#txf never again

[scully-gifs]

[sentientsky]

if i think too hard about this scene my little brain explodes into mush

[whovienne]

nearing the end of season 4 and i’m so frustrated all the time like ughh why can’t these two just TALK to each otherrrr

[actual-changeling]

Keep holding on until letting go is a revelation burned into our skin.

[edjerse]

Never Again Scully + hands - for @stupidasshaircuts

[edjerse]

Ed Jerse - Never Again

[amazalina]

Never Again picks the characters' humanity over their status of character, and it is bold and subtle and brilliant all at once.

What we like about characters is that they are representations of what it feels like to be human, so they'll often 'stand for' instead of just being. Characters don't HAVE an existence of their own, they don't feel, *we* are the ones who feel for them. But fiction is not just used for emotional reflection, it's also used (to some extent) as escapism. Both those things require a simplification of humanity (not to mention that art just CAN'T represent reality with absolute fidelity because it can't CREATE reality per se). Which is why audiences turn to comforting, solid characters, and build them up to fit the profile we have created for them with the writers.

Never Again brilliantly subverts the audience's expectation by making Scully question her role in her own life. She becomes conscious that she's slipped into a 'character' for the person who sees (/perceives) her the most. That is, of course, incredibly disturbing. Mulder's absence allows us to see Scully without a counterpart, without the onscreen presence of someone by her side with a preconceived sense of who she is and who she should be and how she should act. We discover Scully in a new setting, on her own, perceived by new eyes. That allows us to see her more human than ever, because her dynamic with Mulder isn't perfect or even regular in its imperfections. Because there's a WHOLE side to her that the audience has no choice but to get acquainted with and to take in, as we have to adjust to human beings who never fit into a category.

Because she transcends her own normative character, Scully reaches an unprecedented level of characterization: she is aware of her own 'norm', she is actively rebelling against a restrictive narrative that wants to pin her down as predictable or rigid. More than that, she states that this has always been her nature, and reminds us that humanity is infinitely more complex than we'd like to think. It may be comforting to believe you know a person completely, that you know their hearts and their quirks like the back of your hand, but no matter how close to someone you are, you can never know them completely. (And that is confirmed in Home Again where Scully is reminded of that herself, by her mother's medallion).

The beauty of Never Again also resides in its statement that this impossibility of knowing someone else is NOT something to be lament, but rather that a person's emotional complexity has to be acknowledged, although it can never be absolutely decrypted/deciphered. All you can do is to become open to the idea that drawing easy conclusions because of patterns you see in someone is not enough: loving someone means accepting that their life is their own, and to love them for what you see as well as what you don't.

Interestingly, Never Again is also built in such a way that you could easily believe it IS an Orouboros: Scully's exposure as a complete and complex human being would be a parenthesis, and the episode would bite its own tail. It would start and finish with the interpersonal frustration that the impossibly to reconcile your 'true' self with the way you are perceived brings about. Instead, it starts with Mulder's easy resolution of that conflict: he avoids any complete confrontation of the problem and instead decides they need to spend some time alone; time during which that 'unknown' Scully is revealed to us. But in the end, the episode chooses the most human thing of all, and solves the problem by pointing it out without closing it up by answering the questions it asks. The problem is acknowledged, but remains unspoken, because it transcends conversation and screentime (our perception as an audience), just like people transcend the perception we have of them. The episode throws us into a new kind of emotional vertigo: confronting the depth of unspoken and unnamed human complexities means that it cannot be spoken or named, because that would be categorizing something that transcends categories.

[amazalina]

someone just told me never again wasn’t that great I am questioning everything about our friendship