Sharna Pax

Demons: Ah, I remember the first time I saw this episode. At that time, my brother watched the X-Files more regularly than I did, but he knew I didn't want to miss any scenes where Mulder was shirtless or Krycek was wearing a leather jacket, so he'd yell at me from the other room and I'd run in. On this occasion, he actually came and found me to tell me that Mulder was naked in a bathtub. What a great sibling. These are the memories that will flash before my eyes when I drill holes in my head and inject myself with ketamine. (Which I am inches away from doing, by the way, because I've had a migraine for a week and drilling holes in my head sounds great right about now.) I have such mixed feelings about Mulder in this episode. The episode itself I love. This is outrageous drama and I am HERE for it. But Mulder himself - oh, man. Where to start? What was that I said a couple episodes ago about Mulder stepping up and being the adult in the room now that Scully is sick and Skinner is in trouble? I forgot that when the adults go away and leave Mulder in charge, bad things happen. But seriously, what is Mulder thinking, doing this right now? Scully has an untreatable cancer that will at some point move into her brain. Just last episode, she saw a ghost and had to go get checked out to make sure it was just a regular old harbinger of death and not a hallucination caused by her cancer metastasizing. At any moment she could start having a whole host of symptoms, including headaches, seizures, hallucinations and personality changes. So why would Mulder, at this moment when Scully needs him, choose to give himself every single one of those symptoms? Is this an episode that's not really supposed to be part of the cancer arc at all? Scully doesn't seem sick at all, and no one mentions the cancer. Or is Mulder's behavior some weird subconscious response to Scully's illness? Does Mulder, on some deep level, wish he could be the one bleeding from the head and saying "I'm fine" unconvincingly? Or maybe Mulder is just cracking up to the point where he's not capable of thinking, "Oh, I shouldn't do this because I have to be there for Scully." It's absolutely ridiculous that Mulder hadn't heard of this doctor on Friday, and by sometime on Saturday he let the guy drill a hole in his head, but I guess that's how Mulder rolls. It probably took him about five minutes to go from "This guy drills holes in people's heads?" to "Please drill a hole in my head right now." Trust no one, except people who want to take power tools to your cranium. Also, Mulder ditching Scully at his mom's house is such a jerk move it amuses me. My uncle's brother once ditched my cousin at his mom's house overnight, and his mom looks and acts almost exactly like Teena Mulder, and my cousin is still mad about that ditch decades later. (Apparently family memories are the order of the day. Where's that ketamine?) I love this, though, selfish Mulder and all. I love Mulder shivering in a bathtub and Scully swooping in and taking charge of the situation. I love how Mulder and Scully have these whole wordless conversations where he looks at her and his face says, "Did I kill someone?" and her face says, "I don't know but we'll figure it out together." I love that Scully is far more certain of Mulder's innocence than he is. And at the end, when Scully asks if Mulder's going to shoot her, and he nods like a little kid - oh, God. Like I said, outrageous drama. I'm not sure why nobody thought to check his head for drill-holes earlier, or, say, TAKE HIS GUN AWAY, but I don't really care about the plot holes when the story is this gloriously melodramatic. And it's upsetting to see Mulder hit by these sudden flashbacks, even after years of Samantha-drama from this show. I'm used to Mulder being more or less at the mercy of his childhood memories, but the way he just collapses under them, and that choking, whimpering sound he makes - it's disturbing. Some Faulkner critic - I think he's talking specifically about The Sound and the Fury - wrote that his characters are like passengers in an airplane that's going through turbulence. They can be going along, living their lives, and then they drop into the past with the suddenness of a plane dropping into an air pocket, and with the same physical shock. That's what this episode is like. One moment Mulder's talking to Scully, and the next moment he's physically falling into the past. It's sad to see even these tiny snippets of life before the abduction - Samantha is scared and confused, but she's there, being Mulder's sister, and you get to see the two kids together, watching their parents fight. It gives me more of a sense of what Mulder lost when she was abducted. One last thought: How is Mulder still in the FBI after this? I mean, it turns out he didn't kill anyone, but he did drill holes in his head, take hallucinogens, lose two days and put himself at the scene of a murder-suicide, not to mention the part where his partner had to go in with police backup to stop him from shooting himself. Shouldn't he at least be put on some kind of leave where he has to have a bunch of psych evaluations and be cleared to come back? This is one of those episodes where I wonder where everyone went after it. Did Mulder get checked into a psych ward? Did he spend another night in jail? Did Scully take him home with her and lock the door and hide her keys so he wouldn't go driving off to Rhode Island in the middle of the night? Questions.

Yeah, and your eyes would undoubtedly reflect that frantic fear that was at the root of the yelling. Plus there's the fact you're yelling - an inherently reactive response - in the first place. Mulder's not doing any of that. He's just calmly being an asshole with cold, hard eyes. This is a total digression, but bear with me: there's a book I love called The Lantern Bearers, by Rosemary Sutcliff, that reminds me of The X-Files, or maybe The X-Files reminds me of it. It's set in the dying days of Roman Britain, so the impending invasion is by Saxons, not aliens, but it comes to about the same thing - civilization as we know it is going to be destroyed. The main character, Aquila, is still a teenager when his home is raided by Saxons. His father is murdered and his sister is carried off (screaming to him for help, naturally), and by the time he finds her, years later, she's like the Samantha of Redux - she's accepted her new life and he can't save her because she doesn't want to be saved. So he's got nothing left, not even his search for his sister, and all he can do to give his life some kind of meaning is join the fight against the coming invasion. The book covers about twenty years, and along the way he ends up with a wife and a son, who he loves very much but has a hard time relating to because he's closed-off and embittered by the loss of his family. At the very end, though, he finds a way to connect with his sister again and make his peace with what happened, and there's a lovely closing passage where he's on his way home, looking up at the stars, thinking about his sister, and realizing for the first time that he's happy - that this makeshift life that he built to replace the one that was shattered has gradually become real to him. When I get frustrated with The X-Files and its endless series of unsatisfying finales, I just re-read the last few pages of The Lantern Bearers. Anyway, here's where I'm going with this: Aquila is not really very much like Mulder, personality-wise. But one of the ways in which he has trouble relating to his wife and son is that he defaults to being cold and sarcastic and distant whenever he's upset about something. So he makes some serious mistakes with his son, for instance, because instead of just yelling at him when he's worried like a normal father would, he just gets cold and cutting and doesn't actually show any of the worry he's feeling. He always realizes what he's done, and feels terrible about it, as soon as it's too late to take it back. It almost seems like they were going for something like that with Mulder but weren't consistent about it and dropped it. If this were an actual character trait that they followed up and dealt with, and if they showed the disconnect between what Mulder wants to be saying and what he actually says? I would find it sad and worrying but also fascinating. As it is, though, it just seems like Mulder is sometimes randomly a jerk, and there's no way to tell when he's going to be a jerk and when he's going to be understanding and supportive.

Oh, I agree with that. I just meant that he's pretty good at projecting confidence when he wants to. I think Mulder spent a lot of his early life faking normality, and I think relationships were probably part of that. He had the academic success, the fast-track career, and (though I know this is a very unpopular opinion) I like the suggestion that he even made a stab at being married. That's a lot of balls to juggle while standing on unstable ground, and my guess is he was pretty good at it until all of a sudden he wasn't. Yes, I can see that. I mean, I think it basically comes to the same thing: he's afraid of losing what he has with Scully, even though it's not really very much. I think Mulder's had so little stability in his life that once something approaching a stable relationship comes along his instinct is to try to keep it exactly the same forever. And that's a problem, because what Mulder sees as stability Scully sees as stagnation.

Oh, I agree, and that's why I'm not mad at Scully's mom for yelling at her in Memento Mori, because you can tell it's coming from a place of love. That's all I really want from Mulder - a sign that he's doing this compulsively, out of fear for Scully, and that he doesn't really want to hurt her. If we'd seen Mulder's fear, if he'd seemed a little less in control of himself, if he'd had a "Why the fuck do I say these things?" look on his face after Scully left, I would love this scene to bits. But there's a fine line between Mulder accidentally being mean to Scully because he's scared for her and Mulder deliberately being mean to Scully because everything is about him, and I think this scene crossed it. I think they were going for a thing where they shot the scene from Scully's point of view - we're seeing Mulder really close up, and slightly from below, the way Scully would see him, and the effect is sort of claustrophobic, like he's looming over her. It reminds me of the Mulder/Skinner scenes in Zero Sum, actually, where you're seeing Mulder from outside and he becomes this mysterious, faintly threatening figure. But the problem with showing the scene entirely from Scully's perspective is that you lose any sense of what's going on in Mulder's head.

That was exactly my reaction. I rewatched that scene about five times, looking for some hint of fear or worry or sadness in Mulder's expression - anything that would give his words some nuance. Nothing. Before, I thought the end of Never Again was Mulder's most asshole moment, but I think this tops it, because in Never Again you can see past Mulder's sarcasm to the concern and jealousy and confusion that are driving it. Here, you can't. He's just a wall of ice. Yes. I understand that dealing with a close friend's illness is difficult and no one is perfect, but I feel like it's a no-brainer that if your dying friend confides in you about how scared she is, you should not verbally bitch-slap her to the point where she runs away to cry alone in her car. Do better, Mulder.

I see what you mean, but I hope it's not that, because to me that's perilously close to abuser logic. "I thought you were different and I could trust you, but it turns out you're just like all the rest." I mean, it doesn't matter what's going on in Mulder's head or how hard it is for him to trust people, Scully still has the right to keep something to herself for a day without him treating it like the betrayal of the century. My best guess about this scene is that it goes back to the disconnect at the end of Memento Mori. There, Mulder and Scully are committing to continuing their work together, but for different reasons. As Scully tells her therapist here, she isn't quite sure why work is so important to her, but it has something to do with Mulder and the support she gets from him. It's not because she thinks she's going to beat her cancer; it's more about finding a way to live with cancer. But Mulder really thinks that the X-Files are going to save Scully's life. So from his perspective, he's working his ass off trying to save Scully and she's not cooperating with him. And I get that he would be upset about that. But first of all, it's not like she hid this from him and he had to sneak around and find out for himself. She told him herself, after taking a day to process it and get her health checked out. That's a perfectly reasonable delay and nothing to get mad about. Second, she's obviously upset and in need of support and reassurance; it's hardly the time to start lecturing her. (Not to mention that she's also bleeding because she just got attacked. Not to mention that she just solved the case; do her motivations for coming back to work on it even matter at this point?) I'm willing to grant Mulder a certain amount of irrational anger. It's a stressful time. Probably on some level he's angry at Scully for having cancer in the first place. But the way Duchovny plays it, and the way it's shot, it doesn't come across as the kind of anger that comes from intense worry. It looks more like deliberate cruelty to me, like he wants to hurt Scully because she betrayed him. I was also thinking about Never Again, because that's another episode that ends with Scully bruised, battered and emotionally traumatized and Mulder being deliberately unpleasant to her. It's not a good pattern. When Mulder tries, he can really hit below the belt, and this season he's been doing that at moments when Scully is especially vulnerable. I'm starting to understand why people say Mulder is a dick this season, but it's weird because his moments of dickishness are so isolated. Most of the time he seems like his normal thoughtless-but-sweet self, and occasionally he really rises to the occasion and is lovely and supportive. He does seem very unstable and weepy this season - between Herrenvolk, The Field Where I Died, Paper Hearts and Tempus Fugit, I could believe that Mulder is gradually sliding toward a breakdown. In general, though, he still seems like a fundamentally nice person who makes the effort to be there for Scully when she needs him. But then there are these isolated moments of anger or entitlement that seem to come out of nowhere, and they bother me more than they would on another show, because I know that they won't be followed up. The next episode isn't going to start with Scully angry at Mulder. This fight is just going to hang in the air forever. In a way, I like the idea of an unresolved, painful end to the episode. It fits with where we are in the cancer arc and how uncertain Scully's future is. You know how the Van Morrison album Astral Weeks ends with the lines, "I know you're dying/and I know you know it too/ every time I see you/ I just don't know what to do" and then ten seconds of discordant jangling? This is kind of like that. Except that when the unresolved, jangling note is Mulder being a dick, it's hard not to have that affect how I feel about him in future episodes.

One more thought about Zero Sum: It's interesting to see Mulder from Skinner's perspective, because we're used to this parent/child dynamic between Skinner and Mulder, but here it's Mulder who comes off as the adult in the room. Scully is in the hospital, there's a chance her cancer is metastasizing, and Mulder must be terribly worried and upset. But we don't see that, because for once we don't have the insider's perspective. What we do see is Mulder going to work, doing his job, soberly updating Skinner on Scully's situation, and even asking Skinner to help out since he doesn't have a partner. That is some A+ adulting from our boy. I'm proud of Mulder and the way he's stepped up, but there's something oddly poignant about seeing Skinner as the guilty schoolboy and Mulder as the responsible grown-up. And now for Elegy: What the hell happens to Mulder at the end of this episode? He's the sweet, supportive partner for 43 out of the 45 minutes of this episode, and then Scully confesses that she saw a ghost, and he acts like he just caught her cheating on him. Would Mulder really put the X-Files before Scully to the point of getting viciously angry that she can't accept seeing a harbinger of her own death? Mulder, the great source of strength who Scully was just telling her therapist about? Scully looks like she's caught in a nightmare and can't believe this is happening. Mulder's supposed to be hugging her right now, and instead he just verbally slapped her in the face and she has no idea why. And the camera goes in so tight on both their faces that the whole scene gets hard to follow, and I don't understand any of the choices that were made here. Why the tight closeups? Why that low angle that makes Mulder look sort of looming and monstrous? Why does Duchovny play this scene without a smidgen of sympathy or worry or anything but cold anger? What is going on? Putting that aside, I really liked this episode up until the last five minutes or so. Gillian Anderson does a brilliant job here. Just her body language alone can convey so much dread and spiraling panic, and Scully's session with the therapist is heartbreaking. I like that this episode, although it's a MOTW, really engages with the issue of Scully's cancer. The cancer arc isn't really that much of an arc, by most shows' standards - Scully's illness doesn't have much of a presence in most of the episodes, though it's there in the background. But this is an episode about a woman with terminal cancer trying to do her job and deal with her illness at the same time, and it's beautifully complex and messy and upsetting. I love the way Mulder says, "Oh, Scully," when she gets her nosebleed. And then his face as he watches her leave. So deeply worried but trying to back off because that's what she wants. So WTF is up with that final scene? Any thoughts?

Zero Sum - This episode reminds me of the classic John Prine lyric: On my very first job I said thank you and please They made me scrub a parking lot down on my knees Then I got fired for being scared of bees And they only gave me fifty cents an hour. I avoided Skinner-centric episodes as a teenager because they always seemed to involve him getting naked and I couldn't handle that. Watching this as an adult, I liked it a lot. It's genuinely suspenseful, and I like how Mulder becomes this increasingly terrifying figure of justice and retribution as the episode goes on. Skinner scrubbing cigarette ash off a bathroom floor is such a sad image. I already went off about this in the Kitten thread, but Skinner is always the guy who makes the tough, morally iffy choices so that Mulder can stay pure and heroic. He's the Giles to Mulder's Buffy, the Brigadier to Mulder's Doctor, the Elinor Dashwood to Mulder's Marianne. Only here it's not clear that his choice to sell his soul to the CSM has had, or ever will have, any effect at all on Scully's chances of survival. It seems like it was probably just a terrible mistake. Scully is in the hospital for tests and Skinner doesn't know until Mulder tells him. It's weird to get the news of what's going on with Scully at second hand; it makes it all seem more real somehow.

I always thought the main reason Mulder takes six or seven years to have sex with Scully is that he believes he's too damaged and single-minded and emotionally unavailable to make a relationship work, and he's scared of screwing things up and ruining their partnership. But I don't think he was always like this. I kind of assume that Mulder, as a good-looking, confident jock who played team sports, used to have a much more active social life than he does when we meet him. I keep going back to that scene in the pilot when Mulder tells Scully, "Nothing else matters to me." This is someone who has exactly one thing in his life, not because his life was always this empty, but because he's deliberately jettisoned everything else - relationships, friendships, ambition - to make room for his one obsession. I think it's only because Scully enters his life as part of his work that she's able to get in under his guard and become as important to him as she does. And then we get to watch as her presence in his life gradually gives him something to care about and something to lose, until by the seventh season he's a more or less functional human being. Oh, I have watched Detour many a time. Yes, I wonder that too. What's so frustrating about that scene in Small Potatoes, from Scully's point of view, is that it's possible to imagine that exact scene happening for real. "Mulder" is mostly listening, not talking, so he never says anything out of character; even his question about who Scully wanted to be when she was in high school isn't that far off from the question Mulder asked her earlier. It makes sense that Scully would be tempted to try recreating the scene with the real Mulder. And I'm guessing Mulder knows exactly what she's trying to do. For someone who's trying to seem oblivious to any seductive overtones, he certainly takes off into the woods with a quickness. Where the scene finally does get recreated, I think, is the end of Je Souhaite. There are a lot of romantic or potentially romantic moments in the sixth and seventh seasons, but that's the only one I can think of where Mulder and Scully spend time together in that particular way - no occasion, no pretext, just the two of them hanging out on the couch, drinking beer and kind of eyeing each other.

"I fell in a hole!" is my favorite Scully delivery by far. I'm also a big fan of "Oh, you have GOT to be kidding me," from Tempus Fugit. Such pure, beautiful outrage at being given a birthday present. (One reason I love this is that Scully kind of reminds me of my mom, and this is pretty much how my mom always reacts to Mother's Day. She rolls her eyes at me over the phone and tells me it's a stupid fake holiday, but she's always secretly glad I remembered to call her.)

Moving on through my rewatch: Unrequited: Nothing much to say about this one, except that Teager is very effectively creepy, with his thousand-yard stare. This season has been such a rollercoaster that it's a nice change to get a few normal MOTWs, even if they're not terribly memorable ones. I wish I'd waited to watch Tempus Fugit and Max in their proper place in the season, because this is where Scully's cancer really starts to become an ongoing arc. It's not just that she gets another nosebleed and has to get checked out, it's also that you start seeing the mental toll it's taking on both her and Mulder. Synchrony: I wish David Duchovny would quote my senior thesis at me. Aside from that, this episode doesn't really grab me; I think that for all the weirdness on the X-Files, time travel is just a bridge too far for me. Aaand now we're at Small Potatoes, which is the one I actually want to write about. Is it weird that I was dreading this one? I know it's a fan favorite, but I haven't watched it in ages. I have a hard time with body-swap episodes in general, because I have serious vicarious embarrassment squick and also it upsets me to see people deceived by someone they have every reason to trust. So I cringe for Mulder when Eddie-Mulder is going around misspelling Federal Bureau of Investigation and generally being an idiot, and I start feeling awful for Scully as soon as Eddie-Mulder shows up at her house with the bottle of wine. But I can see why people love this one, because it just zings. It's endlessly quotable and endlessly gif-able. "Did he have a lightsaber?" "Good night! This is where my tax dollars go?" "Tell him about the cheesesteaks!" And Scully is so funny and likable and well-rounded here; I think this might be the best writing Scully gets all series. She gets to be deadpan sardonic, with her lightsaber joke, and endearingly geeky, with her Friday night plans and wanting to be Eleanor Roosevelt, and very, very good at her job - she figures the monkey-baby mystery out before Mulder does, even if she's missing a key piece of information about how Eddie pulled it off. But she's also very warm and human and charming, especially on her date with Faux Mulder. When Scully got drunk with Ed Jerse (what's with all the Eds, show?) and talked about herself, it was all angst and daddy issues. But when she thinks she's sharing a bottle of wine with Mulder, there's zero angst. She's just telling dumb stories about prom and searching for the word "pumper truck," and she's obviously having a blast. Also, are we sure Gillian Anderson isn't a shapeshifting mutant? Look at this: How are these the same person? Look how her whole face softens when she thinks she's on an impromptu date with Mulder. Even her hair is better. But ultimately this episode breaks my heart. Because Scully thinks something is changing in her relationship with Mulder, and she likes it. Look how happy she is. And look how thoughtful she gets when Faux Mulder asks if they talk. She's giving his question careful consideration, because this is important to her, and all the time she's just being lied to and manipulated by someone who's trying to rape her. And then when I think about everything that's going on between Mulder and Scully, the whole cancer arc, it bothers me even more. Scully probably thinks Mulder's newfound interest in just hanging out is about her cancer. After all, it was only a couple episodes ago that Mulder gave her a birthday present for the first time in four years. (I will pass over the fact that Tempus Fugit suggests that Mulder and Scully regularly go out for drinks after work. Lack of a show bible rears its ugly head once again. Moving on.) And here's Eddie van Blundht, who knows nothing about Mulder and Scully but assumes he knows everything, coming in and trampling all over this very complicated situation and making it worse. And I feel terrible for Mulder, too. Eddie van Blundht stole something from both Mulder and Scully. Hanging out at Mulder's, sharing a bottle of wine and telling dumb stories, is such a natural place for their friendship to go one of these days. And now it's never going to happen that easily or that naturally, because Eddie van Blundht got there first. Scully is never going to be able to just innocently tell Mulder that silly pumper truck story, and that makes me sad. So I find this episode more tragic than comic, but for all that I really like it. I love the way Mulder and Scully interact in the first half of the episode, the goofy looks on both their faces, the way Scully crosses her hands over her heart when she says, "On behalf of all the women in the world." I love how Mulder, out on assignment with Scully, asks her who she'd be if she could be anyone. That is a Date Question. It's more or less the same question Eddie asks her later. Eddie assumes that Mulder isn't bothering to try to chat up Scully, but he's wrong. It's just that Mulder's real life happens during the workday, when he's out working cases with Scully, and everything else is dead time.

I just had the belated realization that Kitten's origin story - exposed to a box of paranoia gas that gets damaged by gunfire and starts leaking - is exactly the same as the origin story they gave Mulder in Unusual Suspects.

I think you're right, but to me what blurs the line between Mulder and HLL is that Mulder isn't just risking his own safety, he's risking the safety of everyone else on the plane. I think that's something new. Of course, Mulder's quest has had a lot of indirect collateral damage - his father, Scully's sister, Deep Throat, X, now Scully - but I don't really think of that as the same thing. Looking at this episode as part of the cancer arc, though, I think we probably are supposed to make that connection. In "One Breath," Mulder asks Skinner, "What if I knew the risks and I never told her?" and Skinner - never one to offer false reassurance - says, "Then you're as much to blame for her condition as the Cancerman." I think this episode is partly about showing us how easily and carelessly Mulder implicates other people, who don't know the risks, in his personal quest for the truth. And maybe seeing a cracked mirror image of himself in HLL is what he needs to realize that he's doing that. I don't know, just a thought. But it might be relevant as we head toward Gethsemane. What seems very odd to me is that most of that sexual tension seems to be in the script. Unlike Mulder's usual sexual tension with Scully, which is mostly just GA and DD doing their thing. I don't know, it strikes me as the kind of episode where the writers just keep throwing more things in because the script isn't working. Maybe they drafted the episode, realized how intense the Mulder/Krycek scenes were going to be, and then added the Marita scene to try to balance out all the gayness with a little heterosexuality. And then realized they'd gone too far and implied that Mulder was actually banging Marita, and added the watch and clock thing as a save. And then realized they'd completely left Scully out of the equation so threw in the hug in Terma. And then Duchovny got the script and was like, "Okay, they want me to play Mulder as a pansexual James Bond? I can roll with that." Who knows? I've always thought it was clever of Chris Carter to cast Duchovny as Mulder, because I don't think he's the obvious choice. I think most people would have cast someone intense and jittery, but Duchovny's lazy affect makes Mulder much more layered and interesting. On the outside, he's a beautiful hound dog lounging in the sun - the intensity is all on the inside. And I think there's something similar going on with Mulder's sexuality. He lives this monastic life, but then he's played by a guy who gives off a fairly DTF vibe at all times, so you can tell this isn't his natural state, more a side effect of his obsession with his work.

Kaddish: I hardly remembered this episode at all, but it made me think about why I like the X-Files so much, because this is by-the-numbers X-Files. It's a perfectly normal monster of the week episode, and there's nothing particularly surprising about the monster - the only mystery is who made the golem. But there's still so much depth and richness and atmosphere to the episode, where an equally standard episode of, say, Bones or Castle would feel completely flat. I wish the actress playing Ariel were a little better, but you can't have everything. I like how there's no violence in the cold open, just the funeral. In retrospect, that scene of Ariel clinging to her clump of dirt, and her father trying to get her to loosen her fingers, tells the whole story. I wish Mulder were actually part Jewish, since the writers periodically remind us that David Duchovny is. I realize that's a bit difficult with the whole storyline about CSM being his dad, because Teena is obviously 100% WASP, and I don't want CSM to be Jewish because, you know, he's the evil leader of a global conspiracy. I wish they'd just stuck with having Bill Mulder be Mulder's dad, and Bill Mulder could totally be Jewish. When the Neo-Nazi dismisses the idea of Isaac rising from the dead, Mulder says, "A Jew pulled it off 2,000 years ago," and then smirks at his own sick burn. And then he looks at Scully, and Scully gives him a little grin, like, "Yes, Mulder, that was indeed a sick burn, well done," and after about a minute of laughing at the Nazi together they go back to their interview. It's absurd and adorable.

Oh, I love the scene as it is. If I hadn't seen the outtake, I wouldn't feel that there was anything missing. It's just that the outtake is so beautifully acted that I wish there were some way to keep it. There are so many places where CC tries for ambiguity and just lands on ambivalence or confusion, but GA and DD came up with a Mulder/Scully moment that's genuinely ambiguous, for very good reasons, and they did such a good job with it that I wish it could somehow be canon. I know GA won her Emmy for this episode, and I think she absolutely deserves it, but I think Duchovny's performance is right up there with hers. Seeing the look of growing dread on Mulder's face as he listens to Scully, and then realizing that you're not hearing any of that in his voice - I don't see how anyone can knock Duchovny's acting, because he's brilliant here. And that smile of his at the end. I said this in my post on Paper Hearts, but we see that look exactly three times in the course of the show. Twice in dreams or visions when he's holding Samantha, and once when he hugs Scully at the end of Memento Mori. Mulder has a smile that you see only when he's holding someone he thought he'd lost forever, and if that's not good acting, I don't know what is.

Memento Mori (I'm skipping Leonard Betts because I wrote about it upthread): This is probably not an original observation, but this episode is almost completely circular. It starts with Scully still apparently healthy, still able to work, but aware that she has terminal, untreatable cancer. And it ends with her in virtually the same place - giving up on treatment and reaffirming her commitment to working as long as she can. But what's different is that by the end of the episode Mulder and Scully have had a chance to process what's happening to her. The episode looks on the surface like it's about taking action, investigating, accomplishing things, but in the end it's about learning to live with the fact that this is happening and that they may not be able to stop it. It reminds me of "One Breath" in that way - and "Closure" too, I suppose. So many of the key emotional moments in this show are about accepting that some things are out of our hands. In that first scene, Scully looks very in control, she's telling Mulder as clearly as possible that there's no hope of treating the cancer, and yet I get the sense that it's all just words, that she hasn't internalized it yet. (GA and DD are both so good here - she says, "Actually, I feel fine," and Mulder nods hopefully, and then there's a silence, and Scully unconsciously mirrors Mulder's little nod while she's trying to bring herself to tell him about the tumor.) But then you can see her shell of self-control start to crack, as she starts to take in what this all means. There's that scene where Mulder and Scully are arguing about whether she should visit Penny Northern, and she flips out - "Ask her what? What it's like to be dying of cancer?" This is a lovely Mulder scene - his voice is so sad, and his eyes are very bright, but he's holding it together for Scully. I love how he calls her "Agent Scully" and reminds her that she has a job to do. He knows her so well. And of course talking to Penny about what it's like to be dying of cancer is exactly what Scully needs to do - she just can't admit that yet. "I will be right there." His voice is so reassuring it makes Scully smile, and it would make me smile too, if not for the look on his face. How is this the same guy from Never Again? That final scene - it's interesting, because Mulder and Scully still seem to be talking slightly at cross purposes. She's basically saying, "Yes, I'm going to die, I need to accept this and not waste my time on treatment that won't work." She's going back to work for whatever remains of her life because work is what gives her life meaning. Mulder, though - he still believes that if she comes back to the X-Files they can find a way to save her. It's a beautiful scene, and they're as close to each other as they've ever been, but I still don't think they're quite on the same page. I go back and forth on whether I wish they'd kept the kiss. I don't think it would have been too romantic - to me it comes across as a promise of friendship and support, rather than an overtly romantic gesture. But the potential is there. It's a genuinely ambiguous moment, in a show that often tried to manufacture ambiguity, and I think that's why I like it. But as it is, I think you can see Mulder thinking about it and deciding against it, and that seems like it's probably the right call under the circumstances.

Never Again: I think this episode is very good and I really don't enjoy watching it. My thoughts about it are probably going to be very incoherent - here goes. I don't think we've ever seen Mulder be quite this much of a dick before, have we? I think "Quagmire" is the high-water mark of Mulder dickishness up till now, and even in that he's not actively mean the way he is here. I mean, he definitely takes Scully for granted at times, but when he throws his weight around, it's more in an oblivious, self-involved way, not an authoritative, "Here are your marching orders" way. Here, he definitely positions himself as her boss, and he chews her out in a nasty, sarcastic way for wandering off during the interview, and he completely dismisses everything she has to say. All that makes it a little bit difficult for me to take this episode seriously as a commentary on Mulder and Scully's relationship, because the Mulder we see here is, I think, verging on out of character. And yet I love that there's an episode that acknowledges the problems with Mulder and Scully's relationship and allows them to have a fight, so I'm torn. Basically, I think this is a very good episode about two people in a toxic relationship - I'm just not sure it's the exact toxic relationship that Mulder and Scully actually have. It's extra odd to see this just two episodes after the closeness of "Paper Hearts." There, Mulder was a sad, scared little kid, and Scully was literally patting him on the head. It's weird to see him presented as an authority figure who's in a position to chastise her for something as minor as getting bored in an interview. Scully says they're going in a straight line, "two steps forward, three steps back." It's an interesting commentary on the arc of the show. The reason I have so little interest in the mytharc isn't just that I'm bored silly by black oil, it's that Mulder and Scully's basic relationship to the mytharc never changes. Mulder never gets to the point where he can do something with all this information he's collecting, he never leaks it to the press or makes a deal with the conspiracy or does anything that might give him the power to change what's happening. He just keeps information-gathering, pursuing an endlessly receding goal. This episode is like the moment in Middlemarch when Dorothea realizes that Casaubon is never going to publish his Key to All Mythologies, and that he's just going to keep wasting his time on side researches forever. Interesting to see Scully's dissatisfaction at work juxtaposed against Ed going on a paranoid rampage and getting fired. It's a nice illustration of the difference the patriarchy makes - Scully's surrounded by men all episode, and the condescension and slut-shaming she experiences is very real. Ed's paranoia about women judging him is entirely in his head. But I do feel bad for Ed, actually, despite his misogyny, because he's having a psychotic break and he's so isolated that no one notices or tries to help him. Hate all the ambiguity about whether Scully and Ed have sex. Chris Carter is weird about letting Scully have sex, but he's even weirder about admitting that Scully has an actual sex drive - that she might want to sleep with a guy for reasons other than loneliness or insecurity. I realize that part of this is about Scully's weird father issues and wanting to rebel, but I would like to think that some of it is just sexual frustration and Ed being hot. If they don't have sex, the scene ends up being more about Scully's adolescent act of rebellion than about her being an adult woman who's attracted to Ed. I think the final scene is brilliant, and in a way I wouldn't want to change a thing about it. But it's hard to watch it and think there's any way forward for Mulder and Scully. Mulder is so intensely unpleasant, and although I get the sense that he's doing it compulsively because he feels Scully drawing away from him, that doesn't really make it any better. I think if I were writing that scene, I would have Mulder present Scully with a desk and think he's fixed the problem, and then have Scully tell him that this really wasn't about the desk and that he hasn't fixed anything. I love the idea of the episode ending on this gulf of misunderstanding and resentment and things unexpressed, but if I'm going to stay invested in the Mulder/Scully partnership, I want some sign that Mulder's not actively trying to be a controlling asshole. It's depressing to think that Scully's relationship with Mulder is so deeply toxic, and yet that she's so tethered to him that any attempt to get out and live her own life ends up being entirely about him. And yet that's what we see here. She goes off to another city and meets another man, and gets a tattoo symbolizing the cycle she wants to break out of - and yet all that happens is that she ends up making a personal appearance in the X-Files. Again. And she still doesn't have a desk. What a hideously depressing story.

Thanks for reading it! It is not lost on me that I spent seven paragraphs trying to link two episodes about people obsessed with trying to link things that don't go together. Yes, it's the realism of it that gets me - and I think it hits harder because you don't expect that level of realism from The X-Files. Case in point: "El Mundo Gira." This was one I barely remembered, but I knew it had a bad reputation. At first I was like, "Well, it's not very good, but it seems pretty standard," and then it just went more and more off the rails. It's hardly even worth critiquing the episode's treatment of the migrant workers when the whole thing is so incoherent; it's the TV equivalent of someone getting high and telling you about a dream they had. Having Skinner come in at the end and point out that the story makes no sense isn't clever and meta, guys, it just reads as you admitting that this script should have been thrown out. Okay, I guess I will address the treatment of the migrant workers. I get that this is supposed to be a telenovela, but that only works if everyone in the episode is acting like they're in a telenovela, including Mulder and Scully. If it's just the Mexicans acting like that, you're not playing around with genre, just using cheap cultural stereotypes. I think this episode was meant to be sympathetic to the migrant workers, but it doesn't really come across that way to me. Mulder and Scully do seem faintly put out by the racism and indifference they encounter, but they themselves are pretty callous about Maria's death. Scully starts singing show tunes (!) and Mulder does an impression of Eladio screaming "Maria!" that's awfully mean-spirited considering the guy's girlfriend just died in his arms. And that ending. WTF? "They have a way of being almost invisible." Okay, but you're talking about two bumpy-headed green dudes who kill everyone they touch - are they really that invisible? How exactly does that work as a commentary on our country's treatment of undocumented migrant workers?

Here’s my Elaborate Theory of “Paper Hearts” – I apologize in advance for how long it’s going to be. So one mystery in this episode is why Mulder is so quick to throw years of belief in aliens out the window and assume a pedophile killed his sister. I think part of it is that he doesn't fully trust his recovered memories - as a psychologist, he should know all about confabulation - but I think there’s another, external, reason as well. “Paper Hearts” is not your typical X-Files episode; it’s grim and sad and realistic and essentially a police procedural, and the X-File itself is minimal – just Mulder having bad dreams and letting himself be played. The first time I watched the episode I kept going, “Wait, this doesn’t feel like The X-Files at all. This feels like Homicide, Life on the Street.” There’s one scene that really struck me: the one where Mulder and Scully have to tell Addie’s father that they’ve found her body. He asks, “Do you do this full time?” and Scully says, “No, not full time,” and Mulder says, “It’s not a good job.” And for all the death in The X-Files, I think this is the first time we’ve seen Mulder and Scully actually breaking the news to a family member. At any rate, we’ve never seen a reaction as real as Addie’s father’s, or seen Mulder and Scully looking so shamefaced and miserable at being the bearers of bad news. But it is something you see all the time on Homicide – the family processing the news in real time, and the detectives having to sit there and absorb their reaction, whether it’s grief or shock or denial or anger. The Homicide vibe was so strong I started wondering if Vince Gilligan had ever written for that show, so I did some googling and found an interview where he talks about modeling “Drive” on the Homicide episode “The Subway.” And then it occurred to me that “Paper Hearts” has roughly the same plot as the 4th season Homicide episode “Requiem for Adena,” which aired the year before it, and that a lot of things about “Paper Hearts” make more sense if you assume it was directly modeled on that episode. Some mild spoilers for Homicide to follow: Homicide begins with rookie Tim Bayliss being assigned his first case: the rape and murder of a little girl named Adena Watson. Bayliss and his partner Pembleton work the case for six episodes but never close it, and Adena becomes more or less what Samantha is to The X-Files – the unhealed wound at the heart of the show. Bayliss, in particular, develops a very Mulder-like obsession with murdered children. In “Requiem for Adena” there’s another dead little girl and just enough circumstantial similarities for Bayliss to convince himself there’s a link between this murder and Adena’s. And he can’t resist the idea that he could finally, after four years, solve Adena Watson’s murder and avenge her death. He starts poking around, re-investigating the Watson case, questioning the same witnesses again. There’s a terribly sad scene where he visits Adena’s mother and she asks him why he has to bring this up just when she’s managed to stop thinking about it. (And I just realized that the little girl in “Paper Hearts” whose father doesn’t want to know what happened to her? Is named Addie.) But this time the cops get a break. They have a suspect in the box, and they’re on their way to a confession when Bayliss derails the interrogation by asking about Adena Watson. And you realize that Bayliss is about to lose them the case that's right in front of them, because he can't let go of this long-dead case from years ago. And the question is whether Pembleton can talk Bayliss down and get control of the interrogation in time to prevent a child murderer from going free. The prisoner never leaves the interrogation room, but the stakes are just as high as they are at the end of "Paper Hearts." I rewatched “Requiem for Adena,” and there was one exchange, from the end of the episode, that jumped out at me. Bayliss’s boss, Gee, is giving him a gentle talking-to. He asks Bayliss how he sleeps, and Bayliss says he sleeps lousy - "waking up in the middle of the night. Nightmares." Gee says that's a good thing. "Everybody's got something that keeps them awake at night. When you can’t tell the difference between nightmares and what’s real - that’s when you’re no good to yourself or anybody else." So I’m pretty sure Vince Gilligan took this conversation and made it literal, and made an X-File out of it. And I love that. There’s enough overlap between Mulder and Bayliss and their self-destructive obsessions that you can map a Mulder story directly onto a Bayliss story and make it work. The only point that doesn’t match up is that Bayliss has far more reason to connect this killing with Adena Watson than Mulder has to connect John Lee Roche with Samantha, which is why Mulder's motivations end up being so puzzling. But I don't really mind that. What impresses me is how effectively Gilligan uses the tone of Homicide - a much bleaker, more realistic show than The X-Files - to make this episode stand out. It's an unexpected detour into the real world, and it makes for a very striking, haunting episode.

Thank you! Sometimes I feel like I'm spamming the thread, so that's really good to hear. I sometimes wonder if CC was a shipper all along and was just using reverse psychology on us. I mean, he wrote Irresistible, which is super shippy - it's got Mulder calling Scully "a pretty woman," Scully talking to her therapist about Mulder, and that hug at the end where Mulder kisses Scully's hair. That last one could have been just David and Gillian, but not the others, and then the whole premise of the episode is that Mulder wants to take Scully to a football game! Maybe CC just claimed they were going to stay platonic as a clever tactic to turn us all into rabid shippers. Yes, it does that to me too. It's a powerful enough moment that I briefly forget how much evidence of alien abduction we've actually seen. It's like we've suddenly left the world of the X-Files, where we've seen Samantha clones and alien bounty hunters and the chip in Scully's neck, and are in the real world, where a little girl being kidnapped by a pedophile is so much more likely.

Paper Hearts! I love this one. And also find it terribly painful and hard to watch. I have an elaborate theory about where this episode is coming from, which will probably bore everyone to tears, but I'll save that for another post. I think this episode is the epitome of hot, tragic, screwed-up Mulder. Poor sweetie. He should probably be fired, but who can resist that face? What is Skinner thinking, letting an agent work what might be his own sister's murder? Especially after he just hit a prisoner? A whole lot of terrible law enforcement going on in this episode, when I stop to think about it. Mulder's smile when he dreams he's holding Samantha absolutely kills me. It's so completely, unquestioningly happy. I can only think of two other times in the show that we see Mulder smile like that: the "Come on back" scene in Memento Mori, and the starlight scene in Closure. And just to twist the knife, there's that little moment where he looks at her to make sure this is real - you can see him thinking no, this isn't a dream, she's really back. I love the way the memory of Samantha's abduction plays out, with adult Mulder and child Samantha going through the scene we already know. That joke from "Forehead Sweat" where they put David Duchovny's head on a child's body to make a point about the unreliability of memory? This is the not-funny version of that. This seems to be the season where they move away from showing Mulder and Samantha as roughly the same age - either both children or both adults - and start showing him as an adult and her as a child. First the drones in Herrenvolk, and now this. One result of that, I think, is that Mulder starts to seem less like a brother looking for his sister and more like a parent who has lost a child. And from the expression on his face when he's talking to Addie's father, I think Mulder identifies pretty strongly with the role of the grieving parent. It's crazy how physically comfortable with each other Mulder and Scully are by this point in the show. These two hug a lot, in general, but in that last scene he doesn't even bother to stand up to hug her, just kind of leans into her, and she strokes his hair like this is normal.

That's really funny, because three minutes is actually an absurdly short time even for what's supposed to be happening. Marita goes into the other room and presumably makes a phone call on Mulder's behalf, and then he leaves her apartment, gets back to the car and starts it, all within three minutes? I can totally see the writers going "Okay, how long should this take? Five minutes? Would people think Mulder had sex with Marita and got back to the car within five minutes? Maybe. Better make it three." Anyway, I'm glad I'm not the only person who watched that scene and went, "Wait, did they just - WHAT JUST HAPPENED?" To be fair, Marita has done her Eve Kendall impression in every single conversation they've had, so I'm pretty sure that's just the way she talks. And Mulder did show up at her apartment in the middle of the night, not the other way around, so if he assumed her manner was a come-on I'd actually be pretty mad at him. But I agree, it's hilarious how he just straight-up doesn't notice it. He's in a dark room in the middle of the night with a half-dressed femme fatale who's radiating sex at him, and he's just like, "So, can you help me get to Russia?"

Oh, you're probably right. I started watching the X-Files in reruns when it was already going into the 8th season, so I missed all the original discussions. I noticed Mulder looking at his watch but didn't see the clock in the car. It's weird, though, because Krycek's delivery of "Where've you been?" seems to suggest that Mulder was gone a long time. But I didn't actually think they had sex, just that the X-Files for some reason used all the conventions that, say, a Hitchcock film would use to imply that they did.

Finally went back and made it through Tunguska and Terma. Man, these are the kind of episodes that make me avoid the mytharc. It's not that I think they're bad, it's just that I have zero interest in the black oil and old men speaking Russian to each other in darkened rooms. Tunguska: This one is at least enlivened by everyone in it punching Krycek and having mad sexual tension with each other. Except for Scully, who doesn't get to do anything, punch anyone or have sexual tension with anyone, even Mulder. Unfair! She should at least get to punch Krycek once. Mulder and Krycek have such an entertainingly Buffy-and-Spike vibe. That scene in the prison cell where they lock eyes and just breathe at each other? Out of control. I can't believe Mulder actually says "Stupid-ass haircut" while shoving Krycek. Mulder, "You have stupid hair" is a Spike line, and you are clearly Buffy. I briefly thought that the Mulder/Marita scene ended with them having offscreen sex, not because this would be at all in character for Mulder or justified by the plot, but because the scene uses all the conventions that would normally imply that sex is about to happen. Like, Marita is standing there in her robe delivering every single line like she's Eva Marie Saint seducing Cary Grant in North By Northwest, and then she offers to help Mulder and he's like, "How long will it take?" and she says, "How long do you have?' and walks into what's presumably the bedroom. And then it cuts to Mulder walking back to the car and Krycek asking, "Where've you been?" and Mulder says, "Making travel arrangements." Which is probably what he was in fact doing, but is also exactly what he'd say if he'd been having sex with Marita Covarrubias. Terma: I just finished watching this episode, and I already remember nothing about it except Mulder and Scully reuniting in the courtroom. Talk about out of control. If I saw only this scene, out of context, I would definitely assume these two were already sleeping together. The way Scully looks at Mulder when he walks in? And then his line about getting to put his arms around her, which is a very intimate thing to say to anyone, regardless of the whole black oil context which she doesn't know about anyway. Even with the context, it's pretty intense - it pretty much implies that the only reason for having arms in the first place is to be able to put them around Scully. I can't believe Skinner puts up with these two.

Honestly, I'm glad we didn't. It sounds great, and it works great for shows like Slings and Arrows that have a cohesive vision, but given Chris Carter's skill set I think we would have ended up with sixteen episodes of My Struggle. At least this way I can mentally keep the standalone episodes that I like (which, in this season, is most of them) and ignore CC's stupid Struggles. And I don't mind Duchovny giving credit to Chris Carter, either. I took that quote of his to be a very diplomatic way of saying that Chris Carter's greatest skill is the ability to surround himself with people who are smarter and more talented than he is and give them room to do their thing. And I think that's true. The structure of The X-Files is very weird and always has been, but the great advantage of it is how flexible it is - you have all these little movies that are so different from one another, and the whole thing is so very Choose Your Own Adventure that you can pretty much ignore any episodes you want to ignore. I'm choosing to think of everything written by Chris Carter since 2001 as bad fanfic rather than as canon, and the beauty of The X-Files is that it's okay to do that. A few things I forgot to mention earlier: The real reason I will never actually watch this episode or think of it as canon: Mulder murdering people. Look, Mulder and Scully have both killed people in self-defense or in defense of others, but Mulder has never straight-up executed anyone before. There have been plenty of times when he's tempted, but he doesn't do it, because he's not a murderer. Not only is it incredibly lazy to solve your massive 25-year conspiracy by having the protagonist shoot everyone in the head, it's also something you can't do without at least acknowledging that you're doing it. It's not that I'm against ending a series by having the hero turn vigilante and commit murder. My favorite show ends that way, and it works beautifully. But you have to show the character making the decision, and you have to follow it up. For Mulder to just gun people down, without moral qualms, without conflict, and without consequences, is so completely out of character that I could never think of this episode as real. I suppose it's possible, but why now? If Scully can get pregnant, why didn't she get pregnant sometime between 2002 and whenever she and Mulder broke up? It's not like they had any reason to be using birth control. I suppose the CSM could have manipulated the chip with Science, but I think the simpler explanation is that Chris Carter thinks like a kid who's only just learned about the facts of life. He seems to be under the impression that people only have sex when they want babies, and that if you have sex you always get pregnant. I honestly think he believes that Mulder and Scully have only slept together twice. I would really like someone - Glen Morgan, maybe - to sit him down and explain to him exactly how much unprotected sex Mulder and Scully have had over the course of the past eighteen years.