#kissing walter skinner on the mouth for sending them to pretend to be married during the most intense and high-strung period of their lives

[carefulfears]

☕️ + 6.15 arcadia (the episode as a whole, the playing house, etc)

imagine you're in love with your partner and you want him to fuck you so bad and you want to have his babies so bad and then you go on a job where you have to pretend to be married to him and the whole time he's just like "mmhm. you want to fuck me so bad. anyway."

happened to my friend dana.

arcadia is the absolute pinnacle of what i call the "twisted fanfic" that is season 6, and per usual, it all hinges on what is unspoken. this is their first assignment back on the x-files. this is their first assignment since "you're making this personal" (how personal is it now?). since the worst fight of their lives was followed immediately by...congratulations. back down to that office. no one but each other. (till death do you part).

"be like the others...before it gets dark"

arcadia is very allegorical, and the horror lives simultaneously in the uncomfortable perfection of tradition, of suburban matrimony, and the dangers of straying from.

there is danger in cleaving to tradition, for mulder and scully. it reminds them of too much. it's something that they don't really actually want, but are shamefully aware that they should. at the same time, in the "american dream" of the arcadian falls, to deviate from tradition is to be hunted and killed.

and they're simultaneously mocking this life, and the intrusive fact that they'll never have it.

the best part of arcadia, is mulder. this is possibly the most top-tier annoying mulder episode. and it is only so because he's doing it on purpose, and it is grating.

mulder's strategy in arcadia? to fuck around and find out.

people who live in the falls are going missing. it seems to be related to the intense commitment and stress surrounding the community's guidelines. so what do you do? stick a plastic flamingo in the yard. kick a mailbox. dig a pool. put your basketball hoop out at 10:30 at night.

(one of my favorite moments of the episode is when mulder is playing basketball on the driveway, and the neighbors are freaking out, screaming, crying. and he goes to check on win's wife and sees the monster come out, as you just hear someone drag the basketball hoop back into the garage. be like the others before it gets dark, you are not immune. arcadia has consequences.)

it has not been that long since scully asked, don't you ever just want to stop?

Mulder, it's the dim hope of finding that proof that's kept us in this car, or one very much like it, for more nights than I care to remember. Driving hundreds if not thousands of miles through neighborhoods and cities and towns where people are raising families and buying homes and playing with their kids and their dogs, and…in short, living their lives. While we...we just keep driving. Don't you ever just want to stop? Get out of the damn car? Settle down and live something approaching a normal life?

this is the closest to settling down, to normal life, that they'll ever get, so what do you do? accuse her of just wanting to "play house." tell her she "fit[s] in really well here." crack jokes about "honeymoon videos" and crossing the threshold and being "married now," while arranging the bed to where she couldn't join even if she wanted to.

when asked what he does for work, mulder answers that he works from home, "which is great for laura because she gets me all to herself."

this is their first assignment, since their argument over his relationship with diana. and according to him, she just wants him all to herself.

no one ever asks scully what she does for work, though. every woman is introduced as a wife. every dinner table is prepped and cleared by the women, who are then sent away from that table when discussion turns to the circumstances of their society. they hold no input regarding a monster who will "want" them for their husbands' crimes.

mulder even mocks this dynamic, with his sandwich joke. the horror of the falls is tradition, and tradition is predicated on misogyny, on a controlled deficit of visibility.

be like the others before it gets dark: a "normal life" may be perilous, but they'll still never have it. (even when they have the house and the fence for real, he isn't hers.)

and the final shot of arcadia is mulder and scully getting back in the car. driving off, while scully's voiceover informs that the arcadian falls have been named one of the top planned communities in california, for the sixth year running.