redteekal

Absolutely ridiculous on its face because it seems contradictory, but like… Scully wants to protect people from what she views as earthly sins — people hurting people, lying, cheating, stealing, killing — but it’s anchored in a place that’s spiritual. Mulder wants to protect people from the unbelievable, but it’s anchored in a place that’s very real, his baby sister being taken from him.

It’s the reason Mulder can turn around after everything outrageous he’s ever said and tell Scully to remain skeptical; it’s the reason Scully can scoff and whinge at all those outrageous things and then turn around and try to protect Mulder’s curiosity and belief and hope.

It would actually be more outrageous if the believer in all of the things the world tries to convince you AREN’T true also believed in the one thing everyone wants you to believe IS. The same way it’d be more outrageous if the skeptic believed in nothing, because a skeptic has the strongest faith of all. To be told that something is true again and again and still choose to turn away — to seek meaning elsewhere is the biggest act of faith there could possibly be. And faith in the principles espoused by a religion isn’t necessarily the same thing as faith in God itself.

It’s why, amidst all of that, the one thing Scully and Mulder will always agree on is believing in each other. Which is why they have to have that one little incongruence in character in the first place. It is, so it has to be.

ryland grace + orange 🧡, yellow 💛, white 🤍 & blue 🩵💙 outfits

I believe that’s what they recognise in each other straight away. And it’s the first thing they love about each other. What makes them trust each other. That’s their common ground. The differences between them teach them how they will complement each other. That they can do so because that deep respect for one another is there right from the start: we’re the same; we take our moral obligation to ourselves seriously. We don’t betray what we believe in.

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's 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 face on his hand 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 here with me instead of this horrible man. 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.

Scully, we came on this case lookin' for a werewolf, right? No, you did, that's correct.