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Add in a slice of pie and this is golden

The X Files + Twin Peaks is canon

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Could not pass this up, my two favorite shows, an amazing episode and a fantastic print!

Patrons have ONE MORE DAY to get in on my January Patreon reward: An exclusive print celebrating “The Springfield Files”, the X-Files / Simpsons crossover episode that aired 28 years ago this week.

More details at: https://www.patreon.com/posts/119107372?utm_campaign=postshare_creator

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Dr. Robby, say it again louder for the people in the back.

Noah Wyle as Dr Michael Robinavitch in The Pitt 01x01 7:00 AM

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I generally don’t enjoy watching medical shows anymore because, after being in the business, the inaccuracies drive me bonkers. But I had several friends recommend The Pitt to me, including a few fellow MD friends, so I was intrigued. Being a big fan of ER back in the day, I was also pleasantly surprised to learn that some of folks involved in that show were behind The Pitt, including Dr. Carter himself - Noah Wyle! I watched the first two episodes on Max, and wow, I was impressed. The clinical stuff was quite well done, not too many quibbles with the medicine. The portrayals of the different medical staff was very believable, the characters all felt like people I’ve met in my career, and they also did a fantastic job bringing in ethnical dilemmas, difficult conversations, and office politics, while highlighting the crazy state of medicine in the US. I am looking forward to seeing the rest of this series as it releases weekly on Max.

And yes there’s and X-Files connection too! Fiona Dourif, daughter of Brad Dourif (Luther Lee Boggs in “Beyond the Sea”) stars as one of the docs!

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Yes, and honestly it’s one of the greatest things about diving deep into a fandom

Reblog if you've made at least one friend because of a fandom.

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sorry but what is THE podcast?

Gillian Anderson was on David Duchovny’s podcast “Fail Better” so much of the fandom has been abuzz about it. (In my opinion it’s a great podcast overall, but the episode with GA was extra special for XF fans).

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I recently finished the series (again) and have thoughts, especially pertaining to the revival.

I also have lots of thoughts about THE podcast.

But none of these is coherent enough for a post yet. In the meantime enjoy some textposts. It often feels like the medium was made for Mulder!

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Oh I love this so much!

teaching myself how to draw by obsessively drawing xfiles/calvin and hobbes fanart as a way to cope and distract from The Horrors™️

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HBD Mulder! Happy 1013 to all Philes!

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Brilliant piece. I should probably watch another show….

happy 31st birthday to the x files! I put 31 references to various episodes in here, if you can find them all I'm afraid there's no hope for you. watch another show. (just kidding i know there's no escape)

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I finally was able to visit the incredible X-Files Preservation Collection in Saratoga Springs, NY. Jim, the proprietor, personally showed me around and I had such a great time talking about all things XF with him. A true fan and all around nice guy. What an awesome tribute he’s assembled to my favorite show. Any X-Phile should visit in person or virtually, it is a real treat! Here are just a few highlights of what you’ll see.

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TXF text post time again! Well, I for one am glad that Mulder did finally become Scully's pizza man!

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Thank you @sagan-starstuff for this in depth review of the ridiculous medical training of Special Agent Medical Doctor Dana Scully! I concur with it all, unless Scully was a child progidy there is no way the timing works out for her medical training. Even that would’ve only helped her prior to any medical training (skipping grades perhaps or breezing through college in fewer years). At best med school could get shortened by one year - but not typically the case for people pursuing non-primary care specialties. There’s no way any of the post-graduate medical training would have been shortened. I’m an anesthesiologist of the same medical training era of @sagan-starstuff so a bit more contemporary than Scully’s time, but medical training changes at glacial speeds, so even a modern analysis is very applicable.

I could write tomes longer than Harrison’s, Miller, and Barash put together outlining the many, many medical inaccuracies in the show. I’m sure a medical advisor could have easily fixed many of them. But the X-Files is a show I forgive for all that. Maybe it’s because I fell in love with the show well before I ever went into medicine. But really it’s because the show is so much more than that. Its merits are in storytelling, character building, and, at the heart of it all, relationships.

Happy 31st Anniversary my dear show!

XF Meta: Scully's Medical Training Timeline

At the request of @randomfoggytiger, I wanted to do my damnedest to make Scully's education and training timeline make even a little sense. I'm a physician (specifically a specialist in adult infectious diseases), and it's fairly clear to me that CC and Co probably didn't actually talk to any doctors about how medical training works. Love my girl - I'm a Scully Effect kid, I don't think I'd be a doctor at all if it weren't for the inspiration of Dana Scully. But her timeline is...iffy at best.

Disclaimer: My medical school and post-med school training occurred from 2009-2018, Scully's occurred in the 1980's-90's. From what I can tell, the durations of many residencies and fellowships don't seem to have changed much, but I can't say that for certainty for all programs at all institutions. I am also from the US, so I cannot speak to medical training in other countries.

Our girl was born in 1964, and so unless she skipped a grade (which some schools would do if students were classified as "gifted" or otherwise exceptional, she would have graduated from high school at age 18 in 1982 and went straight to college. Let's assume she didn't skip a grade, for the sake of argument.

You have to have a Bachelor's degree to apply to medical school. These degrees typically take 4 years, though if someone arrives at college with credits from dual-enrollment high school classes or AP exam credits OR if they take summer classes some people can complete them in 3 years. I don't know what the availability of dual enrollment or AP classes was like in the early 80's (and like CC, I'm too lazy to do the research to find out), so we can assume that Scully graduated from college in 1986.

Medical school is 4 years long - no shortening this at that point in time, and even now in almost all cases. So that puts medical school graduation in 1990 IF she's following a traditional timeline and went straight from college to medical school.

Now, if someone is going to go into practice they have to do a residency in at least one of a variety of specialties (Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Surgery, etc.) in order to be board certified and practice independently. There are very, very few job options in clinical medicine if you DON'T do a residency, so if you want to practice, you have to do it. Residencies can be anywhere from 3-5 years, depending on the specialty. You can also further subspecialize after a residency by doing one or more fellowships (typically 1-3 years depending on the fellowship) before sitting for your board certification exams and starting independent practice. For example - after medical school I did a 3-year residency in adult internal medicine, then a 2 year fellowship in adult infectious diseases to be eligible to sit for the boards and enter my specialty, so 5 years further training after medical school before I could get a job, get board certified, and practice.

Scully is a forensic pathologist. She would have had to do a 3 or 4 year pathology residency (both were options at the time) followed by a 1 year forensic pathology fellowship. You CANNOT perform autopsies right out of medical school, if you are going to be a forensic pathologist you HAVE to do this training. So, following a traditional timeline this puts her as having completed forensic pathology training in 1994 or 1995. Pilot starts March 7th, 1992, so this is loooooong after she's canonically already an FBI agent and teaching at the academy.

But our girl's a smart cookie, so let's take a little leeway with her timeline. Let's say she skipped a grade some time in K-12. This puts high school graduation in 1981. Let's say she ALSO graduates with a bunch of AP credit and does summer semesters and finishes her undergraduate degree in Physics in 3 years. This puts her as starting medical school in 1984, with graduation in 1988. She'd still need to do that pathology residency and forensic pathology fellowship - let's assume a 3 year residency, then 1 year fellowship, so she'd finish training in 1992.

Still doesn't fit.

Let's go totally off the rails here - we know Scully was recruited out of medical school to the FBI, so she didn't do a traditional residency at all - UNLESS the FBI has an internal forensic pathology residency. It would HAVE to be accelerated in some way - some programs combine residency and fellowship by giving less elective time and more focus to the fellowship content. It's not common but they exist. Let's say in theory the FBI has an accelerated forensic pathology residency that takes 3 years, in addition to the 20 weeks of the FBI academy training. This has her finishing residency AND FBI academy training some time in 1991.

This is the ONLY way she could have finished forensic pathology training AND the FBI academy with enough time to be a fully certified forensic pathologist and FBI agent with some time left to teach at the FBI academy before being assigned to the X-Files on March 7th, 1992.

I can suspend my disbelief enough to be on board with this. You'd have to be pretty damned special, which we know she is, to get recruited out of medical school by the FBI. Maybe they even developed the accelerated combined residency/fellowship just for her! She's Dana Katherine Motherf***ing Scully, people!

Now, IWTB is where things get REALLY unbelievable. (Disclaimer: I have not watched IWTB since seeing it in theaters in 2008. I'll get around to rewatching it someday soon. Probably with a bottle of wine. Not a glass. A bottle.)

Mulder and Scully go on the run in 2002. We don't know how long they were in the wind, but by 2008, she's been allowed to resume a career and is practicing at Our Lady of Sorrows. Clearly in pediatrics - but general pediatricians sure as hell don't do stem cell transplants, so she'd almost certainly have to be a pediatric oncologist. We aren't told what her specialty is specifically, but that's what she'd have to be to do a stem cell transplant.

(That scene in the OR isn't even what stem cell transplants LOOK LIKE but that's a rant for another day, back to my point.)

MEDICAL BOARDS DON'T JUST LET YOU CHANGE YOUR SPECIALTY FOR FUNSIES.

(Deep breaths. Serenity now. Ok, let's do this.)

Scully would have had to do an ENTIRELY NEW residency AND fellowship in order to practice as a pediatric oncologist. Pediatrics residency is 3 years long. Pediatric Hematology/Oncology fellowship is 3 years long. In order for this to be even remotely possible, she would have had to START residency in 2002 to finish fellowship by 2008 and start her job at Our Lady of Sorrows.

And she's a former FBI agent harboring a known felon, on the run from government officials and alien hybrids who want her and Mulder dead.

There is absolutely no way even the smallest, most hard-up pediatric residency program is going to accept her with that hanging over her head. I'm not going to get into all the details of how rigorous and stressful the post-medical school residency application and match process is, but even if she didn't apply until she KNEW it was safe to come out from underground, she'd still have to explain a multi-year gap in her resume/CV to the program directors. Multi-year gaps in career and training without a reasonable explanation like a medical issue, time off to care for an ailing family member, time off for research, time away in a different, legitimate career are NOT looked on kindly when applying for residency positions. She would have a HELL of a time getting into a totally different residency.

It could happen - if anyone could do it, she could. But there's absolutely no way there's enough time for her to complete that training by 2008.

"But sagan-starstuff, it's CC, it's X-Files, we know there was no show bible and no one but the fans gave a shit about continuity or things making sense, there's no logic just vibes"

I KNOW, OK. I KNOW. And I love this insane, beautiful masterpiece anyway. I love exploring the possibilities of how and when it all could have happened with my fellow insane Philes who work so hard to glean meaning and order from this perfect mess of a show.

But couldn't CC have talked to one (1) doctor about what medical training is like at some point between 1993 and 2018? Just one?

Anyway. Yeah. That's my meta. Scully's training timeline makes no goddamned sense. Compels me, though.

@randomfoggytiger, this is for you. Honorable mention to @precedex-files who I ranted about this with in messages a while back.

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Thinking about the brain disease Mulder hid from Scully before he was abducted at the end of s7. I don’t think he would ever hide something like that from Scully, his personal doctor. It seems way out of character. And it’s bugged me for nearly 30 years now. But suppose he found out he was dying during the IVF arc, knowing that none of the attempts had taken and how sad and upset that was making Scully. He didn’t want to detract from what she was going through or add more sorrow to her life. Lord knows he feels guilty enough as is. And that’s why he chose to hide it. Suppose he agreed to be the baby daddy, not just because Scully is his best friend and his family, his one in five billion, constant and touchstone, but also because he knew he was sick and potentially dying. Maybe he thought that if he could help her achieve her deepest dream of motherhood, then she would forgive him for leaving her side, that it might lessen the blow to lose him. Especially if that baby was also his. Excuse me while I go fend off these onion cutting ninjas who have come after me.

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Some text posts I've been sitting on, they always entertain me

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^This is the truth that is out there

the thing about mulder and scully is that if you watch the x files, you WILL love them forever. there's no other way.

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I feel like I want to explain to young tumblr users who weren't born yet that MulderxScully was a revolutionary ship. No, it was not queer but that is not the only way to be revolutionary.

In the 90s when The X Files was airing, media was like misogyny soup. Yes, there were exceptions. But casual sexism was so ubiquitous it was like we were all frogs simmering in it and if you dared to say, hey, uh, isn't this joke a little shitty to the wife? Or maybe this female character could do something other than pose and ask questions so the male lead can answer them? Then you were a hairy feminist outcast loser.

Scully was a lot of things but she was not that. All the "You're not going to believe this, Scully!" memes are based on the fact that Mulder, an attractive white dude, wanted nothing more in his entire life than to share his passions with this tiny redhead. Was he nuts? Yes. But on many other shows, he would have talked down to her, would've ignored her, would've mocked her. He didn't.

When you go back and watch The X Files, there's these moments where Mulder and Scully look at each other like, "wait did Jack Black really just say that" and the significance to fan history isn't just the sexual tension. It's that, yeah, and the origin of the word ship, and the 'will-they-won't-they'. But the most important thing about those looks is how they told the audience that Mulder was looking to Scully for something. A man was looking at a woman and asking with his eyes "what do you think about this?" Was he also saying "and do you want to bone about it?" Yeah, yeah he was. But the first thing was sexy as hell.

Respecting a woman's expertise and folding information she provided into his worldview was a revolutionary thing for a man to do on television at the time. Thank you for coming to my MSR ted talk.