David Duchovny recounts a misinterpretation of CC's writing:
Forever, uh, doing The X-Files, I would read Chris Carter's dialogue; and, um, he used a lot of ellipses: dot, dot, dot. And, uh, I would think, "Oh, it must be a, uh, y'know, something I'm not saying. Something the character Mulder is not saying." And so, I would think about what I'm not saying. And I would, y'know-- if I wasn't too overwhelmed in the moment-- bring that into the performance. Or, or, the intimation of the line.
Anyway ... when we were doing the reboot-- six or seven years ago, or whatever it was-- there was one of these dot dots, dot. And I didn't know... I didn't know what might have not been said. And so, I called Chris.
"Where's he [Mulder] going with this? Where's he not going with this? What's he not saying here?"
And [Carter says], "No, no, that's just 'no widows, no orphans.'"
And I go, "What? What are you talking about?"
And he's like, "No, I don't allow any widows or orphans in my writing; so, I always use ellipses or em dashes to make it a perfect square or rectangle."
And I said, "You mean, I've been working with you for ten years trying to fill in those ellipses; and it's just because you don't like the way it looks on a page?"
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I used to be an online fan on X-Files Usenet in the 1990s, back when there were still vocal noromos everywhere. This might be a hard thing for more recent fans to picture, but people genuinely debated whether (1) there was onscreen evidence for a ship at all (I know); and (2) whether it was a good idea for the show to go that direction. There were also always people taking more nuanced positions (like they shipped M&S but only for the very end of the show, or whatever).
Below, a 90s website (the "Institution for Relationshippers") gives advice on how to handle online attacks from anti-shippers, by which they mean people opposed to the Mulder-Scully ship.
Just in case anyone is new to the fandom and somehow doesn’t know this, this is, of course, where the terms “ship / shipper / shipping” originally came from. It was shorthand used in these early online X-Files debates that then jumped into other fandoms and eventually into mass usage.
Back then—at least in the later 90s when I first entered the conversation—a common anti-shipper argument was that shippers weren't really interested in sci-fi or plot or good writing; they just wanted substance-less, frothy, feel-good entertainment.
I think one thing fans in the thick of it didn't point out enough then (and maybe even now) was that this was often a gendered debate. Although I don't really claim to be an expert, I think this kind of gendered debate is still very much a Thing in other fandoms today (the Star Wars fandom comes to mind).
By "gendered debate" -- in case anyone is unclear -- I don't mean that everyone arguing one position is one gender and everyone arguing the other position is another. This was never the case and never that straightforward. But I do think more shippers tended to identify as women and girls, and more noromos / anti-shippers tended to identify as men and boys. Even more crucially, I think the ways shippers were denigrated often relied upon ideas that media aimed at women and girls was de facto silly, and media aimed at men and boys was more important and substantive.
Note: the below images come from posts on X-Files Usenet— a discussion board with the catchy name of alt.tv.x-files—which was a major fandom spot in the 90s. It looks like email because it was text-based, and also because it is now archived at Google Groups. I think alt.tv.x-files tended to skew more college student / academics / IT types because that is who had easiest access to Usenet in the 90s. There were other popular X-Files discussion sites (e.g. on AmericaOnline / “AOL”) that maybe skewed younger, as the Millennials were still youngsters at home dialing up with AOL on their parents’ computers. But I didn't know very much about those, and alt.tv.x-files is really well archived.
In those days I was a young woman, a people pleaser, and unfortunately not informed by the better sensibilities of today. I fear I often let people make me feel silly and frivolous, embarrassed that I actually wanted them to get together. I did consider myself a sci-fi/fantasy fan and someone who tried to be a serious, critical consumer of media, so I could be convinced that my shipping somehow made me lesser. I think this is an idea that online fandom since has sort of soundly refuted, but it was out there. (It's still out there.)
One of my lingering resentments of CC is that he played into this, and could talk about the "internet fans" and "shippers" in gendered ways. In one interview, he said directly about fans, "[t]here are these 'relationshippers' who kind of dominate the online chats. I’m a little dismayed because I don’t want to do a show about fuzzy warm Mulder and Scully. Never."
Elsewhere, he claimed: "As soon as you have them looking googly-eyed at each other, they’re not going to want to go out and chase these aliens. The relationship will supplant or subvert what’s going to make the show great, which is the pursuit of these cases." In an interview about the cancer arc in 1998, he maintained didn't write "gooily," allowing the characters to fall into one another's arms when they suffered. And tellingly, in 2000 he mentioned that people in the audience "are prone to want things that aren’t necessarily good for them."
The words Carter chooses to describe writing about an onscreen romantic relationship -- "fuzzy," "warm," "googly-eyed," "gooily" -- not only suggest a certain preconception of what a male-female relationship on TV will look like, but also, I would say, paint fan interest in a relationship as soft and unserious. He also clearly thinks it would change the show's genre, working to entirely displace the agents solving cases.
The concern that a relationship would cause the show to morph into a female-oriented genre made its way into the show's writing. In the script to Rain King, after Scully's "flicked switch" speech, the directions say: "This isn't the sort of thing we hear Scully articulate very often, so to remind us that we're watching 'The X-Files' and not a chick flick on Lifetime... [we see the sinks start to overflow]."
The "Mad About You" reference in season 8 to me always seemed like a direct reference to the writers' fear of the show becoming a light relationship comedy, too.
I would argue there is some irony to the anti-shipper argument that the show not be a soap opera. While trying to avoid a canonical ship while still perpetually teasing one, CC became rather addicted to using soap tropes (love triangles, who's-the-daddy, coming back from the dead).
And it wasn't until later that I really understood how inane this idea was at the core -- that you had to choose between being a sci-fi/fantasy fan and being interested in seeing romance/relationships. That it would have been impossible to have maintained a show about agents solving cases and resolved the ship onscreen. Of course there's nothing inherently frivolous or un-serious about being interested in love or relationships or sex as a subject matter; great literature has been written on the subject. It would hardly have cheapened the show to have addressed it, and while it was CC's decision to make, it was wrong to suggest that people who were more personally invested in the show's main ship than in the plot intricacies of alien bounty hunters were somehow intellectually lacking.
Whatever else the show was about, it certainly was about the relationship between Mulder and Scully. If many fans were interested in seeing shades and hues of that relationship, in seeing it unfold and develop, it wasn't something coming out of left field. It was baked into the entire premise from the Pilot on. People who watched the show from the beginning identified the possibility of a "romantic angle" instantly. Like, right away. (See a 1993 review of the Pilot in the San Francisco Examiner below.)
And I know some people argue CC always intended for MSR to happen, for Mulder and Scully to be a romantic ship, despite his many 90s (and more recent) denials of this intention. That what he said doesn't always match what he did in his storytelling. @Randomfoggytiger has argued rather convincingly that part of this is that he just literally does not use the word "platonic" the way most of us do; he means they might have attractions but are not acting on them. These kinds of explanations frankly just make his attitude towards fans asking about it even more galling.
To take this discussion into further speculation that takes me to the margins of my knowledge and is going to involve comparisons to other shows: my darling child is very opinionated on media (she and I are kind of a lot together) and has participated in the Sherlock, Supernatural and 911 fandoms to some extent. Thus the word “queerbaiting” comes up a lot in her vocabulary, meaning when a creator deliberately teases a queer ship to keep hardcore fans invested, but then doesn’t follow through. Sherlock and Supernatural are famous for queerbaiting, and 911 might be in the process of doing it (signs uncertain).
I mean, Supernatural did really do some wild shit (see below). If you never watched the show and weren't on Tumblr at that time, I'm sure you've still seen the meme. But it was some truly outrageous queerbaiting.
The “baiting” that happened with MSR and the X-Files was different, obviously; it makes a difference that it was a het ship, and the ship did become canon, albeit with frustrating ambiguity. (Actually, truth be told, there was mild queerbaiting on TXF. For example, the creators were amused by fans shipping Mulder/Krycek, and the result?)
But what TXF, Supernatural, Sherlock, and probably 911 have in common is that there is an inherent tension between pleasing fans who are eager to see the ship and fans who aren’t—fans who might even be outright offended if there were a m/m ship among leads on their genre show, or (in TXF’s case) even a romance at all. For all of these shows, they definitely wanted to keep the passionate shippers on the hook and watching breathlessly, but they also were worried about alienating those who didn’t want to think of it as that kind of show.
This is not only gendered, but comes back to money—especially because in the 90s, TXF for sure was judged “successful” not exactly because its overall ratings were so strong, but because it appealed particularly to the younger male demographic considered especially valuable by advertisers. I suspect this is also the case with Supernatural. (I know less about the money workings of British TV and Sherlock, and less about 911's world, the more complicated 2020s American TV business. Although I will say that 911 is kind of an old-fashioned network show.) But in the days of the original run of The X-Files it was certainly the truth: even if passionate online fans might be female, the fans that were always going to count with advertisers were male.
I remember reading the "spooky awards" winners back in the day. I don't think I ever voted. But I've revisited some lately thanks to @cecilysass including them in rec lists, and it's nostalgic fun.
Is there any current iteration of this? I'm reading so much good, new shit lately and it made me think- "damn this should be acknowledged".
On the other hand, awards are weird bc tastes vary greatly. I really value the model of learning about stuff via the folx posting them here, connoisseurs and the curation pros, along with random A03 searches.
Sooo idk. But please fill me in if I'm just ignorant to any kind of "best of the year" or awards for our fandom, and please share your opinion on doing so- I'd be curious!
I think my X-Files mutuals must have missed but I wrote a tiny little X-Files meta post yesterday in response to a post about Mulder's neglected fatherhood. Yes, X-Files meta in 2025 :)
So I'm including it here, just in case:
There are very few aspects of the original run of The X-Files that still, even in 2025, make me angrily roll my eyes and warn anyone nearby not to get me started like the the issue of Mulder and Scully’s parenthood storyline. In my opinion, it all goes back to the fact that Chris Carter rejected, and even seemed to resent, being 'forced' into making Mulder and Scully having a romantic and sexual relationship canon, and thus was determined to destroy its progeny from the very start. By doing so, he was robbing both Scully but more viciously Mulder, the experience of parenthood.
Because of that resistance, the show handled their romantic and sexual relationship massively poorly, revealing their relationship only retrospectively, in “Requiem” and confirming it with a bungling plot in “Per Manum”. Remember how their coming together is described? Scully inviting Mulder to her bed one lonely night. As though they didn't have a seven year relationship/partnership before that one, lonely night.
How odd.
I’ve long believed that Chris Carter developed a kind of Madonna/Whore complex with Scully, his own creation, essentially sanctifying her. He did something similar with Mulder in Season 7 by equating him with Christ but Scully suffered longer under his fixation with portraying her as a modern Mary figure. The sanctification in her story is almost literal: she experiences not one but two immaculate, e.g sexless, pregnancies—first Emily, then William.
William’s birth is framed with overt biblical imagery: Scully gives birth in a barn, bearing a “chosen” child, while Mulder follows a guiding light to find her. The Lone Gunmen arriving with gifts complete the metaphor.
I mean, come on.
How and why was all of that necessary? By that point, the show’s mythology was already convoluted and collapsing under its own weight. Why burden it further with this pseudo-religious narrative about a baby who, by all evidence, was wanted and planned?
We know Mulder donated sperm for Scully’s IVF attempts and they obviously were both devastated when they thought there was no more hope for a baby. We know they had a sexual relationship by Requiem. They stayed in contact through emails while he was in hiding, and Mulder’s absence was framed as an act of protection for Scully and the child. Mulder was even ready to ease up on their work in Requiem, encouraging Scully to slow down. Given their relationship at that point, it’s not a stretch to imagine they were considering a future together as a couple beyond The X-Files.
William was a wanted child by both Scully AND Mulder, in the sense that both parents had wished for him, and protected him.
You could play devil’s advocate and say the male-dominated writing room didn’t know what to do with a baby. Mulder, after all, was the loner, spooky weirdo who would never 'grow up' into a family man. Fatherhood didn’t fit neatly into that mold, especially with David Duchovny’s limited presence in Seasons 8–9. Maybe, in their minds, the writers used his absence to justify distance between Mulder and the baby.
I'd accept that, if it wasn't for the fact that in MSIII, which I watched once and will not, never ever, watch again, we realize that in Chris Carter's brilliant big picture plan, Mulder WASN'T William's father.
I don't think they COULD HAVE written and accepted Mulder's journey into fatherhood even if they WANTED TO, and clearly THEY DIDN'T WANT TO.
(Which is a shame, because they could have done so many wonderful things with father Mulder, given his difficult relationship with his own father. He could have had a real tikkun with that child, if only it was just a normal child).
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On Season 7's Closure and the shittening of the mytharc.
My problem with the parts where TXF starts to go bad is that I just want to understand. Just want to figure out why I feel so let down, what mechanism in the writing, in the planning, makes that happen?
'What was CC thinking?' is harder, and I suppose I could make a joke about 'lol what plan?'
I bet the fandom has come up with better answers than I could, about how the Samantha arc could have been ended better. But I think for me what made me hate Closure as a teenager when it first aired, and what makes me hate it now is it feels half-arsed. It feels like someone who had homework stayed up the night before and thought 'I dunno starlight? is that anything?'
but honestly, the wandering souls thing and Samantha being starlight isn't necessarily bad. Mulder and Scully staring at the stars at the end, with Mulder aching and wondering how many of them were souls has something powerful lurking beneath it all. A better execution could have sold me.
It feels like an afterthought though, this Samantha tying up. There it is, plonked in the middle of the season. 'Better get this over with I guess.' it seems to say 'and onto better things'. And maybe most attempts at tying this story up would feel hollow. Feel like 'not enough', because Samantha is more an idea than a person. She is a light Mulder is searching for in the sky. She is an idealised lost child, seen through the prism of Mulder's memories. She isn't a real character. And somehow, all the clones, all the attempts to insert her and then reveal her as maybe fake didn't give her flesh, it just made her into a wall of mirrors. Put a pin in it until later.
Well it's later now. And what's your plan?
I keep thinking of what Severance did for Gemma Scout. How they made this idealised lost person into something flesh and blood in season 2. and what that could teach us in regards to other shows with similar character questions. This is going to be a spoiler for that, (but it's been months, and this shit is everywhere).
Gemma is given a point of view. She is given an episode where she becomes a real person, with wants and needs, and flaws. She is shown as living in real time, and the problem of her imprisonment is given new urgency.
I feel like the only way Samantha would have been satisfying is if they let her live, and made her a real person with a pov. But then, that's not something that fits within the rules of the X-Files procedural structure, and CC's then-desire to continue it indefinitely. Paraphrasing something David once said, just the same status quo forever, with no progress or change allowed. Or as Scully has said, an endless line. To tie it up satisfyingly, he would have had to break his formula. he would have had to plan an ending, a good one. To kill the thing he had put so much into.
It's why fic has managed to do this kind of thing so well. because fic isn't beholden to this need to keep the franchise alive. Fic is happy to break the thing, and scramble everything together into basically anything. Have Mulder and Scully fall in love in a thousand different ways along the canon timeline. To try and fix plot holes. To try and make sense of the lack of emotional continuity, with all the motws and mytharcs, all those different tones and different writers and 'how are they even emotionally ok after all that?'
Fic doesn't have to worry about season renewals and major motion picture aspirations. And that's how you occasionally get things that are truly phenomenal, free from all the worst parts of the show.
The fact is, the show continued on for so much longer than Closure. And committed many more crimes. But this is the point that it betrayed something at its emotional heart in a way you couldn't take back. This is Samantha, Mulder's great quest. And it ends with what feels like a shrug.
Okay, this moment right here? this is her ‘I love you’. Two episodes ago he confessed his love for her, doped to all high hell on painkillers, and she knows - deep down she knows - that he loves her. And that she loves him. He nearly kissed her in his corridor, and he confessed his love to her. And she...isn’t ready. This is her saying ‘I love you’ without having to be ready. They can brush it off as just a funny comment, but she’s about to lose him and she has to tell him somehow, so she makes a joke and under that joke they both know what she means.
This is a photo of my laptop screen. It feels oddly appropriate that Conventional Methods won't allow me to take a fucking screencap of this 30-year-old show to make a stupid tumblr post about it, but those are the times we live in, corporate overreach, erosion of data privacy, technological advances being cynically co-opted by those with selfish interests, etc.
Anyway. It seems insane to me that I have never done a deliberate rewatch of the entirety of XF from start to finish. Ironically one reason I was dragging my feet on this was I'm so sick of the pilot. And yet, I enjoyed the effort to watch it with fresh eyes, imagining I was some regular jabroni just coming across this while flipping channels in 1993. It is interesting to me that it's the procedural-ness that sucks you in, the ordinariness of the world, the deliberate banality of the setting into which extraordinary things are methodically introduced, and you (and Scully) are asked: well? How do you reconcile this? How do you explain it?
Scully starts on this ground level, and Mulder meets her there. She's braced for this legendary basement kook and ready to parry a barrage of propaganda and dig in about how aliens aren't real, but he's got a chemical formula up on a screen and he's like: so what is this? Well, it was found on all the bodies. He lures her in not by telling her a bunch of crazy stories (ok, he does a bit of that too) but by presenting her with facts and asking her to explain them. He shoves her along a few times (if it's not human, what is it?), but it really struck me on this viewing how she's the one trying to get him to tell her what he thinks, whereas he is determined to let her foot her way along the path to get there on her own, without being influenced (or vexed into kneejerk opposition) by his "theories." Scully doesn't get drawn in because she wants to prove Mulder wrong, OR right. It's sort of beautiful that once she's got the scent, it's not about Mulder at all, though he is certainly right there with her, as both a guide and an antagonist. Scully's drawn in by her own investigative instincts and her own determination that, you know, the answers are there. You just have to know where to look.
And then when they're making headway and their motel gets burned down with all the evidence inside it, Mulder doesn't have to rant paranoiacally that someone's working against them; Scully's right there fighting it with him and seeing what he's seeing. And by the time Blevins is scornfully hairsplitting her findings to make Mulder look bad, their alliance is cemented, because they've done it together, she's been in his shoes and in his head with him, on the trail, and the trail led somewhere pretty weird, and she doesn't know all the way what to make of that yet but, one thing is certain: they've got him all wrong, this Spooky Mulder.
I would like to watch a TV show of that. And so, I shall. (Again)
