full of silly thoughts

A small detail from a scene of “Dreamland II” I find intriguing is when Scully exposes Morris Fletcher as fake Mulder. Fletcher has just more or less dragged her onto the waterbed, and they are both lying next to each other looking at themselves in the mirror above.

“You hate it”, Fletcher/Mulder tells her, half question, half statement. There’s a significant little pause before she answers, in a pensive, (I find) somewhat sad tone: “No, I don’t hate it”. And this is revelatory, and I love it to bits, because it so cleverly done, both visually and how GA interprets it. What she sees in the reflection is something unreal (and that’s what we see in mirrors, an inverted, alternative world, a possible threshold, think of Alice’s Looking glass), a wish: Mulder and herself together, in a bed = as lovers. But what’s meaningful, it’s what we see and hear there as well: not Fletcher, as in all the other body-switch scenes, but Mulder, speaking with his own voice. We get to see her dream-wish too.

Then Fletcher turns around, rests his hand on his face and says, “You hate it”. Scully pauses, knowing it is Fletcher but choosing to look at the “Dreamland” up there for two more heartbeats. “No, I don’t hate it”, she says in that melancholy voice and means, I wish this were real, I wish it were you. Then sits up, slips back into reality (steels herself, I guess) and proceeds to unmask Fletcher.  

There is so much in this single sentence for me, it’s so subtly done and so precious to me that she reveals what she is longing for by saying it the way she does.

Still, as much as The X-Files typically leaves volumes unsaid, after eight years no one should underestimate the strength of the bond between Mulder and Scully. “I think they mean everything to each other,” affirms Spotnitz. “They love each other, on a profound level such is rarely found in life. I think people sense that, and that’s why they love these two characters and they love them together. They’d do anything for each other. They’re soul mates.”

{April 2001}

Q: What has Mulder and Scully’s journey meant for each of them?

Spotnitz: The final scene addresses this head-on. You can’t get the truth. You can’t. There’s a larger truth, though: that you can’t harness the forces of the cosmos, but you may find somebody else. You may find another human being. That may be kind of corny and all of that, but that’s really it: Love is the only truth we can hope to know, as human beings. That’s what Mulder and Scully found after nine years. And that’s a lot.

{May 2002}

Spotnitz found the final episode’s treatment of the elusive truth in turn served to highlight the long road Mulder and Scully traveled together. The two, he says, are intertwined. “More importantly, the show talked about the journey Mulder and Scully had been on,” he says. ” To me, the theme of the episode and the series was that you can never find the truth. The truth is out there, but you can never hold it in your hand. But you can find another human being, and Mulder and Scully found each other, and the believer and the skeptic were able to say at the end of the day that they believed the same things. That is the most powerful truth that human beings can hope for is finding another kindred spirit and not being alone. And that to me was the perfect end to the journey that they had begun nine years earlier.”

It's amazing that you can ascribe total control over the universe to Mulder and not an ounce of self-determination or autonomy to Scully, who could have quit at any time but wanted to be there and chose to continue the work because it fascinated and compelled her as a scientist and spoke deeply to her sense of justice as a military kid and a person of faith. That really speaks to your understanding of and deep care about women. Isn't it just great when someone claims to love and defend a character and in so doing reduces them to just a Little Lady who couldn't possibly be making these decisions on her own?

#Lamb, Górecki

Main post dealt with the fact that female trauma is only chosen to evolve a male characters growth. That's something I'm totally d'accord. Especially in the nighties lots of female characters only asset was to show mens emotional side (back in the day when emancipation was thought -by men, of course- to be about men getting in touch with their softer side, instead of equality of the genders. Yeah, takes a lot of nerve to use a word created by women and a movement created by women to be about men, but let's not start on that...)

But someone wrote in the comments that Scullys pregnancy falls into that category too. Saying she would have been fine with Scully chosing work over kids like she always did. Maybe I'm projecting but I don't see it that way. (That the whole pregnancy arc was just to deal more trauma to Scully, yes I see that.) For me it was never a question of job OR kids. I always thought more along the lines of first career THEN a child for her. But my only argument in favor would be the dialogue with Ellen in Jersey Devil and even then she is not openly saying I want kids, just that she struggles to see herself as a mother (meaning she gave the whole kids idea a thought or two).

Do you and your unending depth of knowledge have any inkling towards Scully wanting (or not wanting, I might be wrong) kids?

I think the pregnancy arc is a complicated topic for a lot of people in the fandom, compounded by (perhaps) Gillian's own experiences with her work and early motherhood. To me, it's a Requiem stratagem: something different for the character and a mystery to (hopefully) launch from tv to movies. 20th Century Fox didn't bite-- thus, the scramble for Season 8 story lines. Reportedly, both GA and DD were excited by the possibility of Scully's pregnancy because it was new territory for them to explore (post here.) CC and Spotnitz were excited because they crafted the surprise during the season of secret sex. The other actors (namely Mitch Pileggi, Robert Patrick, and Annabeth Gish) were excited to either have a greater part and/or to join in for the ride.

Importantly, Gillian liked the character work of Scully going through trauma (post here.) In fact, her thoughts for Season 8 were actually darker than anything CC or Spotnitz planned (post here.) She had her quibbles with the writing here or there, but she praised the writers, the direction, the show itself for most of its run (except the adoption and eventually MSIV.) Was the pregnancy arc/baby arc perfect? Nope. Was she an interested participant? Yes.

As for the other points, well....