#dana scully and the terrible horrible no good very bad day

[bisexualfbiagents]

THE X FILES | DANA SCULLY in The Pine Bluff Variant (5.18)

[scullaaaaaay]

The 'triangle' also known as Dana Scully and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

[enigmaticxbee]

✖️✖️✖️✖️ 6x14 Monday

The one where... it’s Groundhog Day but make it a bank robbery time loop.

Best: Mulder’s having a very bad, no good, terrible, horrible Monday morning - but we, we get to see his yellow pajamas - multiple times! - so we are having a great time 😃

Worst: Scully going all the way to the bank to find Mulder to get him to come to the meeting makes no sense but we accept it because of course Scully goes after Mulder. They’re always both going to end up in that bank because their fates are inextricably tied together.

❌ Flashlights

❌ Woods/Desert

❌ Slideshow

❌ Autopsy

❌ Evidence Disappears

❌ Scully Misses It

❌ Mulder Ditch

❌ Sunflower Seeds

❌ Voiceover

❌ Catch Phrase

❌ Scully is a Medical Doctor

❌ Mulder is Spooky

❌ Scuuullllaaaaayy! Muullllderrrr!

❌ Fox/Dana

✔️ Inappropriate Touching (that I am here for)

❌ Casual Scully

❌ Casual Mulder

✔️ Trench Coats

❌ Bad Tie Watch

❌ Glasses Watch

✔️ Taking! It! Personally!: Mulder

50 States: DC x58 (38/50)

Investigate: Together & Apart

Solve Rate: 59%

✔️ Bechdel Test

MSR: 🐝🐝🐝

Goriness: 👽👽

Creepiness: 👽👽

Humor: 👽👽👽

Rewatch Thoughts:

It was all a dream: I adore @dnscully ‘s theory that the reason the day keeps resetting is that Scully can’t die, so they keep reliving it again and again until she doesn’t. Interesting then that it’s Mulder who experiences the deja vu, which he describes as a desire to have a second chance to set things right. He takes the free will side in their fate vs free will discussion. But if there’s a “right” version of events and they are stuck in an infinite time loop until this bank robbery ends as it is supposed to that sounds a lot like fate.

One hand on his chest, the other hand cradling his face - her hand trembling 😭

He kept the WATERBED!! Interesting that once his bedroom is cleared out and decorated he not only keeps it, he actually uses it. Also Scully really gets stuck on the idea of Mulder having a waterbed... (Wait until she sees the mirror 👀)

High key married vibes this episode - depositing each other’s checks at the bank?

Skinner’s ‘I’m so over these shenanigans’ face when Mulder finally shows up to the meeting and immediately leaves when he realizes Scully isn’t there. Can you imagine the headaches involved in supervising these two 😂

Back in the X-Files office! I love the set decoration details that show they’re just settling back in - it’s not as cluttered and full of esoteric objects and clippings as usual yet. Mulder’s basketball is in a moving box. I don’t love that their desk still just has a Fox Mulder nameplate 🙄

Episode-Related Fanfic Recs:

Splintered Dreams by @agentstarbuck - Scully keeps having nightmares about the back robbery and Mulder needs a place to stay while his apartment is being repaired. The UST!

The Next Week by @slippinmickeys - first time fic, takes place in the week between Monday and Arcadia. NSFW.

Pilgrims Creeping Toward the Dawn by @softnow - She starts to ask where the hell he’s been, then, if he’s not dead or dying, but then she hears it: a woman’s voice in the background, uttering that one syllable. That one simple syllable. The one from which she herself has long been barred. Fox. NSFW. This is the angsty shit I am HERE for.

[antiquery]

top 5 Lovecraft stories?

the dream-quest of unknown kadath: where to start? last semester i audited a class on underworld journeys in literature over at trinity, in which we talked a lot about what narrative elements make a katabasis— cues to look out for that tell you “this story might not be a literal journey into hell, but that’s basically what you’re looking at because it utilizes all the tropes common to that genre.” the dream-quest is a pretty textbook example, and the fact that it is makes it a component in one of lovecraft’s most interesting themes: the connection between death and dreaming, between underworlds and otherworlds (which of course makes me think of la vita nuova, but that’s a post for another day). Serious Literary Analysis aside (and not even getting into this story as postwar lit, which i’ve talked about before), though, this one is my favorite for entirely self-indulgent reasons. the dreamlands are a fascinating setting, and the worldbuilding is just well-developed enough to work, but not so explicit that you don’t desperately want to know more about what’s going on. much to my chagrin, i also find carter annoyingly endearing, and (again, for reasons i’ll go into below) his canonical story arc is probably my favorite sequence of stories that lovecraft wrote. besides that, nyarlathotep is far and away my favorite lovecraftian villain, and this is the story where he gets the most page-time (i also have some, uh. some thoughts about his scene with carter). on a more general level, i love this story’s surrealism and brightness, how unabashedly technicolor weird it is; how it’s so good that it manages to not be laughable, but genuinely engaging because of that strangeness. if there’s any hpl story i want to see as a movie it’d be this one, pref. directed by taika waititi and with a soundtrack featuring no less than three eighties hits (talking in your sleep and every breath you take are excellent candidates).

the silver key: so funny thing, i actually wrote my common app essay about this story. seeing as i’m now headed off to the college i’ve been drooling over since i was 15 next fall, i’m somewhat obligated to include it on this list (although i’m convinced that it was actually the supplemental essay where i wrote about fbi special agent dana katherine scully that got me in). jokes aside, though, i love this one. i love the purple prose, i love the melodramatic narration, i love how well it retrospectively foregrounds the dream-quest. i love the ending! i think the reason i like carter’s storyline as much as i do is that it’s very self-referential in terms of lovecraft’s other work, and it turns the tropes we’ve come to expect from him on their heads. this is a great conclusion to that idea— after ages of set-up for a very bad decision, carter does something that in any other cosmic horror story would lead to a terrible fate, but for him it...doesn’t? that subverted expectation is weirdly delightful. and maybe this is just me and what i research, but i really love that it follows the same basic narrative template as the divine comedy, considering what i said about the dream-quest as an underworld journey— in the middle of our life’s path i found myself within a forest dark for the key to the gate of dreams straightforward path had been lost. or something.

the case of charles dexter ward: this one basically hits all my thematic buttons: weird terrifying magic, necromancy, a charismatically horrible villain, and an attempt to get at the soul of new england in the same way the next story on this list does. the way lovecraft writes about new england actually reminds me a lot of the way flannery o’connor writes about the south: this place that is your home, that you love in the way you can only ever love your home, is inarguably haunted by its past, full of a deep-rooted horror that’s inextricably intertwined with its identity, and thus the thing that you love more than anything. besides that, i love the related idea that this story explores with curwen: that same past is never far from the present, always ready to rise up and overwhelm us. i always talk about analyzing the dream-quest as a modernist piece, but there’s probably a lot to say also about this novel, that fear-fascination with the past in the wake of the collapse of the present into globally traumatized chaos. and on a purely indulgent level: i adore curwen, he’s great, i would read an entire 600-page novel about his adventures in weird awful magic and charming villainy.

the dreams in the witch house: i am a HUGE sucker for new england horror, specifically new england puritan horror, as you all probably know by now. i think that this was lovecraft’s most successful attempt at incorporating all the cultural baggage that 20th century america associated with early new england into a horror story. it’s also a much better, much more well-thought-out version of through the gates of the silver key, which is a weird, extracanonical, half-baked attempt to shove some of the themes that lovecraft came around to later in his career into a character arc that was already done and over with, and which consequently didn’t end up making any thematic or narrative sense. dreams in the witch house takes a lot of the ideas in that story and re-works them in a way that’s much more compelling and interesting, and grounds them solidly in the kind of cultural introspection that with lovecraft either went really well or really, really, really terribly. (see: horror at red hook, the.)

at the mountains of madness: when i was a little baby 13 year old watching the x files for the first time, the episode that really got me hooked was ice, in which our heroes are trapped in an antarctic research station with an ancient, malevolent alien entity. that episode was actually based on john carpenter’s the thing, which was itself based on this story. besides that, though, i love this story on its own merit: the delicious sense of “oh god get out of there while you still can” that builds and builds as the narrative goes on (lovecraft is quite good at that), the objectively awesome worldbuilding surrounding the rediscovery of the old ones’ civilization (and how horribly small it casts human civilization as, maybe more effectively than anything else lovecraft wrote, save for shadow out of time) and most of all the introduction of shoggoths, which are 1. cool on their own and 2. a great concept to analyze in terms of horror as reflective of cultural anxiety.