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randomfoggytiger · 7 months ago

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The Scully Family In-Depth (Part XIII): The Erosion of Scully’s Security, on Tape

Scully’s abduction is split into many mini arcs. Season 2 scratched the surface of her trauma with allusions to her and Mulder’s recovering stability (One Breath, Firewalker, Red Museum, Irresistible, Our Town, Anasazi); Season 3 taps into the loss of Scully’s family and innocence; Season 4 will dig deeper into her denial and loss of faith; Season 5 will twist her burgeoning confidence into a weapon against herself; Fight the Future will find her center; Season 6 will show her determination and growth; and Season 7 will shed the last of her self-consciousness with resolution.

Each of these arcs showcase the impact of the wrongs done to her and the women (and people) by the Consortium, as well as her strength of character, righteous conviction, and unbreakable spirit and will. While Mulder initially crumbles under loss and heartache, Scully battles against it; and, once finally exhausted, leans against her partner for strength to move forward. Both of them fight hard in the coming years; and on the heels of Paper Clip, their reliance on each other is so unbreakable that Mulder and Scully never question their reciprocal loyalty, despite the allure of pretty faces or treachery of madness. The show may hinge on Mulder’s childhood trauma, but it takes equal (if not more) time to explore Scully’s pain and emotional turmoil properly-- which is fair and right.

EVIDENCE OF THINGS ONCE SEEN

Season 3 continues its focus on Scully’s losses, bookending the arc with the Syndicate and their video tapes, ala Nisei and Wetwired.

OH, NISEI CAN YOU SEE IN THE CAR OF 731

Scully and Mulder get in trouble (again) when Mulder’s magazine alien autopsy video tape leads them straight to shifty activity and a suspicious Japanese diplomat. After further (officially discouraged) investigation, Scully stumbles upon a MUFON group where the women claim to know her. Here, the seeds are planted for her cancer arc in Memento Mori, complete with an introduction of Penny Northern.

One of the women asks Scully: “Did you have an unexplained event in your life last year? Were you missing for a period of time that can’t be accounted for?”

This implies that Scully was part of the latest round of abductions; and that no one has been taken since their return last November (post here.)

“You may not remember-- you’ve only had one experience. Most of us here were taken many times.”

“Taken where?” Scully asks.

Their answer-- “The bright, white Place”-- unlocks a flash from her experiments.

At her reaction, another member asserts, “You remember it, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” she responds, shakily.

“There are men there, performing tests,” the member continues.

“What men?”

“They don’t reveal themselves. They take our memories away; but somehow, they start to seep back.”

“Some may have come back to you, but they don’t make sense,” Penny adds; an unintentional foreshadowing to her and Scully’s interactions in Memento Mori.

When asked if she knows about regression hypnosis, Scully looks down, closing her eyes and answering, “Yes.” This is the first of several reminders of Melissa's impact on Scully-- it was Missy, after all, who'd urged her into hypnosis therapy; and Scully who'd bailed from the session right before her sister’s death.

“Have you ever considered it?” the women press; and Scully backs away from the subject as fast as she can, regaining her scientific skepticism in the face of their probing: “I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m ready to discuss this.”

“You’re afraid to remember, aren’t you?” the member from before questions, moving closer to Scully in understanding. “It’s okay. We were all afraid at first.”

Scully takes in the women seated around her-- all different ages and stages of life-- trying to fit herself into a group so disparate yet united under one common tragedy. She doesn’t yet know these women have prepared to fight for their freedom and lives; and will all, in a matter of months, die before her own battle against cancer begins.

“I don’t know: when I opened that door and saw you standing there, it was like a revelation-- the image your face was so clear to me,” the first MUFON women expounds.

The dialogue here is filled with biblical language, likely on purpose: image and revelation hand-in-hand-- a nod, perhaps, to the fated and religious undertones Chris Carter often works into his scripts. Scully and Mulder are often painted with allegorical higher callings and fated purpose, creating a contradiction between the mytharc fate versus stand-alone freewill episodes. Scully, in this case, seems fated to be abducted and returned, to meet these dying women, and to get cancer; but she turns out to be the only one to beat this fate, and survive. This could play into my hypothesis on breaking the soulmate curse inflicted on her, Mulder, and Melissa Rydell in The Field Where I Died, (post here), or fall in line with fate ala the Navajo’s White Buffalo prophecy (post here.) I think that topic requires more in-depth discussion than would fit here; and suggest we press on with Season 3 for now.

“But why is it I don’t remember you?” Scully prods, shaken.

“All you remember in the beginning is the light,” Penny consoles. “And then sometimes the faces of the men that performed the tests.”

This triggers another memory Scully forgot-- the stomach air pump-- and she scrambles for a different explanation other than the simple truth. “How do you know you’re a not mistaking me for somebody else?”

“You have the mark, don’t you?” the other MUFON woman says, drawing Scully’s attention and showing her the recent scar on the back of her neck.

Scully closes her eyes again, fearfully.

The women then show their extracted implants, proving their words as one.

Afraid to believe, Scully tries to flee, (her go-to trauma response, post here): “I have to go. I just came--"

“--to see Betsy,” the women chime in.

“Yes-- to see Besty Hagopian. Why are you all at her house? Where is she?” Scully raises her arms, surprised she hadn’t questioned this fact before.

The MUFON spokeswoman and Penny then take her to Betsy’s oncology treatment center, explaining she is in "the advanced stages of full-body tumors"-- a different type of cancer than Scully had.

“They’d been taking Betsy since she was in her teens,” Penny reveals. “This is what’s going to happen to all of us.”

“What do you mean,” Scully softly questions.

“I don’t know if you understand this or not, Dana,” the spokeswoman spells out, “but we’re all going to end up like Betsy."

“We’re all dying,” Penny confirms, “because of what they do to us.”

It’s especially heartbreaking because this scene confirms two things:

Scully is the only MUFON woman to be abducted once-- confirming that she wasn’t an intended target, only collateral decided upon on Sleepless because her expertise; and only returned alive because of CSM’s intervention. Meaning she, unlike the MUFON women, was intended to die in captivity. It’s a testament to her knowledge and skill that Scully was such a threat to the Consortium so early on: still green; and barely on the field before being yanked off of it.

The MUFON women never realized their chips were the cures to their cancers. Each woman still had their chips intact-- only Scully’s had been damaged due to Pendrell’s tampering-- and could, probably, have had them reinserted. But would they have done so? Would these women have wanted their chips reinserted, allowing nefarious abductive forces to easily find and recapture them for test after test after test? Regardless, they were never given the opportunity to choose.

When Scully reunites with Mulder, she’s both stunned by her experience and stunned that Mulder isn't curious about her discoveries (at first):

“Why is the door locked?"

“I’ve got something to show you.”

“Do you have any idea where I’ve been?”

“Allentown.”

“I went to go see those MUFON members to find out about that woman-- Betsy Hagopian?”

Now intrigued: “What’d you find?”

“I found out that she’s dying.” Scully looks down-- an instinctive response when facing information that is personally implicative, “along with a lot of other women who claim to be dying, too. All of them who say they have these implanted in them,” she adds, handing over one of their chips to Mulder.

When Scully adds, “It’s the same thing that I had removed from my own neck,” Mulder’s head immediately snaps up, worried; and he quickly asks, “But you’re fine, aren’t you, Scully?”

“Am I?” she parries, seeking as much assurance from him as he is from her. “I don’t know, Mulder. They, they said that they know me, that they’ve seen me before.”

It’s a trigger response Scully has when lacking security, latching onto Mulder or “other fathers” or illusory footholds when science offers little clear-cut answers for her-- i.e. Beyond the Sea, Fresh Bones, Never Again, all things, etc. Scully largely expunges all outward traces of this behavior from Season 4 onward, thinking she must become what her mother calls “the strong one” in the face of Mulder’s fragility post Herrenvolk, The Field Where I Died, Paper Hearts, and Memento Mori.

“They know things about me, about my disappearance,” she rambles, watching Mulder scrupulously zero in on the chip in hand.

This interaction also shows a parallel aspect of Mulder’s: when Scully faces a personal crisis-- her panic over glowing bugs, her fears, her cancer, her daughter’s illness-- he puts up a front of strength, grounding her focus with logical, provable facts, even if (and when) he suspects the worst.

“That is disturbing,” he quietly agrees. “But I don’t think you should freak out until we find out what this is.”

Scully is hindered from a clearer admittance when the phone rings; and the conversation takes a turn away from the MUFON trip.

As Mulder fills in Scully on his findings about Dr. Ishimaru’s ghastly experiments, she recognizes one of the men in the faxed photo; but is dissuaded (“I don’t think so, not unless you’ve been in Japan in the last fifty years”-- which she was, in 1966. Post here.) Four of the doctors in the photo were recently murdered; but Scully isn’t yet ready to draw ties between their and the Nazis' experiments to alien-human hybrids; and neither have connected the dots between these inhuman experiments and her recent disappearance.

When she begins to discredit his theory, Mulder cuts in reproachfully-- “Scully, after all you’ve seen”-- before softening-- “after all you’ve told me you’ve seen, tunnel filled with medical files, the beings moving past you, the implant in your neck-- why do you refuse to believe?”

At Mulder’s question, Scully looks down to hide her fear, continuing the pattern of avoidance begun in Beyond the Sea and The Blessing Way. “Believing’s the easy part, Mulder,” she insists. “I just need more than you-- I need proof.” Proof allows her something to cling to when the foundations of her beliefs are shaken. Scully eventually comes to term with that realization, shifting away from strict reliance on proof as learns to trust her instincts (all things.)

“You think that belief is easy?” he retorts, a window into his naturally cynical, pessimistic view of life. That cynicism is eventually addressed in Amor Fati, and fully (or mostly) resolved in Closure.

Scully can’t rebut his statement; and with nothing else to say, she sighs and hangs her head.

“Well, we have proof,” Mulder reassures, switching topics to comfortable ground and revealing his ace: a picture of a secret government train car. When asked where he got it, he discloses “From someone like you who wants proof.” Weighing the cost of his next words, he decides to mildly confront her once more. “Who’s also willing to believe.”

Scully remains silent, both aware she’s not ready to take that next step.

Scully takes the chip to Pendrell, who raves about its sophistication and other scary technological advancements (and coming off a tad creepy.) The full weight of the government using computer chips to possibly monitor their test subjects appalls Scully, spurring her to take a more active role in the current investigation.

Back in the office, she reviews the video Mulder bought, realizing her recollection of Ishimaru stems from her abduction.

After Mulder jumps on the train car, Scully is contacted by a Syndicate shadow man (for the second time) and reiterates the (half) truth sold to her: government experiments, yes; but not alien government experiments. “It all makes sense, Mulder-- Ishimaru Zama, he was using the secret railroad to conduct his tests across the country….”

The conclusion of the Nisei and 731 mini arc is the deepening of Scully’s denial. Without Melissa there to push her, and with Mulder (who is supposed to fill-in for her sister, post here) focused on the bigger mystery, her abduction trauma is shoved aside and minimized.

As we will learn in Piper Maru and Apocrypha, Scully has yet to make peace with her sister’s loss; and those open wounds spur her burning desire for revenge-- becoming more and more apparent the more turmoil is piled on her plate.

STEERING THE SHIP OF MEMORIES

Scully’s childhood is the backbone for these two episodes, from the first conversation with A.D. Skinner to her reminiscence on the base with her father’s friend.

Skinner calls Scully into his office, informing her that the investigation into Melissa Scully’s death has bellied up. Stung and indignant, she confronts the FBI’s obvious oversight and his placatory platitudes.

“It’s strange,” she bites, furious tears in her eyes, “Men can blow up buildings; and they can be nowhere near the crime scene but we can piece together the evidence and convict them beyond a doubt. Our labs here can recreate out of the most microscopic detail the motivation and circumstance to almost any murder-- right down to a killer’s attitude towards his mother and if he was a bedwetter. But in the case of a woman-- my sister-- who was gunned down in cold blood in a well-lit apartment building by a shooter who left the weapon at the crime scene, we can’t even put together enough to keep anybody interested.”

“I don’t think this has anything to do with interest,” Skinner begins.

“If I may say so, Sir,” she cuts in, unwavering, “it has everything to do with interest. Just not yours. And not mine.”

When Mulder asks after Scully’s mood, she deflects his concerns back to their newest case, later impressing him by recognizing a submerged North American P 51 Mustang aircraft. She explains: “It’s the shape of the canopy. I watched my father and brothers build World War II model planes as a kid.”

As we know, little Dana Scully was a tomboy; but it’s interesting to learn which activities she did and didn’t think were worth her time-- the Dana who shot air guns but didn’t play baseball, who memorized plane models but didn’t build them; and who learned Latin in college and always loved The Exorcist.

While pursuing a new lead, Scully momentarily relives a happy memory with her and Melissa playing on a familiar military base sidewalk.

Young Dana is triumphantly swung around by an exuberant young Melissa, both overjoyed by her unbroken hopscotch; and modern Scully’s smile slips back and forth between the somber present and nostalgic past as she slowly drives on.

Meeting up with her father’s old colleague, she introduces herself with a delighted, self-conscious smile. “I’m Dana Scully-- I used to live three doors down. My father was Captain William Scully. I, I went to school with your son.”

The past is a haven for Scully, even now (for now): a place to become at home and centered in. Her father died suddenly, with words unsaid; her sister died tragically, with justice delayed; but still they bring a smile to her face in reminiscence. But more than that, Scully beams with pride at meeting a man so like her father in age and familiarity-- her Starbuck nature bobs to the surface, putting her best foot forward in her efforts to please.

“I’m sorry, my memory isn’t what it used to be,” Commander Johanson says, a mirror of Teena Mulder’s pretend amnesia (post here.) At first, he assumes-- or pretends to assume-- Scully is asking after his son; but when questioned about his past with the Piper Maru, he again pleads forgetfulness.

“Say hello to your father for me,” the Commander suggests as they shake hands goodbye.

“I wish I could,” Scully remarks, her smile dropping a shade and (again) looking down out of discomfort. “He’s passed away.” In response to his “I’m… very sorry,” she gives a tight-lipped smile and walks away without comment-- fleeing the moment (again) as quickly as possible.

An interesting thing happens next: Commander Johanson changes his mind, having his visitor’s car pulled over so he can quietly fill her in on the coverup courtesy of CSM, Bill Mulder, and other Consortium men. Captain Scully’s death hit him hard: it connects him to Scully, the fact that they have both lost a loved one to the dead; and it itches and itches at Johanson, driving him from the house and after his friend’s daughter for atonement and peace.

Scully, when commanded to pull over by Johanson, immediately obeys, surprised but not suspicious. Loyalty to her father and his associates runs deep, even after three years, a murder, and a Conspiracy.

“I can’t give your regards to my son, Scully,” Joe wobbles, addressing her by name not only for the first time but also as an equal. “He was killed in a training accident.”

It’s here that Johanson passes on a statement that rings true as it sinks and settles into Scully’s mind: “We bury our dead alive, don’t we? We hear them everyday-- they talk to us, they haunt us, they beg us for meaning. Conscience. It’s just the voices of the dead, trying to save us....”

He tells her his tragic, paid-off history, concluding with: “Whatever killed them, I was allowed to live: to raise a family, to grow old. None of us ever got an explanation why.”

Skinner is shot and Scully rushes to his side, bouncing from Mulder’s room to his while advocating for his interests. When he admits the shooting might be a coverup to permanently halt Melissa’s murder investigation, Scully flares up: “You’re saying that they closed down my sister’s case not because of lack of evidence but because they didn’t want us to catch the killer.”

In the last twenty-four hours, Scully’s trust in her country’s higher ups has eroded so rapidly she now concludes, rightfully, that Melissa is disposable collateral in their latest coverup.

Ignoring Skinner’s warning, she presses for more details, fuming over Krycek’s involvement.

“Listen to me,” Skinner warns, “anger is not a luxury you can afford right now. If you’re angry, you’re gonna make a mistake-- and these people will take advantage of that. …Scully, if you can’t keep your head, it’s all right to step away.”

“That’s exactly what they want.” Scully’s anger is fueling her thirst for vengeance, driving her to more dangerous potentialities.

After returning on Mulder's hunch, she finds Skinner mid-relocation to another hospital; and quickly hops on the ambulance in time to counteract another attempt, intercepting the gunmen and forcing him to give her answers at gunpoint.

“Are you Luis Cardinale! Are you the man that shot my sister! You shot my sister! TELL ME!” she screams over his pleas, weapon drawn with lethal intent. Her motions are erratic, aggressive, and unhinged, tears building as her voice climbs higher and higher.

Cardinale bargains for his life and Scully wavers, hunched over her prey while an inner voice screams shoot him, shoot him repeatedly in her head. She is so unstable, so unsure, that she looks like her younger, greener self watching the fabric of her world fall apart in Luther Lee Boggs’s cell (post here.) But the cops appear, yelling at them both before she can decide; and, with one final struggle, she lowers the weapon in anguish and retrieves her FBI badge.

Luis is toted away in handcuffs, leaving Scully alone with the equal horror of her loss of control and opportunity.

She calls Mulder, confessing his instincts had been right and relating that they’d caught Melissa’s killer; but immediately cuts off his potential sympathy by turning his attention back to the mission.

In the end, it’s all in vain: Scully and Mulder lose the salvaged UFO and Krycek, nullifying future leads for the case. Grateful to at least have Luis behind bars, she visits Melissa’s grave with flowers, taking a moment to commune in the language of the dead: with her conscience, in silence.

Mulder arrives with a bouquet of his own; and she bites her lip, moved by his gesture and frustrated with her surfacing emotions. Pulling herself together, Scully smoothly stands, accepting his consideration and shoulder touch with a genuine though fleeting smile.

“I was just thinking about what a man said to me. That the… that the dead speak to us from beyond the grave. That that’s what conscience is.”

“It’s interesting. I never thought of it that way,” Mulder considers.

“You know, I thought-- when we found him, this man that killed Melissa-- that, that when we brought him to justice, I would feel kind of closure. But the truth is, no court, no punishment is ever enough,” Scully confesses-- a follow-through to her Paper Clip closing line: “I’ve seen the truth, Mulder. Now what I want are the answers.”

And Scully is denied even that, having to listen to another victim of these men in power admit that justice was derailed, that Luis Cardinale was murdered in his cell before he could face trial. To Mulder, the end of Cardinale’s existence is a form of justice; but to Scully, it is a cruel circumvention of the system she believes in and fights for.

“I think the dead are speaking to us, Mulder. Demanding justice. Maybe that man was right-- maybe we bury the dead alive.”

Mulder considers this, too; and is silent.

In this episode, the darkness infesting Scully’s life stained backwards to her childhood: her brother and father building WWII planes that were sunk by the Consortium, her father’s friend a bought-and-paid-for Syndicate witness, her hopscotching sister murdered by a hired gun. Those incidents may not have directly touched the Scullys’ lives as they were then, but the innocence she was able to escape to is no longer afforded to her without darker shadows crying out from the corners.

HERE BE MONSTERS

Wetwired is the last straw.

During her investigation into malevolent mass hysteria, Scully thoroughly watches each and every infected tape she and Mulder recover from the crime scene. Slowly, it eats away at her security, eroding the last shred of credibility the infested, corrupted system had to offer her: the valor of moral individuals. And the last moral individual she could trust-- the man in the trenches with her, who lost and fought and continues to fight for a brighter day-- was Mulder.

Hallucinating Mulder feeding intel to CSM, she spends the next morning, afternoon, and evening harboring heightening paranoia against her partner; and finally snaps when he ignores her command to stay away, shooting at him through the door of her ruined motel room and running away.

Mulder calls Maggie after the sun is up and the investigation is already in full swing, having probably put it off until the last second in hopes of recovering Scully first. Maggie, still in bed at 6:01 AM, picks up the phone the phone, giving us an opportunity to scope out the family pictures displayed on her bedroom table.

An interesting revelation: Melissa’s photo is placed most prominently, perhaps to honor her death; then Dana’s; then her and a mystery baby… which leaves one of her children off of the table.

My guess? Charlie is missing, as he is likely absent from his mother’s life at this point. If this is true, Maggie seems to use her photos as an indication of her children’s interest in her life, not as a showcase of her favorites.

How can we prove this?

Melissa is dead; but while her eldest daughter was alive, Maggie was constantly rubbed the wrong way by her insistent, unmoderated proclamations at the tensest moments (posts here and here.) Yet, her picture takes center-stage.

Bill Scully is often the Scully child most likely to cater to her whims or speak in a language she understands (to be explored in Seasons 4 and 5.) Yet, his picture is placed at the back. We know he is often at sea during this period, pointing to infrequent contact between himself and his mother; and probably even less contact than that, because he would more likely call his wife Tara instead.

Scully’s picture is of second “importance” on the table, despite Maggie’s reliance on and openness with her daughter (acting as her comforter in the following scene and calling her “the strong one” in Memento Mori.) There is often a loving side she reserves for her baby girl, sensing that Dana needs it more than Bill does, or Melissa did.

Which leaves Charlie. Scully doesn’t mention him after Roland-- except for a slight mention in Piper Maru-- until Home (stating she babysat her nephew for the weekend.) Very little is known about Charlie other than the brief glimpse we see of him in Beyond the Sea (post here) and One Breath (post here); and it’s Maggie’s fond flashback of him we are privy to in the latter episode. So, what’s Charlie’s deal? Is he estranged by his own choice; or does Maggie keep him at arm’s length, only remembering him in childhood when he fit her expectations?

From what we know of Maggie Scully thus far, it seems unlikely she would cut a child off for a personal decision they made-- in fact, her actions prove the opposite (i.e. reconciling Dana to Captain Scully in Beyond the Sea, putting up with Melissa’s New Age speeches, trusting a Navajo medicine man to watch over her dying daughter, and celebrating the anti-Church conceptions of both Bill’s and Dana’s sons.) It seems out-of-character for her to isolate the youngest Scully from her affection, no matter his choices.

Or an alternate theory presents itself: the baby is an old picture of Maggie's only grandson-- the nephew Scully babysits in Home. That would mean only one of the two boys flanking Charlie in Beyond the Sea is biologically his... which makes an interesting other implication about his possibly older wife and her own son. Theories, theories.

“Mrs. Scully? Hi, it’s Fox Mulder.”

Maggie immediately knows something’s wrong, her voice dropping an octave. “What is it, what’s the matter?”

“I was hoping that you’d heard from Dana,” Mulder responds. It would seem Mulder calls Scully “Dana” to Maggie, either for Mrs. Scully's comfort's sake or because he and she communicate so rarely he's yet to fully define his and Scully's partnership.

“No, something happened?”

“I’m not exactly sure there’s… there’s some confusion here.” Mulder hunches slightly, pursing his lips and looking down ashamedly-- a posture he's exhibited on a larger scale to his father (post here.) At Maggie’s “What do you mean ‘missing’?”, he stumbles over his words-- “Well, she ran off last night-- screws up his face, and beats at his thigh, anticipating a disappointed or angry reaction-- “We, we’re looking for her as best we can, but we are a little concerned.”

Skinner arrives, and Mulder knows it’s time to go. “Look, Mrs. Scully, I hate to do this to you, but I’ve got to hang up on you right now.”

“Fox, would you please just tell me what’s going on?” Maggie asks, respect and civility barely keeping her from demanding an immediate reply.

“Hang by the phone, I’ll call you as soon as I know something,” he answers, disconnecting the call immediately after.

It’s only after hours of frantic search and heartache that it dawns on him where Scully might have gone.

Where does Dana Scully run to feel safe whenever her life spirals out of control? Home.

Sure enough, Maggie opens her door strung out: jumpy and tense, unwilling to let Mulder in.

“Is she here?” he asks, hopeful.

“Uh, no,” she refutes.

“You haven’t been answering your phone,” Mulder prods, not unconvinced but still suspicious.

It’s Maggie’s exit-- “Well, I’ll call you when I hear from her, okay?”-- that gives her away, too smooth and too quick to slam the door in his face with a daughter missing for the second time.

“I need to see her,” he insists in desperation; and when she still refuses, Mulder ignores her pleas and barges through, halting only when met with the barrel of Scully’s gun.

Maggie isn’t afraid, only scared for him: getting into his face as he carefully pushes past, then shutting the door behind him to prevent someone else from walking in.

“Dana, put down the gun!” Maggie shouts, only drawing Scully’s attention momentarily from Mulder.

“I’m here to help you, Scully,” Mulder announces quietly.

“I told you, Mom-- he’s here to kill me,” she warns, quivering and shifting her stance for a surer shot.

“I’m on your side, you know that,” he replies.

“Put the gun down, Dana,” Maggie repeats, more calmly.

Scully’s eyes, wide and panicked, lessen only slightly when they glance toward her mother, growing wilder when Mulder tries to advance. She warns him back while cocking the trigger.

Maggie, sensing Dana has reached the end of her rope, backs him up: “Dana, he’s telling you the truth.”

“It’s not the truth, Mom,” Scully wobbles, betrayed. “He’s lied to me from the beginning. He never trusted me” Despite Mulder’s heartfelt, “Scully, you’re the only one I trust,” she rebukes, “You’re in on it. You’re one of them.”

Pausing, she gears up for her most wrenching accusations: “You’re one of the ones that abducted me. You put that thing in my neck! You shot my sister!”

“That’s not true, Dana,” Maggie repeats.

“It is,” Scully insists, voice weakening in heartbreak.

Maggie steps forward in spite of her daughter's escalating cries, beginning her attempts to talk Dana down.

“You trust me, don’t you? You know that I would never hurt you. That I would never let anybody hurt you.”

Scully begins to sweat, wavering between fear for her life and belief in her mother.

“That’s why you came here, isn’t it? You’re safe here. Put the gun down, Dana.”

Scully slowly points it up and away, but doesn't relinquish it even as she collapses, sobbing, in her Maggie's arms.

Later, Mulder joins both happy ladies in recovery, sticking up his arms in comedic effect for their (vague) amusement.

Mrs. Scully, sensing they need space to reestablish their equilibrium, soon after leaves the room.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

And in expected Starbuck fashion, her first response is: “Ashamed.” He waits, letting her fill in the silence at her speed. “I was so sure, Mulder. I saw things, and I heard things. It was just like the world was turned upside down. Everybody was out to get me.”

“Now you know how I feel most of the time,” he jokes-- a balm of understanding.

She smiles, continuing her train of thought with less discouragement. “I thought you were going to kill me.”

“I’m not surprised,” he nods, leaning forward to summarize his theory on paranoid mind control: “...a virtual reality of their own worst nightmares.”

“Like me thinking you were going to kill me.”

The knowledge that any action of his holds that much weight in Scully’s life is a fearful realization in itself; and Mulder tries to ward off the power of it (and the last twenty-four hours) by leaning on his shaking, folded hands.

“I was so far gone, Mulder, I thought that you had gone to the other side.”

Sinking further into his posture, he asks, “What do you mean?”

“That Cancer Man-- the man that smokes all those cigarettes-- I was sure I saw the two of you sitting in your car in the motel parking lot. You were reporting to him. You handed him a video tape.”

And while Mulder runs off to check out that lead, we conclude where we began: the video paus de deux, a rectangular reel that bookends the beginning and end of Scully’s media madness.

CONCLUSION

Scully concludes her erosion arc with Mulder's steadfast loyalty, the one stable variable in her insane, topsy-turvy world. The past may be lost, the present may be shifting, and the future may be uncertain; but Mulder is her assurance.

Season 4 then shifts that upends that assurance by turning dependable into dependent.

Thanks for reading~

Enjoy!

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miyokomadness · 3 months ago

Note

Ok here is my review of Feathers of the Fallen Chapters 1-4. From what I’ve seen thus far your story has me interested and I’ll be sticking around for chapter 5. There is plenty room for improvement if you decide to come back and revise it but we’ll get to that later. Before getting to the feedback I’ll tell you what I liked about it. The setting of the story reminded me of the United States we see in the Wolfenstein series (in the sense of a highly controlled and militarized civilization) and being a fan of the video games this immediately got me invested. The concept of a wing virus is an idea I’ve never heard before. There’s a mysterious aura around it as we don’t yet know how it spreads or how it emerged in the first place and I would encourage you to continue to build on this mystery throughout the story. Secondly it doubles as irony to a Christian nation as the infected refer to themselves as angels and yet they are hunted. As a Christian I’d love to see you build upon this idea. A first person narrator is an interesting choice for telling this story. Taking into account the initial brutal setting and receiving her wings I’m wondering how and when the mc is sitting down to write this story. The foreshadowing you give in the beginning of chapter 1 offers possibilities to such a thought but no certainties and I applaud you for that! Finally, I can see that you potentially sprinkled aspects of yourself and personal life onto Seraphine. Not much more for me to add on it, I just like when writers do that.

Feedback

A quick disclaimer before reading my feedback. I would encourage you to continue writing the story and its entirety before acting upon any of this. It’s good to get it all on paper. The advice and recommendations I’m sharing is, as stated, improvements for the editing and revision phase. Also I’m no published author, I’m just someone who’s been writing for a long time and knows a thing or two. Everything I’m giving you is my personal thoughts, do what you will with them.

The overarching gripe I had while reading your story is that it moves far too fast. In the 1st chapter we are given an exposition about the current state of the world, we are introduced to Seraphine, her family, the wing virus, and that they’re infected. In the 2nd chapter Seraphine gets her wings, we are introduced to an entirely new cast of characters and the idea of leaving already pops up. In chapter 3 Seraphine does leave her home, we get a lengthy backstory exposition from her and the group finds the angel hideout. Finally, chapter 4 is actually very well paced, good job here.

I feel what happened (PLEASE CORRECT ME IM WRONG) in chapters 1 through 3 is a classic case of excitement. You were excited to write a certain section so you speed your way to that section. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, I’m guilty of doing the same thing. However, this story telling, speaking from the perspective of one of your readers does come across as rushed and half baked. Again you may be fully aware of this but another option never hurts. Solutions to fix this are as follows, I’ll be going chapter by chapter…

The main piece of advice I present to you in chapter 1 is SHOW don’t TELL. For example the exposition you give on how the untied states got to where it is now…“8 and a half months ago, the US. government had fallen so low into debts, military shortages, and apparently “things us children shouldn’t be concerned with.” During that time, a government rose, claiming the entire United States in a matter of weeks. Nobody was there to stop them. We didn’t have the resources or anything to battle them with”…all of this is tell and you want to avoid it as much as possible because it kills imagination. Put simply you did all the thinking for me leaving me with nothing to speculate or question because you gave me all the answers…boring. I want you to try this instead and you’re gonna have to put on your acting hat. Put yourself in the mc’s shoes and live out the first day of chapter 1 moment by moment, action by action, and emotion by emotion. Then describe what the mc sees on paper. The journey she has from her house to school is potential world building. What kind of cars are there? Are there military grade vehicles patrolling the street? Are there billboards anywhere? If there are what do they say? These small details mean everything over the course of an entire story. You can also use the classroom for world building. Instead of telling us what the world is like via narration have the teacher TEACH the reader what the world is like. Another thought to ponder is, if the narrator is writing this story within their world. Wouldn’t it be fair for her to assume that the reader already knows some of the history? Additionally I encourage that you don’t share everything. You could just have the teacher teach us a one sided history lesson. Leaving out details such as how this new government treats different ethnicities and identity. Branding it as the perfect nation, where Seraphine’s everyday life begs otherwise (all of this is just an example). In a nutshell, not everything has to make sense in the first few chapters. That’s what the rest of the book is for. You leave the reader with questions so they have a reason to turn the page.

The things that happen in chapter 2 I personally think should not happen in the second chapter. I would recommend at least 1 maybe 2 more chapters dedicated to developing the mc and her parents as well as other people in her life before the wings emerge from her back. By doing this you would make the decision of leaving more difficult for the mc and more impactful on the reader. Essentially I don’t care about any of these people because I’m not given enough time to connect with them. Here are some things you could possible include in an extra chapter…

- running errands with Papa and Dad (further seeing how they interact with one another)

- Flat bike tire (slashed as an act of bullying?) how will dad or papa react?

- Another school day (more time to spend with Gregory and Mae maybe?)

Continuing on the discussion of chapter 2 the image of the wings bursting out of her back is gnarly, credit where it is due. I would have liked to see scenes dedicated towards what Seraphine’s life was like hiding the wings at home. Secondly I’d like to call out a continuity error mentioned in chapter 2. Maddie says and I quote “There’s been chatter of a complex in northern Maine for Angelicals to reside safely.” Is the government hunting these things or not? If this chatter traveled from northern Maine to Portland, Oregon (I’m assuming) I highly doubt it’s safe now so why travel? I’m not saying get rid of it but have Sera ask this question because it’s a plot hole. The solution could simply be Maddie responding with something along the lines of “we still have better odds if we leave”

Apologies if I seem like I’m skimming through this now, my brain is starting to shut down but I promised myself I’d get this to you tonight lol. Secondly I also apologize if my words from this point on are more harsh…I’m just tired. I know you said chapter 3 was your favorite so forgive me when I say that it was my least favorite of the 4. My first reason for this is that everything was far too easy. For a nation actively hunting for Angels and trying to prevent the spread of the infection, just getting onto that train should have been a living nightmare. I refuse to believe that 4 kids with baggy oversized sweaters got onto a train, and successfully rode it from Portland, Oregon ALL the way to northern Maine without anyone battling an eye. Forgive my language, it’s bullshit. There is no tension in a scene that has the perfect circumstance to put me on the edge of my seat. I strongly recommend that you make this journey the most terrifying and tense thing these characters have ever experienced. The second reason for my opinion is the fnaf section. I have no issue with the mere inclusion of it…I fucking love fnaf. By all means write whatever you want, that’s the beauty of writing. I will warn you though that the downside is you won’t be able to publish this as book because it contains copyrighted characters. Unless…you as the legend himself for permission ([email protected]) good luck. The main gripe I had with this section is that it too was incredibly rushed and just all over the place. There was so much information in such a short amount of time that I can’t really form a confident opinion on Seraphine’s backstory because I have no idea what is happening. I’ll likely re-read it and send you a follow up message.

Alright, I’d like to close out with saying once again that I did genuinely enjoy reading your story and I am invested. Despite all the negative Nancie’s, I’m giving you my unfiltered opinion because I care about this story…if my 3-4 paragraphs of text didn’t make it obvious. If there is any confusion within this review or any extra questions you have or if you ever want a secondary opinion please don’t be afraid to ask. Happy writing and thank you for the story! I’m going to bed.

Ahhhh thank you so much for this feedback! I will admit, I do have trouble with pacing things, and I always feel like I move things a bit too fast. This was the absolute best feedback I could have ever gotten! Thank you so much!

I do plan on someday trying to publish this story, and what I will do to fix the issues is that I will change up characters names, appearences, a bit of their personalities, and the setting where Seraphine and Mae grew up to better fit the trackline.

Also, I do thank you for the chapter 3 feedback! I feel it was my favorite because of the backstory sequence, and I feel I can strengthen it by loosening it. I do heavily appreciate your opinion though, it's very needed! I do think that chapter 5 will have to be reworked with this feedback in mind, which will delay it a bit, and I thank you so much because this will make my story stronger and will make everything so much easier to read for people!

I am going into the wilderness for about two weeks, so this will give me lots of time to edit and add a few more chapters and put your advice into play.

Again, thank you SO MUCH this is the absolute best feedback and most in depth reading of the story I have ever gotten. I feel nothing bad towards you feedback, just places you have targeted as my weak points and that if I improve on them, it will make my stories easier to read for people.

I'm going to bed as well, goodnight!

#ao3 writer #fanfic #writer stuff #fnaf sb #fnaf security breach #fnaf #fnaf gregory #fnaf au #creative writing #ao3 fanfic #answered asks #ask me anything #ask me stuff #ask box #this was so in depth i was so giddy reading this

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