Twenty-five years ago, the sci-fi drama series began its sophisticated exploration of the messiness of human belief.
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@desertdesign
Twenty-five years ago, the sci-fi drama series began its sophisticated exploration of the messiness of human belief.
“Of course I have memories of 1992 and the years prior, but it’s nearly impossible to believe that Scully and Mulder weren’t with me throughout elementary school, high school, or college. Those characters, that series, were such a force, such a creative influence, that it seems strange to imagine that they actually didn’t exist at one point. Like Elenore Rigby or The Brandenburg Concertos or the Mona Lisa - these things needed to exist, and somehow there was a space in history, waiting for them to arrive; they were inevitable and perfect and, ultimately, awe-inspiring. Sublime, transporting, and damn-near perfection.”
— J. J. Abrams, Preface to The Complete X-Files (via thespiritualmultinerd)
Now, maybe this is important. There is a shot, deeper into the show’s run, of Mulder and Scully in a field with tall grass, the kind you know would itch if you walked in with your ankles bare. The backs of their dark jackets say FBI. She is following him and they are following something outside the frame. I always think of it.
Or another. Mulder and Scully before a wall of trees, grasping at a dark sky. You can’t see the top. There is a fire, an orange spark in this green place, and they are unimaginably small before it. He’s curled against her lap. If there was sound, you can hear her singing. The sparks go up, up, up. She looks down. You can’t see the sky.
Or maybe this: Mulder and Scully and a flat expanse of dust, hot sand, wind. Their suits are fitted, newer, dark. The dust clings to their shoes but never their jackets.
Or even: Mulder and Scully on the highway. The pass of green, grey, brown. The thrum of an engine you can’t hear.
Or go back to the pilot. Mulder and Scully in the rain, in a graveyard. Shivering in the cold. Laughing in the very, very quiet.
Maybe this should be obvious, but through it all, in standard definition, black coated, real and dirty and ephemeral and monolithic all at the same time, they are Mulder and Scully. Scully and Mulder.
And do you get it, even a little? That the point is not that they fit but that they somehow apply?
Put them in Alabama, in a bunker in Alaska, in your childhood bedroom, in a space you know like the taste of flat Coke on hot pool days and suddenly you don’t know it anymore, just because of their presence. But at the same time, you do. You know them. They are easy to read, like a picture book story, told and re-told. It’s always them, peripheral.
It is like this: You can change the background but never the scene.
–
The show still lives in unexpected corners of rooms and experience. To this day, highways at night have a rhythm that conjures up The X-Files like a smoke screen, a projection, an invisible cloak. It had an incidental style, a scuzzy 90s methodology and all the scape and gape of rainy Vancouver setpieces. I’d never before wanted to go to Oregon. The show always pronounced it like Ore-gone, and I sometimes, in a romantic, curious way, I wanted to be there, wherever gone was.
It worked because it was rarely slick, the show, often stumbling. It served Mulder and Scully watery diner coffee. Put them in too big coats and neon-lit motels. Taught them to drive in crowded rental cars. Shoved their hands in their pockets and across diner tables. Let them bleed on starched pillows and dark suits alike. Dwarfed them by tall, cleaving trees in unimaginable forests. Cowed them by nature, by bodies of water, by white, inhuman, expanses of nothing, nowhere. Stranded them against skies of stars and stained glass in churches. Made them whisper in the dimmed light of TVs and the blue glow of fish tanks, between library carrels and behind their hands.
It dusted them up and then off. Set them out against the unknown, linked their hands, turned their chins up and said, Look, look, but never find.
–
Maybe it’s about a feeling, a laid out space, a quality of time. All of this, somehow, is familiar.
In a famous episode, a country-county sheriff brushes off a creeping sense of local danger. This is my home, he says, like that’s the only protection he could ever need, like its clipped into his gun.
And when it kills him, that familiarity, you get the sense that he wouldn’t have it any other way. You get the sense that, in some slapdash, sincere way, The X-Files wouldn’t have it any other way either.
You get the sense that it allows for this kind of love. Knows it. Knows that the familiar, the comfortable, the safe, will kill you if you let it. And you will let it. But it won’t be so wrong when you do.
–
The familiar is strange and lethal. The unknown is romantic and sweet to reach for but only if it stays that way. It’s not that any of this means anything outside some sort of philosophical thesis on the unnecessary tautology of spaces.
Except. Except. I have memories that hinge on X-Files episodes. It’s not just the pilot. There is the night there were lightning storms, heavy July air and the ripples of light across the backyard. Me alone on the couch, with monsters and Mulder on TV, coming in and out of light and shadow.
There is a candle lit in my childhood bedroom, with all the black and white pictures I cut out and put up on the walls, and I am watching Mulder and Scully pas-de-deux through a haunted houses, and the thunder outside is so loud that I can’t tell if it’s coming from the show or from the world outside it.
It’s not that it makes it easier to remember. That I wouldn’t feel summer the same way if it weren’t for the lulling omnipresence of two fictional archetypes and their heady aesthetics. It’s not.
It is, maybe, that it makes it a little harder to forget.
–
Because it was never about the defining the indefinable, but about undefining the supposed definite. Suburbs hid chimeras, broken glass windows, inexplicable death. Anger. Quiet towns are only silent to account for their secret-keeping. Home is never where you think it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s nowhere at all.
–
Scully writes to Mulder. She wants to capture something nameless, to pin it down without killing it. She talks about a “memory and experience that belong to you. That are you.”
That’s the secret then. My house at sixteen, myself at sixteen, is that June viewing of the pilot. Is the July lightning storm and the whining surge of electricity, monsters on the screen. They’re gone - wherever that is - but I keep them in me just the same.
In the pilot Scully is wrong: Time is not, in fact, a universal invariant. Mulder’s wrong, too: We can’t ever really lose it.
To lose something, definitionally, means it is something you once had. In the same fashion, The X-Files says that everything you love you possess, or everything you love possesses you. But in over 200 episodes about the unnatural and the strange, there has never been an exorcism.
And in that way everything is always over. And in that way, it never ends.
— Excerpts from Conspiracy Summer (Or: a piece of a piece of a piece I’m hopefully publishing on The X-Files and nostalgia and me)
Happy 25th Birthday to The X-Files! (Sep 10, 1993).
House Hunters Renovation: "An Unremarkable Reno," S147/Ep84 (2018) (New, HD)
A Washington, DC-area couple searches for a home with space, privacy and security; once they settle on a choice, they must contend with unexpected delays, and they argue over his preference for farmhouse style versus her wish for a sleek, modern look while also investigating a series of unexplained murders in a small town. (Reality, 60 min)
(House Hunters Renovation themesong)
(Onscreen legend: Bethesda, Maryland)
(Mulder and Scully are shown in the kitchen of Scully’s apartment from Followers. Scully is cutting a grapefruit. Mulder is getting down coffee mugs.)
MULDER: (voiceover) I’m Fox Mulder, I work for a well-known federal law-enforcement organization, here in the DC area.
SCULLY: (voiceover) And I’m Dana Scully and I’m a medical doctor. And I consult in law enforcement as well.
(Interview: They are seated on a sleekly upholstered bench in the apartment’s bedroom.)
MULDER: We’ve been together for…wow. 25 years now?
SCULLY: We’ve known each other for 25 years.
MULDER: That’s what I said! We met through work. (smiles)
NARRATOR: Fox and Dana are on the hunt in and around the nation’s capital for new living space.
SCULLY: Well, we “live” in –
PRODUCER (OFF-CAMERA): Please don’t do visible air quotes.
SCULLY: We live in this apartment in Bethesda. But it’s too…
MULDER: Ridiculous.
SCULLY: It doesn’t suit our needs at the moment.
MULDER: And evil.
(A robovac zooms by purposefully in the background. Scully jumps.)
MULDER: What’s that thing still doing here?
SCULLY: Plus there was a little…incident not long ago and the house, um, partially exploded.
PRODUCER (OFF-CAMERA): Wait, what?
SCULLY: I mean, it was just the fireplace. It took out most of the living room and the whole uh, back area. We’ve seen worse.
MULDER: A bunch of uppity robots were mad that I didn’t tip them. Can you believe that?
(awkward pause)
SCULLY: So, we need a “new” (fingers twitch in lap) place.
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“What if there was only one choice and all the other ones were wrong? And there were signs along the way to pay attention to.”
Mulder and Scully in oil colors.
I felt so in love with the original pic I needed to turn it into a painting asap! <3
This is just a part of a thing I’m making for ya’ll but I’m not even sure when I’ll finish it so here’s a little piece.
this is the most accurate video I’ve ever seen.
Well… time to reblog this
Scully: And this is Mulder, my ex boyfriend.
Mulder: Stop introducing me like that. Hi, I’m her husband.
Morgan called Gillian Anderson and told her he wanted to write a story about Scully and a guy with a talking tattoo. Anderson not only liked the idea, but told Morgan she was anxious to have a “dark” Scully episode. Furthermore, she wanted Scully to have – finally, after three and a half years – a sex scene. “She said, ‘I want my head banging off the wall, I want fingernails, I want flesh torn,’ ” Morgan recalled. He told Anderson he’d be happy to write the scene, although privately he suspected it not pass muster with Ten Thirteen or the network.
…Morgan and Wong argued to keep the sex scene in, but to no avail. “I said, ‘Why not film it? Gillian wants to do it. You tell her that if it goes overboard, we’ll cut to the door closing. You’ll have complied with something that she asked for, and who knows, maybe you’ll get something really wild.’ They said, ‘No way, it’s not even in the script.’ Morgan had the unhappy task of telling an understandably upset Anderson that the scene she specifically requested had been cut. As to why it was cut, Morgan said that Carter and the other writers felt that every other woman on television was jumping into bed, and they had worked very hard to differentiate Scully from other female television characters. Morgan’s response: “She’s different, but the way she is now, she’s not human.”
- Morgan and Wong on “Never Again”, 1997.
Gillian literally requested this as she thought it was the right time in Scully’s development and would reflect her sexuality, showing her as a multidimensional woman as opposed to just a specific textbook microcosm. Yet the male writers believed that Scully could not be a sexual being, and express her sexuality because in their eyes ‘strong women don’t do that’. Yall I am so tired of this bullshit. Men really don’t fucking understand women and that’s the tea. At times, it appears that Gillian understands Scully a lot more than everyone else seems to do - hence; the authenticity and characterisation of Scully’s persona which was central to All Things, which just so happens to have been written AND directed by Gillian herself. So yeah. You see my point.
They literally wanted scully to be the “I’m not like other girls” person.. honey no
Furthermore, just another example of what people tried to talk cc out of and it didn’t work. This is allll Chris Carter. From fucking to kissing to babies to adoption to rape and back again.
Mulder has a one night stand in season fucking two. So gimme a break CC.
The Conversation in the Car
“Scully… Dana…” Skinner’s biting back tears. This is the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. “Mulder’s-” he trails off.
“Jesus, Walter, spit it out.”
“Mulder’s not the father.”
The arch to her eyebrow, familiar, almost causes him to break down right there.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“The Cigarette Man… he… earlier this year he. Shit. Scully it’s him. He is William’s father. I’m so, so sorry.”
He has never seen this level of shock on her face, before.
“Why would you even start to believe that lying bastard, Skinner?”
He sighs. Looks away from her. “Scully, when you disappeared with him… that’s when. He told me,” Skinner swallows, “he impregnated you through science.”
Scully belts out the goofiest fucking laugh he has ever heard out of her, so loud he jumps in the seat. God, she’s in shock.
“Walter, that is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard. Through science, pft. Let me guess, alien science right? Why the hell,” she cackles one more time, “why the hell would you believe him?”
Keep reading
I was talking with @perplexistan and @para-amour earlier about why this pregnancy is so obnoxious compared to William and even Emily.
What has always resonated with me about the X-Files is that you have these two (brilliant, beautiful) but otherwise normal people delving inside deep conspiracies and paranormal events. They’re our proxies, because they experience shock and amazement and fear the way any of us might.
Emily represented a big part of the horror of what happened to Scully because of her involvement. Medical rape, the creation and destruction of a child. While I hate the arc, I think we see a lot of her struggle trying to reconcile this horrifying situation in terms that make sense to her. She’s a regular woman having a nice holiday with her family when her life gets shredded by this outside forces.
With William, Scully tried using conventional methods (IVF, sex) to get pregnant and couldn’t. When she finds out she has conceived, she’s a woman in her thirties experiencing a shocking but within-the-realm of possibility pregnancy. Maybe her Clomid finally worked, who the hell knows. But we see a character we really love finally get the baby she has wanted. Ostensibly with the partner of her choice, CARL. We see Scully as a working pregnant lady/mother dealing with lullabies and babysitting against a disturbing backdrop, but she is the relatable center that holds.
So now we have Surprise Baby Three, and here’s where it loses me. Scully is now 53. She’s had decades of health and fertility issues. She’s had severe psychological and physical trauma. She’s not indicated any unusual efforts to conceive, and even tells Mulder that this part of her life is over. So then we hear that she’s pregnant. And I hate it because I’m that moment, Scully isn’t our proxy anymore. She’s an X File. She’s on the other side of the paperwork. Sure, that’s happened before but with Scully being cited because of what happened to her as, again, a regular woman in adnormal circumstances. But now we have Scully herself as the anomaly. It seems fitting to me that in the moments where two of the last human links to her life die, in the moment that she rejects her son, she confirms to Mulder that she exists outside the normal rules of biology and physiology. I mean at this point, just make her a Jeremiah Smith to heal Skinner and Reyes.
And that’s why I really hate this pregnancy.
Exactly. I’ve heard a lot of arguments about how “anything can happen on The X-Files” in response to the idea that Scully pregnant at 54 isn’t realistic. @para-amour made an excellent comment about this that I’m hoping she doesn’t mind me sharing:
“To me, having two people in their 50s spontaneously conceive a child really took the show into a different genre. Like, prior to this last episode, the world in which Mulder and Scully lived had lots of fantastical creatures and aliens and monsters. But those two were essentially human. They experienced basic limitations of human nature and biology. And to have her get pregnant basically turn this into some sort of different show. It broke the frame for me. Now it’s some sort of Twilight type shit. If that makes any sense.”
Yes, it makes total sense. Anyway, I’m over it and don’t really care, but I thought this was a good discussion.
Is this The End? - XFN talks with Chris Carter about "My Struggle 4"
We sit down for a very long conversation with Chris Carter, a boxing match, if you will. XFN’s Avi Quijada talks with Carter about William, Scully’s pregnancy, some actual truths about periods (we’re not kidding) and what the merger between FOX and Disney could mean for the future of the show. And much more. There’s a lot to dig through, settle in, grab a drink and read here.
“’Now though I want to ask you… let’s go back to the pregnancy question.” He says. “Okay,” I say cautiously.
“When you knew she was pregnant, how did that make you feel? Knowing that she’s 54 years old…What did you say to yourself about that?” I didn’t sign up for a therapy session, nor being interviewed by Chris Carter, but hey if you don’t do wild things while you’re able, when are ya?
“About the possibility?” I try to buy myself some time to form an answer that isn’t ‘Are you effing kidding me?’”
ETA: If the link wasn’t working try again, tumblr wants to fight me tonight, apparently
X-Files Happy Fic Recs
This question was pretty much impossible to answer because there are SO MANY choices of fluffy, happy fics. This is a small sampling, not even exhaustive from my own previous fic recs. These should keep you busy and distracted for a good long while!
SEASON 5
at the close of day by @foxmulders
the dream where we pulled the bodies out of the lake by @foxmulders
Wednesday Night at Slim’s by VinRouge84
SEASON 6
Dr. Popularity by haphazard method
Kroner by DM
Pillow Talk by Alelou
Serendipity by @leiascully
Tethered by @lilydalexf
SEASON 7
Dana Scully’s Guide to Dating by @lilydalexf
February 2000 by @bitshortforastormtrooper
the fervor of a first day by @a-steady-wish
Green Love by @baronessblixen
Guitar Hero by Alicia K.
Home Ec by ArtemisX5
inertia by @foxmulders
Small Lives Awake by Jesemie’s Evil Twin
Touch the Moon by Pteropod
SEASON 8
things you said with no space between us by @alldolleduppink
I WANT TO BELIEVE
Beating the Darkness Back by Anjou
in the vacant places, we will build with new bricks by @becketted
These Things Keep Us From Sinking by anythingbutgrey
GENERAL MSR
Fourth Morning by Oracle
Hardball by Missy Pennington
If the Fates Allow by @skylandmountain1013
it could be sweet by wen
Poltergeist by @all-these-ghosts
The Smell of the Person You Love by @mangokiwitropicalswirl
up (where the world won’t let us down) by @quxnce
We Wish You a Happy Holiday by @mldrgrl
VERY LONG GENERAL MSR
Hurricane Season by Beduini and Rah
Terra Firma by @malibusunset-xf-blog
@bckennelly
The X-Files ➡️ cast offspring cameos
“Memento Mori” / “My Struggle IV”