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randomfoggytiger · 1 month ago

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The Scully Family In-Depth (Part XXIV): Guardian Angels and Inverted Nativities

I was struck with the overt nativity symbolism while combing through this two-parter-- not as a direct religious comparison (a mother to an impossible child), but as a poignant antithesis to Scully, Mulder, and Emily's story.

(**Note**: A deep dive into the Scully family spanning A Christmas Carol and Emily can be found in this post here.)

EMILY, SCULLY, MULDER: A DISASTER IN THREES

When we first glimpse Emily, she is cradled in her father’s arms, silent and expressionless in the wake of her mother’s death. She locks eyes with Scully and refuses to look away, following her movements in that room, during Scully’s second visit, during the arrest of Mr. Sim, after the social worker van drives away, and in her hospital room: an intense, though bland, fixation. Emily, it seems, was beckoning Scully to her; and was perfectly content to be in her company while chaos was erupting around her. Although part of this has to do with Chris Carter’s characterization in A Christmas Carol-- which Spotnitz, Gilligan, and Shiban tone down in Emily-- the germ of that idea remains: in short, Emily quite blatantly chose Scully-- whether because she was obeying a supernatural or biological or other more normal and sacred impulse.

This is important because of two reasons:

That inclination sends her biological mother into a spiral of questions and doubts, which culminated in a fight for custody and willingness to leave the FBI to raise Emily. If she had not fought to adopt her, Scully wouldn't have been able to keep her safe during Emily’s final hours on Earth.

That inclination creates friction between Scully's intentions and Mulder's subdued resistance.

To set the scene: Scully has been avoiding the temptation to call her partner up to ask for help-- in fact, she bailed on the only phone call to his apartment and worked around him to get answers (Mulder’s friend Danny at the FBI-- not TLG, not Mulder himself.) On the one hand, we know she is conflicted and struggling with her infertility; but the struggle is greater-- much greater-- than she is letting on. As discussed in the previous part, she nearly breaks down in tears trying to convince the social worker to advocate for her: “--” Scully either found out she was infertile during her cancer treatments (but didn’t have the time or energy to abstract that fact into her reality) or she found out afterward (either before or after Mulder dodged-- intentionally or not-- her cheese platter in Detour.) And yet, she has not shared this burden with her partner nor (until Maggie applied a little pressure) with her family.

If this be the case, of course she would avoid Mulder’s calls: her sister’s voice eerily over the phone? A niece, she presumes, who is involved in a cover-up conspiracy? Everything would point, in Mulder’s mind, back to the Conspiracy; and Scully isn’t allowing herself to entertain that notion. But now, against her first inclination, she is left no choice but to call Mulder: Emily is her daughter, and that means she is a part of the Conspiracy with a capital ‘c’. “Well, how did she come into this world?” Scully asks when Mulder arrives; and avoids a direct response when he replies, “Have you asked yourself that?” Because no, she hasn’t-- hasn’t wanted to.

And that’s the (not-so-subtle) subtext: everything, to Mulder, is the key to everything, to his quest for the truth. And where does that leave her, newly recovered and ready to let her walls down? She tried to change but he hadn’t: he’s still the same Mulder running after mothmen and trying to find answers about his sister. It’s the endless line again, it’s Never Again again, it’s a preemptive taste of a weekend tossed aside for crop circles.

The next big question is: where does this begin and end for Mulder?

Over the course of ten days (according to this timeline), Mulder receives two phone calls: one Scully drops and another where she asks him down to be a character witness. But that, of course is not the full picture: his partner asks him down to be a character witness to adopt her daughter whose parents have been murdered and whose case she has been investigating without asking for Mulder's help. In short, he feels purposefully excluded and reduced to the boxes of "partner" and "character witness."

Mulder seemed secure in his brief appearance in A Christmas Carol: Scully was out of town, but she’d be back; and he’d get up to shenanigans in the meantime.

Mulder shifted to being insecure, withdrawn, and downright fearful in Emily: not only had he, in his eyes, already lost his partner right from under his nose, but he might alienate her further because of the information he’d kept from her-- the fact he’d known about her infertility as far back as her early cancer diagnosis.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Scully is calling him in as a character witness to win the adoption rights for her daughter; and all the facts he has to give are deemed unworthy of a normal court’s time.

Lastly, he knows-- he just knows-- that something is off with Emily. If she is a product of Scully’s ova, there is no way on Earth that the Syndicate hasn’t tampered with her DNA. The clones he met in Memento Mori who called her and other MUFON abductees “our mothers” prove that to be the case.

And he knows that Scully either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know this.

To Mulder, this spells disaster: Scully dropping out of the FBI and leaving him behind to raise a child that is most certainly half-human, half other. What is even more disastrous is that he doesn’t know how to react or respond to this situation: does he council her against the adoption? He can’t in good conscience. Does he support her decision to adopt, which would mean he supports her transfer from the X-Files department? Does he warn her of the consequences and dangers of trying to raise Emily? Yes. But does that change Scully’s mind? No. His hands are tied.

And how do his concerns and his fears factor into this dynamic? In short, how could a miraculous conception-- quote on quote-- spell disaster and doom for him, Scully, and Emily?

MULDER ARRIVES

Emily opens on Mulder’s arrival at the children’s foster care center, a lone figure asking directions to where his partner and her daughter are. And that loneliness continues when he finds them: Mulder hangs back, observing Scully’s happiness and Emily’s complacency with dread. Already, Mulder is placed as an outsider-- more precisely, he is placing himself as an outsider by hanging back.

Why is he hanging back? Why, specifically, is he hanging back from Scully and her daughter instead of embracing this?

Simply put, we know Mulder is bracing for disaster. And we also know that he is in no place in his life to make space for a family, to “settle down, have something approaching a normal life” (as Scully says a year or so later.) Put these two factors together, mix them up with a child he suspects is the half-human result of his partner’s abduction, and Mulder has already set up sky-high brigades to protect himself.

This is not new for him, either: after her remission, Mulder put barriers back in place between himself and Scully; and when she tried to explore their boundaries, poke them or topple them with a cheese platter in Detour, he purposefully muted his awareness and ran after monsters. And his decided, purposed avoidance of settling down or having a family or-- in short-- leaving the quest was a decision he’d made before Scully came into his life (one he stated decisively to her in The Jersey King.) It’s not until The Unnatural that Mulder realizes he can have both, that his goals won’t suffer by living just a little normally, enjoying life just a little bit. (And afterward, Scully approaches him for the IVF, post here.)

Combine all of that together, and it explains why he nearly sags when seeing Scully smiling eagerly at her daughter-- a child, he tells her, that was never meant to be: his guard is up, and he's keeping a distance between himself and little Sim (and warning his partner to do the same) despite his kindness and gentleness, despite chasing leads and yelling threats to save her life. In short, he’s saving this girl for Scully, not himself. And because he loves Scully, truly loves her, he's willing enough to lose her for a child that was not meant to be.

But Mulder is Mulder, and his partner and her daughter are Scullys: he puts on a brave face when Scully looks up at him from the floor, walks over, and tries to strike up a friendship with Emily. He then proves he’s a natural with kids, particularly shy ones: he asks what Emily what she’s coloring, waits for her answer, and makes an exaggerated Mr. Potato Head face to lower her guard. It cheers her up instantly, and makes Scully smile as well.

Another warning sign lights up for him right after: he notices Scully's cross around Emily's neck. His partner is already attached.

But what a conflicting brew of emotions that would be. He wore that cross during her abduction, while her ova were taken and her daughter-- who is now wearing it-- was created. It's a passing of the baton Maggie did for him in Ascension, one that must have stung a little for her as Scully distanced from her mother to draw closer to the work (and Mulder.) But Mulder is given no choice or prior warning (like the keychain in Alone): it's happened; and that connection between them has been made significant another, different way... for someone else.

When Scully insists, “I can protect her, too,” he persists: “And who’s going to protect you?” Despite his reasoning-- that both the Sims are dead to protect the Syndicate’s interests-- Scully replies, “I know. I-I’ve considered that. But I’ve also considered that there’s only one right thing to do.” Mulder doesn’t seem to agree: silently here, publicly in the judge’s chambers; but he supports her decision both times (just as he supports her decision to let Emily die.)

“Why didn’t you call me sooner,” he asks, the same edge in his interrogation in Elegy.

“Because I couldn’t believe it,” she answers, the same response as Elegy.

Predictably, he is annoyed, irritated: he feels the step backward in their dynamic. When Scully states she called him to be a witness on her behalf, he (quietly) snaps, “And I should have declined.” Off her hurt expression, he softens and clarifies, “If I never want to see you hurt or harmed in any way.”

Branching off of this conversation, the judge’s chambers reveal a deeply rooted psychological insight into Mulder’s character. He lays out the facts as he knows them-- the dangers and unanswered questions-- but states, in closing, “The fact that she can adopt this child-- her own flesh and blood-- is something I don’t feel I have the right to question and I don’t believe anybody has the right to stand in the way of.” ‘Her own flesh and blood’ and ‘the right to question’/‘right to stand in the way of’ are specifically coded in the language of Fate.

The irony, or serendipity, or fate, really-- and this two-parter is dripping in Fate, be it because of Emily’s miraculous birth or Melissa’s miraculous guidance or the lingering vestiges of Scully’s partner and late sister’s belief in Fate-- of Mulder being completely correct (that Scully will get hurt) and of Scully being completely correct (in the face of her family’s disbelief and her own desire to stay at the FBI) is beautifully tragic; and horribly marred by the Consortium's last spiteful maneuver (a coffin full of sand.) “No matter how much you love this little girl, she was a miracle that was never meant to be, Scully”-- that is the theme of A Christmas Carol and Emily.

It’s not the first time Mulder has alluded to the concept of fate or its working in his and Scully’s life-- in fact, Mulder builds the identity of his quest on top of that concept of Fate (post here.) He lost his sister because of fate; but his fated, mythical quest will bring her back. His father played with the hand of fate and lost. The Consortium choose to tamper with Fate, taking it into their own hands; and Scully was taken and Emily born because of it. But it was Fate to bring mother and daughter back together; and he doesn’t see it as his right to step in the way of or prevent that fate.

By contrast, Scully’s own beliefs are in direct opposition to Fate: she argues Mulder out of his own biases and beliefs, calls into questions the lies he chooses to believe in (or tells himself), and points out that she chooses to stay by his side, that she chooses to be his partner. “I wouldn’t put myself on the line for anybody but you” is a choice she made as far back as Season 1; and the FBI a choice she made farther back than even that.

Emily is a wedge of in both systems: she was not fated to be, according to Mulder; but she is there and must be protected, leaving Scully no choice. The Consortium played with Fate, making themselves god, and created a life that had no purpose other than to die; and the Consortium ripped away Scully’s one choice by robbing her of the peace of burying her own daughter.

(As an aside: this is why I’m so invested in Scully’s pregnancy in Requiem-Existence: William’s conception and birth was not an act of fate, but an act of freewill and choice. Scully chose to stay with Mulder in all things; and he was conceived that night-- according to Frank Spotnitz, post here. Season 8 played with the confusion of “Is this fate?” from all parties; and all parties were proven incorrect. Mulder and Scully’s baby wasn’t what anyone were predicting-- not some special, magical, or given-by-God-to-save-the-world figure. He was simply, and beautifully, normal. “But that doesn’t make him any less of a miracle, does it?” Mulder asks; and Scully agrees. He’s their miracle that they conceived and worked hard for and angsted over during the long, hard months that Fate tried to rip them apart forever. Free will, then, wins.)

After advocating for Emily’s adoption, Mulder waits for Scully on the Scully family couch, attention caught by the Nativity scene-- the same one that caught her attention in the previous episode (post here.) He fiddles with one of the wisemen-- again, breaking that direct comparison between his own ties to this story-- until his partner approaches; then he turns the figurine around and sits back as she approaches.

As touched on previously, the religious imagery filtering throughout these episodes-- the Nativity scene, Mulder pondering Joseph’s figurine, Scully's face fading out to the Virgin Mary's stained glass image-- serves to invert and pervert the Nativity story. More often than not, this episode is read through a ham-fisted, morally superior, distasteful parallel between Mary the Mother of Jesus and Scully’s surprise motherhood. The reality is, the narrative points of the Biblical story do not at all align with Scully or Mulder or Emily’s journey-- in fact, the latter three serve as its antithesis.

Mulder is not only a man who feels excluded from this miracle but also one who chooses to avoid becoming a father figure.

Scully is an expectant mother not through divine blessing for her strength of character but because of ruthless, corrupted, and inhumane interference.

And Emily is a child who doesn’t see Scully as her mother, who staunchly holds her separate from her own beloved Mommy (“Mommy said no more tests.”)

The writers themselves said they weren’t trying to set Scully up as the Virgin Mary incarnate, either (post here)-- the parallel was simply a Christmas one-- and I believe them. Because they wrote the true parallel between Tara and the Nativity, showing the display first by her side in A Christmas Carol. From then on, Scully and Mulder separately gazed or pondered or played with the Nativity as an unreachable, almost inconceivable notion-- because it is, for them. (For now, anyway, if you cosign canon after Je Souhaite.)

“It takes two of us to get my sister-in-law in bed these days,” she says, explaining her length of absence and attempting to lighten the mood.

Sincerely, Mulder asks, “When is she due?”

“Two weeks ago.”

(Which means-- if the math maths correctly-- that the Scully family expected baby Matthew before Christmas; and since he hasn’t arrived, Maggie and Scully might have then expected to stay longer and help Tara and Bill transition into parenthood. Or maybe Maggie intended to stay and Scully to fly back. In any case, her almost panicky reaction to the baby kicking (mentioned in a previous post here makes more sense in context.)

When the phone rings, Scully is almost afraid to answer it (sitting on the couch a few seconds longer than necessary as Mulder stares at her.) This time there is no voice, no “go to her Dana”, which would probably be more unsettling than her sister’s instructions, at this point.

Emily Sim, they find, is deteriorating (Mulder, in fact, finds the green cyst on her neck); and both scoop her up and rush her to the hospital. It’s bad news after bad news (as he predicted.)

“Now, are you two the parents?” asks the doctor.

Scully looks from him to Mulder, eyes troubled and almost pleading. When her partner notices, he tilts his head away, sags, and withdraws: this is her child, and her call. For Scully, this signals that he is not ready to commit further-- won't, in effect, join her in these new responsibilities; and feels the rejection like a blow. Although Mulder didn’t mean to reject her-- he thinks that she’s leaving the work (and him) to be a parent, something he can’t do; and now feels outside the circle of her decisions-- his meaning is clear. From now on, Scully feels she must battle for Emily’s life on her own, reliving the struggle and isolation of her diagnosis and treatment in Scanlon’s office.

“How did you know?” Scully questions Mulder after Emily’s blood has incapacitated a doctor. He continues dancing the thin line between keeping information from her and telling her just enough, and the little he gives his partner weakens her resolve and sends her into a mild panic: “She’s just a little girl. You say that I can’t protect her, but I can’t let this be her life. Just a few days ago she was fine.”

“She was also being treated,” he points out; and Scully’s eyes widen, more proof she is so rushed that she hasn’t considered this circumstance-- her daughter, the adoption, the Conspiracy-- from all angles.

As Emily’s condition worsens, Scully keeps watch, knowing she has no real authority to save her daughter but hold onto what little foothold she has. The little girl, however, begins to resist: “Mommy said no more tests.” Again, an inverse of the Christmas story: a child drawing away from its biological mother.

Stung by the reality of their situation, she doesn’t deny Emily's statement, carefully deflecting, “We just want you to get better. That’s what these tests are about.” And with each test and each procedure, she has to endure worse and worse news: a tumorous infection, the doctor proclaims; a possible revocation of rights, the social worker warns. After storming against Emily’s possible removal, Scully relents to a quiet, “What do you want me to tell them you’re doing for her?” Pausing, she admits, “I don’t know yet. But I will”: active choice, Freewill, beginning to assert itself. During her daughter’s last round of tests, Scully gently talks her through the procedure. It seems to work, at first, before Emily starts screaming; and she rushes to try to both help and calm her down.

The last glimpse we have of the two together is of Emily near tears and Scully unable to soothe her completely.

And where is Mulder while all this is going down? Hunting down and assaulting men that won't “Help that little girl!”, causing havoc and mayhem and disruption… and finding yet another Scully baby submerged, alive, in green goo (post here.) But he does not save this baby or any other baby there-- knows he cannot, now, with so much at stake-- but instead grabs a cure for Emily; and flees.

Mulder is committed to protecting the innocent; and, though he fears how this will play out, he is willing to stand by Emily’s hospital bed (and Emily’s coffin)-- there for his partner, and for her daughter, as much as he can. It might not be in ways Scully needs from him, but it's the best he can do.

Unfortunately, Emily Sim slips into a coma before the cure can arrive.

Scully is staring at her body, watching her breathe up and down, when Mulder rejoins. She is gutted, but accepting, knowing without having to ask what he’s thinking: “I’m okay, Mulder.”

As they stand there together, she shares her resolution: “It’s what’s meant to be,” she says. Paths and purposes, saving a girl to deliver her up to death, guiding her from life into her sister’s arms in the afterlife. She was meant for the FBI, and Emily was meant for her for a short time; but both weren’t, ultimately, meant for each other.

“But if you could treat her--” Mulder begins; and is shocked by her conviction.

“I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t do it to her.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mulder, whoever brought this child into this world didn’t intend to love her.”

Surprised at her stability-- and trusting to it-- he carefully admits, “I think she was… she was born to serve an agenda.” His way of having her back, of saying “I would do the same thing.”

“I have a chance to stop that.” Face crumbling, she mourns, “You were right: this child was not meant to be.”

Looking from Emily to his partner, he assures, “I’ll stay with you”; but Scully, still remembering his gun-shy distance, feels she must grieve this loss alone-- a loss she knows he sympathizes with, but hasn’t internalized for himself. And, despite Mulder’s growth since the early days of their partnership (post here), she is right.

“I think I’d like to be alone,” she requests, casting her watery eyes up for understanding. And as rejected and dejected as he feels, he understands.

Mulder retreats without telling her about the cure, sparing her the moral quandary of second guesses-- knowing his partner well enough to know she would doubt herself and revive Emily, only to watch her die a second time.

Alone, Scully climbs into Emily’s bed, cuddling up against her daughter. The scene transitions to a stained-glass window of the Virgin Mary-- another mother doomed to lose her child to the cruelty of others; one with, however, a happier ending-- as the girl quietly passes away.

Alone, Scully sits in the church, withdrawn. But alone no longer: Mulder wanders in, last but not least; and surprises (and amuses) his partner with flowers he'd bought for Emily, determined to do this right. He may be a man who doesn’t see the value in convention, who remembers birthdays in dog years, and who kisses hands one day and runs off to the woods the next; but he is also a considerate soul who understands these conventions are meaningful for other people-- for his partner, most of all.

“Who are the men who would create a life whose only hope was to die?” Scully questions, seeking the truth from the only one who will give her that truth.

“I don’t know.” Seeing the pain in her face, he reassures, “But that you found her… and you had a chance to love her…. Maybe she was meant for that, too.” Melissa would certainly agree.

“She found me,” Scully replies; and, again, this draws me back to my earlier theory on Emily’s psychic prescience (post here): in each dream, Emily made herself known; in each run-in, Emily sought her out with her eyes; at each step of the way, Emily looked up to her like a guardian angel-- her rescuer. And, in turn, Emily rescues Scully, as well (All Souls.)

There is no evidence of Calderon’s work, Mulder explains; and Scully quickly realizes, “There is evidence.” Walking up to the coffin, she stands before Mulder’s bouquet, shooting him a shaky last side glance before raising the lid; he, in turn, pivots away, unable to stomach what he suspects she will find.

And there is nothing but sand; nothing but second guesses. Scully concludes, as the episode’s opener, “It begins where it ends, in nothingness. A nightmare born from deepest fears, coming to me unguarded, whispering images unlocked from time and distance. A soul unbound, touched by others but never held. A course charted by some unseen hand. The journey ahead promising no more than my past reflected back upon me-- until at last I reach the end. Facing a truth I can no longer deny: alone, as ever.”

Season 5 was, as I’ve previously discussed, a rough season for Mulder (post here), but the loneliness and guilt and indecision that molds to Scully will not be torn from her until All Souls, and then only under more painful, more disharmonious circumstances.

ALL SOULS AND ALL THINGS

All Souls begins and ends with Scully’s confession, the doubts kicked up from A Christmas Carol-Emily doubled and tripled in the two-fold issue of religious uncertainty and biased doubt from her partner.

This episode, for Scully, does not end kindly: she must make peace with Emily’s loss, and let her go; and she must begin a serious battle with her own abilities-- is she helping anyone? Can she help anyone? Emily died, Mulder’s struggling, her resolve is cracking. Soon The Pine Bluff Variant will play on that distance, and Diana Fowley will swoop in to exploit it. Soon the office will burn; and, in spite of all her efforts, Scully will feel like she failed herself, her partner, and their work. Soon, she will embrace him as he stands in transfixed horror, unable to reciprocate back.

All Souls is set up to break and subvert the patterns the previous two-parter set up, just as that two-parter set up just to subvert the Nativity scene: Scully calls Mulder for help from the get-go, but he dodges her call; Mulder sneers at rather than investigates other possibilities; and Mulder comforts her about seeing Emily in a vision but believes she is allowing herself to be compromised on a case. At least in Emily, Mulder knew the answers (or suspected them), and advocated for her exactly how and when she needed him to. What she recounted, he confirmed; what she guessed, he affirmed; what she grieved, he comforted with larger concepts like Fate. But here, Mulder is detached-- religion and its religious superstitions and beliefs are such an ugly concept to him that he gave no credence to Scully’s visions and tried to talk her down from her intuition instead of supporting her in crisis. Mulder is proving, again and again, that he has not changed from the ditch in Detour-- and, moreover, that he can’t: this year, he’s just trying to keep his head above water. Like I’ve mentioned before, Scully has changed, Scully has grown, Scully is working to lower her shields… but over and over, she finds that Mulder is not ready for that vulnerability and avoids it: “Have you ever thought seriously about dying?” she asks in Detour, and chuckles-- at the time-- over his flippant “Only once, at the Ice Capades” response.

But All Souls also provides an interesting flip in her relationship to Emily-- i.e. mother and daughter reverse roles. Like Scully had last Christmas, Emily is there to save vulnerable children and guide them to a better afterlife. And like Scully, she has accepted, in death, that her role on this Earth wasn’t “meant to be”: she pleads with Scully, “Mommy, please, let me go.”

It’s striking, then, that Emily becomes the spiritual medium instead of Melissa. I understand why it was written that way-- Scully connects her sacrifice and Emily’s death to the church, and her faith, to bring her comfort. (And I don’t think Melissa Scully would be too keen to dabble around with Catholic mythologies.) It’s even more striking that Emily becomes the only truth Scully clings to or believes in: no one else, be it deeply entrenched priest or well-researched paranormal partner, believes in her eyewitness accounts. (Or, in Mulder’s case, does… but suggests it’s born from outside manipulation.)

This episode is yet another ouroboros: Scully her only witness, Scully her only source of strength-- a pattern that began in Beyond the Sea and loops back around and around until she puts it to rest in all things. And there's another parallel: Melissa acting as her conscience and guardian angel; Emily acting as her literal conscience and guardian angel. It was Scully herself who spotted the physical similarity between the two; and the narrative continues to connect that similarity to Scully's emotional growth.

“You believed you were releasing her soul to Heaven?” the confessor asks after Scully admits to a fourth girl's death.

“I felt sure of it,” she says, tears brimming.

“But you still can’t reconcile this belief with the physical fact of her death?”

“No. I thought I could, Father, but I can’t.”

“Do you believe there is a life after this one?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

She stops, confused; and doesn’t answer. Second-guesses, doubts, and an inability to know her own conscience: all bubbling to the fore, once again. The ouroboros.

“Has it occurred to you that-- maybe this, too, was part of what you were meant to understand?”

“You mean accepting my loss?”

“Can you accept it?”

Tears trickling down her cheek, Scully trembles out, “Maybe that’s what faith is.”

Her journey of faith has always been fraught (will continue to be so, post here) but Scully is mistaking belief in faith as an acceptance of loss-- a loss which she believes to be a punishment. She is afraid of attaching to others, has been since as a little girl; and that has driven her to and from God in different moments of extremis.

Further, the struggle to be always in the dark, to never fully understand, is not one she gives much thought to… if she doesn’t have to face it, alone. However, Mulder-- her backup-- has been drifting aimlessly in recent months; and, because her own family can’t completely understand the strange horror of her reality, there is only one person left to lean on: her faulty perception of God.

Why can’t Scully accept and believe what Emily has asked of her-- to let her go-- when she believed and accepted that truth when her daughter was dying? Because her conviction was shattered when she saw Emily’s coffin filled with sand: a spit in the face to her deliberate choice and hard-won decision. She has lost faith in herself; and the one person who she relies on-- as she admitted in Irresistible and Elegy-- for strength (inadvertently) withheld that comfort and support in All Souls, shattering it further.

And the reality is, Mulder withdrew in All Souls because he was afraid of her (as he perceived) blind faith. Mulder himself is in desperate straits; and the thought that he could lose Scully-- to adoption (Emily), to a belief in aliens (The Red and the Black), to a wackier belief in God and angels and demons (All Souls)-- scares him to death and stirs up his distance or anger. While they were working towards a common goal in the cancer arc, neither needed to feel out-of-sync in their partnership, or question her nosebleeds, or withdraw from each other (more than their normal withdrawal parameters.) But now? Now, they’re completely out-of-sync-- Scully two steps ahead, doubting her progress, doubling back; and Mulder slouching, slumping, then sliding down a wall.

THE GREAT CHANGE

What sets them right?

Mulder’s confession in Fight the Future (post here) is mandatory to the shift from Season 5-- his dissipation and disbelief; her discouragement and lack of self-esteem-- to Season 6-- her assuredness and slow-build to loneliness; his wobbles forward into embracing a life on this planet with his touchstone. (I also recommend my meta on their Season 6 push-and-pull, post here, to understand why both had a lighter tone and higher confidence compared to last season.)

TLDR: Scully was walking-- “You never needed me, Mulder. I just held you back”-- because she felt useless and worthless. Mulder was forced to battle with his own fear and insecurity or lose her forever; and, clutching his courage, chased her into the hall and tried his best to convince her to stay: by telling her, honestly, how much he truly needed her.

CONCLUSION

Emily Sim was not meant to be; just as Scully was not meant to leave the files, nor Mulder to set aside his mission and walk away with them. Her birth, her life, and her death were a circumstance forced by a tampering with Fate-- the antithesis to Scully's freewill.

While Mulder rules his life by Fate-- parroting its principles, enshrining his quest and his losses in those terms-- Scully rules hers by choice: it is her choice to join the FBI, her choice to stay, and her choice to leave when she chooses (e.g. Season 8-- to be discussed in future.) Without her, Mulder’s life would become chaotically imbalanced, thrown about on every whim that promised to satisfy, toyed with by every voice that sold him lies; and without him, she would be confused and lose faith in herself and her choices.

This child was not meant to be... but what about those that were? That is a meta for another time~.

Thanks for reading~

Enjoy!

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