Sharna Pax

Well, heck. This show has been around for 25 years, why shouldn't it get to write its own AU fanfic? I'm really starting to get a kick out of the complete lack of continuity in this season. The X-Files has always had a weird relationship with continuity, what with MOTWs that don't interact with the mytharc, joke episodes, unreliable narrators, etc., but this season is really giving me the impression that all the episodes exist in slightly different universes. I mean, Mulder and Scully definitely didn't live this way in "This." Not only were they apparently living together in Mulder's house, but all they had to do to keep the bad guys from tracking them was ditch their phones. Depending on what episode you watch, Mulder and Scully are simultaneously platonic, friends with benefits, casually dating, and married. They are absurdly hyperconnected to all kinds of tech, but Mulder is also a Luddite and Scully an old-school, pre-google repository of information like Katharine Hepburn in Desk Set. They live together, but also they have separate homes and Scully never invites Mulder over. There is literally no way to reconcile all this, so all I can do is think of this season as a series of interesting riffs on the concept of Mulder and Scully - each one compatible with some aspect of the show as a whole, but none of them fully compatible with each other. I kind of like it. It's like the writers are leaning into the ambiguous, Choose Your Own Adventure quality that the X-Files has always had and making it an explicit theme. Anyway, I liked this episode, even though I didn't buy that Mulder and Scully would be in such a weird restaurant in the first place, or that they would be completely silent for that entire first scene. The part where they're just sitting there scrolling on their phones was great, and very real, but two people who can make an X-File out of a bran muffin would definitely not react silently to the blobfish. And I don't think the episode quite figured out what it was about. "We need to be better teachers" is a fine moral for a completely different episode, but the moral of this one seemed to be that we should stop outsourcing our lives to technology. But I don't really care that none of this made sense. Scully got to wear boots and sweatpants and own a vibrator. Scully turning up the volume on her phone and sitting back with a blissed-out look on her face when "Teach Your Children" came on was hilarious. There was a Birds scene with tiny drones. All of Mulder's facial expressions were amazing. Scully's fridge literally started flinging ice at her. "Poor, Middle-Class, Rich, or Ballin." Harry Reid wants Mulder to deny everything. Mulder and Scully held hands at the end. I was happy.

Awesome! I can't believe it took me so long to figure out this site existed. I've been in TWOP withdrawal since it closed down, so this is great. Okay, next up is "Home." Pray for me.

I've realized I don't know Season 4 very well at all, and watching Leonard Betts and Memento Mori got me interested in it, so I think I'm going to rewatch the season from the beginning. I've seen a few comments here and there about Mulder getting less likable/ turning into a jerk as the show goes on, and I was just watching some Season 1, so I'll be keeping an eye out for any changes in his personality. I hope nobody minds if I pop in here fairly often to comment on the episodes as I watch them. Starting with Herrenvolk: I rarely watch mytharc, so I didn't remember this one at all. Peacing out on a boat with Jeremiah Smith and leaving Scully with the not-dead ABH - and then not answering her calls - is not Mulder's best hour, but I can't find it in my heart to criticize him. I can retroactively forgive Mulder for anything he did in the last few episodes, and preemptively forgive him for anything he does in the next few, just for the sake of the scene where tells Marita, "I've suffered some very personal losses recently," and has to stop halfway through the sentence and start again because his voice isn't working. And the scene where he comes back to the hospital and Scully runs to meet him and he just says, "I can't...there's nothing," and kind of blunders toward the wrong door and Scully has to steer him to his mother's room. Poor sad puppy. I just want to give him a hug. The ABH magically healing Mulder's mom would be really silly, except for how clear they make it that the CSM's motives here are entirely personal. I'm guessing the Alien Bounty Hunter figures that one out, too, because he straight-up rolls his eyes before he heals her. I watched it twice just to make sure. Agent Pendrell is so cute here with his crush on Scully. Poor guy.

And on to Leonard Betts. This is one I never rewatch, because the idea of someone eating cancer makes me feel physically ill. But having just seen the end of Never Again, I forced myself to watch it to see if any of that uncomfortable vibe between Mulder and Scully carried over. I’m not totally sure, but it does seem like there’s something subtly off between Mulder and Scully here. At the end, Mulder can tell Scully’s upset, but instead of asking her what’s wrong, he tells her she did a good job and should be proud. It’s well-meant, but it also makes me want to shake him, because there is NO REASON why Scully would think she did a bad job, and Mulder should know that. Scully doesn’t start spiraling into a panic attack because she needs your approval, Mulder! Not everything is about you! But I don’t blame Mulder, because the sense I get is that the lines of communication are down in both directions. Mulder is just making the kind of wildly wrong guess you make when you’re no longer on the same wavelength with someone and you know they won’t give you a straight answer if you ask what’s wrong. It’s going to take Memento Mori to get Mulder and Scully communicating again, and I’m very proud of this show for doing an actual character-driven arc that carries over from one episode to another.

I must have the same station, because I turned on the TV Tuesday and caught the last two minutes of Never Again (two minutes of TV that I absolutely love, although I have deeply mixed feelings about the episode as a whole), followed by Leonard Betts. Not having rewatched Never Again, I'm not sure, but I don't think we're supposed to have any sympathy for Jerse? For most of the episode, I'm not even sure we're supposed to have any sympathy for Mulder. I mean, this is basically two poles of the patriarchy, right? On the one hand, the low-key, patronizing sexism inherent in Mulder's assumption that Scully doesn't want or need the kind of workspace he does, and on the other hand, the kind of outright hate that makes Jerse want to kill women. Obviously, given the choice, anyone would rather be in Mulder's office feeling sidelined, but what a choice! It's like Tess of the D'Urbervilles, where there are only two men in this poor woman's life and they're both awful. I love many things about this episode, but I hardly ever watch it. I find all of Scully's issues with Mulder plausible, even inevitable, and it's refreshing to see the show directly addressing the inequality in their working relationship and the effect that it would have over time. The desk thing is perfect as a trigger for everything that happens, and I really, really like the idea of Scully going out and having a one-night stand and knocking some holes in Mulder's image of her. And those last two or three minutes are gold. I don't much like Mulder, in that moment, but I do feel for him almost as much as I feel for Scully. It's like he doesn't want to be a dick to Scully but can't stop himself from lashing out at her because he feels like he's lost something. But I have trouble actually watching the episode. It's partly that it's disturbing to watch Scully ignore so many obvious red flags, partly that I don't like the recurring thing about Scully being attracted to powerful father figure types, and partly the feeling of intense claustrophobia that I get from seeing Scully caught between her increasingly frustrating relationship with Mulder and this guy who's literally trying to kill her. I should add, by the way, that I don't think this episode represents Mulder and Scully's relationship as a whole, so much as it represents the way Scully sees it at this particular moment. I think Mulder mostly does think of Scully as an equal partner, but as Duchovny says in some interview, he's the engine and she's the brake. He decides where they go and what they investigate, because he's the one who's interested in digging up these cases and investigating them in the first place. That leaves Scully trailing along after him a lot of the time, and I can see how that wouldn't always feel like an equal partnership. (I also think that Scully would be willing to give dating Mulder a try at pretty much any time in the course of the show, and that it's Mulder who keeps things platonic because he knows he's too screwed up to handle a serious relationship. Which would also be frustrating. But I don't have much textual evidence for that one.) I have thoughts about Leonard Betts, the episode I actually watched, but I'll save them for another post because this is getting way too long.

I wonder if Mulder even knows what his own state of mind is at that point. I loved that scene too, and the one where Mulder drops the bomb on Skinner that Jackson Van de Kamp was William. What really struck me was how restrained Mulder is in both those scenes. There's none of the yelling and pouting and shoving people that Mulder used to do in times of crisis. I think it's partly that he's outgrown all that, and partly that his anger goes so deep he can't begin to let himself express it.

You know, I watched Ghouli twice, and the second time I found myself pretty much just watching Mulder. Duchovny has such a rep for being poker-faced, and I've never really understood that, because I think he has a very expressive face. Look at that phone conversation in Memento Mori that we all love - it's so effective because we see all the dread and confusion that he's feeling, but all Scully hears in his voice is love and reassurance. But here Mulder is so impassive it's like he's wearing a mask. And I think you can see the moment when he puts the mask on. When they're still at the house after the shooting, he looks into the room where they found Jackson and sees him being zipped into a body bag. Mulder stands in the doorway and looks at the body bag, and for just a moment his mouth starts to twist - and then he just shuts that down and goes looking for Scully. It's like he realizes that if he starts thinking about this he won't be able to function enough to help Scully, so he just doesn't let himself feel anything. And it makes me so sad for him, because I don't think that ability to suppress your own emotions is something you develop all in a moment. I think that on some level Mulder's been expecting this. Not this specific scenario, of course, but I think it's been a very long time since Mulder felt any kind of hope relating to William. Scully talks about feeling that she and William would one day be reunited - I don't think Mulder ever thought that would happen. When Mulder and Scully are talking after the body disappears, and Mulder tells Scully, "Your hope is not a fact," he's speaking from experience. This is someone who spent decades believing his sister was still alive, and who turned out to be wrong. And I think that experience has always affected how Mulder feels about William. I think that as much as he's always wanted to put his family back together, there's a part of him that believes that a family is just something he doesn't get to have.

I just watched Fallen Angel, which I hadn't seen in years and barely remembered. Mytharc is generally not my thing, but I'm glad I rewatched this one, because my god was David Duchovny beautiful in it. I'm sorry, I have to be shallow here for a moment. I've always thought of both Mulder and Scully as being very good-looking but in a normal-person way rather than a model way, and that's one of the things I liked about the show. But I may have to revise that judgment, at least as far as this episode is concerned, because Mulder is just too darn pretty in it to be a credible FBI agent. There's a scene where he's sitting at a computer, and he's got his shirt open at the neck and reading glasses on, and I haven't seen anyone make reading look this hot since Gael Garcia Bernal in The Motorcycle Diaries. Then I watched Eve, which of course is a classic, and I don't have that much new to say about it. But I did find that my heart twisted a little bit for Mulder and Scully when they took the evil twins into the diner for a bathroom-and-poison break and I got to see what they would look like as parents on a family road trip. That little moment when Mulder goes up to pay for the sodas and he thinks to hand the money to one of the twins so she can pay? He's so naturally good with kids. It's one of those things that was just sort of sweet at the time but in retrospect is sad.

Yes, it's really beautifully paced, and very focused - as you say, everyone gets one scene, but they tie it to the central plot of the episode, and they make it count. I remember noticing the same thing in the Season 1 finale of Buffy, which is all about Buffy nerving herself to make a colossal sacrifice that she doesn't at all want to make, but which also has room for important and defining moments for every other character in the show. But it took me a while to notice how fantastic the pacing and organization is in "One Breath," probably because the emotional content of the episode is so real and so overwhelming that it all comes across as very natural and unstructured. And I think it's rare, in the X-Files, to get that perfect combination of sweep-you-away emotion and controlled, economical writing. I think you often end up having to go, "Ok, this doesn't really make sense, but I can understand and respond to it on an emotional level, so I'm going to go with it." Like Samantha and the starlight. Nonsense, technically, but nonsense that I find terribly moving and satisfying on some level that goes beyond logic. But "One Breath" is just an all-around great episode.

I'm sorry if my wording was unclear. I didn't mean the gas itself was to blame; obviously the government that created the gas and exposed soldiers to it is responsible. Here's how I put it in my original post: "By putting the blame on the government for creating the gas, the episode is kind of suggesting that the government wouldn’t be equally to blame if all they did was draft a scared kid into the Marines, put a gun in his hand and make him kill children." I take your point that Kitten is not supposed to represent every soldier who became a monster. But to me, the real horror is that none of the atrocities committed in the Vietnam war were due to something like a fear gas. The reality is that given the weaknesses of the human psyche, certain conditions are enough to make human beings do terrible things - no gas necessary. As I see it, creating an alternate explanation for even one of those atrocities muddies the waters, and the issue of how institutional racism and deliberate training in brutality can make people into monsters is not one that I want muddied. I get that the gas is supposed to be a metaphor that directs our attention to precisely that problem - but like I said, I don't think you can use an alternate version of the war as a metaphor for what really happened in the war without things getting confused. But I'm clearly in the minority here, so I think we'll have to agree to disagree, and I'll let it go. As I said, I liked the episode all in all. Sometimes I just like to put things under a microscope and see if they make sense to me close up. If others don't find the central metaphor illogical, then I may be looking too hard.

Yes, you did! And I should have quoted you, because I completely agree, and that's what made me think of "The Gardener" in the first place. “Closure” has always reminded me of Kipling’s story “They,” in which a man is drawn again and again to a particular house, not knowing why. We guess early on that the children he's seen at the windows and heard playing are all ghosts, but only at the end of the story does it dawn on us - and him - that one of them is his daughter. It's lovely and sad and halfway between a ghost story and a dream-vision of heaven, and like "Closure" it's very much an ending. Having seen his daughter, the man goes away again, knowing that he can never allow himself to return. I hadn't thought to put "Closure" together with "Ghouli," but when you did, "The Gardener" popped into my head right away. Because what all these stories have in common - "They" and "Closure" and "The Gardener" and "Ghouli" - is that the person who is grieving gets exactly the miracle they need and no more. A dream-vision of a lost child, a short conversation with an apparent stranger - it's not much, really. It can't bring back everything that's been lost. But it's enough - enough to free someone from a self-imposed prison and allow them to find peace.

It occurs to me now that I spoke too soon when I said that this episode wasn’t Jesusy in the way that William’s birth was. There’s a definite parallel, I think, with the moment in the Bible when Mary Magdalene finds the stone rolled away from Jesus’s tomb and the tomb empty, and then meets Jesus himself but doesn’t recognize him and thinks he’s the gardener. That’s not to say that William himself is a Christ-figure, because I think he’s obviously not – he’s a perfectly normal, not entirely likable teenage superhero with two girlfriends and questionable taste in literature. But look at that sequence of events in the hospital: Scully goes to the room where she left the body, finds the body bag empty and the window open, and then, almost immediately after, meets William and speaks to him without recognizing him. The parallel is too close to be a coincidence. So why, if William isn’t a Christ-figure, and isn’t meant to be (thank you, James Wong, for being very clear about that), what are those parallels doing there? I have an idea, and I hope you guys can bear with me while I talk about Rudyard Kipling for a moment. There’s a really beautiful Kipling story called “The Gardener” that’s also written around this passage. There’s a twist I don’t want to reveal, so I’m going to have to be very cryptic, but basically it’s about a woman visiting the grave of someone she lost in WWI. At the end of the story, she asks a stranger a question, and he answers, and we suddenly understand two things: that she has been carrying an unbearable, lifelong burden of guilt and secrecy, and that this brief exchange has, for one moment, freed her from that burden. The conversation, though she never realizes it, is a tiny miracle, a moment of grace for a woman who desperately needs it. Nothing happens that’s incompatible with reality – the person she lost in the war doesn’t come back to her – but she herself is, on some level, brought back to life. The poem that accompanies the story begins, “One grave to me was given/ One watch till Judgment Day/ And God looked down from heaven/ And rolled the stone away./ One day in all the years/ One hour in that one day/ His angel saw my tears/ And rolled the stone away.” To me, the look on Scully's face as she watches the security footage at the end of Ghouli is the look of someone who has just seen the stone rolled away from her own particular tomb. I don’t know if James Wong has read “The Gardener,” or if this is just a case of like causes begetting like effects, but I think the episode is using the biblical allusion in much the same way the story does – to make us think about all kinds of resurrection, all kinds of renewal, and what it's like to carry something for seventeen years and then, against all expectation, feel that burden lifted.

I see what you mean - that one is deliberate and the other is not - but ultimately I think it ends up being a distinction without a difference. If you send soldiers to war, you need to take responsibility for the results, whatever they are. All war results in PTSD, but the specific conditions, tactics and training of the Vietnam war, combined with a lack of oversight and accountability, also resulted in a lot of atrocities. I think the point here is that the government took scared, poorly educated, confused kids, sent them into a war zone and encouraged them to see the enemy as monsters. And some of them reacted to that by becoming monsters themselves. The only difference between what really happened and the X-Files version of events is that, because of the gas, the soldiers in the X-Files literally see the Vietnamese as monsters. But the formula remains the same: Fear + dehumanizing the enemy = atrocity. Now, I agree with the point they're making, and I want this metaphor to work. If they'd set it somewhere else, not in Vietnam, I think it would have. But when you try to make an alternate version of the Vietnam war a metaphor for the real Vietnam war, you get yourself into a serious logical tangle. Because if the gas is to blame, then all the other aspects of the Vietnam war that the government tacitly condoned are not to blame, at least not to the same degree. And so the episode undercuts the very point it's trying to make. Don't take this as me trashing the episode. I like it just fine, and like I said, I agree with its fundamental argument. I just think it's one of those X-Files episodes that works on an emotional level but breaks down logically when you look at it too closely.

I'm procrastinating and in a shippy mood so I watched the scene in The Truth where Mulder and Scully make out (I guess I could have just said "the scene where Mulder and Scully make out," since, y'know, there's only the one) and then I watched Memento Mori. And what I've concluded, from watching these right after "Kitten," is that Mulder and Scully have massively underappreciated Skinner and taken his awesomeness for granted, and they owe him a heartfelt apology and thank you for everything he's done for them over the years. Exhibit A: The Truth (makeout scene). In this brief scene, Mulder not only puts Skinner in the supremely awkward position of watching him make out with Scully from like two inches away, he announces that he doesn't need a lawyer for his murder trial because Skinner can represent him. Skinner is like, "dude, I'm not a lawyer," and Mulder's like, "no biggie, I trust you." If you trust him enough to make him be your lawyer in a capital case when he doesn't want to and isn't qualified, Mulder, maybe you should give him the benefit of the doubt when he starts acting a little weird. Maybe you should even consider the possibility that he needs your help, instead of jumping to the conclusion that he's a traitor. Exhibit B: Memento Mori. Mulder goes to Skinner demanding a meeting with CSM, saying he's finally ready to deal in exchange for information about Scully's cancer. Skinner tells him not to because CSM will own him, then goes straight to CSM and makes his own deal with the devil to save Mulder from having to do so. And that, in a nutshell, is what Skinner has always done for Mulder. He bows down in the house of Rimmon so Mulder doesn't have to. He lives in those moral gray areas so that Mulder can keep on being noble and righteous and uncompromised. That is what Skinner has always done, since the beginning, so why is Mulder now so shocked that Skinner smells like smoke? He's always smelled a little bit like smoke, and if he didn't, Mulder would have been out of the Bureau a long time ago and Scully would probably be dead. tl;dr: I'm in love with Assistant Director Walter Skinner.

As I think more about this episode, the whole concept of the gas as an explanation for Kitten’s transformation is starting to bother me. Like, the idea here is that the army took a scared kid and sent him to Vietnam and exposed him to a gas that turned him into a monster. And I feel like the episode is trying to put together two things that don’t really go together, and by putting them together it weakens them both. Because yes, soldiers in Vietnam got exposed to toxic gases, but they also got exposed to a particularly brutal form of warfare. The Kitten that we see wearing a necklace of ears and telling a story about mutilating a live prisoner is sad and horrifying, but that’s what a lot of soldiers really did become. And it’s not because they were exposed to an experimental fear gas, or even because of Agent Orange, it’s because they were sent to Vietnam and made to fight in terrible, dehumanizing conditions. By putting the blame on the government for creating the gas, the episode is kind of suggesting that the government wouldn’t be equally to blame if all they did was draft a scared kid into the Marines, put a gun in his hand and make him kill children. I think what the episode is trying to do, in a confused way, is use the gas as a metaphor for the government’s actual responsibility for all the fallout of the Vietnam War, including both Agent Orange and what happened to people like Kitten. But it doesn't really work to use something as a metaphor for itself. Final thought: Knowing that Skinner is a former Marine, and that he’s missing, I’m surprised that Mulder and Scully’s minds don’t immediately go to suicide. Mine would. I guess Kersh gives them enough to know that Skinner is probably alive, but still.

Me too! And I have no idea why, because I haaaated Kersh and everything that went with him - Fowley, Spender, all that nonsense - back in Season 6. But I saw him on the screen and actually cheered. I think it's the feeling that if Kersh is hauling Mulder and Scully into his office to yell at them, the X-Files must really be back. Welcome back, Kersh, all is forgiven!

I was just thinking about "One Breath" again, because we got a callback to it in "Kitten," with the flashback to Skinner in Vietnam. I've always loved "One Breath;" it's probably my favorite episode, and definitely the one that made me a shipper. But I've always focused on what it does with Mulder's character, and on all the nuances of Duchovny's performance. I didn't realize until now, thinking about Skinner's monologue, how much the episode manages to show us about the secondary characters without losing the focus on Mulder. It's like all the characters that we've sort of vaguely known come into focus at the same time: Skinner, Scully's mom, the Cigarette Smoking man, even Scully's dad, get these lovely self-contained moments where they show us the essence of who they are. And it's a measure of how rich the episode is that a monologue like Skinner's - beautifully written, perfectly delivered, at a pivotal moment in the episode - wasn't one of my defining memories of "One Breath." I never thought about how good it was until "Kitten" reminded me of it.

Just watched. I liked it in concept, and I thought Mitch Pileggi did a fantastic job, but the whole thing seemed flat and weirdly paced to me. I don't think it's the plot that's at fault. Yes, the whole episode is just about people running around in the woods and falling down holes, but so is Detour, and that one worked out fine. But there wasn't much suspense to the parts that were supposed to be suspenseful, and the climactic scene where Mulder finds Skinner, the monster pushes him in the hole, Scully rescues him, Skinner rescues them both just went by so fast it didn't seem like they were ever really in danger. Maybe if Mulder and Skinner had gotten stuck down in that hole for a bit longer while Scully was trying to find them? Maybe if I'd had more time to process the danger that Mulder and Scully were in from that tripwire before Skinner showed up to save them from it? Mostly, though, I just felt like Duchovny and Anderson weren't really trying. They both had a lot of lines that seemed way too formal and like nothing anyone would really say, but Mulder and Scully sometimes talk like that, and the actors have usually been able to make it sound natural. In this episode they just sounded - weird. Like they were reciting, not acting. Meanwhile, Pileggi was acting up a storm, and all the scenes with Skinner had a lot of power; it was just in the Mulder-Scully scenes that the energy level really dropped. Even the sheriff was acting Duchovny and Anderson off the screen. Very odd, especially after the last few episodes we've had, where they were both so present and so good. And thinking about that scene on the boat last episode, and the pain on Skinner's face when he thought that Mulder and Scully's son had died, I would have liked to see a little less emotional detachment from Mulder and Scully. The impression I get - and I can't tell for sure if I'm meant to have that impression - is that Skinner cares deeply about Mulder and Scully, on a personal level, and they don't have that same level of affection for him. They're concerned about him, yes, they respect and like and want to trust him - and I do like the bit where Scully tries to explain that he wouldn't kill anyone, but if he did, he'd do a better job - but they think of him as their boss, and he thinks of them as his kids. If we're meant to see it that way, then props to the X-Files for a realistic, nuanced bit of character development. I'm just not sure it's deliberate, rather than a side-effect of lackluster acting. I agree about the difference in Gillian Anderson's voice. I don't think it's just her voice, though; it's her whole delivery and intonation that's subtly different from what it used to be. She's a fantastic actor, but I don't think she's got as good a handle on Scully as Duchovny has on Mulder, maybe because she's spent the past few years playing such a variety of characters. Sometimes she seems just like the old Scully, but then she'll seem unfamiliar again - she slides in and out of character in a way I find disconcerting. I have to say, though, this is mainly a criticism that belongs to last season - I haven't felt that sense of the unfamiliar this season, until now. Skinner's final speech was great, and made me glad I watched the episode. Nice continuity with One Breath, and man, Mitch Pileggi has not forgotten anything at all about how to play Skinner. Didn't have much reaction at all to Haley Joel Osment, but liked Davy's line about visiting his father and not being able to touch him. When I was four or so my dad had cancer and was treated with radiation, and he would come home from the hospital still radioactive and I wouldn't be allowed to hug him. That's the sort of thing that sticks in your mind, when you're a kid, and I thought it was a nice detail to include.

I gave up on the X-Files and correct grammar and usage a long time ago, somewhere around "that without which he cannot live without." I'm constantly yelling at Mulder to quit saying "Scully and I" when he means "Scully and me," so at this point I'd be surprised if he used "begs the question" correctly. It does bug me, though. You went to Oxford, Mulder!

I have big plans to skip it and watch "This" instead. I started watching the reboot because I hated the Season 9 finale so much that it affected how I felt about the show as a whole. I had a hard time watching earlier episodes, knowing that these two lovely people were going to end the show curled up in the fetal position waiting for the world to end. This season has made me feel much better about Mulder and Scully, and I'm not going to let Chris Carter undo all of that. I'm watching Mulder and Scully eat bran muffins and banter about handcuffs, and as far as I'm concerned that's how the show ends.

Yes! I was thinking that too. It's also a very low-key way of showing how easy it is to get trapped in a lie and have to keep telling it. Mulder uses "Bob" one time to make things easier, and next thing you know he's a regular at the coffee shop and that's just his name there. And honestly, I can understand why Jackson keeps hiding, once he's started. I think he wants to connect with Scully, and wants her to be happy, but he's just lost his family and there's at least one government agency trying to kill him, and he has no idea what will happen if he reveals himself to these unknown bio-parents who work for the FBI. Traveling the country like an amalgam of every YA coming-of-age road-trip novel you've ever read sounds like the smart move under those circumstances. It does seem like it must be something like that. Jackson just seems so much like Mulder's kid, regardless of what the CSM did or says he did or thinks he did. (The implications are still really horrible, but I find it easier to think about if I imagine it narrated by the narrator from Jane the Virgin. "It all started when the Cigarette Smoking Man artificially inseminated Scully with Mulder's sperm! And some alien DNA! I know! Straight out of a telenovela, right?") As I said upthread, I wasn't really expecting to care all that much - or rather, I was expecting the acting to tug at my heartstrings but the underlying storyline to leave me cold. I was really surprised by how moving I found it to see Mulder and Scully, together, watching their son on that grainy security footage, and knowing that in spite of everything he's going to be okay. I think it's because we spent so much time, in the original series, watching Mulder and Scully grow into people who could have a child together and raise him together and be good parents. And everything odd and strained and uncomfortable about their relationship since then has stemmed, I think, from the fact that they feel they're supposed to be a family of three. So for me, seeing that kind-of reunion wasn't so much about William as it was about briefly filling the void in Mulder and Scully's lives. The ending is bittersweet; they've missed their son's childhood, and they don't know when they'll see him again. But he wishes them well, and he can take care of himself, and really, isn't that the main thing?

I just watched the episode, and I was dreading it, because I don't have good memories of the William-related angst in Season 9. I was surprised to find that I really liked it! Sure, William seems a little screwed up, but I find that sort of refreshing, honestly. There was so much Jesusy stuff surrounding his birth that I'm kind of relieved to find that despite his supernatural powers he's basically a teenage boy - kind of idealistic, kind of self-centered, prone to horrifically bad judgment calls, but fundamentally a sweet kid. It makes sense to me that a teenage boy who knows he can manipulate people's image of reality would be drawn to things like that pick-up artist book, because he's trying to figure out how to use that power. But that doesn't mean he's going to keep messing with people for the fun of it - I get the impression he's learned his lesson about that. The only thing that bothered me was how little reaction he showed to his parents' death, but I put that down to a gap in the writing rather than sociopathy. I have to say, I wasn't expecting Skinner to be the one to break my heart this episode. The way his face just collapses when Mulder says, "Jackson Van de Kamp was our son," and he tries to say how sorry he is and Mulder basically tells him it's his fault? Kills me. I found the line "You seem like a nice person. I wish I could know you better," terribly poignant. It's so - inadequate, as Scully would say, and yet so real. What more could Jackson really say to this woman he doesn't know, even if she is his biological mother? And yet we know they're connected, and we know there's a lot of emotion there that can't be put into words. Loved all the coffee shop stuff, especially Mulder sympathizing with Frankenstein's monster. "He's afraid of fire, he just wants a friend..." Aww, it's Season 1 Mulder!

I guess I see Scully as more of the stiff-upper-lip, quietly-lick-her-wounds-in-a-corner type. You know, all that Naval training. Yes, Mulder is who she goes to when she has to go to anyone - but she even took a while to tell Mulder about the cancer, and then instead of going to him and telling him in person how scared she was, she wrote letters to him that she never sent. I agree with you that Mulder ends up having to do a lot of the emotional labor because Scully is so reserved, but I think that in her mind she's just trying to be strong and keep her troubles to herself and not lay them on him. I think this scene is a reversal of their usual dynamic, in a couple of ways. Mulder has such a tendency to put the full weight of his problems directly on Scully's shoulders - think about Sein und Zeit/Closure, when Mulder asks Scully to do an autopsy on his mother, and she really doesn't want to but he insists. Mulder is an absolute mess in those episodes, and I completely understand why, but I've always marveled at Scully's ability to support Mulder through all of that and never show the strain. I also think there was a long period of time when Mulder wasn't ready for a relationship with Scully but did want her to be around and emotionally available to him forever. I find it perfectly believable that it's now Scully who can't deal with a relationship but also can't imagine her life without Mulder, and I can understand her getting insecure at the idea that Mulder might meet someone else. But Scully's also a rational person and an adult. She's got to know that when you're upset because you want your ex to stay single forever, your ex is not the person to talk to about that, unless you want to get back together. If this were the kind of show that has continuity, I would worry that Mulder really will meet someone and Scully will be crushed. As it is, I have absolutely no idea what Mulder and Scully's relationship status will be next week, so there's no point in worrying about it. I guess I'm bothered by this partly because I really like the idea that Mulder and Scully's relationship has evolved over time, that they talk to each other much more easily and openly than they did all those years ago. I like the idea of reserved, stiff-upper-lip Scully being able to just go straight to Mulder and tell him what she's worried about, instead of waiting until the next time they get stranded out in the middle of nowhere with something trying to eat them. I just wish that worry weren't "What if you meet someone," which, depending on how you look at it, is either totally irrational or really thoughtless.

Yeah. I wish it didn't, because I do think it's a Giant Leap for Mankind that Chris Carter is finally able to admit that Scully has sex, after all those years of portraying her as a virgin saint. And I'm a sucker for scenes where Mulder and Scully lie in bed together and talk. The actors are great, the visuals are lovely, the afterglow comment was a delightful surprise - but the more I think about what's actually going on, the more I don't like it. First of all, Mulder and Scully just don't work as friends with benefits. Mulder and Scully have been best friends for 25 years, they spend every work day and a lot of their free time together, they don't seem to have anyone else in their lives, they automatically go to each other for emotional support, and they have sex. That's a relationship. It may be an unconventional relationship, it may not be constant or exclusive, but it's not friends with benefits. In my experience, when people spend all their time together, act like a couple, but insist they're not a couple, somebody is on track to get hurt. Second, I really don't like the pattern Mulder and Scully seem to be in, where she says they won't be having sex, he waits patiently because he knows better, and then she gives in to temptation. That's a deeply unhealthy way to conduct a relationship, and it's giving me Moonlighting flashbacks. Finally, Scully comes across as neurotic and self-centered in a way that I think is out of character. Overall, the impression I get of Mulder and Scully in this episode is of a couple who broke up so recently that they haven't yet been able to drop all their old habits. So you have Scully getting upset and going to Mulder for support, as she has many times over the course of the show - only now what she's upset about is the fear that Mulder, whom she broke up with, might meet someone else and have a family. And you can tell, from Mulder's reaction, that he realizes how phenomenally unfair it is to ask him for reassurance on that point. I really don't like the thought that Scully, regardless of how insecure she's feeling, would crawl into her ex's bed and effectively say, "Hey, I don't want to get back together or anything, but can you hold me and promise me you'll be there for me forever and reassure me that you won't meet anyone else?" Of course, in the next episode it seems like maybe they did get back together. And in "This" it seemed like they'd never broken up. So who knows? At this point, whenever I try to figure out Mulder and Scully's relationship, what comes to mind is that exchange from "Were-Monster:" "I'm just looking for some kind of internal logic." "Why? There isn't any external logic to any of it."

Not to mention that Goop-O A-B-C is apparently highly carcinogenic. I'm equal parts horrified and amused by the idea that Scully had cancer not because of an alien neck chip but because of all the cherry jello she ate as a kid.