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randomfoggytiger · 4 months ago

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Mulder's Alien Baby Baby Trauma In-Depth (Part X): The First Touch, and Unconscious Limbo

While this next part is tinged with tragedy and filled with Mulder's reemerging self-doubt, a beautiful, unconscious moment does occur between he and Scully.

AN UNCONSCIOUS TOUCH

During her partner’s entertaining whine over the price of pizza in these our modern times, Scully’s been slowing up in the background. Unable to silently endure the sudden, searing pain she’s in, she gasps.

Mulder immediately twists around to inspect the situation-- already suspecting something’s wrong. Already fearing something’s wrong.

That fear is interesting: Mulder is known for his blank panic faces, but this one is new. In the wake of his abduction, torture, and resurrection, he is grappling with PTSD and his own feelings of helplessness and uselessness (posts here and here.) All it takes is the hint of an emergency to reveal that he needs Scully to be okay to be “okay” himself.

When she doubles over, taking her hand from the present to clutch her belly, he swings from worried observation to worried vocalization (“Scully?”), turning further to get a better angle from where he’s standing.

And when Scully doesn’t respond-- as she would if her cramps were the first wave of serious contractions, or as she has with past bothersome but minor afflictions-- he shifts from worry into controlled panic (“Scully!”), ordering the pizza man to dial 911 while rushing to her side.

Here, an important moment happens: Mulder initiates contact for the first time since his resurrection.

As he barrels over and kneels next to his partner, his hand reaches for Scully's arm to steady her-- an instinctual, unconscious action. In this time of danger, neither he nor Scully notices.

This is the first pregnancy related emergency Mulder has been around to observe-- perhaps the first he's aware of-- and he sits, carefully, tilting his head around to catch her eyes. Calm, still, when she releases her control long enough to gasp for breath.

In Mulder's absence, Skinner had haunted Scully's footsteps like a shadow, tenaciously guarding her secrets. Doggett looked after Scully when she’d been acid-ed in Without, saved her from a spinal slug in Roadrunners, gently chastised her for not telling him the truth in Per Manum, and tried to spare her the grief of seeing her loved one dead in This Is Not Happening. When she was hospitalized here or there, her boss, her partner, and even the Lone Gunmen held down the fort to keep her and Mulder’s baby safe.

Now that he's here and Scully is in peril, he does what he can as naturally as breathing.

Unfortunately, this hard-won security lasts a very little time.

The scene cuts to their arrival at the hospital, with Scully strapped to a gurney, no longer conscious, and Mulder walking along beside it, doing his best to keep her from being jostled-- to help at all, in any way-- while nodding tightly and emphatically, mouth open (a classic panicking Mulder sign), to the on-call nurse’s identifying questions.

“She’s got, what? Abdominal pains?”

“Her doctor is Dr. Speake,” he insists, and doesn’t that point to a conversation they must have had off-screen?

This confirms Mulder and Scully have spoken about the baby at least once: he knows her doctor, is allowed on the ambulance, and is acting as her emergency contact… unaware that, as the show implies, Scully changed her medical papers after his death.

The nurse moves in, shoving Mulder aside and turning her back dismissively-- quite effectively butting him out of the unfolding situation.

“He’s been called.”

“She,” Mulder insists, angrily, fighting back against this unexpected assumption and exclusion.

“Who are you?” she barks; and Mulder is pulled up short a step or two behind his (former) partner’s gurney.

In the past, Mulder and Scully have always relied on each other in a crisis. After his abduction, torture, and “rebirth”, Mulder has been struggling internally, fearing he can’t hold up under the strain of his new existence, fearing that life has moved on without him, and fearing that his issues will only drag Scully back. That was resolved somewhat (off-screen) sometime after Three Words; and Mulder, finding he was able and willing to battle back his new demons, waltzed over to her apartment for a fresh start, family heirloom for the baby in hand.

But now he has been judged worthless and axed from Scully’s crisis.

“Who are you?” means he’s not on the paperwork, means Scully hadn’t updated it since his return, means she could have if his subsequent distancing hadn’t needed to be worked through first. It means Mulder’s traumas did, indeed, have a negative effect of some sort on Scully’s life (as he feared, post here); and it also means he can lay no claim to his unconscious partner currently being wheeled through the emergency room.

“Are you the husband?” the nurse asks, giving him the standard inch.

Mulder, however, is so overwhelmed by his dawning realizations that he fumbles (truthfully stuttering “N-no”) and summarily dismisses himself from the nurse’s considerations. “Then you wait outside.”

Realizing he’d flubbed his chance, he leans from side-to-side to catch a fleeting glimpse of Scully, kicking himself as she disappears (and not noticing Agent Doggett’s approach.)

“Agent Mulder, what happened?” springs into view; and, thus confronted with Doggett (whether he likes it or not), Mulder snaps out of his personal thoughts to give the intruder a suspicious once-over.

“How’d you find out?” he demands quietly, conspiracies pinging around his head a mile-a-minute.

“I was droppin’ somethin’ off-- the landlord told me,” answers Doggett, confused by Mulder’s immediate stonewalling.

From Doggett’s perspective, he’s already saved Mulder’s life at the DOD; and it’s been a bit (of undesignated time) since then-- haven’t Mulder and Scully talked? And if so, why is Mulder still suspicious of his movements?

From Mulder’s perspective, Doggett continues to have suspiciously perfect timing, arriving at just the right moments to hand over just the right alibi.

To further hammer home the message being beaten over Mulder’s head, the same nurse doubles back to prod Doggett-- “Are you the father?”-- a reinforcement of how excluded and unnecessary Mulder feels in his own life: towards Scully and the baby, Scully and Skinner and the files, and Scully and Doggett and their partnership.

Yet Mulder isn’t cowed by these assumptions: he’s (assumingly) vowed to do things right (or as close to it as six months gone and a grave of trauma will allow), and is refusing to give up ground to Doggett the interloper. Strangely (or not), the territorialism Doggett inspires continues to push Mulder past his here-and-there fugue and possible lethargy.

Mulder’s on the brink of saying something (either a snipe at Doggett or the nurse or the situation at large) when his phone chirps.

He jerks at it, then jerks away from both listeners, floating a half-hearted, “Excuse me,” in his wake-- not noticing or caring to notice that Doggett is watching him walk away, open-mouthed at the thought that he is simultaneously shirking his parental claim over Scully's baby and waving off the chance to probe the nurse for more information. (Overall, Doggett's partner’s baby daddy continues to fall further in his estimation.)

“Mulder?” Mulder says into the phone.

“Special Agent Fox Mulder?”

“Speaking.”

“Agent Mulder? My name is Monica Reyes. We never met.”

Mulder has a very interesting reaction here: he pulls his lips in to chew on them-- a self-soothing measure similar to his one in Sein und Zeit, post here-- while weighing the voice on the other end. That gesture is kicked into overdrive when Reyes clarifies, Melissa Scully-style (post here), “Not since you’ve been alive, I should say”: he slams his eyes shut, tightens his jaw, and hunches his shoulders, physically steadying himself after the reference to his former deadalive status.

In essence, Mulder freezes (post here.)

Two explanations present themselves:

1. Mulder doesn’t know who Monica is and assumes this is a new shadowy informant, checking in right as Scully is hospitalized. This spells doom and disaster on a greater scale than he was anticipating, especially combined with Suspicious Agent Doggett’s suspiciously perfect timing.

2. Mulder does know who Monica is, and is guarding himself against a relay of information gathered during a dark time in his personal history.

The circumstances don’t warrant a prolonged Freeze; so, per his usual modus operandi, Mulder shifts into interrogation mode.

“Who?” he demands, turning away from his locked-in Freeze state by literally pivoting to the side. Still, Mulder hasn’t fully replaced his defenses yet-- the unintentional jab was too deep-- and listens with anxious trepidation for Monica's answer.

He licks his lips-- another self-soothing tactic-- but is snapped out of discomfort when his caller mentions “FBI” and “Agent Reyes.” The job, as always, allows Mulder to immediately disconnect and keep distance from himself.

“I know this is out of the blue, but I have a case I need your help on.”

Ah, the old Mulder siren call.

Why would Mulder take a case while Scully is in the emergency room?

We aren’t given enough in the episode to justify his position (not by a long shot), but there are a few hints we can Blues Clues together.

Mulder looks back at Doggett, watching him chum up with the nurse and feeling (again, again) further isolated. Doggett’s demeanor and candor have already won him favor in areas Mulder no longer has access to: in the state of heightened paranoia he now lives in, post abduction, he can’t look a person in the eye without suspecting a conspiracy over their shoulder: Skinner and Scully trying to prevent him from sneaking into the basement (post here), Scully and TLG trying to keep him off a case (posts here and here), Doggett showing up at all the right-wrong times, a good moment unfolding into yet another disastrous nightmare, and a mysterious, alluring call popping up out of the blue.

Mulder lives to be distracted from his pain: bringing work home to stave off his childhood nightmares, watching Ed Wood’s campy horror movie to free up his subconscious to make more work connections, watching older, simpler film to focus his attention away from the crummy present.

As discussed in previous parts, Mulder was existing hollowly during the events of Three Words, aptly described by another abductee he interviewed in the past: “I can’t be sure of anything anymore.” That was managed (or shoved to the side) by the panacea of the files. Work is the siren call away from his present: Scully incapacitated and unable to fight for them; a nurse who’ll likely kick him out if he protests; and a partner’s partner who is hanging around, won’t leave, and won’t be near whatever case Monica might be suggesting.

Still, Mulder resists, intrigued but exasperated.

Turning continually back and forth from the Doggett-nurse tableau with an irritated sigh, he rejects the offer kindly. “I can’t help you, Agent Reyes. For so many reasons,” he adds, a touch of heightened stress peaking through.

“I think you should contact Agent Doggett,” Mulder continues, eyes lighting up at the thought of Doggett leaving. “At the X-Files,” he clarifies, somberly, mouth tightening (again) while swallowing down a pang of longing.

“I can’t call Agent Doggett because it involves him,” Reyes insists.

Thus, the case presents itself as a chance to get proof-positive dirt on his rival. Scully may be in critical condition, but he can at least save her somehow, someway, by doing what he does best: using the truth to eliminate a threat.

Mulder takes one last look back, noticing that the on-call doctor has joined Doggett and the nurse; and, after weighing their faces and responses against a typical emergency, is convinced, enough, that Scully isn’t in immediate danger.

Reyes’s “I’m in New Orleans, but I can be in D.C. in a few hours. It’s important, Agent Mulder. Very,” finalizes his decision; and he pulls in his lips and closes his eyes once more (a repeated self-soothing gesture/action/motion) as he gives in and agrees.

“Call me when you get here,” he decides, jutting out his jaw in protest at the entire situation.

Mulder walks back to Doggett, where the other man politely-- despite his personal thoughts-- relays, “They’re telling us not to worry. They’re running some tests.”

And despite his own personal judgments against Doggett, Mulder’s face opens a little in relief as he nods. Worry lingers in his clenched jaw, but does not deter from his new mission.

MULDER HAS CHANGED

Thus, we have born witness to two reversal and shifts in Mulder’s psyche: reaching out once more to Scully (though in crisis), and only succumbing to the call of a case when it could directly benefit her.

Mulder has changed after his abduction, more than he is currently aware.

Throughout the rest of the season, Mulder only accepts cases that will help Scully-- Empedocles’s dirt on Doggett, Alone’s begrudging assistance for Scully's sake, Essence-Existence’s existential threat on Scully and the baby’s life-- but breaks that rule, twice, for cases that directly relate to his trauma-- Three Words’s DOD break-in, Vienen’s black-oiled oil rig workers, and even, loosely, Dr. Parenti’s IVF experiments. Mulder swings from disinterested apathy (not wanting to return to work until jealous and territorial) to shoot-from-the-hip reaction. He is no longer pursuing X-Files because of the fascination he has for the unknown, or for the shadowy men peeking from shadowy corners. He is in limbo, unaware he is in limbo: wanting to hoard the files but unable to work them.

The X-Files will always make him feel alive-- that hasn’t changed-- but there is something seriously wrong that is both draining him and jumping him from danger to danger to danger or from bleeding heart to frantic request to terrifying personal loss.

In short, Mulder is traumatized, burnt out, and struggling. Though leagues better than he was in Three Words-- more open communication, free-and-easy with Scully, better small-scale coping mechanisms-- he still swings wildly back and forth between forward progress and baffling backwards regression. That pattern continues the rest of Season 8; and it holds that, if Mulder hadn’t been forced out of the FBI when he was-- or if Scully hadn’t survived his stunningly idiotic plan in Essence-Existence-- there would have been a serious mental collapse, sooner or later.

CONCLUSION

All good things come to abrupt ends; but not all tragic events are without silver linings.

The seeds for that touching scene in Empedocles have been sown, and Monica is (unwittingly) setting both men on a path to understand each other better.

And Scully finally gets some good-- though often interrupted-- rest, so there’s that.

Thanks for reading~

Enjoy!

#txf #xf meta #mine #Mulder's Alien Baby Baby Trauma #Part X #The First Touch and Unconscious Limbo #S8 #Empedocles #In-Depth #Mulder #Scully #Doggett #xfiles #x-files #the x files #Monica Reyes

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randomfoggytiger · 1 year ago

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The Scully Family In-Depth (Part X): One Breath and the Scully Men

I'd forgotten to write up an analysis of Captain "Ahab" Scully's speech to his daughter in One Breath-- ironically, the title drop moment of the episode; and, while starting that process, I then realized I'd forgotten Scully's brothers, too. So, I have one last post to squeeze out of this episode before I move on~.

Scully Brother Speculation

Where were the Scully brothers in One Breath? In the opening monologue, it is clear that Scully shared a close relationship with both her brothers (which I touched on here and here): they saved up to buy her a bb gun for her birthday (although the dates are off-- again, no show bible) and were very enthusiastic to further fill in the gaps of her shooting instructions once their father had left. But as their sister lay dying, Bill and Charlie weren’t anticipated or mentioned by the Scully women; and the only time that Maggie perhaps indirectly refers to their absence is when she greets and thanks Melissa for coming-- and neither she nor her daughter are, seemingly, surprised, phased or burdened. So… what is going on?

What we do know: Bill Scully, at least, is enlisted in and at the whims of the Navy. In future episodes, he is able to take time from his career to check in with Scully’s cancer (only after Maggie tells him the cancer metastasized) and to successfully accomplish an unspecified number of IVF trials with his wife which results in her pregnancy and delivery near Christmas. I’ll touch on it more in the future, but it would seem big brother Bill spent more time at sea earlier in the Scully family relationship then switched tracks to some degree before the events of A Christmas Carol (i.e. understanding-- though not liking-- why his sister was “chained to the job” and avoiding the family celebrations… until)-- which is interesting, because he would have had to recognize how much could be lost by sacrificing too much in the dogged pursuit of his career, a lesson his own father learned too late. Bill, at least post Gethsemane, seems to have taken a more deliberate path to be more involved with his family and loved ones. So, likely, Bill was at sea when his sister was returned, unable to swoop in and arrange things to his satisfaction.

And what of Charlie? It’s often hypothesized that Charlie, like Melissa, was the shunned misfit of the family. However, that seems to be unsupported with the canonical evidence we know. In Beyond the Sea, he and his wife and their children were at Captain Scully’s funeral, post here (and noted in the script here-- thanks, @x-files-scripts!-- as twenty-five? A young Catholic wedding, I suppose-- maybe even married someone a little “older” who already had a child, since at least one of the kids is too grown to have been born sometime after Charlie turned eighteen); and he’s mentioned by Scully in Roland and in Home (having babysat one nephew in the latter episode, perhaps lending credence to my unsupported "the second boy is Charlie's biologically" theory) without the restrained awkwardness she sometimes displays when talking about her father or Maggie or Melissa. The only other times that “count” in canon are two phone calls: a deleted Memento Mori check-in (script here, outtake scene here) that pinpoints Bill as the "Charlie go-between" (a role Bill fills in for Maggie and Melissa as well) and the Revival's Home Again follow up for his mother's decline. Besides a deleted script featuring Charlie escaping death by psychic powers (read here), there isn’t anything more to glean from his character. So, all we know is: Charlie Scully was close enough to his dad to bring his whole family to the funeral (and cry at it), is close enough to Bill to always call him with updates, and is simultaneously close enough and distant from the other Scully women enough for his absence to not affect them and for his two deathbed calls to be taken as a matter of course. Interestingly enough, it would seem Bill Scully is closer to his mother and two sisters-- rushing in to “mother” (read: boss) Scully about her cancer, advocate for his mother's stress and hurt, and later reveal a picture of Melissa she had given to no one else but himself-- than Charlie actually is.

Again, I touched on this briefly in my Typing Post here, but my hypothesis that Charlie is disconnected from his family by virtue of not gelling with them rather than a huge familial blowout seems to, at least, be heavily supported by what scraps canon does provide. (Even more shockingly, Maggie and Bill Jr. seem to be the two people keeping the family glued together-- i.e. shaming Bill Scully Sr. and Scully for their withdrawn ways-- and insisting on keeping up family tradition-- i.e. Christmas and baby showers.) No one seems to hold expectations of or grudges against him, even though the only time Charlie is there for his family (other than the odd mention) was at Captain Scully’s funeral. As an aside, another theory I hold-- but also cannot be supported with evidence-- is that Charlie can’t tolerate or is afraid of death-- showing face only at his father’s funeral while calling to get updates on his sister’s and mother’s health (and not at all for Melissa’s, likely because everything happened too suddenly.) Perhaps Charlie can’t abide watching his loved ones die; and everyone knows it and lets him be.

Captain Scully's Last Farewell

Captain Scully’s speech is the crux of One Breath, acting as one of the three most pivotal scenes that happens to Scully during her coma.

He advances to his daughter’s “morgue” table in a firm military stride;

but stops a few feet away, keeping this distance between them while standing at ease-- emblematic of his relationship with Scully: accidentally cultivated in life, and physically enforced by death.

Ahab is aware of this great gulf fixed, clenching and unclenching his fists in distress while softly calling out, “Hello, Starbuck.” There’s a tremble in his voice and a long pause after he adds, “This is Ahab.” No matter what happened before and after, he is affirming that his and Scully’s special bond was never broken; and that she was and will always be his little first mate.

Continuing to open and close his hand, Captain Scully goes on in a halting, heavy voice: “People… would say to me… ‘Life is short…. Kids, they grow up fast-- before you know it, it’s over.’ I never listened.

But me,” he deviates, narrating the past to explain the lessons learned by his failures and choices-- a lesson Scully will repeat to her own revelation in All Things, “I’ve went at a proper pace. Earned many rewards.” Again, he pauses, his expression filling with despair as he briefly reflects on the emptiness of the pride felt then.

“...Til the moment that…” a long pause as Captain Scully gulps down a wave of emotion with a heavy sigh,

“--I knew, that I understood that… I would never see you again. My little girl.” Tears on the brink, he continues: “Then my life felt as if… it had been the length of one breath.” Another heavy pause as regretful tears choke his confession.

Recollecting himself, Ahab finishes the choked-off sentence: “One heartbeat," looking meaningfully at his daughter-- sharing, silently, the heartrending truth that his heart had beat in time with hers; and, while he had shared that beat and that breath with her, he realized, too late, that had never told his little Starbuck.

The weight of that unspoken admission takes the most out of him, his voice having dipped from soft to low, from gentle to desolate.

“At that moment--” he barges forth, fury at the missed opportunities and his own blindness giving strength heretofore lacking in his voice,

“I would have traded every medal… every commendation, every promotion, for… one more second with you.”

Here the Scully family trait kicks in: Captain Scully licks his lips to steel himself against a swell of emotion and to prepare himself for the approaching farewell.

“We’ll be together again, Starbuck. But not now.” And it’s both beautiful and heartbreaking: that he is glad this is not Scully’s end-- quirking up a side smile for her sake-- but is miserable with the depth of his longing-- eyes hungrily devouring her with a last look.

“Soon,” he emphatically promises, swearing as much to himself as to his daughter.

Then, with a slow, reluctant turn, Captain Ahab retreats back into the whitened hallway, back to the afterlife where he will wait for their soon.

With all of Captain Scully's love unspoken and his attention swallowed up with his work, it's easy to see how Scully internalized and applied the setbacks of their relationship into other relationships with "obsessed with his work" men, ingrained as her wiring was to seek out the approval of "other fathers" (Never Again analysis post here and Typing post here.)

Captain "Ahab" Scully's second chance may have soothed the doubts between them, but his accidental neglect will continue to haunt Scully and her choices for most of the series-- until All Things serves as her own personal revelation and absolution, guiding her out of her father's footsteps and into independent freedom.