Sharna Pax

I was thinking about this - the fact that Scully explicitly compares Max to Mulder - and I think it goes beyond Max's being a loner. Mulder is less of a loner than Max, I think - he at least has Scully, and I think he would be more social if he had ever had a chance to live a normal life. But he's just as obsessive as Max, and it's not often that we get to see how deep that obsession goes. There's a Shaw play where he introduces a character, tells you at great length how attractive and disreputable he looks, and then ends the description, "But his eyes are the eyes of a fanatic." I feel like any description of Mulder ought to end the same way. He's chill, and he's goofy, and he's sardonic and whatever, but underneath all that is the guy we saw in the pilot, who said "Nothing else matters to me," and meant it. That's what Mulder shares with Max, and what Scully notices - their single-minded, self-denying devotion to a cause. And that kind of single-mindedness is frightening. It leads Max to give himself radiation burns, get himself murdered, and take an entire passenger plane with him. And it leads Mulder to do the exact same thing that Max does, with the minor difference that Mulder is luckier and no one gets killed. It's even crazier when Mulder does it, though, because he's just seen what happened to Max's flight. And yet he picks up that radioactive McGuffin, not even knowing what it is or why he wants it, and walks straight onto a passenger plane with it. That is insane. I think it's the most insane thing I've ever seen Mulder do. Like, there are three people in this episode who are nuts enough to give themselves radiation burns, steal an unidentified radioactive McGuffin, and risk being abducted by aliens and/or shot down by the military in order to hold onto it. One is Max, who is obviously mentally unstable, and who ends up dead. Another is a woman who is so mentally ill that she is actually in an institution. And the third one is Mulder. This episode confuses me, actually, because I think it goes farther than it meant to in showing how dangerous Mulder's obsessions are. When the Harry Lime character (if he has a name, I don't know it) gives Mulder his little points-of-light speech on the plane, I think we're supposed to understand that the difference between Mulder and Harry Lime is that Harry Lime thinks the McGuffin is worth sacrificing human lives for and Mulder doesn't. But Mulder certainly seems to think it's worth risking human lives for, or he wouldn't be on the plane at all. Anyway, like I said, I'm confused. The episode is definitely inviting us to make a lot of connections - between Mulder and Max, between Mulder and Harry Lime - but I'm not sure what it all adds up to. The sense I got from this episode was that Mulder might be a saint, or he might be a terrorist, or he might just be a guy under a lot of strain who's gradually sliding into a nervous breakdown. I don't know what to make of it all, but it's certainly interesting. What I liked about Pendrell was how real he seemed. Is there anyone else on the show who's human enough to say something dumb like "Keep it up yourself!" and then kick himself for it? He probably had a family he was close to, and one or two good friends outside the Bureau, and he probably went hiking down by the Potomac on the weekends. His presence made everything seem more plausible. I'll miss him.

Now that makes sense. The child wouldn't even have to be Scully's biological child - just a kid who needs their help. I find it very weird that Chris Carter seems to think the only way for Mulder and Scully to be a family is for them to conceive, bear and raise a child who is biologically theirs. I can understand why they wouldn't have adopted, during those years they spent living together - their life wasn't stable enough, and for a lot of that time Mulder was supposed to be in hiding. But taking in an older kid who needs protection would make so much more sense to me than having a baby in their mid-fifties, and they would be just as much a family. The more I think about the WIlliam plot, the more I hate it. It's basically Chris Carter using rape as an excuse to scribble out eighteen years' worth of story and start over. Sad because Mulder and Scully had a miracle baby and gave him up for adoption and mourned his absence for sixteen years? No worries! It turns out Scully was raped and the baby wasn't Mulder's, so nobody really needs to worry about him at all. Here's a brand-new baby who's really a miracle. Look, I thought the William story was stupid from the beginning, but it happened, and you can't erase it. Mulder and Scully had a baby, and they were scared that he was going to turn out to be an alien, but then it turned out he was just a perfectly normal baby, and they were very happy and kissed awkwardly while holding him. That happened. And even if you manage to convince me that William wasn't really normal, and wasn't really Mulder's biological child (and that's going to be a hard sell, because the show seemed very clear about both those things back at the end of the eighth season), that doesn't erase the fact that for seventeen years they believed he was. And that means he's their kid, because biology is really the least important factor here. Saying Scully was raped and William was an experiment shouldn't make William's loss any easier - it just adds an additional layer of trauma. I understand wanting Mulder and Scully to have a happy ending. That's what I want for them too! But I think Chris Carter has a very narrow view of what a happy ending is. "This" and "Forehead Sweat" and Ghouli" were really all the happy ending I needed for Mulder and Scully. "This" tells me that the years they've spent together weren't all angst and regret; that there's been lot of fun and silly jokes and comfortable TV-watching and recreational use of handcuffs along the way as well. "Forehead Sweat" shows us that we can be nostalgic for the past without needing to recapture it. And "Ghouli" sets Mulder and Scully free from their guilt over William. Do Mulder and Scully have perfect lives? Do they have everything they once envisioned for themselves? No, but who does? Regrets, disappointments, missed opportunities are a part of life. Sure, they've missed William's childhood, and Mulder never got to build rockets with his kid, and that's sad. But realistically, they'd be empty-nesters by now anyway. Their son is alive and well and knows they love him; they have their health and their jobs and each other, and that's more than a lot of couples their age have. I don't need Mulder and Scully to have a new baby and start all over again. I just need them to take stock of their lives and realize that they're happy, and maybe get a dog.

(Raises spoonful of carcinogenic goo to her lips; hesitates; puts it down.) I want to remember how it was. I want to remember how it all was.

I think Mulder needs a new poster for his office. I haven't watched this episode yet, and based on what I'm seeing I think I'll give it a skip. So Mulder murders a bunch of people and Scully is pregnant at 54? That's so bad it circles back around to being hilarious. I almost love it. I saw the pregnancy thing coming because Plus One was so reminiscent of Requiem and the season as a whole was so reminiscent of Season 7, and Chris Carter has no new ideas - of course he'd be heading toward the exact same ending. It's hilarious that last week we got a show about an aging diva mouthing the same lines she delivered decades ago, and this week Chris Carter is trying to rewrite Season 7 and get it right this time. Look, Chris, it's too bad you didn't admit that Mulder and Scully were sleeping together back in Season 7, and it's too bad you didn't just end the show there and let them raise their kid together. But trying to do it all over again twenty years later is not the answer.

I watched Max almost a week ago, but I haven’t had time to post about it because I had to fly all over the place for some work-related stuff – and boy, was it fun to fly four times in four days right after watching the plane-crash scene. I do like the investigator a lot. Even in his first appearance in Tempus Fugit, when he has no patience for Mulder's UFO theories, his basic decency really shines through. I like how that scene makes us sympathize with three points of view at once - Mulder, who knows he's right and knows this needs to be said, Scully, who's painfully conscious of how humiliating this all is, and the investigator, who can't help thinking that Mulder is making light of a tragedy. And because we know that his antagonism toward Mulder comes from a place of really caring about his job, it makes sense that he would do his job well enough to eventually stop being an antagonist and become an ally. I feel so sorry for him - he spends days wading through a field of dead bodies, does his work as best he can, and still has to accept the official story, knowing that it's wrong and that the people who made that field of dead bodies are going to get away with it. The rest of the episode - well, it's a lot. A few fragmented thoughts, in no particular order: Man, Mulder exposes himself to radiation a lot. I hope he carries potassium iodide with him wherever he goes. Only Mulder could nap on an airplane while holding a bag of radioactive McGuffin. Hey, did you know that in French, Close Encounters of the Third Kind translates to Rencontres du Troisième Type? And "type" in French also means "guy" or "dude?" So that in French you can mash up Close Encounters of the Third Kind with The Third Man and have it work as a pun. I'm sure that dialogue from The Third Man was supposed to be clever, but it pulled me right out of the episode. I kept expecting Mulder to say, "You know, I've seen that movie." I don't actually think the medallion just means teamwork to Scully, though that's certainly one of the meanings she assigns to it. She starts out talking about the "extraordinary men and women" who make history, and then she talks about teamwork, and then sacrifice - all the people who made sacrifices so that the work could go forward. And it's all framed as part of this question about the lives that have been lost and what it's all for: what meaning does Pendrell's death have? What meaning can Mulder and Scully give it? In the past few episodes, we've seen how frustrated Scully is by the feeling that her life has been swallowed up in Mulder's quest. But we've also seen how important her work is to her - it's what she turns to in times of fear or grief; it's what gives her life meaning when she doesn't know how much time she has left. So she's prepared, I think, to devote herself to the work, even if it was originally Mulder's, even if she doesn't know where this is all going or if it will ever get there. But she needs to know that Mulder recognizes her choice and her part in the work, and that he sees her as an equal partner. And that, I think, is what the medallion ends up meaning to her. The joke about the alien implant is fun, but it also strikes me as a little pointed – it’s Scully ribbing Mulder about seeing everything in terms of the X-Files, including her. The medallion is pretty much the opposite of an alien implant. It’s about the work, the end goal, but it’s also a recognition of every single person who worked toward that goal, and at a time when Scully is terribly afraid of disappearing and leaving no trace, I think it makes her feel seen and validated – as a human being, as a member of a team, and as someone who has struggled and made sacrifices for a greater good. Now, as for what it means to Mulder – Mulder is a more emotional thinker than Scully, and my guess is that whatever he saw in the medallion that made him think of Scully, it’s not something that he ever bothered to parse out logically or put into words. My best guess is that the Moon landing impresses the hell out of him, and so does Scully, and that this is as far as he got. When he thinks of brilliant, bad-ass people doing impossible things, he thinks of Scully, so he got her a cool keychain to tell her he thinks she’s cool. I have more thoughts about the comparison between Mulder and Max, but I will save them for another post because this is already too long.

I did love all of that. I adore Mulder's declaration of faith in Scully - it's a callback to "One Breath," in a way, and it's lovely to hear Mulder say it again, in so many words, with so much certainty and with so much genuine respect for Scully's beliefs. And Mulder is still better at saying variations on "I'm here," than anyone else in the world. Scully's puppy/prayer story is terribly cute, and really every Mulder/Scully scene is a delight. Mulder deliberately weirding out the younger cops is a nice callback to "Squeeze" - "sometimes the need to mess with their heads outweighs the millstone of humiliation" - and I loved that Scully joined in by yelling "GOUT" at them for no reason at all. The glasses are a fun running joke and also look great on Mulder - he should wear them more often. Though Juliet's story didn't quite work for me, I liked the idea of the background for Mulder and Scully's final scene being this woman who has just sacrificed her entire future to save her sister - a kind of Portrait of Mulder as a Young Vampire Slayer. And that final scene with the mother and daughter sets up another parallel to Mulder's story, because, as he points out, his obsession with finding his sister ended up costing Scully hers. Mulder is so much mellower these days, it's easy to forget how very reckless and single-minded he used to be. Juliet is a reminder of the Mulder we met in the pilot, the one who told Scully, "Nothing else matters to me," and meant it. In what's effectively the finale, it's nice to be shown how far Mulder has come. But ultimately I didn't love this episode as much as I hoped to, and it's not just because of the pancreas smoothies. It's the ending. I wanted it to resolve the relationship issues that Mulder and Scully have had all season, and all it did was make me worry about them more. Mulder and Scully talking about the guilt they both feel is lovely and poignant. But look at the way Mulder's face falls when Scully asks if they're together. Everything about him says that he wants them to be together and he's just waiting for the word from Scully. And whatever the whisper is, I don't think it answers the question. Mulder doesn't look to me like someone who's just gotten good news. He looks like he's bracing for something difficult, and his last line sounds awfully final. I don't think this scene can be a breakup - that wouldn't really make sense - but I don't think it can be them getting back together either. I think the whisper must have to do with William, and I'm okay with that, but I have to assume that the status of Mulder and Scully's relationship is still completely unresolved. And that's not enough for me, mostly because I don't think it's enough for Mulder. He looks so terribly sad when he's telling Scully she should have fled earlier. What I want is for Scully to tell Mulder, as clearly as he told her, that she still wants to be here with him. Not just that she feels bad about giving up on them. Not just that she doesn't begrudge him the things she's lost. I want her to remind him, as she did in "Je Souhaite" and in the "The Truth," that she chooses to be with him, that he brings something to her life that she values, that he makes her happy. If this is the last normal episode we get with these two, I want Scully to tell Mulder something that will put a smile on his face. Oh, and that "before I even needed glasses" line desperately needed a rewrite, because even if you accept that in this universe Mulder only just got glasses, it still doesn't make any sense. He wishes Scully had walked out of the basement office before he needed glasses? So, any time before 2018, then? Duchovny does a wonderful job with that line. It's a very powerful moment. But how did no one notice that the line made no sense?

Oh, X-Files. You promised me a kiss, and you gave me organs in a blender. I don't really know what else I could have expected. And yet, somehow, I'll miss you.

Yes, absolutely. This is a side of Mulder that we never see, but that still seems completely in character, which is why I love this scene so much. He's bringing the same energy to everyday human interaction that he normally reserves for chasing aliens, and it's mesmerizing. I knew Mulder gave Scully that keychain at some point, but I was expecting him to be sort of casual and embarrassed about it - not to gift-wrap it and present it to her and seem so happy and confident that she'll like it. He's enjoying the hell out of himself, and he doesn't care how much she rolls her eyes, he's just going to keep grinning at her and flipping that straw around and making dumb jokes. It's hilarious how suspicious she is - clearly Scully hasn't seen this side of Mulder much either. She thinks he's just doing this to embarrass her, and he's letting her think that because he's more comfortable with jokes than with sincerity, but really he just wants to give her a present and hang out with her on her birthday. The thing that bugs me about Pendrell's death is why does Scully take the very important witness who she's trying to protect to a bar in the first place, and why does she choose her regular bar instead of some place where no one knows her? I don't know how often she and Mulder go there, but Fenig's sister managed to track them down there just a couple of days ago, so you'd think she'd go somewhere more anonymous. I love the scene of drunk Pendrell trying to buy Scully a birthday drink (poor Pendrell, forever thinking Scully's on a date when she's not), but the whole setup makes Scully look pretty sloppy at her job. I don't really know what I think the keychain means to Mulder, but haven't had a chance to watch Max yet, so I'll see if I have any ideas after I watch it.

So despite my plans for an orderly rewatch, I ended up skipping ahead today and watching "Tempus Fugit" because it was on TV. This was one I did not remember at all - possibly I never saw it when I first watched the show. Despite my general meh-ness about mytharc, I pretty much loved it. I can't believe that for all these years I've been denying myself the scene of Mulder and Scully and the birthday keychain. I love that scene so, so much. It's so rare, especially in the earlier seasons, to get a scene of Mulder and Scully just hanging out, living their lives. This scene raises all sorts of intriguing questions: do Mulder and Scully regularly go out for drinks after work? It doesn't seem like they're out specifically for her birthday, more like she thinks they're just getting a drink and then Mulder surprises her with the birthday cake. Is this bar some kind of FBI hangout, since we see Pendrell there later? I like it when we get these little snapshots to remind us that Mulder and Scully's lives go beyond what we see on the screen. And the dynamic between the two of them is just so perfectly judged. She's all "Oh, HELL no," as soon as he pulls out the gift box, and he's got a drink stirrer between his teeth and is grinning at her like a maniac, and I could watch this scene a million times. I think even if I didn't know about Scully's cancer, I'd get that something was wrong and Mulder was overcompensating. He's just a little too manic. But it's all very subtle. These are two people who have adjusted to the reality of one of them having cancer, and they don't have to talk about it all the time, but it's always going to be there as subtext. Scully points out that Mulder never remembers her birthday, and he makes a joke about liking to celebrate every four years - "like dog years" - and Scully pretends to take offense, and neither of them mentions what they're both thinking, which is that Scully might not have another birthday. Is it just me, or are they both halfway to their "Bad Blood" personas (personae?) in this episode? He's all manic energy and telling everyone he meets about aliens, and she's all eye-rolling irritation and vicarious embarrassment. But not in a way where she's actually mad at him, more like, "Oookay, Mulder's extra crazy this week, guess I'll be apologizing for him a lot." That scene where Mulder's telling the NTSB people about Fenig being an abductee and Scully is slowly sinking into the ground? And the scene where Mulder calls Scully in the middle of the night and she's like, "Mulder, we've been up for 36 hours," and he's like, "I know I know I know, I just need you to come over and listen to something." Mulder, I think it is you who need to work on listening. But he's not deliberately being a jerk this week; he's just slightly nuts. I think that first scene with the keychain shows that he's trying to do better and pay more attention to Scully, it's just that being Mulder he overdoes it a little. RIP Pendrell. Poor guy, he never had a chance.

I really enjoyed the callback to Mulder not tipping in "Bad Blood." It always cracks me up that the not tipping is in Mulder's version of events, when you'd think it would be in Scully's. But to be fair to Mulder, he doesn't just get poor service from the restaurant; he also gets ripped off. If I'd just paid for an entire meal that I never got, I'd be pretty firmly against giving the restaurant any more of my money too. I think it's the principle of the thing more than anything else - but it strikes me as very Mulder to make such a stand on principle that he's repeatedly almost getting them both killed over a $5.50 tip. Maybe it's just my own personal aesthetic, but when I look at these two houses, it's Mulder who comes across as more connected and social, just because his house seems like somewhere that human beings would actually want to hang out in. Scully's house strikes me as cold and inhuman and very, very empty. Mulder's has a lot of warmth and personality, and even when he's the only one there, it doesn't look visually lonely in the way that Scully's does. That, and I think her saying "Not all of them" was plenty suggestive already. I like it when Scully gets a chance to make the suggestive remarks.

I didn't know who the TvMouse was, so I googled her and promptly fell down a rabbit hole of all her X-Files posts. She seems to be the world's biggest shipper, so I can't imagine her liking an episode where they break up. Now I'm mostly worried they'll tease us with a resolution but just give us more ambiguity. It doesn't make me like William much, either, if he's the one who kills her. Didn't she basically deliver him? I don't care how much of a traitor she is, this is the woman who sang whale songs while he was being born!

Seriously! If all those people die and Scully leaves? It'll basically be Mulder all by himself, because they'll have killed off virtually every person he's ever spoken to in his life. That doesn't seem like a practical plan for continuing the show, so hopefully they won't even try.

"I have a son" was my favorite moment. Duchovny is killing it this season. Yeah, why would Scully ignore the salt? It's pretty obviously evidence - not a weird Mulder thing like "THIS MAN'S SHOES ARE UNTIED," which she could reasonably dismiss. You'd think she'd at least add it to her list of evidence that a human being was involved. And the crime scene thing was weird too. I don't think Scully has gotten mad at Mulder for disturbing a crime scene since "Conduit," when she barely knew him. Mulder tasting the evidence: yup, loved that. Classic Mulder. He's basically a dog in human form. Droopy triangular eyes, wrinkles his forehead like a Shar-Pei when he's worried, tends to run off without warning, and can't see something gross on the ground without getting into it. And he sometimes has the exact same obstinate, "I'm not going to listen to you" look on his face that my sled dog gives me when he thinks he hasn't been walked enough.

Much as I don't want Skinner to die, I find that the episode I'm really worrying about is the next-to-last one, "Nothing Lasts Forever." It looks from the promo like Mulder and Scully are either going to get back together in this one or break up for good, and I don't think I can handle them breaking up just before Gillian Anderson leaves the show. The clips make it look like they could be getting back together, but the title of the episode has me very worried.

Well, I guess the streak had to end sometime. I've been loving this season so far, but not this one. That dialogue was labored even by X-Files standards, and I think I'm going to have bruises from all the anvils. OMG witch hunts! With a literal witch! There's no way we could put that one together on our own - good thing we had Mulder there to monologue about it for like twenty minutes. A few thoughts: Yup, that was "Chimera." Except that I found "Chimera" genuinely terrifying, with all those ravens and shattered mirrors, and also very funny. This was neither. Even Anna asking Mulder if he had kids was basically the same as the scene in "Chimera" where he's asked if he has a significant other. I half expected him to say, "Not in the traditionally understood definition of the term." Someone actually said, "You've unleashed something, something that you can't control!" Mulder and Scully just watch Anna burn to death and don't try to do anything about it. I know that realistically there's no saving her, but shouldn't they at least try? As many people here have pointed out, no one in a million years would let their kids watch Mister Chuckleteeth, and no kid would want to watch it. It's hard not to make comparisons to the Angel episode "Smile Time," but what was brilliant about that episode was the care they put into crafting a kids' show that seemed like it would actually be popular. Like, there's a puppet called Ratio Hornblower who has a horn for a mouth and does math! I'd plunk a kid down in front of that without a moment's hesitation. Mister Chuckleteeth and the haunted Teletubbies, not so much. Things I liked: Mulder calling Scully his homie. The way Duchovny delivers, "I have a son. He's grown now." There's a hesitation after "He's," where you can see Mulder trying to figure out what he can possibly say about William. Mulder and Scully whispering about hellhounds in the courtroom, and the amused look on Mulder's face as he's trying to explain the hellhound - like he knows there's no way Scully will believe him but he's going to try anyway. Now that I think about it, all the things I liked were Mulder-related, and they were mostly the acting, not the script. Scully seemed off to me, but I couldn't tell if that was the writing, Gillian Anderson's voice, or some combination of the two.

I like this! I can't figure out exactly how it would work, but that's why I'm not a writer. I think they could have found a way, and it would have had a lot more emotional resonance. And if there was enough ambiguity attached to it where we didn't know if it was real or not, but there was a possibility that Samantha was dead and this was really her trying to reach out to Mulder, that would help explain Mulder's behavior later on in "Paper Hearts." Even with the premise as it stands, I think this episode could do with a lot more ambiguity. (And that's something I never thought I'd say about any X-Files episode.) It would be so easy for the episode to suggest that maybe Melissa is just delusional and Mulder is unstable enough to buy into her delusions. Scully does argue that at first, but by the end it seems like we're just supposed to believe that all this is real and Mulder and Melissa are really soulmates across the centuries. Wouldn't it be more interesting if we honestly didn't know? If we were left wondering whether Mulder's memories under hypnosis were real or false? I agree. Mulder gets so incredibly vulnerable whenever he comes across these women who are so damaged and traumatized that they can't lead normal lives anymore - I think he's got to realize that if he ever finds Samantha as an adult, there's a good chance she's going to be in that kind of a state. He keeps being drawn to women who are too far gone to be saved, and he keeps trying to save them, and he keeps failing. It's like he's deliberately reliving Samantha's abduction, every time. And that's a big part of why I want more ambiguity. I would find this episode more meaningful if it had more of a suggestion that Mulder could be doing this to himself as part of his pattern, rather than just being uncontrollably drawn to Melissa because she's definitely his Civil War soulmate. I think the way Scully figures into Mulder's hypnosis-memories would benefit from more ambiguity as well. I mean, if Mulder and Scully have been close to one another for centuries, that's already interesting, and I like it just fine. But if there's a possibility that Mulder is imagining past lives for himself and putting Scully in all of them, that tells us something very different but equally interesting. I find the concept of soulmates dumb as well, and I also think it's pretty destructive to storytelling. If two characters have an instant bond, the way we're supposed to think Mulder and Melissa do, there's no way to get the audience invested in the relationship, because you can't show it developing. I mean, it's interesting to think that maybe Mulder and Scully have been connected in other lives, but that's not why we're invested in their partnership here and now. We care about their partnership because we saw Mulder decide to open up to Scully in the pilot, and we saw Scully take a leap of faith and side with Mulder in "Squeeze," and we saw them having to trust each other completely in "Ice," and so on. If the pilot had had Mulder and Scully instantly love and trust one another because they'd fought side by side in the Civil War, it would never have been picked up.

The Field Where I Died: Oh, dear God. I tried to watch this episode all the way through. I honestly tried. And actually, I saw every minute of it. I just didn’t hear all of it, because whenever the prose got purple I was irresistibly impelled to yank my earbuds out and watch the episode in blessed silence. This isn’t the worst episode of TV I’ve ever seen, by a long shot. But it is the episode where I feel the most embarrassed for everyone involved, because it’s incredibly ambitious and almost none of it works, and you’re just watching four talented people – Morgan and Wong and Duchovny and Cloke – try to do more than they can handle and fail spectacularly. And honestly, I don’t know that anyone could handle what’s asked of Duchovny here. It’s not just that he has to spend the entire episode looking straight into the camera and ugly-crying, it’s also that there’s no way to make all that crying believable, no matter how well he does it. Why would Mulder, who took all of “One Breath” to break down and cry over Scully’s impending death, be so instantly weepy about recalling his past lives? And even if we could buy that, how can we possibly enter into the emotion, when it doesn’t connect to anyone or anything we actually know? There’s no point in going over everything about this episode, but a few stray things: So Scully was Mulder’s father in a past life, huh? And in “Never Again,” Scully is going to claim that she sees Mulder as a father figure, and look, I realize that not everyone sees Mulder and Scully as a romantic pairing, and that’s totally valid, but they are 100% not each other’s dads! I don’t even know how that would work. Also, Mulder already has two fathers, does he really need a third? Mulder as Samantha’s father, though – that I can believe. We only really know Samantha as a child, and the age difference between her and Mulder is so great that in some ways he seems more like a grieving parent than like a brother looking for his sister. Wow, Mulder is really a dick here, and Scully is not a fan. I listened to Kumail Nanjiani’s commentary on “Never Again,” and he says that Morgan and Wong were planning a big blow-up fight between Mulder and Scully that would put a rift between them by the end of the fourth season. I can totally see that starting to happen here, and I think it’s too bad it never got fully dealt with. I like that Scully has no problem yelling at Mulder for being self-centered and lying to Skinner and using the lives of fifty people as a pretext to dick around with hypnosis. What I can’t tell, though, since the episode is so weird, is whether this is normal Mulder behavior or not. I think by the end we’re supposed to put it all down to past-life influences and the emotional impact of suddenly finding your long-lost soulmate in a poison bunker, but it definitely leaves a bad impression. “I wouldn’t change a day.” Now that is a nice moment. Almost worth suffering through this episode to get. The Flukeman line is great, too. A touch of humor that the episode sorely needs. Though wasn’t Scully in Quantico wearing huge coats for that particular episode? I guess the Flukeman was just so gross that dealing with him even at a distance stands out in Scully’s mind as worse than getting abducted by aliens. Edited to add that one thing I do think works about this episode is the character of the cult leader. He's very plausible as a leader so charismatic that he could get people to commit mass suicide. He has an air of calm rationality, even when he's spouting apocalyptic nonsense, that's weirdly compelling.

Unruhe! Finally (I know it’s only been three episodes, but it feels like forever) the kind of X-Files episode that keeps me watching the show. No mytharc, no experimenting with the formula, no shocking twists – just a good, solid, suspenseful Monster of the Week. The screaming photos are super cool and creepy, the villain is both terrifying and pathetic, and the suspense is real – a botched icepick lobotomy is about the worst fate I could imagine for anyone, and seeing it about to happen to our brilliant Scully is genuinely scary. Mulder seems pretty much like his Season 1 self here – yes, he just laughs at Scully’s attempts to explain the photos as the result of heat warping, but it comes off as friendly ribbing rather than dismissiveness. And I just never get tired of seeing Mulder react to the threat of losing Scully. I realize that the show probably went to that well too often, and it would be nice if Mulder paid a little more attention to Scully when she wasn’t kidnapped or dying. But man, Duchovny is good at playing depressed, desperate, barely-holding-it-together-but-still-competent Mulder. I like how people keep asking Mulder what they should do next – it’s a nice way of underlining that Mulder has no idea whether anything they’re doing is going to work. I also like that Mulder and Scully actually catch the bad guy halfway through the episode, and not only that, they interrogate him and get a confession. (I think Vince Gilligan harbored secret fantasies of writing for Homicide, Life on the Street, and I always enjoy it when he puts Mulder and Scully in the box.) They're both very competent and efficient here, in their different ways. Scully works out the connection to the construction site, which of course is something that doesn't need any paranormal investigating, just observation and common sense, and Mulder is able to use his profiling skills on the evidence he pulls from the photos. I love how the perfectly the two avenues of inquiry come together, with Mulder calling to tell Scully about the killer's long legs just as she's talking to Schnauz. I also like that Scully doesn't question him at all; she may have her doubts about psychic photography, but she trusts Mulder enough to pull out her gun and arrest Schauz without a moment's hesitation. One question: why does Schnauz feel the need to speak to his kidnap victims in German, when English seems to be his native language? I also kind of wonder whether he even speaks German, apart from a few prepared phrases, because he uses the same script on all the victims, and when Scully speaks to him in German he immediately switches into English.

Next up are Teliko, Unruhe, and The Field Where I Died. And thank goodness Unruhe is in there, because this stretch of the show is rough going. I think I’m going to go ahead and skip Sanguinarium, which I remember as having absolutely nothing to recommend it. Teliko: Who exactly thought this one was a good idea? Here’s a show so lily-white that their idea of diversity is having people think Mulder is Jewish when he’s not, and they think they can respectfully and responsibly handle a story about an African immigrant skin-pigment vampire? Ooookay, you guys keep telling yourselves that. Just as one instance of this episode being tone-deaf, could we not have Mulder arguing that Aboah must be guilty just because he ran from the police? Could we not have him dismissing the social worker’s excellent point about what a history of police brutality will do to people? And – this is the most important part – could we not have him turn out to be right? Leaving all that aside, and leaving aside all the weird unexplained stuff about how Aboah’s power even works, this is actually a more watchable episode than I was expecting. It’s certainly suspenseful, especially the ending, with Mulder paralyzed and looking absolutely terrified, and Scully having to protect him and try to catch Aboah at the same time. Given that the next episode is going to put Scully in danger and have Mulder save her, I like that here it’s Scully who’s having to lug Mulder’s dead weight out of a window. And I like how gently she says, “It’s okay, Mulder. I’m here,” like she’s comforting a scared kid. Final thought: Mulder punking Pendrell by telling him Scully’s on a date is pretty rich, considering how Mulder himself would react if Scully ever went on a date. Scully should probably have a torrid affair with Pendrell, just to serve Mulder right for being so complacent.

Same here. And again, I know we've seen a lot of violent deaths on this show. But most of them are supernatural in some way, so we don't have to take them too seriously, and usually there's a lot more implied than shown. Making us watch a brutal beating, in real time, without cutting away, and then the additional touch of the wife hiding under the bed, almost escaping, and then being found - that's realistic violence on a whole other scale, and I don't see what there is about this episode in particular that justifies that. This scene reminds me a lot of on Twin Peaks, which is even more horrifying because it involves characters we know well. But there's no suggestion that the Twin Peaks scene is gratuitous. It's a turning point in the show, a moment where evil triumphs and Cooper can't stop it. It has to be that horrific, because it's a bomb that goes off in the center of the show, and it affects everyone and everything. Who or what does this scene affect? Not Mulder and Scully; they don't care at all. What purpose does extreme violence serve when your show is missing its moral center? (Other than, obviously, pushing the boundaries of network television and giving viewers something to talk about for the next twenty years.)

Ok, here we go. Home again, home again, jiggety jog. Sigh. This is one I wasn’t terribly eager to re-watch. I read a fairly recent interview with Morgan and Wong where they talked about this episode, and it seems like they still don't understand why it was so controversial - to them it's just a MOTW episode. Which just confirms me in my belief that writers really have no idea what they create. The X-Files has always had these moments of really icky body horror and graphic violence, but this episode does it with a kind of sadistic glee that really sets it apart from the rest. This isn’t the echoey, atmospheric, flashlights-in-the-dark horror that we expect from the X-Files; it’s bright, sunny, technicolor, comic horror. I don't know exactly why that should be so much more disturbing, but it really is. The thing that makes it weirdest to me, I think, is Mulder and Scully. Up to maybe the halfway mark, I'm really enjoying all their interactions, even if his goofy idealism and her constant snark makes them seem more like Jimmy Stewart and Ruth Hussey in The Philadelphia Story than like normal Mulder and Scully. Mulder’s Proustian moment with the baseball is cute, and I seriously relate to his whole self-deluding fantasy about moving to the country, though I don't actually buy that someone whose sister got abducted would be waxing nostalgic about the days of not locking your front door. And Scully's little snicker when Mulder is fiddling with the TV antenna is magic. She doesn't even have to say, "Still planning on moving here?" The smirk on her face says it all. The only conversation that feels like it's played totally straight is the one on the bench, where they’re talking about whether they want kids. That one feels like it could belong to any episode from this era of the show. The rest seems like Comedy Mulder and Scully rather than the real thing - like they've wandered over from a Darin Morgan episode, or maybe traveled back in time from the sixth season. And for the first half of the episode I don't mind that at all. It's all good fun. But then the sheriff and his wife get beaten to death, and the deputy is crying, and the tone of Mulder and Scully's interactions does not change one iota. Pretty soon Mulder and Scully are watching as the Peacocks kill the deputy and mutilate his corpse, and Mulder, in his blandest monotone, is narrating the whole thing exactly like a nature documentary, right down to the wording. And look, I don’t expect Mulder and Scully to cry over every dead body, but a man they were talking to ten minutes ago just died a horrible, violent death right in front of them, and Mulder’s air of detached fascination is incredibly creepy. And then a minute later they’re in the pigpen and Scully is quoting Babe and Mulder is joking about being turned on by the pigs, and I’m like, “Who are these two sociopaths and why am I watching a show about them?” I think they might as well have left that deleted bathroom scene in, as Mulder and Scully making dick jokes while dissecting a baby seems entirely consistent with where the episode is going. So that, as far as I’m concerned, is what makes “Home” so truly horrific: it implicates Mulder and Scully in the horror, and even their terrific chemistry becomes creepy. That scene where the sheriff and his wife are bludgeoned to death while “Wonderful, Wonderful” plays? That’s basically the entire episode. Something unbearably awful juxtaposed against something bright and peppy – and the something bright and peppy is Mulder and Scully standing in a sunny field bantering about where they want to live.

Oh, yes, I love that too. The one point about the original X-Files that consistently bothered me was the weird obsession with treating Scully like a virgin martyr, and I love how clearly and definitively this season has swept that nonsense away. Even if I didn't like anything else about this season - and actually I like it a lot - I'd think it was worth bringing the show back one more time just for that. (I do wish Scully had hooked up with Mulder in "Plus One" just because she felt like it, and not because she was insecure about her uterus, but hey, Chris Carter gonna Chris Carter. At least we got "Mulder, come back to bed," which is more than I ever expected.) I get such a Season 7 vibe from this season. You've got Mulder and Scully in some kind of relationship that's unconventional, unofficial, and apparently secondary to their work together, but that seems to work for them and make them happy. And you know what? I'm okay with that. I was happy for them in Season 7, and if they've circled back around to this semi-relationship because it's what works, then why not? I'm just glad that the show can finally admit that they're sleeping together instead of drowning everything in ambiguity.

I just meant in the context of the episode - Annapolis gets mentioned because it's one of her security questions, but the label on the Roomba box says Bethesda. But I agree with you, Scully should live in DC. I grew up in the DC suburbs, and Bethesda is no place for a human being to live, especially since the Barnes & Noble closed down.

Annapolis is just where she was born, I think - presumably because that's where the navy base is. Her sleek, shiny new house is in Bethesda, Maryland, which is the only thing in this episode that actually makes total sense. If there was ever a sleek, impersonal, creepy-as-hell suburban town ripe for a robot takeover, it's Bethesda.

To add to my previous comment - I think I was able to enjoy this episode because I don't think of it as "real," exactly. For one thing, it seems to exist somewhere in the near future, and as far as I can tell the rest of the season is happening right now. For another, there's something extra not-real about a massive robot uprising that can be triggered by something as small as not tipping for poor service, but that only affects Mulder and Scully. Does the restaurant even exist? There's no one else there. Did it just pop into existence for Mulder and Scully as part of a weird cautionary vision of the future we're making for ourselves? (Please tell me William didn't somehow engineer this whole thing to get his parents back together. Just kidding - that would require way too much continuity for this show.) I think of this episode as having the same relationship to The X-Files that a Simpsons Halloween special has to the Simpsons, or that the Lord Peter Wimsey short stories have to the novels - it's part of the universe but it's not canon. I can't imagine that Mulder and Scully will ever mention it in a later episode.