Thanks for reading my maunderings. I'm glad I finally got to see Mulder grinning like a lunatic with a stirrer stick between his teeth - that was pretty much the best thing ever.

Gethsemane: I have to say, I'm disappointed in this episode. The basic concept is such a good one - Mulder and Scully both having crises of faith, as Scully is collapsing physically and Mulder collapsing emotionally, in the culmination of two parallel season-long character arcs - it deserves better than Chris Carter as a writer. So much of this episode is Scully talking to the committee, delivering lines that sound like they came out of an automatic Chris Carter dialogue generator, and the rest of it is people tromping around in the snow, and Mulder and Scully are separated for most of the episode, so there's no space for Mulder's crisis to develop and take on weight. I kept waiting for this episode to start. I was like, "Okay, this has all been a bit tedious, but any moment now Scully's going to tell Mulder her cancer metastasized, and we're going to see him react to that, and then Bill is going to find him and just tear into him for killing both his sisters, and we'll see him react to that, and then Kritschgau is going to show Mulder some really definitive proof that he's been hoaxed, and probably he'll go to Marita and figure out that she's been lying to him, and it's going to be a perfect storm of Mulder-angst." Instead, all we get is a brief, not too convincing conversation with Kritschgau and Scully saying, "He told me the men behind these lies gave me this disease to make you believe." If true, this would be horrifying, but it's not evidence. It doesn't explain why either Scully or Mulder should trust the word of this random guy who just pushed Scully down a flight of stairs. And yet it has such a devastating effect on Mulder that when we next see him he's watching science conference tapes and crying - and props to David Duchovny, because he sells that scene 100%. But wouldn't it be so much better if we'd watched this emotion building in Mulder all episode, as he's gradually forced to accept that Scully is really dying? Wouldn't it be more meaningful if he'd had to interact with the Scully family, instead of running around in Alaska by himself for half the episode? It just seems like a waste. The other thing that bothers me is that conversation Mulder and Scully have about faith and proof, where they're both talking about Mulder's belief in aliens as if it's a religion. And it's Scully who starts it! Scully, the medical doctor with the background in hard science, asks Mulder why he needs to prove the existence of aliens when he already believes. And Mulder, instead of pointing out that aliens are not an article of faith, is just like, "But don't you want to prove the existence of God?" The really frustrating thing is they could have gone somewhere very interesting with the idea that Mulder has made his belief in aliens into a religion. If you think about it, it fills the place of a religion to him - it's what orders his life, gives him a sense of purpose, even gives him some kind of hope that he'll see his sister again. And that makes him vulnerable to manipulation, because he's not the objective investigator he thinks he is. Think about Marita, in the first episode of the season, handing Mulder a picture of the Samantha clones and saying, "Not everything dies, Mr. Mulder." Mulder desperately needs to believe that the things he's lost aren't lost for good, and that's a very dangerous state of mind to be in, because it makes him fair game for any confidence trickster who comes along and seems to offer hope. So that could easily be a factor in Mulder's breakdown - the realization that he's made something that should just be a matter of objective proof into the central belief system of his life. But for that to work, you have to have Scully there, as a scientist, to point out that this is entirely the wrong attitude - that science has to be based on evidence and reasoning, not on faith. I can buy a lot of improbable things in this episode, but I cannot buy Scully, whose entire purpose on the X-Files has been to expose Mulder's ideas to scientific scrutiny, conflating science and religion in such a fundamental way. Also, why exactly does Scully say that proving the existence of extraterrestrials is not her last dying wish? It's a line that would make sense for a lot of people, but for Scully? She's stuck doggedly to her work as she gets sicker and sicker, and a world-changing scientific discovery would be a hell of a legacy. I don't think Chris Carter knows who Scully is. And yet! Despite my frustration with this episode, that final scene of Mulder in front of the TV, tears streaming down his face, really gets to me. I don't think this episode does enough to set up that moment, but I do think the season as a whole does. Mulder's been increasingly unstable all season, and it's easy to understand why, given all the accumulated burdens that have been heaped on him over the past couple of years. Duchovny has done such a good job playing him as someone teetering on the verge of emotional collapse, and so on that level the scene feels earned to me.

Another thing I love about "Demons:" this is another episode where you see how physically comfortable Mulder and Scully are with each other. She finds him shivering in the shower and just hands him a towel and wraps him in a blanket, and then there's that lovely moment at the end where he collapses and she goes over to him and rests her head between his shoulder blades. These two have invented enough new ways of hugging to illustrate some kind of platonic Kama Sutra, and I love it.

Oh, I totally agree. I adore this episode. I actually went back and watched it a second time, and I almost never do that. And I can't hate Mulder either, no matter how many terrible decisions he makes. I mean, part of me wants to channel Cordelia Chase and go, "God, WHAT is your childhood trauma?" But the sappy teenager in me just wants to wrap him up in that blanket and hug him till he's not frozen anymore. Mulder is a child, and I think some of that is a delayed effect of having to essentially be the adult in his family at a young age, because Bill and Teena abdicated their parental responsibility and left him in charge of dealing with Samantha's disappearance. I think it's such a relief to have Scully around, as someone he can depend on, that he's going overboard and doing some of the insane teenage shit that he never got to do as an actual teenager. And the poor guy is carrying so much survivor guilt, between Samantha and Scully, and it just keeps getting worse. I keep thinking of the scene in "One Breath" where he corners the Smoking Man and asks, "Why her? Why her and not me?" and the Smoking Man says, "I like you." It tells you something about Mulder's state of mind that this is the first question he thinks to ask. And it gets more upsetting when you realize that the Smoking Man is answering two questions at once, and that this little exchange is the story of Mulder's life.

I wish I could think that Mulder drilling holes in his head has anything to do with trying to save Scully, but I think it's all about Samantha. I'm guessing it wasn't premeditated - he hadn't heard of the doctor as of Friday afternoon, so presumably he saw the article about Amy's abduction, went to talk to her, and was so convinced by her recovered memories that he signed on to get his own head drilled right away. This is standard impulsive Mulder behavior, and I could easily see him doing it without a second thought at any other time in the series. I would just hope he'd be a little less fixated on Samantha when Scully is in immediate danger and needs his support. But maybe this is his way of dealing, or not dealing, with Scully's cancer - maybe he's throwing himself into the Samantha mystery because it's something he can actively do something about, even if it's something incredibly stupid like drilling holes in his head. And probably there's not a clear line in his mind between his stress over Samantha and his stress over Scully - maybe the more he worries about Scully, the more he also obsesses over Samantha. That's the way life is - things slam up against each other, and you can't just put grief aside, no matter how many responsibilities you have. It's still disturbing, though, that Mulder doesn't have the restraint or the mental stability to look at the situation and go, "You know what, this is not a good time for me to disappear, do something dangerous and not tell Scully where I'm going." I'm not criticizing him, exactly, because I honestly don't think he gets why this is a bad idea. I'm just starting to think he's suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness. It just occurred to me that in my list of things Mulder should have been suspended for, I forgot letting Amy Cassandra use his gun in a murder-suicide - a murder-suicide that arguably would not have happened if he hadn't been there. This is the second time this year that a killer got Mulder's gun and he doesn't even know how it happened. Does the FBI have a three-strikes policy or something?