I've been having so much fun with the Hollanov ones, I thought I would take a break and do one for my OG fandom! As always, Spotify link at the bottom.
The Mythology
What A Wonderful World - Joey Ramone - hear me out: as cynical as the show can be, I think at it's heart, there's still a core of hope. I mean, why else would they risk their lives over and over, sacrifice relationships, lose family members unless they still think the world is worth fight for?
(Also, The Ramones were huge fans and would arrange shows so they could watch the new episodes as they aired. It started when they needed clearance for Langley to wear a Ramones tee on the show, so they sent them some tapes to watch and the whole band was hooked. Joey Ramone and Dean Haglund actually stayed close friends until Joey's death.)
Everybody Wants To Rule The World - Tears For Fears - the mythology is littered with people with bad intentions, but the thing that pulls me to this song are the lines: There's a room where the light won't find you/Holding hands while the walls come crumbling/When they do, I'll be right behind you, and like that's them. Mulder and Scully fighting, right there with each other.
For What It's Worth - Buffalo Springfield
Play God - Sam Fender
War Pigs - Black Sabbath
Vignettes
This Year - The Mountain Goats - [Interior, basement office. Mulder is giving a long presentation about vampires. A very bored Scully is sitting at the desk, this song playing as her internal monologue.]
Night Moves - Bob Seger - [Interior, rental car. It's dark and they're driving down a lonely highway. This song is playing on the radio. Mulder is singing along while Scully rolls her eyes.] Mulder: Come on, Scully, you know the words! (I may have stolen this from Supernatural, get off my dick)
Runaway Train - Soul Asylum - [Interior, Mulder's car. He's just come from visiting Scully in the hospital while she's fighting cancer. He turns the key and this song is playing on the radio. He begins to sob, laying his head on the steering wheel.]
Fox Mulder
David Duchovny (Why won't you love me?) - Bree Sharp - A little meta but it's my fucking list. If you haven't seen it, here's the music video the crew made for their Christmas party
Paranoid - Black Sabbath
I'm Not In Love - 10cc - Agent Mulder does not gaze at Scully.
One Headlight - The Wallflowers - Reading the lyrics for this, it feels very Samantha coded and Mulder's search for her
Dana Scully
Gillian Anderson - DeRita Sisters
I Like The Way You Die - Black Honey - Scully gets underestimated so much, but she could kill you with a stapler.
Only The Good Die Young - Billy Joel - this is so Catholic coded it's sickening
Mulder/Scully
I Won't Back Down - Tom Petty
Old Man - Neil Young - Look they both have Daddy issues. This might have a bit more Mulder vibes, but I think it could apply to both.
Lonely Soul - UNKLE, Richard Ashcroft - this has such a vibe to it, omg, just listen to it
Enjoy The Silence - Depeche Mode - I think silence is actually maybe comforting for them. The silence of early mornings in bed together, the silence of their office phone not ringing with another brutal death, the silence of falling in each other’s arms? It's a luxury that's rarely been afforded to them. Besides, All I've ever wanted, all I've needed/Is here in my arms? Fucking swoon. Also, Words are very unnecessary/They can only do harm: that's them. They don't talk about what they want or need with each other, which is how we ended up with Yearning & Aliens: The TV Series.
Fire and Rain - James Taylor - this all about grief, and they each have loads of it. You could almost say that grief has made each of them who they are.
Landslide - Fleetwood Mac - oof, the line Cause I've built my life around you? This feels like a song for Scully and her feelings for Mulder.
Stand By Me - Otis Redding
Running Up That Hill - Placebo - the vibe of this is total X Files, and come on, And if I only could/Make a deal with God/And get him to swap our places? They have literally both tried to do that.
Laid - James - I'm not saying Scully can only cum when she's on top (but not not saying it either) but they have such a chaotic relationship of bouncing off each other over the years, it seemed to fit (also another James song, Ring The Bells, is my fav needle drop of the series - the cold open of DPO, when the kid gets electrocuted outside the arcade)
Songs About Fucking Aliens Because I Can
Aliens Exist - blink 182
Cynthia - Blue Rodeo
Two Little Men In A Flying Saucer - Ella fucking Fitzgerald
power dynamics and the way the x-files pilot subverts and meets our expectations of them
in the pilot, what we learn of mulder, we first learn through scully. she laughs, almost girlishly, about the reputation that precedes him, only concealing her joy when she realizes the others in the room are not in on the joke. these men are solemn, not because they don’t agree about the nature of agent mulder, but because mulder is no laughing matter to them; he is a threat and scully - notably religious, the cross on her neck, scientifically driven, and hopelessly young - is the weapon they hope to aim in his direction. on the outside, she is the perfect candidate: honest, intelligent, skeptical. this, they are sure, is the answer to their long standing problem.
from the beginning we get a sense that there is an imbalance placed between mulder and scully. in the next scene, it becomes visual: when mulder meets scully, he is hunched over photos, sitting in a chair. she is the taller one, the one with nothing to lose, and he is the man they’ve thrown in the basement, hidden away like the joke she’s preemptively laughed at. it is important that we meet him as a man leaning, almost protectively, over his vulnerabilities: his work.
but then he stands and he brings up her thesis. she has rewritten einstein, an act unfathomable and crazy in its own right. mulder does not wish to go down without a fight; he challenges her immediately, like he’s been waiting his entire life for this moment. he calls her “scully,” puts a professional distance between them, while also making the most of her medical and scientific advice. though he stands taller than her physically at this point, he doesn’t ever aim to reach above her. mulder is not interested in the ‘90s workplace misogyny, invalidating her simply because she’s been sent to debunk his own work. he only wants her to understand. for a moment, they become equals. he even makes a joke of himself, asking her if she believes in extraterrestrials bemusedly. whatever advantaged he has over her physically, he begins to concede in this initial meeting. he wants equality; he wants understanding. nothing more.
this visual imbalance is important, and we find ourselves returning to it in the airplane. as they travel to the plausible state of oregon, mulder lays on his back and scully sits across the aisle from him. again, she is sitting taller than he is. his vulnerabilities are still out in the open. a casefile - his work - sits in her lap, and he lies with his body turned away from her, his eyes closed. they don’t ever reach equal playing grounds in this scene, because they are ascending on his life’s work. he is operating on the belief that she’s been sent to debunk everything he believes in, and we as an audience can’t be too sure she’s not.
then the airplane shakes, tips, and, for a moment, provides us with a physical unbalance. it is the tilting of the scales. he turns to her with a wide grin after. she looks visibly disturbed. he is still lower than she is—but it seems he’s got the upper hand as he cracks a joke. we learn of mulder as a man confident in the face of his trials and tribulations. the lack of power does not rob him of him of his beliefs, but simply reinforces them. it is scully who is shaken. the power does not make her confident or certain. maybe, we begin to suspect, it isn’t meant to belong to her. maybe he is reading her wrong.
in the car, they are back on equal grounds. he is guiding her through the case details, making glib remarks, and she is asking him about the details. the radio goes wonky, they get out, and he paints the road orange. he doesn’t tell her why. he won’t. she looks almost girlish, standing there, clueless, with her hands on her hips. it is he who gains the power in this moment, taller, in the know. he is less concerned with equality than he is the protecting of his work and his beliefs. he doesn’t look to knock her down, but he’s not interested in lifting her up.
the next time the visual imbalances are most interesting is when she comes to his hotel room. perhaps this is the most notable of them all. initially, scully comes to his room because she is terrified about the marks on her back. he towers over her in the beginning of this scene, but it is not long before he is on his knees, inspecting her. she is so scared of something she claims she doesn’t believe in, and he has every right to stand back and laugh at her. but he doesn’t. he does laugh, but its not malicious; it’s kind. he tells her about his own bug bites and when he does stand back up, she crashes into his arms. he holds her. if he’s got the power in this scene, he is not interested in using it against her. he is taller and she is more vulnerable in every way, but he seems surprised by it. this is a beautiful segue into the next scene.
mulder sits on the ground and tells his barest truths. scully got naked and scared for him, and he sees fitting that he do the same. she sits on his bed, higher than he is, and he takes the ground. he talks about the sister he can’t find and how it ruined his family, and how he can’t get to the information he wants. he accuses her of being a spy, and she tells him that she isn’t.
in a moment of absolute trust, he rises to his knees. they become equal, seeing eye to eye. he tells her about the hypnosis, the drive he feels, how this is more important to him than anything. and it is so earnest and intense, so absolutely serious, that we must be saved by a ringing telephone to escape it. this sets the groundwork for the rest of the series, and the foundation for mulder and scully’s relatjonship as a whole. they become partners—he allows for this in this scene. he wants to believe her.
the power dynamics between them have been constantly challenged, and at times, have subverted our expectations. we watch as mulder, often times the taller one of the pair, seeks to bring he and scully to equal playing grounds. we watch as scully, the one who is offered many opportunities to have the upper hand and the power, stumble her way through it or put herself in a position where she loses it. mulder and scully, we learn, are best when they are equal, seeing eye to eye.
What Mulder and Scully had was more than simple sexual tension; it was a loving and respectful partnership between two intelligent individuals whose differing attributes perfectly complemented one another. It assured us that, despite all the monsters and aliens at play, there was an inherent humanity rooted firmly at the show’s center. —Mark Rozeman
The absolution of Dana Scully in the aftermath of My Struggle IV: one pissed off fan’s grand manifesto
–also known as, “what in actual hell happened to Chris Carter?”
If you have not already read through this interview, courtesy of Avi Quijada and XFN, I am going to need you to start there first.
And listen: before anyone goes there, I am not analyzing the fuck out of this to excuse Chris Carter for the disastrous finale he just served up to us. Rather, it’s that there are a lot of us who are products of the Scully Effect in one way or another, and we’d like to feel good about her legacy. We deserve to figure out a way to clean up this mess you left us with.
Some people write fanfic. Me? I do this. Get some hot chocolate and pull up a comfy chair.
Rant rating: R, for language and possibly some implied violence against Chris Carter
Content warning: I mean…you saw MSIV, right?
Did MSIV actually destroy Dana Scully for all of us forever? Nah. We just witnessed the apex of a once skilled writer complete his own demise. We just witnessed a writer who got in way over his head, who was trying to articulate extremely complex, controversial ideas and concepts, and doing so in about the most tone deaf way anyone ever possibly could. Having read his interview with Avi Quijada, I now think it is absolutely fair to say that Chris Carter actually did have at least some idea about what the right motivations for his characters were. But in a writing decision that will baffle me and the rest of the world forever, he did not heed the warnings of those around him, and convinced himself that his audience would be able to infer absolutely everything of import to his story, and that we didn’t need to see any of that stuff actually fleshed out on screen. Sure, fine, whatever, Chris. Challenge accepted, here we go.
Let’s review. In the space of a scant few ridiculous hours occurring over the course of MSIV, Scully found out all of the following:
the child she thought was conceived miraculously with her partner was not, in fact, created as a the result of that union
she was medically raped and violated in order for William to be brought forth into the world
the being that she has conceived of as their son for 18 years is barely human: he is a shape-shifting, unstable lab creation, who is far, far more dangerous than any of the many forces that have been out to destroy him
William was created specifically by that fucking bastard Carl, and for whatever purpose Per Manum previously served in this universe, Dana Scully and the rest of us ostensibly should now assume it was to obtain fertilized embryos for the CSM to screw around with and deploy when she made the biggest fucking mistake of her life going off with him in En Ami
she is somehow pregnant right now, at age 54 (because Chris is apparently fascinated by perimenopause? or some shit like that?), after having not gotten miraculously pregnant at any point before in her extensive sexual history with Mulder
William directly and repeatedly said to both of his parents of genetic origin that he does not want to be protected, and that he wants them to let him go [quick break here: sorry, Chris, but there is no way that the CSM is the literal genetic father here, because Scully had a fucking AMNIO in season 8, and therefore you will neverrrrrrrrr convince any of us that this could ever possibly be the case]
And in the midst of all of this, Skinner is killed (maybe), her now compromised friend Monica Reyes is killed (maybe), her partner witnesses the murder of their son (maybe), and her partner kills his father (maybe), after having himself killed or witnessed the killing of dozens of New Syndicate operatives (definitely, because: exploding entrails!!!).
Two things stand out to me. Number one: this level of emotional trauma and upheaval is far, far too much for anyone to even be capable of putting up a coherent verbal response to in its immediate aftermath. Number two, to reiterate points Gillian Anderson and Avi Quijada both made directly to Chris: this “grand vision” or “Big Idea” of his should have had an entire season or two’s worth of episodes behind it if it was ever going to stand a chance in hell at working. I do not believe that the simple act of making these specific storytelling choices is in and of itself the problem, no matter how I might personally feel about it. The X-Files has been telling us a story involving horrifying genetic, physical, and reproductive assaults on its characters since 1995. We just, y’know, occasionally used to think about the aftermath of those atrocities in scripts and on camera, in episodes like One Breath, Memento Mori, or the Emily arc. What is abso-fucking-lutely a BIG problem, though, is if your reproductive horror show is executed as poorly as it was written in MSIV. Full stop.
I will argue until I am blue in the face, though, that Dana Scully is not destroyed by this ending, no matter how poorly written it was. Chris Carter simply didn’t let this character actually do any of what she should have been doing with this ON SCREEN, where we could see her. We now know for a fact that Chris was aware that he was leaving all of this off screen, so what I want to know is…why? No, really. I really want to know the answer, here. Why on Earth didn’t you show us, Chris? Hell, you could have even gotten this done with one, or two, or six additional bloated voiceover monologues, since most of what went down in MSIV wasn’t articulated *~anywhere at all~* outside of post-mortem press conversations. (Exhibit A: the entire Monica Reyes sub-plot.)
As a parent myself, I cannot even fathom what it would be like to find out that your child was capable of doing horrific, terrible, inhumane things. That’s also a pretty relevant–if extremely uncomfortable–concept right now, one that could have been grappled with in an era in which we are beginning to finally engage with mental health, gun control, and domestic terrorism in very public forums. We are made to understand thanks to Avi, that Chris Carter apparently loves using The X-Files to ask us tough questions that don’t always have answers. So…why the hell didn’t he do it here? I mean, come ON! What does it mean to be the parent, biological or otherwise, of a child capable of these horrors? I’m not saying that any of us have to like it, but as written in MSIV, William is a sociopath. William is not a human being. William is not anyone’s child anymore, and William is for damn sure not something capable of being protected. William can only destroy, because that is exactly what Fucking Carl (trademark pending) made him for. Whether in the Supersoldier sense, or in the New Syndicate global-contagion-let’s-wipe-out-humanity sense, we have been told that the CSM made him to be nothing more than a tool to help execute his own post-apocalyptic needs.
So after 18 years, Scully suddenly and very traumatically has to process that William was an experiment gone wrong (or right, I suppose, if you go talk to Carl). After 18 years, this is the William we’ve got. Can you even imagine how much worse it might have been for Scully if she had actually been there the whole time, watching this happen? William had a good childhood, he was raised by good people, and he still turned into a sociopath, and he tells us so himself. Was Scully ever a parent to what William ultimately turned out to be? That’s…actually a pretty damn good question, in this context.
And the answer to that question, according to Chris, is that Scully was the mother of the idea of William, the mother of the idea of a child who was miraculously created out of nothing more than love. She was the mother to the ideas and imaginings that she had about William for 18 long years. She was that mother during her pregnancy, she was that mother during his infancy, and she was that mother when circumstances erroneously convinced her to put him up for adoption, in a move that we were told was to try to give him the best life she thought she couldn’t ever possibly give to him. She was that mother in Ghouli, pouring her whole heart and soul into the idea of her son William in that heartbreaking morgue scene. So, no, I don’t think it means that she instantaneously stopped loving that idea of her son, when the shit hits the fan in MSIV. But it does mean that she understands that her idea of William hasn’t ever been the right one: the “truth we both know" was actually a horrific lie. “William…was an idea, created in a laboratory…” is true in this universe, for better or for worse. Dissecting what that means for Scully, just this one single solitary point alone, should have been granted an entire episode, not 10 seconds on a pier.
“Scully, he was our son! He was our son!”
He was.
He was their son. For 18 years, they both believed that he was their son. I don’t think anything Scully stutters and stumbles to explain to Mulder in this moment suggests that she doesn’t actually believe that, or grieve for that. It mostly indicates that Chris Carter has no idea how to write this magnitude of dropped psychological bomb. I think he does know his own limitations, which is why it all happens off screen. Thanks only to Gillian Anderson’s acting, it does appear as though we are witnessing a confused, traumatized Scully here, one who has been exposed to so much death and destruction immediately proceeding this moment that she can’t even find the way forward. Gillian Anderson, thankfully, fills in the cavernous script hole, and gives us a Scully who doesn’t know how to begin to explain what she has been forced to understand to a now very visibly fracturing Mulder.
This is not a mother suddenly throwing away her decades of love for a child just because she is getting a “do over” baby. And the only reason we even had to consider whether or not that was the case at all, is solely because of the steaming pile of inadequate shit dialogue that was written for her.
Let’s step back now and consider Mulder, and how his presence impacts Scully’s reaction. Mulder, who shocks the hell out of all of us when he says, “if I am not a father, then what am I?” in MSIV. We have gone an exorbitant amount of time watching this man, who devoted his life to finding his lost sister, seemingly refuse to engage in the same manner with his own lost son. So, we could take this as an example of even more what-the-actual-Carter-fuckery-are-we-doing-now, OR we could choose to listen to what Chris tells Avi, and believe him when he says this is the hidden motivation that’s been driving Mulder all these years. You know, off screen. Because this isn’t at all yet another concept that needed its own entire episode to explore. Exploding entrails, bitches!
Or, how about we also revisit a much better writer’s take on all of this? Let’s pick up adoptive father James Wong’s narrative, because he actually kind of gets how this kind of thing might work. In Ghouli, Mulder tells us that we’ve had no idea about his state of mind on any of this. Not ever. And we can infer that that was intentional on Mulder’s part. He’s doing it because he thinks it is what he needs to do for Scully’s benefit. There is no possible way that Fox-Freaking-Mulder, you punks, didn’t have some ridiculously big feelings about all of this. He’s been presented on screen to us as having sublimated his feelings on the matter since he found out about William’s adoption in The Truth. He wasn’t there to make the choice, and whatever resentment or sadness he may feel about what Scully did, he is swallowing it for her. He’s standing right beside her, he’s just listening. That’s his choice.
Also courtesy of James Wong: we know that Mulder has outright lied to Scully about his feelings about William in the past. In Founder’s Mutation, he tells Scully that he’s had to put it all behind him. James Wong does what a writer should do to communicate a character’s motivations, by actually showing us that Mulder has lied to all of us at the end of the episode, and letting us see Mulder’s dreams about what parenting William could have been.
So yes, I am going to take Chris at his word that these really are Mulder’s feelings in MSIV, even though he failed to articulate those motivations appropriately on screen. Look, many of us have been complaining for years that Mulder’s seeming non-response to his lost son seemed wildly inconsistent with everything we know of his character. I will take the bone Chris has so generously offered us here as an attempt to rectify all of that. I think coming into peripheral contact with William in Ghouli began to dismantle Mulder’s carefully constructed walls of sublimation, and by the time he actually gets his hands on him in MSIV, the flood gates have opened and cannot be closed again.
I have no trouble at all buying the narrative that the idea of being a father has quiescently been the single thing holding Mulder together for almost two decades. Look, I am absolutely here for that. I think most hard core X-Files fans are absolutely here for that, too. We know Mulder pretty damn well at this point, and we know that the loss of his sister shaped him forever. You even made him bring it up in IWTB after years of dormancy. So, yeah, I don’t have any trouble believing that through it all, while on the run, while locked away and adrift in the Unremarkable House for years, and when ultimately left by a very lost Scully who couldn’t bear north anymore, that this broken man from a broken family did indeed secretly cling to the idea of being a father. That for all of his failings and losses, he wanted to believe that he had at least had a part in making this miraculous child he dreams is out there. That he could believe that William was, in fact, living an idyllic childhood, the kind of childhood that he himself never got to have. For so damn long, Mulder wanted to believe all of that. Yes, Chris, for fuck’s sake, I BUY that, okay? As obnoxious and stupid as that written line is, having now heard it for the 4,000th time, this concept is right on for Fox Mulder.
[Another aside: that line is the one and only moment that David Duchovny loses me in MSIV. But OMG, as an actor who has had to say this ridiculous line every which way to Sunday? I can’t say that I blame him. No one actually talks this way! There is no actual right way to play it without making all of us want to crawl into a hole and die.]
Okay. So Mulder watches his son die. The ideas and dreams that he has carried beneath the surface this whole time die along with him. Scully sees all of this happening to Mulder, and based on what the Wongverse has established, she has probably not ever seen it look like this for him. So, what we are getting here is that for this one instance, we are seeing Scully put her own feelings about William second to Mulder’s feelings about William. Every other moment between them thus far has been Mulder putting his own feelings second to Scully’s feelings about William, right? I do believe that Chris Carter is daft enough to think that Scully got “her turn” in Ghouli, and so in MSIV, there’s no problem at all if we only get “Mulder’s turn.“ (And apparently, we also have time for Ford Mustang’s turn.) That all plays into the nonsensical words coming out of Scully’s mouth at the end of MSIV. Scully can’t find the words to speak to the guilt and pain she is trying to absolve Mulder of. How could anyone?
Listen to Gillian’s work, actually giving us some damn meaning here:
“William…William was–”
William was.
Ultimately, here’s MY truth: I hate how the William narrative turned out. I have hated every single moment of the William narrative beyond the end of season 8. Existence absolutely could have ended the series in the way in which these characters deserved to have their hero journeys end. And you know, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I found out that Chris Carter secretly hates that this ending got away from him, too. I mean, look, we know Chris is a lying liar who is lying in all of the press he is doing right now, as he tries to convince the world that this has been The Grand Plan All Along. Never mind that this plan is contradicted by his own press prior to 2018, never mind that it is contradicted by all of the other writers and producers who worked on the William story at the time it was conceived, and never mind that it is contradicted by the simple reality that every zig and zag in the X-Files universe beyond season 7 is really the result of never knowing if David or Gillian were going to participate in the story anymore going forward. So, I’m sorry, but bull-fucking-shit that you had any of this in your head when William B. Davis wrote En Ami, Chris. Why not just admit that handling The X-Files was kind of impossible when one or both leads were maybe not going to be involved in telling the story anymore? We would all completely understand that, Chris, no one would ever in a million years question that. Of course you might wind up losing your narrative thread under those business circumstances. We aren’t blind to how the entertainment industry works.
I mean, there was never any hesitation on Chris Carter’s part to explain why all things had the intimations of a sex scene, not for one minute ever, so don’t try to tell us now that he just kept a lid on the truth about what role En Ami was actually fucking serving in this story for 18 whole years. Sorry, bro, I am not buying it. When you really think about it, how can Chris Carter possibly not know that he blew it years ago with William’s narrative? It is precisely the impossibility of navigating the logistics of telling a story far beyond the boundaries set by the involvement of the real people making it that drive showrunners like Vince Gilligan to give themselves a finite amount of time to tell it. Chris (or the Fox network, or whoever you want to blame) didn’t do that, and therefore he wound up giving up at least 4 other possible endings to The X-Files over to the uncertainty of actors continuing to involve themselves in this project. I really do wonder if that’s why he went down this particular path of turning William into a monster, and I wonder if that is why he seemingly worked so hard over the course of his Struggles to try to strip Mulder and Scully’s ties to him. Because this really wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.
And so now here we are, hitting the do over button with a new pregnancy. I have no doubt that this guy thinks that he actually could hit the reset button just like that, and magically get back to the original poetic justice that these characters were given in their 2001 ending. He probably thinks that the fans would see this as a gift, even! I mean, shippers were heard, amirite? But even the idea of ending with a pregnancy, now many many many years too late, isn’t ultimately the real problem. All together, one more time for the folks in the back of the classroom: the problem is, and will always be, piss poor execution. You could hand this exact story to a Penumbra, or a syntax6, or an Aloysia Virgata, and I have no doubt it could be told in a beautiful (if utterly soul-crushingly painful) way.
So, fine. You want this to be the narrative, Chris? Fine. I will fill in the Grand Canyon of plot holes that you left us. The fandom will follow your stupid bread crumbs, and we will imbue them with the motivations and meaning you claim to have been driven by, but inexplicably chose not to write into any of your recent scripts. William was. Fox Mulder and Dana Scully have been letting him go, piece by piece, for 18 years. He was not meant to be. He was, ultimately, not ever theirs, even though he was created from genetic pieces of them. (Fight me, Chris, you can have that CSM created him, but FUCK NO WE ALL DRAW THE LINE AT CARL’S SPERM!) We can even give this bleak, wasted moodscape a soundtrack, if you want, in the form of a song you chose 10 years ago for them yourself: I will fire up UNKLE’s “Broken” right here, right now.
And OKAY Chris, I will even follow you down the rabbit hole of this new pregnancy, and I will take it in the spirit of the way I want to believe you intended it: as a way to desperately claw our way back towards getting the ending Existence gave these characters, the ending that was supposed to be their just rewards for all the nightmares they have lived through. Scully and Mulder are alive, they are a family, they are going to get to finally have a real human child, okay, fine, it’s fiiiiiiiiiine. I will go ahead and imagine that Scully, somewhere a few exquisite and bittersweet heartbeats down the road from the pier, is running away from the FBI and blowing up the motherfucking car (the Mustang, please). Scully is going to row a damn boat to an island paradise on her babymoon with Mulder, her vibrator, and a blobfish. You once wanted all of that to be the post-script for your characters, Chris. You lost the thread. I get it, I really do.
Look, I’m not a gifted writer or a gifted storyteller. I’m a Scully Effect scientist working in medicine, and I’m an overanalyzer at heart. My creative outlets skew in an entirely different direction. I am a woman, though, and I am a mother, and people with life experiences just like mine might possibly have had the perspective that could have saved your story, Chris, if only you would’ve consented to hear us out.
If I had been given the chance to help figure out how to crawl out of the William mess created by all those years of renewal-or-not uncertainty, here’s what I might have suggested to you, Chris: let’s make William a savior, not a monster. Let’s make William an empath with the power to heal others. Let’s reference Scully’s alien DNA, her chip, Mulder’s season 7 alien artifact brain shit, and let’s say that all of that came together and allowed for the possibility of superhuman recombinant DNA magic once those two people came together. Let’s give William the ability to read his biological parents’ minds and hearts from afar, but have it be a benevolent thing, and not a painfully torturous apocalyptic thing. Let’s have William come back to Mulder and Scully having harnessed his powers for good, after the New Syndicate killed his adoptive parents as part of a failed attempt to take him out of the picture. Let’s give some concrete evidence that William’s adoption did, for a time, keep him safe, to absolve Scully of that guilt. Let’s have him tell Mulder that he saw all of the same dreams about building rockets, and father-son TV nights and talk. Let’s end the New Syndicate’s plans by letting Scully have some motherfucking agency, y'know? Remember? Let’s let her do it all like she used to in the glory days, and go be the scientist that she is. Let’s have Scully save the world, by distilling out some saving grace compound from William’s superhuman blood, or stem cells, or whatever the fuck you want to ask Anne Simon to give you, to fight against the New Syndicate’s planned viral apocalypse. Let’s have Mulder and William vanquish CSM together; these two sons taking out this toxic, villainous “father” that’s been hovering over this whole show, and let’s have them reclaim the narrative of fathers and sons as something that is good, and positive, and right.
Where’s the writer? I want to speak to the writer!
In the end, Chris, you didn’t do Dana Scully any justice on screen at all. But your inadequate words don’t get to be the last words on the subject of Dana Scully, nor do they get to define what she means to us. You can’t ruin her, Chris. She belongs to us now. We’ll take care of her. We’ll give her the ending she deserves.
i'm being forced to read moby-dick, so i think its only right that i get to come on here and talk about it in relation to the x-files. the first order of business i want to bring up is the curious relationship first shared between the characters ahab and starbuck. after ahab announces to the whole crew that his motivations for this three year whale voyage is so he can find and defeat moby-dick, starbuck is a little perturbed. later, to himself, he muses, "my soul is more than matched; she's overmanned; and by a madman!…but [ahab] drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! i think i see his impious end; but feel that i must help him to it." starbuck is seemingly possessed by ahab's mission, though he can't entirely understand it and doesn't readily want to dedicate himself and all the ship to it. like dana scully, our life-long starbuck, we see starbuck become enraptured in a quest that is not entirely his own for a purpose he cannot express.
later still, we get an insight into ahab's thoughts on starbuck. melville writes, "starbuck's body and starkbuck's coerced will were ahab's, so long as ahab kept his magnet at starbuck's brain; still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain's quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it." in episode one, dana scully and fox mulder share this relationship: she is presented to him as someone who could, if she'd like, effectively destroy him and his mission. he understands the importance of psychology and--dare i say it--manipulation the way ahab understands it with starbuck here. in order to continue his mission, ahab and mulder both know they must capture and hold the interest of their starbuck, lest their starbuck turn against them. while their white whales make sense to an ardent few, ahab and mulder know that it is starbuck alone who will make or break them. and starbuck, beyond all reason or doubt, commits.
my heart breaks when i think about how desperately mulder clang to the narrative that diana fowley was an innocent woman. it wasn’t because he wasn’t smart enough to see the signs, or because he wasn’t skeptical enough to have doubts about her. even if that were true of him, scully - who he trusted more than anyone - had told him explicitly, multiple times that she did not trust diana and he dismissed her outright, each time. i think mulder did know but he couldn’t believe it for his own sake.
mulder turned his back on who he was, at one point denying everything he once knew to be true, in part because he so badly wanted diana fowley to be on his side. and maybe, in some small way, it did have to do with love, but i think in a larger sense it was because mulder could not cope with the fact that anyone else would chose to hurt him like that. he married diana, opened up the gaping wound that was samantha’s disappearance and founded the x-files with her by his side. before scully it was diana fowley who was guiding him to the truth. when everyone was shaking their heads and coining the term “spooky mulder” diana fowley was telling him he was brilliant, that the work he was doing was, despite what everyone was saying at the time, valuable. diana fowley’s betrayal was so unthinkable to mulder, not because he loved her too much, but because he once had loved her and trusted her as deeply as he had scully. to think of diana fowley as the enemy would mean to accept that even the most intimate of his relations could be turned against him — that even dana scully, unwavering in her devotion and skeptical as she was, could do this too. to accept this truth was to accept that he could not trust anyone and he could not do that.
as much as it was about diana and what she meant to him, it was also about scully and what it meant for their relationship. mulder only accepted fowley’s betrayal as truth when he was provided sure evidence of scully’s unwavering devotion; when she stood by his bedside and held his hand and told him that he was meant for more than the easy life his mind concocted. he could only accept the fact that diana fowley was a liar when he decided that dana scully, in every universe, in every situation, in every lifetime, would be the person who spoke the truth to him, no matter how harrowing. he could not risk losing diana until he knew for certain it meant that he would not lose scully, too.
i’m a cancer arc lover, not because i’m a masochist, but because i think it forced mulder’s hand. where diana was the other woman for scully, cancer was the other man for mulder. sure, he loved scully before, but never like he loved her then. because her sickness made her weak: it put rings under her eyes and dotted documents with red splatters of her own blood. it was a third character in every scene from the moment she told him she had it to the moment she told him she didn’t, a palpable, unavoidable thing. there’s no doubt in my mind that mulder loved scully before scully got sick. when she was abducted he stopped sleeping. he chose her, over everything, back then.
but in contrast to scully’s abduction, scully’s illness was more certain. it reeked of death, no question about it. she wasn’t being doomed to uncertainty the way samanatha had been, but doomed to a inescapable finish. he hated it, couldn’t grapple with it, refused to accept it, but in a way he was: he loved her fiercely. completely. he loved her to the point of pushing boundaries, sitting on her hospital bed and kissing her hand. he loved her to the point of wrapping his arms around her in comfort and kissing her forehead. he loved her to the point of not being able to let go, searching for answers and truth and cures in the face of hopelessness. he loved her so much because this other man, this thing, was threatening to take her away from him and as much as he refused to believe it, it was still there, happening. and he continued to love her like that: quietly, achingly, as if his love alone could save her from anything, while knowing he himself was the thing was continually dooming her.
