#xfilesmeta

[sagan-starstuff]

all things

Watching all things for the first time in a loooong time and my feelings are SO MUCH MORE complicated than when I was a teenager/early 20's. I do not think this episode is when they first had sex. I think they had been since at least Millennium, possibly earlier - I am very pro-Season of Secret Sex. I think a lot of Mulder and Scully's behavior to each other in this episode comes from adjusting to their respective ideas of their future life together, especially now that Mulder has been released from the burden of his search for Samantha. I think Scully is struggling with the failure of their IVF attempt, what she thought was her last chance at something normal. I think Mulder is afraid that without their child, she won't see a reason to stay with him, even with their new romantic relationship. I think he keeps pushing forward with cases, doesn't stop running, because he wants to distract them both from this huge sense of loss, and the thing that comes first to his mind is the intellectual stimulation of their work -or at least what he finds stimulating. Scully needs time, and the reminder of how much she's fundamentally evolved since when she was with Daniel, to accept that even without a desperately wanted child, she's where she needs to be...and with who she needs to be with. They love each other, they've let each other in, but it isn't until now that they have to start coming to terms what a tenable future together looks like, with or without a child, with or without the FBI. And at the end of the episode, they know that every choice, every event that marked their lives, has led them to each other. That's where they belong, no matter what the future brings. That's their truth.

[sagan-starstuff]

YES YES YES I ENDORSE THIS TAKE!

I also hated 3 as a teen. How dare he have sex with a stranger when he loves Scully??? But as I aged, I came to understand how deeply hurt and broken Mulder is at this point. His actions in this episode are entirely in line with a deeply traumatized person with little regard for his own life reaching out to another deeply traumatized person with little regard for her own life, connecting in their pain, and trying to relieve some of that pain, even for a moment, the only way they know how. Sex is complicated. I don't see it as a betrayal of Scully at all, though he probably did. I see it as a desperate act of self-harm, an attempt to feel anything other than guilt and pain.

And in the end, Mulder still can't save her. He fails another woman, again. My god, the depths to which this man tortures himself. It puts so much of his rage in One Breath in context.

I also LOVE that you touched on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the context of the time period. I'm in health care, specifically in infectious diseases. The first regimen of what was then called HAART (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy) didn't even come out until 1995, and they were insanely expensive and had many serious side effects. Until those medications were introduced, HIV/AIDS was a death sentence. I cannot understate how scary a time it was for many, many people. Kristen's casual disregard of HIV/AIDS would have been shocking at that time.

(Things are MUCH MUCH better now for people living with HIV - we can't cure it yet but current therapies are extremely effective and safe and people living with HIV now have an excellent chance of living long, full, healthy lives with regular care.)

Mulder’s Depressed Vampire Sex: Me on 3

You know, I like the episode 3. I mean, not the casefile part of 3, which is whatever whatever, but the important part: the blood fetishist lady has her way with Mulder and then he cries.

I definitely loathed the episode back when the show was airing. Back then it seemed like it was intentionally hostile to the ship—like going out of its way to be hostile, having Kristen tell Mulder shit like “I can tell you’re missing someone, but attention please: just a friend. Definitely not more!!!” I honestly kind of felt like she was looking out of the screen directly at me when she said it.

But looking back, knowing that MSR was endgame (and that fans kinda took over the narrative anyway), I definitely see the episode totally differently.

From a Mulder character arc point of view, this episode is all about him being a sad, sad boy. It is all about his depression, his hopelessness, his grief for Scully. It’s also about his drive to try to save women and girls in order to save himself. And he so often seems to fail at this when it is someone he cares about (or even when it is someone he has a fleeting connection with, like Kristen). And that’s so, so devastating for him. In that sense, this episode is a really desperate expression of his grief and frustration.

The HIV/AIDS angle to this ep is super important, too, so we have to make sure we’re getting into the full 1994 mindset on this. Mulder says in alarm to Kristen back in the club, when she’s playing fast and loose with blood: “AIDS. Aren’t you afraid?” (To which she responds that she wants to die.) Mulder knows that HIV transmission through sharing fluids is no joke in 1994 (it probably really shouldn’t be now either, but that’s not today’s lecture). Yet later, when Kristen is shaving him and he’s nicked, he allows this to be the catalyst for sex, even as he makes attempts to stop her from tasting his blood.

So his choice to have sex with Kristen is depicted as reckless, with someone who has been shown being careless about HIV. And he is doing it not just because he is turned on, but because he is being intentionally reckless with himself, clearly knowing the consequences. He shows concern for her, yes, but he’s also self destructive. He wants to fuck the hot vampire, but he also wants to fuck with death.

In other words, there’s a difference between what the episode tells us about Mulder’s relationship to Scully and what it shows us. And what the episode shows us about their relationship is that Scully is central enough in his life that everything is fundamentally affected by her abduction. He’s broken. He’s visibly depressed. He makes decisions that risk his job and his life. All the while he is actually choosing to wear her cross: a symbol that traditionally wards off vampires, as Kristen observes, but also keeps Scully’s presence in his mind constantly and in every frame of the episode he's in. And the episode ends with him looking like a hero in a romance novel mournfully casting his eyes to the hills clutching her cross in his hand.

None of this obviously communicates “I miss my work friend,” right? No objective observer would see this and say, “ah, he clearly is missing someone—most likely a friend, I would say.” But probably that’s exactly why they included Kristen’s “just a friend” line. They knew his grief in this episode was reading very powerfully, and they didn’t want it to seem overtly romantic.

I also feel like it’s kind of significant that the only time we actually see Mulder have confirmed sex with someone (besides Scully later) is when he’s depressed and Scully is gone. Linking his grief for Scully to his very-rarely-seen acting out on sexual desire like this also seems kind of psychologically sus to me, but I don’t know, I read a lot of fanfic.

Speaking of which, I did a little fanfic search for 3. And unless I am missing obvious fics (always a possibility), it was kind of difficult. Partly because this is a stupidly hard episode to look in search engines for. (No one should ever name episodes after numbers, although this one I will forgive because it’s from 1994 and they couldn’t have fully understood about Google and AO3.)

But also I just think there hasn’t been a ton of 3 fanfic, probably because this episode isn’t very well-liked. And listen, I get that Scully isn’t in it, which is often unappealing for writers, and there is Mulder/other, which people don’t like. But I feel like there are a lot of possibilities for story ideas here that don’t necessarily take place during the events of the episode. Like: how does it affect them later? Personally I like fics where Mulder and Scully discuss the events of the episode long after (actually I wrote one, which I included in my recs because I’m not that cool). I also think Mulder’s angst and depression has a lot of ways it could go—not to mention it’s the last canonically confirmed time he has sex before like 2000 or something. And it seems like AU takes on what happened to Kristen could be interesting. So what I'm saying is: maybe try writing 3 fics.

3 Fanfic Recs

Three is a Crowd - wendelah1 Mulder has sex with Kristen but can’t stop thinking of Scully.

Analgesic- settledownfrohike Mulder has sex with Kristen but can’t stop being a self-loathing, self-destructive mess. And thinking of Scully.

The Woman In His Heart - Spangle This shorter piece frames Mulder’s time with Kristen as a revelation about his feelings. Angsty and nicely observed. A 2005 Spooky winner, evidently.

False Dawn - emmbright A sharply etched portrait of how Mulder moves through his life between 3 and One Breath. For me this fills in the blanks perfectly.

Dreams - Characteristically_Exuberant This is actually a (great) post-ep for Field Trip, and the events of 3 aren’t the main focus of the fic. But I like how this author discusses what happened with Mulder in that episode and contextualizes it for both agents.

We’re Not Here To Get Involved In Personal Problems - cecily_sass This is mine, also not really a 3 post-ep; it’s an X-Cops post-ep. I feel a little silly including it. But I had them discuss the events of 3 in this fic in a way that sort of lays out my own thesis of the episode, and I thought, hey, it’s my list. Mulder and Scully walk to a gas station in Willow Park in Los Angeles the morning after X-Cops; they discuss plenty.

Any others? I feel like I probably missed some.

[sagan-starstuff]

Mulder - over the course of the Cancer arc, culminating in Redux II. I like to think he started to think about why the events of Never Again upset him so much and then Scully gets her diagnosis and he has to face the fact that she really will die and then by Redux II it's slapping him in the face just when it's about to get ripped away. But he continues to push it away over the course of S5-6 because of his guilt and loss of faith in his mission and doesn't get to a point where he not only understands, accepts, and feels the can ACT on those emotions until The Unnatural.

Scully - She had a HUGE crush on him in season 1 but it fades over season 2-3 because she thinks he'll only ever live for his mission and she accepts her place as his partner and friend. Then the cancer diagnosis, and I think she realizes it by Redux II but Mulder is in the depths of anger and self-pity and because he doubts his mission, she doubts if he really needs her in his life or not, which is only amplified by Diana's arrival. Then the FTF Hallway scene, and she gets the confirmation that he DOES need her, and she realizes she's in love with him. S6 is all about the fact that they know this about themselves and suspect it about each other but the looming specter of Diana and their own internal dissonance with each other over Scully's "refusal to believe" and Mulder's "asking her to be someone she can't and believe like him", and she ALSO doesnt get to a place where she can feel comfortable allowing Mulder into that part of her soul until Milagro (especially after his jackassery in One Son).

Definitely recommend @randomfoggytiger's meta posts on this and more

question for academic discussion: when did mulder realize he was in love with scully? and when did scully realize she was in love with mulder?