greycoupon

[greycoupon]

In what context does Emily come up? How does Scully feel about her now?

Scully thinks of Emily "She was mine and not mine, known and not known."

2. Mulder thinks over every bad thing that happened to Scully as a result of working on the X-Files including "a dying little girl named Emily, connected by DNA and by something more besides, an inexplicable vein of feeling that had brought them together against all odds."

3. M/S are having an intense discussion and Scully is listing the things that have been done to her including Emily.

4. Scully is deliberately thinking of very emotional things and remembers Emily lying dying in her hospital bed.

[greycoupon]

[greycoupon]

Just finished The X-Files: Perihelion by Claudia Gray

The post season 11 X-Files novel comes out July 30th. I will have a complete review in a few days but here are my initial thoughts. This takes places a few weeks after MSIV and Mulder and Scully are very traumatized.

Mulder is also frustrated in general. Can't really blame him.

Other notes:

LGTBQIA characters! Casey, a non-binary nurse is a real stand out.

Scully has a female friend. Skinner is in a coma. Melissa flashbacks and Scully thinks of her multiple times. Monica Reyes doesn't exist. Mulder and Scully go through it. Scully investigates her pregnancy. People can teleport & conduct electricity. New A.D. and Mulder gets a quirky new source. It's a good read even if parts of the mythology are kind of out there. I read the entire book in the last 20 hrs.

Claudia Gray is a true fan and gets the characters in a way no other tie-in author has. She gets their trauma and pain and the fact that Scully's bodily autonomy has been violated over and over. The book constantly references the past and includes references to Pendrell, Duane Barry, Pusher, FTF, Emily... You spend a good bit of time inside Mulder and Scully's heads and see their scars.

Claudia started out as a fanfic writer in this fandom back in the 90's and her love for these characters and this universe comes through.

If you want to send me questions, I will answer them as best I can.

[greycoupon]

my dash is broken

I keep seeing the same 7 posts over and over no matter how much I scroll. They are lovely posts but I would like a little more variety. Does any version of XKit or something like it work at this point?

[greycoupon]

I hope everyone who was so ready to praise Macklemore for creating Hinds Hall are also pushing him to cancel his show in UAE for their funding of the ongoing genocide in Sudan and normalization of relations with Israel.

[greycoupon]

Howdy

I keep forgetting my login. My pronouns are They/Them. I'm incredibly tired. I'm glad I'm not working in politics at the moment because everyone is a gigantic disappointment. and I'm not real happy with Gillian either. Silence in the face of genocide says a hell of a lot. Please don't tell me Peter is Jewish. I'M JEWISH. It's not a get out of genocide free card.

I feel like I am complicit at my job because of who our customers are and I'm not sleeping well. No one work with will say a word. I feel like I should be doing more. I want a job that makes the world better and I'm realizing just working for a non-profit isn't doing it for me. But the odds of finding a job with a pro-Palestine org aren't very high. I'm just very tired.

[greycoupon]

Gentrified food snacks

[greycoupon]

Sex Education actors in the Barbie Movie. Emma Mackey, Ncuti Gatwa and Connor Swindells.

[greycoupon]

Margot Robbie in Barbie (2023)

[greycoupon]

oh to a fly on the wall at the fbi watercooler after the word got around that special agent spooky fox mulder literally rose from the dead after being (allegedly) abducted by aliens like "yeah i heard they dug him up and he was still alive" "no fucking way man, he was buried for THREE MONTHS. there's no way he'd still be alive. i think he faked the whole thing" "no, i SWEAR i saw the coffin and everything" and then tim from payroll pops in like "do you think mrs. spooky did some kind of necromancy to bring him back? i mean, i'm sure she's learned a lot about that kind of stuff being around him all these years" then someone else nods and goes "it makes sense, i'd be pissed too if some guy knocked me up and then went and got his ass abducted by aliens--" "i thought it wasn't confirmed that it was his baby?" "oh come on brenda open your fucking eyes" and i'm there holding my little paper cup of water just living for this drama

[greycoupon]

but pls explain me season 6 🤪 (i would love to hear ur reading of mulder in s6)

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.

All of that is so much better than whatever the show is trying to do with Diana. She’s not written well enough to explain why Mulder is so loyal to her (but is written just badly enough to justify Scully’s animosity lol). The X-Files doesn’t care about Diana as a person or even about her relationship with Mulder and how it affects him; it’s not like being burned by Diana brings up Mulder’s trust issues later in the season. They just wanted Scully to be jealous. It’s the weakest trope in a very tropey season; they threw in a love triangle and then immediately stopped caring about it, and not in a funny “no one else stands a chance” kind of way, although obviously yeah, no one else stands a chance.

But Diana isn’t the point. Even if she were better written she wouldn’t be Mulder and Scully’s biggest problem, because all of the interesting episodes of the season are about how Mulder and Scully are their own biggest problem. Diana just weaponizes those insecurities. Like, yes “you’re making this personal” is so rude it’s comical and Mulder is a jerk to Scully about Diana and Diana is a snob, and you can see all of that contributing to why Mulder and Scully are on edge with each other in the first half of the season. But it’s not like either one of them actually thinks Diana might be better for Mulder than Scully is. They’re just afraid they’ll let her stand in their way.

If I wanted to really give the Diana arc the benefit of the doubt, it would go like this: Diana is a catalyst for Scully to realize how much she wants to feel wanted. Mulder takes Scully for granted, and I’m usually kind of charmed by that (I know) because he trusts her so much. He’s so comfortable with her (@wtfmulder has written about this). But when Diana shows up and he starts siding with Diana over Scully, it hurts, especially because he never gives her a good reason. Really I think he’s just loyal and handling it badly. He sides with Diana because that’s the relationship he thinks needs defending right now. We talk a lot about the power imbalance in Scully’s previous relationships, but from the way Mulder behaves around his old girlfriends it seems like he’s been overpowered just as much. This is the first equal relationship for both of them.

It’s just wild that they put themselves through so much because it’s so simple. Of course Mulder loves Scully. He tells her so. But I think Dana “oh brother” Scully is right that he’s not ready to do anything about it, because if he were he’d be making her feel desired. He can say “I love you” on painkillers, but he can’t even ask her to dance in Kroner. He makes bad jokes to deflect (hence all of Arcadia). He’s just as overwhelmed as Scully is by the weight of what they are. I think in early season 6 they both still need the song and dance that gives them plausible deniability: him stealing her car keys and her insisting that she really should be getting home. And if Mulder has a hard time earnestly pursuing her, I think Scully also has a harder time than she’d admit letting herself be pursued. They’ve been kicked off the X-files. In a way just spending time together is so much more intentional than it used to be. Everything means more.

I don’t think they start to get their act together until Milagro, when Scully lets go of her desire to be pursued. The show’s method is bad—Dana Scully is never allowed to learn a lesson until her body is put in danger—but I think David Duchovny mostly saved it by making sure Mulder learns something too. Even if he had no idea what would happen right before The Unnatural, the way the episodes fall is perfect. Mulder finally figures out that Scully wants him to want to spend time with her outside work. It only took six full years. 

And then because they are very zero to sixty I think there’s a good chance they start doing IVF, like, right after that. Love that journey for them. If they started IVF before Mulder read Scully’s mind, he must have been insufferably needy. Maybe that’s why they’re so short with each other in Field Trip; they’re trying to make a baby and they need supernatural intervention to process it. It takes a literal religious revelation to convince Mulder and Scully it’s okay to hook up.

[greycoupon]

[greycoupon]

sir please thats my emotional support song that i first heard on a 8tracks playlist in 2014

[greycoupon]

THE X-FILES Episode 1.05 "The Jersey Devil".

[greycoupon]

Hannah Waddington back for Sex Education S4

From her August 8th, 2023 LA Times interview.  Thanks to Alleya ( @agentdkscullyy ) for the heads up.

Hannah plays Sofia Marchetti, Jackson’s mom, for anyone who doesn’t know.  I’m guessing Sharon Duncan-Brewster who plays Roz, Jackson’s mom Roz, will be back as well.

Neither of the IMDB profiles have been updated for the new season,

[greycoupon]

I’m not going back out there. I don’t trust myself.

[greycoupon]

Not sure how I’d make this into a poll, but I wanted to throw the question to the fandom: 

Why do you think Mulder trusted Scully so deeply from the get go and claims her almost immediately as his touchstone?

I mean, he does trust easy. But he has had so many other people he could have invested that trust in and he does seem to be willing blind himself to others’ faults and see them as he wants to see them, but there is just something about Scully that he just goes, “She’s the one! I pick her! I don’t need anyone else!”

He always calls her first, always bugs her if one of them is on vacation, always looks to her for a reaction, always looks out for her. 

She is a skeptic, sent to spy on and needle at him, but he just trusts her absolutely from their first meeting without hazing her or testing her at all. He isn’t even hesitant to trust her after everything Diana and Phoebe and probably countless others have put him through. Why is that do you think?

Maybe he does that with everyone until they give him a reason not to but as I’m rewatching the series with Mr. Welsh, Scully just seems to be everything to him from the get go. He is super possessive of her in the first season and, even when trapped in his worst moments of fear and distrust (which is always center on her lying to him), he will instantly settle when she reassures him that she is on his side. 

It’s just so fascinating to me and I am curious what y’all think. 

Why was Mulder so drawn to trust Scully so deeply from the moment they met?