i know what you're afraid of

“Gillian has a lot of will,” Duchovny says two days after the Emmys. He and Anderson have a big scene in a hospital room, and as Duchovny utters his lines, Anderson tears up.

“Print it! Excellent! Fucking great, great!” the director cheers. A few minutes later, Anderson approaches her costar and says, “Great David.”

“Hey, thanks for that last one,” he says. The tears helped him nail his lines. “I thought maybe you had conjunctivitis. But you were really crying. At least one of us was good.”

I don’t think it can be overstated just exactly how necessary they were/are to the success of a show that was sometimes lazy at best. 

They took characters that were well formed but not always well written and made them iconic, larger than life, more interesting than the mysteries they were supposed to be solving. 

They took flowery, sometimes ridiculous dialogue and made it intimate, personal, loving, flirtatious. 

They took scenes that on paper were supposed to be nothing but turned them into everything. 

They understood their characters so well that they could play them through anything, through the good and the bad and the sometimes very bad. They were the only things the audience could connect to for years. 

What they didn’t see on the page, they brought to the screen based on nothing other than instinct and simply knowing what was best. The touches and glances and facial expressions that made us fall in love with Mulder and Scully and Mulder and Scully fall in love with each other. 

No matter how angry the fandom has been at this show’s creator and its writers, David and Gillian have given us enough that we want more. That we read bad spoilers, bad interviews, bad plotlines and shrug and say “well at least David and Gillian are Mulder and Scully” and that’s enough.

They went beyond simply portraying these characters, they went beyond simply showing up to work and reading their lines and going home for the day. They took something that likely never should have worked and made it legendary.