On the note of season 7/season of secret sex, why does everyone seem so sure that scully was playing with mulder’s tie in rush? I still can’t see this
Rush's Tie Twirl and Timeline
I can understand that, anon. So, here's the clip!
To prove the tie twirl, I must explain the slight shift from Position A to B.
At the beginning of the clip, Scully is at rest in Position A: parallel to Mulder, shoulders straight across, distance between them.
The shift to Position B begins after she looks down and says, "Mulder...": her right arm moves forward, angling her body towards him, closer in.
While she continues, there is a distinctive rustling of either material-on-material friction or her fingers rubbing material between them.
Her attention remains fixed where her hand is.
Position A is regained after she says, "Please? Just..." and pouts:
her arm snaps abruptly back to her side, leveling her shoulders (and dropping whatever she was fondling.)
When she finishes, "...for me?" we get a glimpse of Mulder's face before Scully switches gears and becomes serious again.
Now, granted, Scully could have been fiddling with Mulder's coat or a button hole or a bunch in his shirt or his hand or her hand (though there isn't an audible skin-on-skin noise) if not his tie, but she was fiddling with something. Otherwise moving her hand forward, keeping it in empty air, then pulling it back only after pleading her case wouldn't make sense.
So, the most plausible explanation would be....
-Timeline: Production Drafts-
Here's a fun little aside I've thought up.
One of the quirks in Rush is its timetable, specifically a date printed on one of the teenager's exam papers (here.) If taken at face value, this would place the episode around Thanksgiving, before New Year's 2000.
After investigating the production dates, I discovered (and will prove) the episode was crafted after Millennium.
Millennium, September 13, 1999:
Rush, September 17, 1999 and Rush, September 24, 1999 respectively:
Which means Millennium's kiss (courtesy of John Shiban and Frank Spotnitz) was written no later than September 17.
Which means Rush was written after the kiss was penned.
Which means Rush was created off in the "after" era.
Couldn't find filming dates of either episode (probably wouldn't matter, regardless), but the on-screen goof can probably be explained by an oversight: Rush was aired December 5, which means a lot of its production was taking place during November (leading up to Thanksgiving.) Some exhausted or misinformed crew member must have accidentally included the wrong detail.
(Besides, timelines were never clear in The X-Files, anyway.)
-Bonus-
Want more content?
You can find a gifset of Scully's insane levels of flirtation (and territoriality) here. And this gifset. And this one. And this. And that.
And Mulder's crack here.
@agent-troi's Rush meta here (including a line from Mulder) and here.
My entrance meta here. @fringephile's thoughts/screenshots here. @scullysbagelbites's thoughts here. @unremarkablehouse's thoughts on Scully's turtleneck (hickies) here and etc. here.
My season of secret sex meta here.
Lastly, this is an open invitation to everyone: include your Rush thoughts in the reblogs or tags below. It's open season. Have at!
hi! i saw your meta about s5 through mulder’s perspective and it had some great points i hadn’t considered, but it also left me wondering if you had any other thoughts about how s5 went according to scully’s perspective. sorry if you’ve already posted that and i missed it somehow!
Season 5 Is a Rise and Decline for Scully
(Companion to Season 5 Is a Pretty Dark Time for Mulder.)
Scully began this season confronting her fears: of dying, of opening herself up to loss: "I'm so sorry. I fight, and I fight, and I fight. But I'm so stupid. I've come so far in my life on simple faith, and now when I need it the most I just push it away. I mean, why? Why do I wear this? Why do I wear this, Mom? I put something that I don't even know or understand under the skin of my neck. I will subject myself to these crazy treatments, and I keep telling myself that I'm doing everything I can, but it's a lie!"
During her battle with death, she finds her version of faith (while her partner loses his.) Thus, after her miraculous recovery-- either by Mulder's chip, God's Hand, or both-- Scully starts anew. As she reveals in Detour, "Have you thought seriously about dying? When I was fighting my cancer, I was angry at the injustice of it and its meaninglessness. And then I realized that that was the struggle: to give it meaning. To make sense of it. It's like life."
As she further explains in A Christmas Carol, "Well, it's one I've given a great deal of thought to. I mean, to be honest, I've started to question my priorities since I was first diagnosed with cancer. I feel like I was given a second chance. Ever since I was a child, I've never allowed to let myself get too close to people. I've avoided emotional attachment. Perhaps I've been so afraid of death and dying that any connection just seemed like a bad thing-- something that wouldn't last. But I don't feel that way anymore."
In Detour, she smiles over Mulder's quips and believes he's taking an opportunity to get them (personally) out of the conference. While not out of the ordinary for her partner, it's a tantalizing insight: Scully thinks Mulder maneuvered time alone with her, away from work obligations, and is shocked not only by his engrossment in the case but also his decision to run past her celebratory platter after creatures in the dark.
Still, this didn't dampen her spirits. She gamely trudges into the woods, rescues her partner, and initiates the topic of her cancer-- a previously unheard of emotional exposure. Then, giving up on the fire, she wordlessly draws her partner closer. (Mulder resists the gesture at first, quickly quipping away the newness of this intimacy. Scully shows no such compunction.) She even sings him to sleep at his request, though under a save-face pretext.
Despite its unreliability, The Post-Modern Prometheus ends with Mulder and Scully escorting the newly-released Fly Man to Cher's concert and closing the night in a dance, together. It speaks to Scully's mindset (or Mulder's perception of it): accepting her partner's advances, letting him draw her close, opening herself up to him-- so different than standing side by side, physically close but emotionally separate.
Narratively, Season Five's purpose is to build towards Fight the Future's wedge. Mulder loses his belief in aliens, sinks into depression, and becomes quietly listless. So listless, in fact, that his partner is unaware of the damage Gethsemane-Redux I inflicted until Patient X. Scully, by contrast, begins to believe; is then frightened out of that belief; and sinks lower and lower in her own estimation as Mulder flounders and slides deeper into himself. This culminates in Diana Fowley's introduction and the burning of the files (to be discussed.)
But this sequential degredation begins in A Christmas Carol.
Scully doesn't call her partner at first, chasing phantom voices and tangled leads until she winds up in legal requests and adoption interviews. Reverting to old patterns, she licks her wounds (infertility) alone and chooses to leave the FBI without consulting her family
(or talking with Mulder), viewing this path as redemption for former griefs. When Mulder does fly in and pry for an explanation, she answers, "Because I couldn't believe it. But I need you now to be a witness on my behalf in this hearing."
Then she faces her illness again by proxy, watching over Emily as the little girl resignedly (and fearfully) undergoes test after test in vain. Scully is forced to make peace yet again with death only for that peace to be robbed at her daughter's wake.
And slowly, she distances further and further emotionally.
Why couldn't she reach out to her partner-- symbolically, to believe-- for this second chance? For the same reason she closes back up and remains closed the rest of the season: not only is she processing remission, infertility, and a niece turned very ill daughter, she must also confront and accept her and Mulder's differing wants.
Mulder arrives, Mulder testifies on her behalf, Mulder scoops up her daughter... but Mulder remains apart, turning away from a white lie
(the kind he's told a thousand times) presented on a silver platter outside Emily's hospital room. When an on-call physician asks,
"Now, are you two the parents?" Scully looks to Mulder, waiting for his reaction; and when he turns, drifts away down the hall, her face falls (posts here and here.)
Whatever this means (and there are many theories), their interaction boils down to Scully needing something from her partner and not receiving it. Unlike Scully, Mulder is not ready for that second chance. Unlike Scully, Mulder is not prepared to walk away from the files.
Worse still, he voices what she's been brushing aside: "No matter how much you love this little girl, she's a miracle that was never meant to be, Scully." Later, as her daughter lays dying, she concludes, "You were right, this child was not meant to be," and gently sends her partner away when he offers to stay. The episode's ending underlines this point:
she stands alone as Emily's guardian, attached to her by circumstance and responsibility-- a role Mulder stepped back from taking in the hospital. Scully reflects on this divide-- the forked path in their journeys, the remove in their perspectives-- in her monologue: "It begins where it ends, in nothingness. A nightmare born from deepest fears, coming to me unguarded. Whispering images unlocked from time and distance. A soul unbound-- touched by others but never held. On a course charted by some unseen hand. The journey ahead promising no more than my past reflecting back upon me. Until at last, I reach the end. Facing a truth I can no longer deny. Alone, as ever."
She has opened and received pain. It's at this point she closes, and remains closed until Fight the Future.
Kitsunegari begins the arc of doubt that has spread from her partner to herself. She questions Mulder's lucidity before he runs off into Linda Bowman's trap. They've both lost; and the seeds for her dispirited resignation are sown (but not quite grown) here.
In Chinga their roles are reversed but recovering, with Mulder quipping "marry me" at a safe distance and Scully feeling satisfied enough to send the detective a copy of Mulder's poster. Kill Switch switches their positions back to normal, and her trust and skill saves his life (while another couple hurdles willingly into cyberspace.) Even Bad Blood doesn't pose a threat to their partnership, in spite of petty disagreements or entertaining bickering.
This spate of episodes, in combination with those that came before, demonstrate how solidly Scully has her feet under her. During the cancer arc (and for most of Season 4), there were questions of where she stood in relation to herself, her loved ones, and that "endless line." For all the bubbling confusion soon to rise, she knows which direction her compass points.
However, the previous dilemma will return in a new shape. The indecision has shifted from directionless spinning to increasingly dispirited driving: from Memento Mori to Redux II, Scully chose the files (and her partner)... but is she necessary for their continuance? Building off of her monologue in Emily, is she wanted-- or, more importantly, is she needed? With Mulder unmoored (to be discussed below), she isn't sure if her presence is helping or hindering them both.
Patient X-The Red and the Black is where we observe the second order effects of Scully's "second chance." She is afraid, not to believe but that she does believe.
An alien abductee, chips, Skyland Mountain-- all wounds she had thought healed are broken open and burned. Instinct tells her that Cassandra Spender's words are true.
More terrifying to her stability is Mulder. More specifically, his lack of stability, his unbelief.
Until Patient X, Scully hadn't realized how lost her partner truly was.
Of course Mulder wouldn't want to talk about her cancer in the woods, of course Mulder wasn't prepared to leave the files for her daughter. These can be rationalized away. He still danced with her in Memphis, still chased after spooks in the night.
So she is shocked, shaken, to discover how far Mulder has sunk-- the depths of which exceed what she's ever known or observed. Never has she witnessed him in the grips of sheer hopelessness, having been shielded from his despair by her absence (Ascension-One Breath) or illness (Memento Mori, Zero Sum, Gethsemane, Redux II.) The few glimpses she's caught in the past were always in alignment with his beliefs (e.g. Grotesque) and never to the obstinate degree she faces in Patient X and The Red and the Black.
This matters because her own beliefs are solidifying. They're blinding freewill and leading her to a truth she and he are unable to prevent (another trip to Skyland Mountain), leaving her singed and lucky to be alive. This matters because fear begins to choke her belief. She needs her memories to continue following Mulder: again, that distrust from Kitsunegari creeps up on them. She reaches for his hand during her hypnosis, he leaves unsettled afterward. She reaches for his hand again after yet another loss, stares into his tormented eyes as he mutters,
"I don't know." This matters because she lapses into skepticism, unable to face the unknown of her experiences (again) without his help.
This matters because Scully's isolation is deepening. Before she could bottle up her emotions and depend on her partner: as she revealed in Elegy, "I guess I never realized how much I rely on him before this. His passion. He's been a great source of strength that I've drawn on." Now she has become vulnerable after her cancer, lifting wobbly legs forward to renew acquaintance with life. But after Emily's death and Mulder's withdrawal, she's at sea.
Her partner has lost himself and now she's losing herself.
All Souls unveils the breadth of this mire. She retreats from aliens towards miracles and God's divinity, but Mulder is so lost to both that he doesn't show up at first. When he arrives, it's Kitsunegari but flipped: he doubts her ability to judge clearly and advises she step back from the case. She battles her demons alone.
More personally, All Souls grapples with her open wounds. Dana Scully, unable to let people go; Dana Scully, who sees her father and sister and daughter because of unfinished business (post here.) Dana Scully, who fears the emptiness of absence. Dana Scully, who cannot find absolution because she cannot fully forgive herself (post here.) (Dana Scully, who will see her partner's wraith and collapse in grief, yet put her lessons to work and move forward, post here.)
Saving Emily (twice) is still a loss.
The burgeoning sense of failure begins to take root and sprout.
The Pine Bluff Variant gives her courage-- her instincts were right, Mulder hadn't defected-- which Folie a Deux immediately crushes-- she'd doubted her partner's sanity, again, and nearly sealed his fate. She can't admit to the truth of her experiences-- had she seen what she'd seen?-- officially or otherwise.
And a second realization dawns as The End approaches: the files are teetering with the higher ups. Scully is the X-Files' credibility, is Mulder's credibility; but the doubts they've collected this season have undermined her trust in herself (a pattern of cyclical self-doubt,
post here.) She begins to believe what is untrue: as stated in Fight the Future, "You don't need me, Mulder. You never have. I've just held you back."
Scully is a woman who takes her failures, her "sins," very personally. Her father's pride, her sister's murder and its investigation, her struggle to believe in God, her daughter's death, her failing attempts to raise her sinking partner.
And in this moment of weakness, Diana Fowley walks in.
Curiously, Mulder is as wary of his past as Scully is. However, she doesn't witness his strained glance at Fowley in the mirror, nor his gentle rebuff of the latter's advances. All Scully sees are their smiles and Diana's familiarity, a gesture Mulder doesn't reciprocate when she hugs him in their ashen basement. All she sees are Diana's firm beliefs in the paranormal, her scientific pronouncements, and her partner's renewed hope to prove an aspect of his life's work.
And despite this twin hope and belief (which she doesn't quite share), their mission fails and the X-Files falls.
Her second chance at life has seemingly gone up in flames.
As irrational as it may be, Scully internalizes this failure. Perhaps if she had been the partner Mulder needed, this wouldn't have happened. Perhaps yet another person wouldn't have been shot and yet another proof taken from them. Perhaps they wouldn't have lost Mulder's only way forward (she believes.) She hugs him and internalizes his lack of response, his devastation.
CONCLUSION
Season 5 was a limbo of sorts: Mulder and Scully didn't draw further apart-- they smiled, consulted, danced, saved each other-- yet they didn't draw closer together, either.
Their trust was whole but their self-belief tarnished.
And limbo is not a state Scully does very well in.
In which season andor episode was the pregnancy book seen in their office? I can't remember.
Just my thoughts:
When the IVF fails, she tells Mulder "it was my last chance" and not "it was my only chance", so I take it as they have tried before. This gets me thinking that there might have been a time when the IVF did take, but then she miscarried, and why they have a pregnancy book in the office. Not a medical book on IVF or other medical research book. For a moment, they were looking forward to a pregnancy together.
He says "don't give up on a miracle" which suggests that she could still get pregnant without IVF because they were already doing it. He wouldn't suggest a "miracle" with another man. No way.
I think you're looking for the "Pregnancy, Birth, and Family Planning" book, credit to @dreamingofscully.
The still is from Brand X (or earlier?), credit to @fashionbooksboozefeminism):
You could also argue it was present in Amor Fati:
But to answer your last question: Scully could have had multiple attempts, of course.
Personally, I think not. Because--
Parenti's pressure when Scully consulted him: a "good chance" he called it, with the caveat, "it's not out of the realm of possibility if we start soon."
I'm no medical doctor, but I don't believe he'd say that if her remaining ova could be preserved and stored reliably.
I believe the writers were referring to Emily (since Frank Spotnitz not only had a large hand in her fate but also in Scully's pregnancy.)
As Scully said in A Christmas Carol: "I feel like I was given a second chance." Her language in Per Manum ("It was my last chance") was in keeping with and building on (and concluding) past sentiments.
Mulder's face. If this had been the final of a series of attempts, his reaction would have been different: more worn, weary, stricken. Instead, he rises nervously, rambles about sleeping on her couch, and tries to read her expression to know if the attempt was successful. Those are first timer responses: he's unused to this new side of his partner (and them.) By the second, third, or etc. time, he would have known within a glance ("that unspoken.")
Meta and Resources
“Pregnancy, Birth and Family Planning” (and Emily's photo?)
All IVF Roads Lead Away from The Unnatural and to Millennium
"Life on This Planet" Before the IVF Arc
Biogenesis-The Sixth Extinction and Scully's healed fertility
Mulder Didn't Use Scully's Apartment Key Until He “Belonged”
The Scully Family In-Depth (Part XIV Home and Part XXV: Existence.)
The X-Files (In-Depth): Scully's Pregnancy, Mulder's Abduction, and the Truth Behind Requiem and Season 8
Bonus
Fan Theories on the IVF Arc's Placement
@settle-down-frohike's Treatise on the Intimacy of IVF
@carefulfears and @gabby-msr on Mulder's IVF parenthood
In the early seasons, Mulder had lost someone (his sister.) That absence marked the highs and lows of his arc. That loss impacted Scully, too (though her own journey was one of self-actualization.)
Then Season 7 resolved matters in Closure and all things, in the hopes that the show would kick off into movies.
It did not.
Season 8 was scrambled together and created to be the conclusion to the original series, to kick off into the movies.
It did not.
Season 9 was turned over to Doggett and Reyes, mainly, in the hopes that DD and GA would then be transferred into a movie franchise.
They did not.
CC decided over Christmas that the plug needed to be pulled. Then he decided to adopt out William.
Why?
William became the new Samantha for both characters: the someone "out there" to long for, the wound Mulder and Scully would therefore build their arcs off of (as seen in Season 9.)
...Then CC backtracked Mulder all the way back to Samantha (and aliens) and kept him there instead of progressing (which erased his growth in Season 7-8, as well as the glimpses in Season 9.)
Although CC didn't backtrack Scully, he also gave her no fresh material. So, technically, her arc had advanced more than Mulder's... but was no less boxed in, restrictive, or one note.
I've been thinking about Mulder and clutter, how he hangs on to things, and the psychology behind that. Perhaps he's prone to hoarding because of the loss he's experienced in life? Or is he just an ADHD trash panda?
tl;dr: Mulder isn't hoarding, he's trying to fit.
It's interesting because Mulder lives a very simple life: by necessity, on the couch, in the basement. Even Scully agrees he chooses a Spartan existence in pursuit of his aims.
However, I'd make the case that he's also a very nostalgic man-- celebrating a launch at NASA (a childhood dream), pouring memories of happier times into Scully's ear (ala Aubrey, Home, etc.), watching old movies (preferably in black and white), struggling with modern technology and preferring to live off the grid (even in the original series), the list goes on.
Yet when his apartment was hollowed out and renovated (and his boxed and boarded pieces probably dumped somewhere) in Dreamland II, Mulder just... moved on. In a way, his bedroom was cluttered up by an existence he didn't live-- papers and gear and a four-poster bed-- and, once emptied, provided him another habitable (if still simple) space to exist in. A proper pillow, a proper sink. And he chose to live there, which is interesting.
Season 6 in general was Mulder's year of domestication: forcing him to ground, pair bond tighter with Scully, confess his love to her, sneak case files or hack emails or drag her to Florida or invite her on a date-- in short, to reinforce how important she was, not just their partnership. And while some cosmic force, fate, or freewill gave him this choice, bam!, along came a bedroom. One he simply moved into.
This post has escaped your original question, so I'll reel it back: why is Mulder prone to hoarding?
The one place we see Mulder's true hoarding tendency manifest is where he actually lives: the basement. Mounds and stacks and pockets and spaces and jammed crannies and crammed histories.
There is his passion.
And in a way-- I suspect-- Mulder's not really a hoarder so much as a man who's forced a lifetime, with all its incumbents, into a small office tucked away in the bowels of a basement. Same with his study in I Want to Believe. Same, if I recall, with their house in the Revival (or S10, at least.) What we're witnessing is a man boxing himself into the safest, most intimate corner he can-- away from prying eyes-- and filling that space to the brim and overflowing. Until Scully expands him, frankly.
That, and he's messy.
My analysis is that Mulder isn't hoarding: he's trying to fit into (and slipping out of) constraints placed by himself, for himself.
Not dissimilar to Scully, in her own way.
Mulder's clutter in canon is often research for his work. For example, the items stuffed into his bedroom weren't nostalgic because he neither complained nor commented on their disappearance. A clear, intentional parallel was drawn between his advantaged surprise in Dreamland II - Monday and his devastation in The End.
We know Mulder's a nostalgic man (Samantha fuels his quest and is passed on to Scully in stories.) He watches and tapes old media.
We also know he's a messy man, spending more time away from home than in it (i.e. compare his crammed office to his tidy kitchen and dusty living room.) Mulder keeps his video tapes in the basement, for heaven's sake-- along with some trophies, a picture or two, a basketball-- while at home he has a photo album (as seen in Fight the Future), his fish (probably by necessity), and a place to lay his head. And that's it.
In canon, Mulder rarely acquires new items (other than, again, research); but if he does, it's usually light and easy to carry (Max Fenig's hat, Scully's keychain.) Even then, he generally doesn't engage in acquisition (of anything other than evidence.)
The pattern repeats for IWTB and S10: the house mostly uninhabited, the study crammed with research for work. You could make the case that S11 changes this slightly, since his mess begins pouring into the main areas-- but again, they're mainly items he hasn't put away properly, with a glimpse of nostalgic iconography here and there.
If I were to take a guess, I'd say Mulder fits everything in his head, but what can't be contained spills over into manageable piles. (He's nostalgic, certainly; but, again, his nostalgic items are few-- the rest is research). The piles created then compound because he's messy and doesn't organize.
Everyone is welcome to contribute their own opinion, though!
Please do-- the floor is open!
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