The Baked Baker

Thank you to everyone who did such a wonderful job writing for this exchange (and being patient with some of the technical difficulties we had). A special thanks to the TXF Fandom; we have survived over 30 years by sharing the stories we love, letting our fandom authors know they did a great job, and supporting one another.

Tagging: @xf-fic-fix @today-in-fic @lilydalexf @randomfoggytiger

Hope you enjoyed these stories as much as I have.

Men’s Journal (Aug. 12, 2026): And now you have your Director’s Cut [of I Want to Believe] out this week. I watched both versions of the movie to prepare to speak with you, and it seems that, with this release, you’ve made the movie a bit more accessible to non–X-Files fans. The Director’s Cut removes callbacks to Samantha, William, and even the two kisses between Scully and Mulder. Can you talk a bit about your decision to pull those bits out of the film, specifically? 

Chris Carter: I always felt the movie was, the weight in the stories was kind of wrong. I set out to tell a really scary X-Files story, and when I had to cut it back for reasons beyond my control- for the executives who wanted a PG-13 movie and the MPAA made us cut it back even farther. It became a Mulder-Scully relationship story that happened to have a scary element in it. Also, what I couldn’t have foreseen is that there would be two X-Files reboots, Seasons 10 and 11, so people got their fill of Mulder and Scully. I felt, going back to this movie, I wanted to take some of that out because we had gotten a fill just recently, and I wanted to make it the scary standalone story that I intended to make. 

Men’s Journal: Any message to fans upset you’ve robbed them of some MSR, Mulder-Scully Romance, moments? 

Mulder is scared of being left behind again. Obviously, Samantha's abduction (and his parents' response) gave him some serious issues related to how he conceptualizes his own worth, so I think in addition to their preexisting complex intimacy, the main thing Mulder wants out of the more standard version of a relationship they move towards is ultimately security. It's the knowing that Scully won't just leave or be ripped away, leaving him alone again. He needs that support and long-term commitment of a family that he knows wants him around. (Which I think is reinforced by the fact that most of his big gestures are the result of him panicking about Scully possibly leaving)

Scully, on the other hand, has convinced herself that love is a competition that she can win or lose, and that the only way to get people to pay attention to and share affection with her is by excelling in some way. It explains her tendency to become involved with authority and mentor figures, because she needs to feel like she's distinguished herself and an authority figure telling you you're special and different and better than everybody else, even if they're just doing it to sleep with you, feels like it holds more weight and legitimizes that impasse for her. In their further relationship, Scully just wants to be the first choice. She wants to be loved with intention and not be an afterthought to her siblings, or the work, or a hot entomologist. (And I do think this plays into her tendency to become outwardly jealous in a way Mulder doesn't. She takes the concept of competition for affection pretty literally)

Agh you put it into words!!!!

It’s easy to say ‘here are these character’s Wounds’ but that doesn’t necessarily tell me what they want out of a relationship, per se, but the way you phrased it makes me see exactly how they would achieve resolutions through their relationship. They love each other, sure, but how do they get there? Mulder’s desire for stability is absolutely reinforced by his tendency to 1) panic with a freeze response at moments where his world is upended and then 2) pull out all the stops to resolve whatever crisis he’s landed himself in (in good or bad and in deep or superficial ways, see anything to do with the Files and more importantly anything to do with Scully). And a lot of Scully’s agony over season 3-6 is about her not being chosen by him, which I’ve talked about a lot.

And I think that in the end, these are pretty normal things to want out of a relationship — stability, acknowledgment, acceptance. They are the crazies “without you I would kill everyone in this room and then myself if they tried to split us up” that we know and love, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t want to share coffee and too-early mornings and too-late nights together for the rest of time. I think that they’re weird in a lot of ways, and their relationship would alternatingly fit and not fit what we see as “heteronormative”. I mean, look at them. They’re chasing aliens and playing baseball.

Hmm. I think what keeps tickling my brain about it, though, is that they’re so non-normal (and the ways that they’ve enmeshed themselves are so non-normal) (they LOVE their enmeshment and won’t give it up for anything else) that they have trouble picturing themselves in a quote unquote “normal” relationship. Which is why Mulder defaults to his “files files files” attitude and which is why Scully presents the “house in the suburbs picket fence dog 2.5 kids” dream even though we know that closet adrenaline junkie Federal Agent Dana Katherine Scully would get bored of that pretty much immediately… looked in the physical laws of the universe and the processes of life and death and then finally found her personal satisfaction in what she didn’t know and couldn’t solve…

I mean Mulder says word for word “well I wouldn’t know what I’d be missing” when Scully asks him, in her normal roundabout way, what he wants overall out of life. Season 6 tells Mulder and Scully “you both know you’re It for each other, so come on out and say it” and GA’s all things says “you guys should slow down and look at each other.”

There are bits and pieces of “normal” that they want, and Mulder and Scully struggle to picture that, but at the end of the day they whatever life they choose to be together… aliens and baseball…

Anyway apparently Mr. Eclipse made 5000 years' worth of solar eclipse graphics, which you can find the simpler versions of here