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lol neither one of us expected this to be 1400 words long but here we are.

So my first and most honest take on Mulder and Scully in season 6 is just that the writers were playing the game more that season. They spent five years subverting the Hollywood idea that two people who love each other have to act like they hate each other, and then the show moved to L.A. and the writers were like okay! It’s trope time! And they dropped a cow through Mulder’s roof so there would only be one motel bed for him to share with Scully. I respect the game. It’s my favorite season. But it’s a big shift from the way Mulder and Scully were written before, and it really only works because the season winds up being thematically cohesive enough to justify it, to a degree that was probably sometimes intentional and other times definitely not. Like in Arcadia I think we can all agree the writers were simply men making bad jokes about marriage.

But in the big picture, so much of the season supports the idea that Mulder and Scully are backsliding because they’re fighting the next stage of their relationship. I’ve said this before, but I think the hallway confession in Fight the Future is massive for Mulder and Scully in season 6. Way bigger than Diana. Scully says it in the season premiere: When Mulder told her that he needs her to be his scientist, the lesson she took from that was that she can’t change. The whole season thematically is about the two of them being afraid to let themselves change each other or admit they already have, because they’re afraid that if they stop being the Skeptic and Believer they stop working. They don’t want to risk losing each other. But they can’t be in a relationship if they can’t be changed by each other. So they’re stuck in this terrible limbo, and they’re not happy about it, especially because they’re already at a point where the roles they’re playing don’t fit them anymore. And at a macro level that’s honestly some of the best justification for “will they/won’t they” screwball comedy fanservice I’ve ever heard.

I love all the ways the season plays with Mulder and Scully’s anxiety. In Dreamland Mulder gets trapped in traditional married life; in Arcadia Scully signs them up for it and all he does is mock her; in The Rain King they keep getting mistaken for a couple. They’re always having to confront these domestic expectations. Neither one of them wants that life, but they were both kind of bred to expect it: Mulder the Martha’s Vineyard kid, Scully the sacrificial military wife. That’s part of what they’re struggling with: They don’t have a blueprint for what being a couple will look like for them, and they keep having these visions of the worst possible ending. “Getting out of the car” isn’t even a line until Dreamland, but Drive is literally “if Mulder gets out of the car, will someone die”? Do they die without each other (Tithonus) or because of each other (How the Ghosts)?

A lot of people have written so well about the motifs of this season. @iconicscullyoutfits pointed out how many season 6 episodes involve resets (How the Ghosts), usually with memory wipes (Dreamland, Monday) and dreams (Triangle, Field Trip). The message is that Mulder and Scully can’t move forward if they can’t get out of their own heads. (Field Trip pulls it all together by putting them in each other’s heads.) @foxmulders brought up how season 6 keeps telling Mulder and Scully they’re fated to live and die together (Triangle, Monday, How the Ghosts) but still forces them to choose each other on purpose, and I think a lot of the season lives in that tension between knowing something and still having to choose it. And @thegrotesckque has a great take on how Field Trip resolves the “getting out of the car” question (is it a betrayal for Scully and Mulder? Is it a betrayal for the show?) by proving that they’re better as a team when they stop playing Skeptic and Believer anyway. That’s what saves them.

this list | msr | post-ep for s4x04 unruhe | angst & hurt/comfort | 1.6k words | pg(-13) | ao3 link 

prompt 8: “i’m not doing that again.”

thank you to iz @dianafowleys for helping with the german!

tagging: @today-in-fic @xffictober

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Outside the RV, the glare of day is nearly blinding. Scully stumbles into the grass, her stomach rolling, mouth twisted into a knot.

A few yards away, a clump of officers are talking, and she catches bits and pieces, something about profiling, about genius. She rests a hand on the metal to steady herself, needing to keep her composure. It wouldn’t do to collapse in front of them.