#txf: within

[sentientsky]

help

[dabeth-is-dead]

Hallucination (?) Scully: You were right about everything the whole time Mulder

Mulder, internally: She would Not fucking say that

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

s2 episode 13 thoughts

so i read the description of this episode and i was thinking to myself, yeah, this one seems believable. i keep loosely acquainted with the drama of the funeral world, and after learning of the harvard morgue scandal of last summer, i was like. well. the truth echoes art, i guess.

but that was the POINT of the episode- that the real world is scary, even without vampires and bigfoot!

so we begin with a funeral for a poor little girl. and it is an open casket, which is upsetting, and these little kids that i assume were her classmates are looking in. and then to make it even MORE upsetting, this creepy man working the event shows up and starts... touching her hair...

boy, i hope that child actress got a fat check for that very uncomfy bit part.

next we see a man eating an ice pop in the embalming room, to which i say: king. and he's hearing some weird stuff, and who emerges but... donnie!

(donnie's the guy who was stroking her hair... and he's holding scissors... and the girl's hair is scattered all over the floor...)

donnie briefly morphed into a demon, and ice pop man banishes donnie from his realm upon realizing he cut the little girl's hair. he says "i should report you" but i don't think he actually did.

(PRO TIP: if you are in a workplace where this type of event happens, please do file a report)

anyway. agent time. they're arriving in a graveyard. and i saw a gif this morning of mulder lifting the caution tape up so scully can get her umbrella in!!! it is suuuuch a cute moment. and a tiny consolation for the agony the rest of this episode produced.

the policeman is blabbering on about aliens and says to mulder, "you know andy" and he says "no i don't" "well, he knows you" which is sooooo funny. another example of mulder being famous amongst the nerd population.

poor scully looks absolutely horrified at this little girl's desecrated body...

and while the policeman thinks it's aliens, which may be a first, mulder does not, which again may be a first, because he says he's seen cases like this before

"you okay, scully?" he asks, noticing that she is Not Okay, but seeming unsure of how to approach the situation. she insists that she is, and perhaps he accepts this at face value.

they share an umbrella <3 but whilst doing this she's deeply shaken, and says she's surprised he isn't bothered. he says he prepared himself, and i thought he was going to elaborate on what preparing yourself for a case like this looks like, but he didn't

and she's shocked that they drove all the way here for a case that isn't aliens... why did we come here then?

because he got them tickets to a football game. LMAOOOOO this man........... football date night. it does not sound pleasurable to me but maybe watching his nerdy face light up would make up for the misery. i was giggling here. he wanted to take her out and show her his culture.

okay so now we're back to donnie. he's applying for a new job. he says he used to be a cosmetologist.

NOOOOO they had to miss their game because there are more bodies dug up and violated... and since this took place in the 90's they didn't even have facebook marketplace to try and sell their tickets beforehand... this is truly a devastating loss </3

and did they show a football player with the same name as the dude who runs this show... you can't sneak that stuff by me...

scully has to walk out after seeing the pictures of the crime scene and i'm already so deeply sad for her but oh boy, past me, wait a bit and see where all this goes!

mulder says that the police need to put an alert out NOW and the policeman is all "well we don't have a whole lot of guys on the squad so it might take awhile :(" THEN HURRY??? mulder says he thinks this dude is gonna kill someone and you're gonna complain about lack of resources???? WORK OVERTIME???

poor scully is sososo shaken and mulder pops his head out to where she was sitting... he says he'll cancel their plane tickets so they can stay longer and she's just staring out into the distance... SOMEONE HELP MY QUEEN PLEASE

then we get a glasses and takeout moment as the agents come up with a profile for a guy who steals body parts from dead people

donnie sees a woman on the side of the road- a working woman, if you will- and he takes her back to his place. and this woman is sooo pretty. but he's running her a bath and marty i'm scared.

(wait i just realized i can straight up insert the reaction images i'm referring to on here)

HE IS OBSESSED WITH HAIR... first the little girl's, and now he asks this woman if she needs shampoo for chemically treated hair...

he goes to take a phone call- congrats, you got the job- and she sees his room is FILLED with wreaths from funerals. and she might be naked but i was still yelling at the screen GIRL YOU NEED TO RUN!!!!!!

well. we cut to body time. so we know how that went. it is a spectacularly bloody body. and our freak has escalated from desecrating graves to killing real people.

mulder wants to go look at the body and asks scully to come but she can't bring herself to do it. WHY IS NO ONE NOTICING THE STRESS SHE IS IN. HOW CAN WE TAKE STEPS TO AID HER.

(i think that mulder is trying his best to Not Make A Big Deal out of her visible distress to make her feel better, and instead just gives her space and respects her lack of desire to discuss the whole thing. because there is no way he doesn't actually notice)

now donnie is on the job as a grocery deliveryman. which i am familiar with as i do use doordash occasionally. but the woman whose house he's delivering too just. LETS HIM IN??? to pack up the groceries. is this how the job worked at the time... can anyone confirm or deny... because i'm trying to imagine welcoming the doordash or instacart guy coming in and putting the food away for me... and i feel my skin crawl... what a textbook murder situation...

and if that isn't bad enough, the woman tells donnie they have 3 daughters and leave the backdoor open........ this does not bode well for the plot....

he asks to go to their bathroom and he digs through their trash to find a clump of hair and he SNIFFS it and then pockets it... we need someone to deal with this man with a QUICKNESS.

scully is in autopsy mode now, and unlike her usual very professional self, she looks like she is going to pass out conducting this one. which is remarkable because she has seen some nasty stuff, but this is what puts her over the edge.

in her report, she's writing about how every autopsy tells the story of a life, and that being killed for someone to take a piece of your body is perhaps the most dehumanizing death imaginable

someone who saw this freak donnie says that he looked like an ordinary guy, so this is gonna be a tough search. so mulder is going into deep psychoanalysis mode, saying it must be driven by a very intense hatred of women. which seems fair. i'll trust the oxford trained fellow.

now donnie is in class and he sees a woman and we know what's coming, but when he approaches her and tries to get creepy, she kicks him away and manages to run!!!! thank god honestly we could use a victory.

the phone wakes up scully from a nightmare where she sees the same demon we saw earlier and also SHE was the one on the autopsy table- but mulder says they have a suspect at the station. and i'm like, yes! they're gonna get him!

but it isn't him that they get! they brought someone else in, and we SEE donnie watching their interview moment and this was the narrative taunting me

mulder can no longer try and ignore scully being so on edge, and he says "scully, if you're having trouble with this case, i want you to tell me" and my first reaction was, king, do you have eyes, she has been about to collapse this whole time. but now i see he is doing the best he can to put the ball in her court, and yet she STILL denies it. lies straight to his face.

"i'm not having trouble", she says <- okay so we all see that this isn't true but i respect that he's trying to be mindful of her boundaries. however i would have been like hey queen let's get you out of here <3

"i just don't want you to think you have to hide anything from me", he says, and i kiss each of my fingers like i just savored a delicious meal, because that is EXACTLY what i wanted this man to say. mmm angst. just what i had ordered.

so donnie is asking the guy who DID get questioned what they were talking to him about, and what their names were, and he remembers scully's name because she has the same name as a baseball announcer i guess? and then they let the donnie go -_-

she goes back to DC to get a fingerprint read on the body but says something about maybe not flying back to the case that night... she did NOT want to be there!!!!!

at this point we learn that the FBI has an on sight therapist, which honestly makes perfect sense... but man. this scene.

she's referring to herself in the second person, talking about how you have to become used to seeing death in med school and in fbi, and she's distancing herself to try and cope. and the therapist brings up losing her father and her coma, and asks if she feels uncomfortable with her partner, and she's like no, i trust him with my life.

wow. that's incredible. but!

"i don't want him to feel like he has to protect me"

and i cannot imagine a world in which mulder, the protector, would ever NOT try and guard those he loves like some sort of snarling beast. but she must still feel horrible after just coming out of a coma, and he had been so scared to welcome her back, let her come on the missions, she had to PROVE herself, and she can't make herself feel guilty knowing he'll see her as something to protect.

(as if there was ever going to be another way)

so yeah i was basically barking at the screen here.

she says she's lost faith, and she needs it back. and where do you get faith these days?

but, while she was away, they found a print. she calls mulder to tell him this and decides that she'll fly back that night.

"anyway, you could use my help" "always" <- what if i started crying.

but someone called for her while she was away... and i knew it was that donnie freak........... foreshadowing....

so the agents trace the prints to donnie and bust into his house, where they find his endless funeral wreaths and even a FINGER in the fridge, but no donnie

and this is just as scully is arriving from the airport AND DONNIE IS STALKING HER. and i wrote, donnie, i will get u with my bare hands.

and he HITS HER CAR and DRIVES HER OFF OF THE ROAD and then mulder comes to the scene and they find her car but no SCULLY

back at donnie's place, he is running a bath and my screen was dark enough to see my face in the reflection and it could best be described as looking like that dizzy emoji. "oh girl i am UNCOMFY", i wrote, but in a sort of horror way that you expect from the genre.

she's tied up in his closet and sees him as a DEMON again which is more evidence that she has had to endure SO MUCH and i'm getting duane berry flashbacks with the gag in her mouth and i'm feeling a profound level of defensiveness for a person who does not exist

mulder is stressed, there are no witnesses, and he's pissed, he says "there are people that can videotape police beatings on darkened streets, they manage to spot elvis in 3 cities across america every day, but no one saw a pretty woman being forced off the road in her rental car"

AUGHHHH his bloodhound nature, need to find answers, is kicking in again.

(and also he thinks she's pretty)

so back at donnie's place, he is approaching rapidly with a knife, and mulder is sleuthing. the car they found was donnie's mother's car, so maybe they're at donnie's mother's place... but he is PICKING UP THE KNIFE AS MULDER SPEAKS

he ASKS ABOUT HER HAIR to properly shampoo it which is SO FREAKY but she manages to BREAK AWAY by shoving him into the tub. yes yes those FBI agent skills are kicking in!!!

shes hiding and he yells "there's no way out, girly girl" which briefly took me out of the scene because i just know that he would have said "girly pop" if the writers had their hands on that phrase and it was distracting but still. STILL.

she's hiding in the closet and he opens the door and she SPRAYS HIM WITH ROACH SPRAY and runs and they're tussling about when...

MULDER BREAKS DOWN THE DOOR and sees her!!!! he's calling for paramedics while the policemen take care of donnie

and the first thing she says to him is "i'm okay", reassuring him despite her awful situation, perhaps referring to her mostly uninjured body, but she's shaking like a leaf, and she just keeps saying that she's fine, she's fine, until he lifts her chin up to look at her face...

and she starts SOBBING into his chest. he's got his fingers in her hair and he's mumbling "it's okay" to her again and again and. i could feel my heart melting. i was a mere puddle of a human being at this moment. it's okay. it's okay.

there is something i think you will understand that is so rich about seeing characters hit their breaking point. it tells the audience so much about them- here we see that scully's biggest fear is the evil that lies in the ordinary, in the idea that anyone could be a monster, that this is a world of constant fear, and how do you try and rationalize the things that humanity is capable of doing? how do you walk down the street knowing that someone, anyone that passes you by could be a devil, metaphorically speaking? and she doesn't have the luxury of believing that it could be some outside force- some aliens, or evil vampires- manipulating people into doing their bidding, like mulder does. she knows that it is flesh and blood people that she sees everyday at the grocery store or next door or even those she autopsies, that do horrific things. and that there is a capacity for that in anyone, and no way to keep yourself or those you love entirely safe. what is there in this cold world of facts if there isn't faith? and again, where do you get more faith when you run out?

(and, of course, her deep and terrible fear of needing protection. needing to rely on someone that isn't just herself. of inadequacy. how scary that must be for a person who sees the terror in the rest of the world)

so yeah. love to see a character break. and i love it even MORE when we get to see someone they love comfort them. hurt/comfort trope remains undefeated.

the episode ends with mulder writing the case report and talking of very similar things as i just rambled on about- about humans being demons, and demons being what humanity comes up with to explain that- but this is delivered over a slideshow of donnie's childhood pictures to emphasize how he was just the boy next door, except that honestly he looked like young sheldon. so i was a bit taken out of the whole thing.

so yeah. this episode did not leave me with the warmest and fuzziest of feelings, but in terms of horror it was definitely one of the scariest so far, again because the entire lack of supernatural causes. i mean you could choose to interpret that this guy genuinely WAS a demon, but i think that defeats the purpose of the episode and scully's character study we get as a result. i was spooked, but we still had some good moments, such as attempted football date.

overall, i thought this episode was great. and we could talk about how the creepy killer was super queer coded, and discuss if this was done in bad faith, which could be an interesting conversation- but i find it not entirely relevant to the overarching theme. like, the scary part was that he wanted to keep your fingers, not that he called scully "girly girl", and i didn't get the sense that those two things were being equated in the episode.

now give me 10 beach episodes, or perhaps a journey to a museum, or a spa, or the mountains, or an ice-skating trip with matching scarves worn by our agents, or a day at the mall. really i don't ask for a lot!

[deathsbestgirl]

i absolutely adore doggett because the first thing he does is piss scully off, because he had to make sure she didn't know anything about where mulder was. and he's hesitant to trust or believe her through within & without. but then he sees scully thrown into a wall, shoot someone who looks like a person she tried to protect & trusts, and uncontrollably break down & let him hold her.

and from that moment, he decided to follow her, protect her. he was always going to do his damnedest to find mulder but she gave him another reason. right off the bat (lol) in patience, he was defending her and poking holes in her crazy theory and then he found an article about a human bat !!! she was so raw & vulnerable, trying to be mulder & feeling completely inadequate and doggett tried so hard not to dismiss her, to validate her.

i just can't not love this man when he loves scully so similarly to the way she loved mulder in the beginning. he's another man with a hole in his heart & life, where his son used to be. and who is he if he's a father without his son?

[palamedeeznuts]

i love walter skinner thats it thats the post

[enoughslices]

I recently learned about DOPS - the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia - and beyond it being fascinating full-stop, I cannot stop thinking about the MSR canon divergent fix-it fic plunny potential.

Like-

Like!!! What could be more THEM? Let Mulder maintain a purpose. Let Scully and Mulder move to Charlottesville and continue with their work dynamic under the auspices of a large university. Let them also get married and go home! together! and spoon up like baby cats at the end of the day! WHO ELSE SEES THE VISION

[buzziightqueer]

if i had a nickel for every time an actress whose character i hyperfixated over posed with a fake mustache on id have two nickels. which isnt a lot but it's weird that it happened twice

[caridrea]

Poor poor Scully 😭

[randomfoggytiger]

The Mulder Family In-Depth (Part IX): Tena Mulder's Suicide and Saving Mulder from Himself

Without further ado, here we go~.

Sein und Zeit

While Mulder is investigating a child disappearance that parallels his sister's too closely, his phone rings. He springs up to answer it, vibrating with energy and ready to tackle the next lead. However, he's pulled up short when Tena answers with a soft "Fox? It's me" to his "Mulder" greeting. 

His voice immediately softens (“Mom? Hi.”)

Tena launches into the purpose of her call, telling him: “I’m watching the news. That little girl in California-- you’re out there, aren’t you?” Despite the distance in their relationship, she knows her son and his mad pursuit for answers, correctly deducing Mulder would be compelled to solve this case out of a sense of empathy, absolution, or both.  

He can’t deny it; though he reflexively shrinks from wanting to discuss a case so close to their pressure points. 

“Yes”, he admits: a mix of trepidation, hesitation, and a little shame. “I am.” 

Either as a deflection or as a gentle probe into her welfare, Mulder asks “Are you okay, Mom?” 

Tena demurs: “When are you coming back here?”

Mulder snaps upright, possibly a little shocked she would care to know anything about his routines.  

“Well, I’m not sure, I, y’know, I-I…I dunno.” 

“Call when you get back, Fox.” 

Tena is tense-- knitted brows and troubled eyes-- but doesn’t betray it in her voice as she bids her son goodbye.  

Mulder promises-- “Okay, I will. Um, you take care, Mom--” and hangs up as fast as he can, gritting his jaw slightly. 

It’s obvious that, while he loves his mother, the blind trust he had given her regarding his emotions has not recovered. Since Demons's separation and Amor Fati's mild reconnection, the fracture has not fully healed, or even really started to. Mulder knows that his mom loves him; but even when he was comatose, Tena never dropped her pride enough to verbally tell her son that she loved him (she didn't know he could read minds so her confession was only incidental; and while it was nice to know she loved him, Mulder probably felt more hurt that she wouldn’t say it before she signed him over to the man that cut his brain open.) And after Amor Fati it seems the gap has still not been bridged.

While this is sad, it's a huge step for Mulder. He is not letting himself be taken advantage of or duped anymore: there are firm boundaries in place, including when he schedules his life around his mom. Before he would have dropped everything in the midst of an intense and interesting case and flown immediately to her side; now, he has placed her importance firmly where she has placed his in her life. Mulder may have forgiven Tena in the wake of his enlightening experiences while trapped in his own mind, but he has not forgotten.

Tena hears his sharp disconnect, 

and hangs up the phone, caught up in her own thoughts as well. 

It’s revealed she has been gazing at a photo of her children--

the very same photo CSM had in Redux II-- 

and contemplating something that her son is not aware of (yet.) 

She is also clearly wearing a wedding ring on her left ring finger, 

meaning one of many options (or all of them):

1. She kept Bill Mulder’s ring and wore it anyway post divorce. This would be odd because she didn’t wear it previously. 

2. She put her wedding ring back on to create a comfort zone of nostalgia: Mrs. Mulder again, with her doting son by her side-- an ode to a happier, more familial time. It would bring a little cheer to the present so that she and her son would have an easier time making peace with her approaching death.

3. She, like the Mulder men, likes to wear random wedding rings without being married to anyone (as shown in Travelers-- post here-- where Bill Mulder and Fox Mulder wear bands without documents or timelines to legally bind them to a wife.)

4. She got married again? And her husband is just some guy in the background who must've been literally shoved out of any room Mulder (and the camera) walked into. Maybe there’s a random guy named Joe who spent an afternoon being pushed around by the investigative team and ignored by everyone else.

While Tena stares at her children, she swallows before stretching her neck: steeling herself against unwanted emotion. 

The next time we see Tena, she is looking at her emptied photograph frames while leaving a message on Mulder's answering machine: 

“Fox, it’s your mother. I’d hoped you’d call upon your return, but I haven’t heard from you. I’m sure you’re busy. There are… so many emotions in me I wouldn’t know where to start. So much I’ve left unsaid for reasons I hope one day you’ll understand.” 

As her words play overhead, Tena takes the infamous photo of her children, 

plucks it from its frame, 

and proceeds to burn it. 

As she gazes at the disappearing photo, Tena sighs, tries the straighten-your-back-to-contain-your-emotions trick; but loses some ground to the fight (crunching her shoulders up, lowering her head, and pinching her face a bit more.)

Mulder is informed sometime soon after that his mother is dead.  

Tena Mulder, even in her last moments, was a selfish woman. While Bill Mulder was cowardly and quailed under the iron fist of the Consortium, buddying up with ex-Nazis and sitting on the sidelines while his colleagues hushed up and obliterated the lives of innocent people to keep themselves from being exposed, Tena railed, raged, and finally stewed. If she couldn’t have it the way she wanted-- a happy family life, no abductions, no affairs to taint her moral code-- then she wouldn’t remember any of it. This led her to systematically cut out everyone that served as a reminder of everything she wished to forget: her CSM lover (before her daughter was even abducted, post here), her ex-husband (laying all blame at his feet and none at her own, post here), and her own son (post here.) It’s not simply a matter of burning her children’s photos, although that’s bad enough. In destroying her past, she destroyed her son’s as well; and with it destroyed any tie Mulder had to his earlier happy childhood, something he always remembered fondly and wanted to recapture through his quest to recover his sister. While Tena viewed her actions as taking control of what she was robbed of by burning up all the lies she lived in the process, she threw in the good with the bad; and cast her baggage onto Mulder, leaving him with wounds grown deeper and deeper and robbing him of the last proof of his former life, family, and sister he treasured.  

Mulder and Scully drive up to Tena’s place, navigating their way through the team of investigators. As he numbly walks around the kitchen, Mulder curls in on himself; and when that doesn’t provide enough comfort, he sticks his hand into his mouth like a small, confused child trying to self-soothe. 

His mother held a huge place in Mulder’s life, as evidenced by his raw anguish and vulnerability. All those years, their bond was wound tight through their mutual trauma-- but Mulder spent his childhood wrapping his mother in a metaphorical trauma blanket while punishing himself for her pain and for his sister’s abduction. He never had a chance to be taken care of or given support to process his own trauma; and, per his words, is “still walking into that room” every day of his life. 

Mulder wilts even more as he’s handed Tena’s suicide pills and explained she used them in conjunction with the gas stove.

Tena left no final note. 

Mulder doesn’t see the sense or logic in any of her actions; and wanders around her bedroom, lost, looking for something but not knowing what. Finally, he sits before he falls to pieces, trying to center himself and think more clearly.

As Mulder relates Tena's phone call to Scully, a new theory pops into his head-- the White Whale, the elusive and uncatchable beam of light he can forever chase to keep the ugly realities of his life at bay-- that she had been subdued and killed. 

He rushes into this theory with renewed vigor. When emotions start to bubble to the surface again, almost drowning out his words, he uses his hands to demonstrate to Scully what to look for in his mother’s autopsy--

becoming insistent when Scully begs him not to ask her to perform it. His voice is deceptively upbeat, cheerful, a late-stage effect of teaching himself not to upset his mother (or anyone else) with his emotions in times of crisis. Internally, he’s bleeding; externally, he’s ignoring the wound and pursuing the chase. There’s an addictive quality to his hunt for answers: a simultaneous distraction from his needs and a focus for him to stave off discouraged apathy with life’s continual beat downs. He has yet to develop an effective coping strategy (though he has improved a lot since One Breath) since he is so used to running around, half-bandaged, shouting oaths at the world for justice (or vengeance.) As long as there is something to fight for (as his subconscious demonstrated when Amor Fati dream Scully ordered him to “Get up and fight”), Mulder will keep going. Unfortunately, this goal has driven many a more stable and healthily functioning person straight into single-minded madness.

Tena knew these things about her son and still did what she did. 

The worst thing about Tena’s uncommunicated suicide is that it pushes Mulder further into unhealthy coping mechanisms: he immediately discounts the evidence,

believing it has been planted and that his mother was murdered. Mulder then jumps to conspiracies, insisting Scully prove him right by autopsying his mother.

Tena's final act put her son in a very, very precarious position: either he pursues her murderers to his grave (an expanded clause on his Samantha Recovery Pact), or folds in on himself in blame, crushed forever. Her death is an unexpected, piercing grief that only serves (despite whatever her intentions) to strengthen Mulder's one-sided purpose. Not only that, but with the case he was working on and the guilt of his mother’s death (and tangentially Samantha’s abduction) combined, Mulder would have been eaten alive with his belief that Tena's death was preventable and entirely his fault: he had driven up for his dad the night he died-- why hadn't he at least called his mom back? Especially when she had finally, finally, reached out to reconnect with him? Mulder would have concluded that his mother had died thinking that he didn't love or care about her, the ultimate stake in his heart. Always his fault. Always too late. Always a failure that loses his family and gets them killed.

The last we hear from Tena Mulder is her phone message Mulder replays over and over. His hyper-focus on trying to decode her words, find a secret somewhere between her sentences, is a failure; and before he can further lose himself in this untruth, his partner saves him. If Scully had not been someone Mulder trusted above all else, he likely would have discredited her autopsy and driven himself crazy. It’s Scully who gives him a modicum of peace about his mother’s death: having suffered a painful, deadly illness herself, she understands the muddied logic of the dying; and she uses Mulder’s trust in her to convince him that his mother committed suicide because she simply wanted the pain (all of it) to end. While that may or may not be true, Scully believed it for him, so Mulder believed in her. 

With no one to blame and no other explanation out of this nightmarish reality, Mulder collapses in grief. It's here we see how devastated, helpless, and toothless Mulder is without his pursuit.

Scully saves Mulder from a fate worse than Tena's death, helping him to finally address his injury and start to heal it (and others that it was bleeding over into.) Without her, Mulder would not have been ready to accept Samantha's final gift of peace in Closure.

It’s interesting to reflect on Tena and her husband’s variations on neglect. Bill Mulder created a lot of early damage in his son by erecting immovable barriers between himself and young Mulder. While it was motivated from a deep fear of his inabilities and a cowardice of his past, Bill at least reached out when he could no longer escape from exposure. In his final hours, he tried to give his son closure, even opening himself up emotionally and revealing his pride that his son was a better man than he. In contrast, Tena was close with her son-- doting, loving, and sharing a bond with him that was layered with trauma and affection (see post here.) Her neglect was emotional: Mulder learned that he had to suppress himself emotionally to care for his broken mother. This set him up for too much reliance and dependence in relationships, leaving him to be easily exploited by others (Phoebe, Diana, Krycek, etc.) and a gun-shy attitude towards emotional vulnerability (see post here.) But, most crucially, when Mulder needed honesty from Tena about her past-- and was ready to empathetically listen and forgive-- she expunged him from her life, not reentering it for almost three years (not even for his faked suicide); and still maintained a distance that was all her own doing. Both of Mulder’s parents failed him; but in very different ways. 

So ends Tena Mulder: the person who molded Fox Mulder into the man he is today with all his virtues and faults, tenderness and stubborn insistence, empathetically bleeding heart and faulty coping mechanisms. While she had been an important part to him for almost all of her son’s life, their final years were filled with too many words left unsaid. 

Mentions:  

Tena was mentioned once or twice more-- in Within, Mulder visits Raleigh (where she was buried) "every week" and buys a tombstone by her grave (the evidence on that is small, but was never disproven-- or thoroughly questioned-- canonically); and we are shown her grave when Mulder’s “dead” body is buried in Deadalive. (The only other reference, maybe, to Tena might be in connection to the doll Mulder gifts Scully in Empedocles: it was a family heirloom-- likely belonging to Samanatha at some point-- that was stored at the Vineyard. At least Tena didn't burn it.)

We have reached the end of the Mulder Family saga, concluding with Tena's suicide and the impact of this decision on her son. While their relationship started out strong, her excommunication completely nuked it; and her curated, preservative selfishness prevented any further reconnection that she could have had in her final years. She was a woman who adored her son, could shout down CSM and live to tell the tale (post here), and had self-preserving instincts so fierce she could cut someone from her life and never look back. A flawed, neglectful, and stunted person; but one who wasn't evil so much as complicated.

Thank you for reading~

Enjoy~

[gingerteaonthetardis]

wildly obsessed with david duchovny writing his wife into the x-files universe. as herself. the implications ajshdksdh. and then in the x-files universe she is cast as scully. fantastique chef's kiss no notes

[x-files-scripts]

The X-Files - “Within”

Written by Chris Carter

September 26, 2000 (2ND BLUE)

Scully’s first day without Mulder...

Introducing John Doggett...

Scully falls asleep on Mulder’s bed...

[dabeth-is-dead]

I just find so funny that the other people in the FBI act like Mulder went from this amazingly promising, logical, evidence-based profiler until he discovered the x files and got spooky about it as if profiling isn't also literally fake bullshit

[carefulfears]

finally back together

[deathsbestgirl]

the thing about lazarus for me is ... even if scully believed mulder's theory that dupre was in jack's body. what would scully have done differently? literally nothing. things would have happened in exactly the same way. she still would have urged him to go to the hospital, he still would have refused, they would still work the case and he still would have kidnapped her. and she would have talked to him the same way, still unable to believe that jack was completely gone & lost to her. because he's right in front of her. she would still be asking mulder about the time on his watch. and he would still be caring & gentle with her, giving her space to mourn because she's more important than being right.

[anders-hawke]

also insisting msr was platonic was homophobic bc arguing that mulder and scully’s relationship had no romance to it because can’t a guy and a gal just be friends implies that if mulder and scully were both cis men or both cis women and they acted the same no one would be arguing that it was a romance but that’s untrue. they would just be gay for each other. the romance of their relationship transcends gender. them being canonically cishet only aided in making them popular, not in dictating the fact that their love is also romantic.

[harmonicabisexuals]

okay what the fUCK is this brain disease thing is this the thing everyone was talking about?? i hate it soooo much omg