thinking tonight about how much has been written over the past 30 years about the x files' subversion of gender roles, mulder as a 90s sci-fi hero who is the more emotional and open of the two, who cries on screen regularly, who is empathetic to a fault and deeply devoted to helping the vulnerable. scully as the rational one, the science brain, the person who is taken seriously. the unique view of a relationship to the paranormal and occultism, which, from its rise in the 1940s, was originally viewed as feminine and something irrational that women were comforted by. and how all of this is true and interesting but, to me, none of it is the biggest marker of gendered experiences in their characters.
at the end of the day, their characters both respond exactly as men and women in our society do, in the ways that they respond to violence.
mulder, in his mid-20s, started at the FBI working in the violent crimes division
where his profiling abilities, his way of being able to get into the mind of a killer, were revered
it's also where, in his words, he first saw monsters.
this show always deeply understood that the scariest monsters were not the vile creatures, they were violent men, and some of the most memorable villains on the show (john lee roche, luther boggs, john barnett) are resurfaced serial killers that mulder previously caught in his violent crimes days.
but mulder's background is in behavioral science, and he always wants to understand what makes someone how they are
and his positive worldview requires him to view every act of evil as the consequence of a larger cause, as not being senseless
which is why he wants to believe that men who are killing women are only doing so out of a biological imperative to survive
or out of a misguided attempt to SAVE them
meanwhile, scully is affected by the brutalization of women on an emotional level.
she hangs back at the crime scene and the police station to compose herself, while the men she's working with march up to a woman's desecrated corpse
she knows that even when mulder is right, even when the killer is acting out of a biological need for survival
that doesn't make it any better
because the impact on the women that he brutalized is more than physical, it's more than biological, it's more than any rational reasoning that he might have behind why he did it
she knows that it doesn't matter
and she doesn't need to try to understand. she doesn't need to know what the killer's reasoning is.
she already knows why men brutalize women
she's experienced it, she doesn't need to study it.
rewatching early txf and seeing mulder and scully when they are so young and so enamored with each other is so heavy…they are so excited to have met each other and they are going to go through so much together…they are going to lose their entire families together. they are going to lose time and autonomy and health together. they are going to live together and die together and nearly die together and never die together. they are going to have and lose a child together, and see that loss in each other for the rest of their lives. they are going to look to each other anyway, for everything, and say things like “i’m always happy to see you” and “always happy to find a reason” even at their most distant and estranged. she doesn’t know it then, but running out into the rain after him in bellefleur will be the end of the life that she imagined for herself. she doesn’t know it then, but it will lead to the loss of her safety and her family and her career and her children. and when she does know all of those things, she says “i would do it all over again.” she says “i wouldn’t change a day.” she says “i don’t begrudge you any of those things.” she says “i want to remember how it all was.” and if she could do it all over again, she would still chase him into the rain and laugh when he said that aliens were summoning the kids to the forest and ask him where they were going next and follow to wherever the answer was. because they would rather do this life together than do any other apart.
so i really love whenever you call mulder & scully best friends. wanna talk about your top 5 favorite moments of their friendship?
DO I EVER
1/ little green men
they have a secret code. they have their own language.
when mulder gets to his desk that morning, the photo of samantha is tipped over, and he knows that this means to meet scully at the watergate. which, first of all, is unbelievably dorky. these two work in the same building. these two have cell phones.
but they have been split up and reassigned and it is not a phase you guys it is the end of the world!!!!
when he arrives in the parking garage, he asks what she wants, and she responds, "to know that you're alright."
they have a secret code and their own language and for nothing more than to check in.
(shoutout to the depression hair era, they are so funny for both getting bangs the moment they were separated. that's how you know things are really bad for the girlies.)
when he sinks down to the floor and tells her the george hale story, she crouches down next to him, listens, tells him not to give up.
you can tell that it makes her uneasy to see him defeated, to see him doubting himself and what he believes in. she's almost trying to convince him of aliens in that moment, telling him that he's seen so much and reminding him of samantha. trying to spark something in him.
they have a secret code, they have their own language, and when he leaves town, he buys the plane ticket under a name that only she will recognize. she cracks his computer password in three tries.
earlier, after skinner questions scully, he tells CSM that she's telling the truth, she really doesn't know where mulder is. "because if she knew, she wouldn't be so worried about him."
they aren't as hard to decipher as they want to believe.
PAUSE!!!!! this is the cuntiest thing he's ever done. the sunglasses, the denim, the boots, the dangerous lack of exit strategy...anyway
she interprets his clues, she follows without obligation, they go back together. hand in his hair, not giving up, just like she started the episode.
in the end, they have nothing. the hail mary trip resulted in empty tables and silent tape recordings.
one thing i didn't notice until i rewatched this one the other day is that it's not when he says "i still have you" that she takes his hand.
it's when he switches the tape from the record of his failed excursion to his actual assignment, hours of listening to slimy men talk about strippers.
she listens with him for a moment before shaking her head, and squeezing his hand. she does understand that this isn't what he wants to be doing, and that it's disheartening.
2/ tooms
i could list every season one episode here. i could do a whole other post just about season one. i could do a whole other post just about season one, and include every episode. but i guess i will settle for this one.
this is my favorite season, and this is my favorite MSR.
him waving the pine tree air freshener in her face when she said he smells 😭😭😭
squeeze was all about the choice between climbing the ladder and the "out there" but "good" work of the basement, with all of the ridicule and consequence that come with it.
its sequel episode is about the aftermath of that decision, what it means to choose the side of the victim, to stop reaching for personal success.
(this shot is so beautiful, her face through CSM's smoke)
tooms opens with scully in a negative performance review, skinner (in his very first scene!! we love you skinman) going over her reports, CSM lurking in the corner.
the two share a look, then warn scully against having too much of an open mind, telling her that it is her "responsibility to see that these cases are by the book"
"by the book" becomes the theme of the episode, with the phrase repeating multiple times throughout.
this isn't the first time that the show has explored this topic, with young at heart also centering a debate of “by the book” protocol, what it really means, and who it really serves. ending with this final dialogue:
SCULLY: Mulder, I know what you did wasn't by the book.
MULDER: Tells you a lot about the book, doesn't it?
“by the book” isn’t an easy order to follow when you have a partner who doesn’t believe in it, and you aren’t sure you do either.
it’s not an easy order to follow, for the navy captain’s daughter who worships authority.
she does try though, and she's initially frustrated with mulder's behavior in the case. she tells him that he "sounded so....." at the trial, and she's reluctant to pursue his methods without approval from the bureau.
ultimately, when she comes to bring mulder something to eat on his unauthorized stakeout, she tells him that what he's doing is not proper surveillance protocol, and he good-naturedly accuses her of peddling "the book."
she responds, "this is not about doing it by the book, this is about you not having slept for three days." and tells him that he is inevitably going to get hurt.
to her, it's not about following the rules or pressure from the bureau or respecting authority, it's about making sure he's okay.
when she tells him to go home, that she'll take over the stakeout, he smiles and shakes his head (it's almost the same look that he gives her years later in redux ii, when she tells him to lay it all on her. just less tears.)
and i know that we tend to focus on the next part of this scene, but this line stands out to me too, as he declines because he doesn't want her to get "in trouble."
he doesn't want her to break the rules or disobey authority, and he still believes she'll be head of the bureau someday.
it kinda makes me teary, this stupefied look on his face at her response. when she looks at him unflinching and says, "mulder, i wouldn't put myself on the line for anybody but you."
they are so kind to each other. they really don't care about official reprimands in files or welfare protocols; they each just want the other to get some rest, to have a bright future.
he relents, allows her to take over, on the condition that she calls "if anything happens. immediately. i'll be here." and suggests she catch the sports talk radio show
she bends down to give him one last smile and eye roll as she exits the car
and makes a joke to herself while walking back to her own. best best best friends.
what better way to celebrate life than annoying the hell out of your best friend on her birthday?
the way he clearly gave the waiters her name and this snowball and sparkler and sang "special agent dana katherine scully" while they all sang "happy birthday dana" is one of his most embarrassingly extra moments and it never fails to make me laugh
she rolls her eyes at him, but the way she stares when he's not looking says so much. they both know why this year gets sparklers and song when last year didn't. they both know there might not be a next year.
he's literally never been more irritatingly overjoyed lmao. and he brought presents! ("oh, you've got to be kidding me" "just something that reminded me of you")
he said "i didn't know it was your birthday, scully!" with a wrapped gift in his pocket, always prepared with a smile and a cover story
he does this same thing in memento mori, after getting the call to come to the hospital, when his first words of the episode are "i stole these from some guy with a broken leg down the hall. he won't be able to catch me." about the flowers we watched him come through the front doors holding
he clearly puts thought into these gestures, but everything is so fragile. neither of them are comfortable with what too much sincerity would mean, how limited it all is.
but they find little ways to give to each other anyway, they hang out in bars and roll their eyes and discuss the meaning behind a keychain.
if this is the last birthday, maybe it's worth a little vulnerability (and annoying song and dance), that he did it up right.
4/ one breath
another Mulder Gift™️ entry. god, the sweetness here is just overwhelming. he is so strange and tries so hard.
this whole scene is one of my favorites of the series, but i love this little moment so much.
it's so inadequate, in the end. to see someone that you thought you'd lost, your most important person, who was gone for so long, and have nothing more to give them than a shitty VHS sports tape.
but what else can you do? he's so quiet and self-conscious in this moment. he raced to the top of mountains and stood on broken cable cars and choked a man and wore her necklace around his neck for months and wept on the floor. he had the strength of her beliefs, and he prayed. he held her hand by her bedside after they pulled the plug.
so much goes unsaid between them, because how can you say it in words? how can you do anything but smile and buy something stupid at the gift shop?
she makes a joke while he smiles at the floor, but it's not a joke, not really. he's there and he's giving her whatever he can and he's cracking jokes, and she knew there was a reason to live. that's it right there.
5/ detour
GO, GIRL!
this is a best friends episode. this is a "we survived that hospital and we refuse to spend our one wild and precious life at the annual FBI teamwork seminar, if you need us, we'll be lost in the forest" episode.
look at her trying not to laugh while he's making sarcastic comments at her in the backseat. can you imagine carpooling with these two? they are forever passing notes and whispering behind backs.
she is not making it to the teamwork seminar. she is not getting her wine and cheese, either. she is looking for mothmen in western florida.
they think they're so much better than that communication exercise, just to make vague innuendo in a motel room.
they tell each other all about native species and how ticks can halt their metabolism and the livestock that was killed in a town 30 years ago. she teases him about his filing system.
neither of them tire of bashing the hell out of that teamwork seminar.
they talk about death. about searching for meaning in life. about which flintstones character they relate to the most. they swap dirty jokes.
she fusses over his grave injury (a dislocated shoulder) and holds him. sings to him so that he'll know she's still there.
a few years down the road, she'll sing that same song to their baby, on one of her last days with him. she'll sing to him about this night, about his dad, about her favorite memories.
sitting there together in that forest in florida, they have already started to carry the weight of near-misses. of lost time, of almosts, of purposeful disease.
they have come a long way and taken on a lot, in the years since the parked car outside tooms' house and the garage at the watergate.
but they have yet to be separated longer than 90 days. they have yet to lose a child. they have yet to plan funerals and prison breaks.
there's something about that time, that ability to just sit in the woods and talk about everything, looking for mothmen, that is so precious and so special.
and when she tells him that night that she had struggled to find meaning, that's where it is.
the two of them sitting in that coffee shop, both cups in front of them untouched, filled to the brim, reading samantha’s journal. bearing witness to the suffering of this little girl. they are in this moment together. they have been in this moment together since he looked at her and told her “nothing else matters” to him, seven years ago in that motel room.
for the past seven years, scully’s job has been to play the skeptic, to argue against the paranormal theories that his grief leads him to. later that night, she stands outside the door of the last person to see samantha alive, and prays for aliens.
they’ve been in this together for the better part of a decade and they’re sitting in a coffee shop reading the truth they’ve been looking for, how devastatingly human the evil of it was, and she looks at him with tears in her eyes and squeezes his hand.
2. redux ii
one of the few moments in the series where you see scully break…scully defines herself so completely in loyalty. in following him, in being ahab’s starbuck, in being her captain father’s first mate.
in this moment, mulder is heading off to a hearing where he will be testifying to details of the conspiracy and against members of the FBI. this is It. this is The Truth. this is The Quest that they’ve been working on for five years. the dutiful first mate would send him on his way.
scully clings to his hand. she doesn’t want to lose any more time (nine minutes in bellefleur was enough). she can’t believe either of them are going to go through the next few hours, the last few hours, without each other.
she might not be there when he returns, she’ll be the next on the list of people to have disappeared behind his back, and he’s kissing her cheek and casually cracking jokes, and she‘s desperate to hold on for just a moment longer.
3. tithonus thumb war
one, two, three, four…we die next to each other or never at all. what’s immortality next to a mindless game with your best friend?
scully asked fellig, “how can you have too much life? what about love?”
he answered, “love lasts 75 years, if you’re lucky. you don’t want to be around when it’s gone.”
in a story about the grief of eternal life, waking up in that hospital, i don’t see scully taking on the quest to give it up.
4. dreamland
the central question of this episode, becomes the central question of the rest of the series: don't you ever want to get out of the car?
while they may be years from stepping away from the car long enough for that house and "normal life" that scully laments driving past, for a moment they stand in front of it.
they gaze up at lights in the sky the way they did on their second case together, the way they did in antarctica, and he reaches wordlessly for her. half "scully, you gotta see this" and half "stay here on the ground," it's an instinct that doesn't disappear with their memories.
it's like that thing DD said once, "there is no such thing as that story ever ending. those characters are forever searching. that’s what they do. even if we’re not watching them, they’re out there."
they'll get back in the car and they'll "just keep driving," for years and for decades and for the rest of their lives, because they'll forever be searching. and when there's something to see, they'll reach for each other.
5. pusher
"smile, scully."
kneeling down before her to surrender his weapons, he meets her worried eyes with a calm smile.
this episode is all about palpable tension and anxiety, about walking into a losing battle without control of the stakes, and it's most visceral in scully from the moment they decide to send mulder in alone.
but before she nervously watches a surveillance screen, before she jumps up the moment the feed cuts out, before she runs in after him, before she screams at a serial killer and cries out to him in fear...she quietly looks down at him, the way she has so many times before, and keeps his hand still. steadies them both, holds them both in this moment.
the emotional arc of this episode is bookended with touch, and more than the absolution in the way she reaches for his hand in the final scene, it's this moment that simplifies it to me. it's the calm before the storm, and the time that's taken in the midst of it all, to pause outside influence while they still can.
(BONUS: Fight The Future)
reaching out to him as she recommits, parroting back his own words to him. she has memorized everything that he has ever said and it is the two of them in this work, in this fight.
thinking about "you made me a whole person" and the difference between
"she has made him feel not like an outcast, not like discarded FBI trash, but actually somebody that’s worthy of her friendship. that, as he says, she’s made him a whole person."
like rob bowman said and
"you told me that my science kept you honest. that it made you question your assumptions. that by it, i'd made you a whole person."
like scully said
and how he meant "you have made me whole in that you know me and you see me as whole and you make me feel like a whole person in someone else's eyes for the first time since i was twelve years old and someone's big brother" but she heard "i am whole in that you offer something to me, in that you supply the other side of the argument"
thinking about my post on fire and the levels of mistreatment that mulder accepts and how 1,000% on purpose it is as a result of being blamed for samantha’s abduction since childhood. and how that was the point of making him feel responsible for her disappearance in the first place.
when CSM said “i created mulder” it rings true in many ways, but perhaps the most sinister is the joint effort to break down someone he watched play outside the summer house as a child, someone who was once the 1-year-old whose first words they laughed over, into someone who could be the kind of hero and foil that he craves for his own story.
it’s why CSM gave him scully, took her away, gave her back again. gave her a terminal illness, let it kill almost all of her, then healed her for no reason other than to beg belief in his miracles.
it’s the reason why mulder was left home alone “in charge” that night and the reason why 20 years later his father said “do you realize what this will do to your mother?” and watched him sob apologies.
it’s the reason why he doesn’t flinch when his mother hits him and he doesn’t flinch away from the empty relationships with women who are just like her and he doesn’t own a bed. it’s the reason why he runs in front of cars and into suicide missions on military facilities and jumps onto trains with bombs on them. it’s the reason why he can’t do anything more with scully than kiss her cheek on her deathbed.
because you might not be able to kill one man’s religion without turning it into a crusade, but you can make sure he never belongs anywhere further than at your feet.
seeing their baby, seventeen and dark-haired and alive, on that surveillance footage.
the ultrasound moment that they never got. all teary eyes and smiles and facing forward.
thinking he was dead, scully had cried out, “i’m so sorry that i didn’t get a chance to know you. or you get a chance to know me, or your father.”
watching that black and white tape, she hears jackson say to her, “i wish i could know you better.”
and unlike when she stared at sonogram photos, when she decorated a nursery and planned a funeral at the same time, when the first year of life was just the two of them…mulder’s there.
hands on her shoulders, eyes on his son, for the first time since those first 48 hours all those years ago.
they wept over failed rounds of IVF and talked about miracles and looked down at their baby and decided he was the truth, and then they spent a decade in grief in a haunted house. a handful more years apart, barely speaking. they came back together to talk about him with the only other person who understands, asking “do you ever think about william?” and whispering “of course” and “i can’t help but think of him.”
this is them listening for a heartbeat, and after everything that’s been taken from them, getting it.
