Never Again -- the extended remix
Oct. 11th, 2003 07:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katallisonI felt like riffing a bit on some stuff that came into my head while I was doing yesterday's Favorite Fannish Moments list. (And may I just encourage others out there to likewise go on at more length about particular beloved episodes? Lists are great, but I also love the extended wallow.)
I really should go down into the basement and dig out a couple of episodes to rewatch, because it would make more sense to rewatch them before noodling at length, but then I've never done things in proper order...
So, first, Never Again. I know that at the time this was a very controversial episode in XF fandom, and a lot of people loathed it, I think in large part because it violated their conception of Scully. (Boy, had we but known what was coming down the road...)
Me, I loved it. Because when you stop and think about Scully--here's someone who is fundamentally shaped by, who has spent her whole life living up to the expectations of, a series of authoritarian, rigid, profoundly *male* power structures. The military. The Catholic Church. Medical school. The FBI. And while she's clearly succeeded on their terms, she's also clearly made a series of crucial decisions that constitute small rebellions of a sort--she's chipped little chinks in the armor of stainless-steel conventional male success. Her semi-estrangement from her father. Her ambivalent relationship with her religion. Her leaving medicine for the FBI. And most notably, her choice, over and over again, to sabotage her FBI career by siding with Mulder.
And yet these are all small and incomplete rebellions; she never stops loving her father or caring about his judgments, she never really loses her faith or leaves the Church, she retains her medical role, she continually struggles to keep herself and Mulder in the decent graces of the Agency. She has so many balls in the air at any given moment, and she almost never drops a one. I think a lot of women who spend their lives juggling many balls, multiple roles and allegiances, can resonate to the kind of inner price tag that comes with this--the frustration, the exhaustion, the sense of "What about me, dammit?" and the anger at all those men-in-authority whom one works so hard to please.
Her relationship with Mulder is especially interesting in this respect; she came on board with the X-Files as Mulder's nominal subordinate, pretty clearly, and for all that's happened since, she still functions in that role much of the time, doing the scutwork, making nice with the bosses, covering his ass. Her absent desk is the recurring metaphor for the enduring inequalities in their relationship, and his complete cluelessness about what that means to her is--wow, that's beautiful, that is so *exactly* the kind of thing I've seen in lots of relationships, personal and professional. "What are you so upset about? Jeez, it's just a desk!"
I absolutely love it that when she does crack and go off the rails, it's with a guy who really is a kind of Mulder doppelganger. Ed Jerse is a weirdo, an outcast, a loner, with an ambiguously troubled past, a loser by conventional standards, dark, intense, possibly dangerous. He's Mulder without any of Mulder's brilliance and obsessive passion; a Mulder without a mission, and without any need for her to be support crew for the mission. He has no expectations for her to live up to. She has no need to be strong with him, to hold everything together, she can let everything fall apart.
And it matters to me that her rebellion is sexual, the most traditionally condemned-by-male-authority form of female rebellion. Whether or not she and Ed actually Did It, the consequences are, literally, written on her flesh.
It kills me that in the aftermath she's left sitting, blank-faced and tight-lipped, back in her rigid putty-colored suit, being swarmed with Mulder's anger and guilt-tripping. (His jab about her "making a second personal appearance in the X-Files" is damn near unforgivable.)
Then her famous line, "Not everything is about you, Mulder. This is my life." Which is perfectly and gorgeously ambiguous, because -- yeah, on one level it is about him (there's a reason she chose Ed), but it's not subjectively about him, in the way he thinks. It's not that she's a moon circling Planet Mulder, but rather that he's one of the moons circling her, capable of causing perturbations and tidal shifts, but not the central thing. This is her life; she gets to fuck it up, just as he gets to fuck up his, but he's merely an element in her fuck-up, just as she is in his.
And Mulder, lovely clueless Mulder, starts to say, "But it's my--" At which moment, you can see the vestige of a glimmering of a clue get through to him, because he just. Shuts. Up. He realizes there's absolutely nothing he can say at that moment, to complete that sentence, that has any significance whatsoever for her. And so they sit. There's nothing more that can be said between them. Pull back, fade to black. Silence.
As I recall, the original intention was that this episode would air just before the launch of the Scully-cancer arc, preceding Leonard Betts and Memento Mori, but that the order got shuffled and it got shown between them. I have mixed feelings about that; Scully's awareness that she has terminal cancer gives some additional resonance to this episode, but at the same time I kind of want all the resonances here to be about her life and her life choices, not about impending death; I'd rather her realizations weren't weighted by that kind of baggage.
But in any event, I love this episode. And getting rid of Morgan and Wong, making this their last XF episode, is definitely on the list of Stuff For Which I Will Never Forgive Chris Carter.
And mercy, this got long. I was going to say a bunch of stuff about Indiscretions, too, but that'll have to wait for another time.
I really should go down into the basement and dig out a couple of episodes to rewatch, because it would make more sense to rewatch them before noodling at length, but then I've never done things in proper order...
So, first, Never Again. I know that at the time this was a very controversial episode in XF fandom, and a lot of people loathed it, I think in large part because it violated their conception of Scully. (Boy, had we but known what was coming down the road...)
Me, I loved it. Because when you stop and think about Scully--here's someone who is fundamentally shaped by, who has spent her whole life living up to the expectations of, a series of authoritarian, rigid, profoundly *male* power structures. The military. The Catholic Church. Medical school. The FBI. And while she's clearly succeeded on their terms, she's also clearly made a series of crucial decisions that constitute small rebellions of a sort--she's chipped little chinks in the armor of stainless-steel conventional male success. Her semi-estrangement from her father. Her ambivalent relationship with her religion. Her leaving medicine for the FBI. And most notably, her choice, over and over again, to sabotage her FBI career by siding with Mulder.
And yet these are all small and incomplete rebellions; she never stops loving her father or caring about his judgments, she never really loses her faith or leaves the Church, she retains her medical role, she continually struggles to keep herself and Mulder in the decent graces of the Agency. She has so many balls in the air at any given moment, and she almost never drops a one. I think a lot of women who spend their lives juggling many balls, multiple roles and allegiances, can resonate to the kind of inner price tag that comes with this--the frustration, the exhaustion, the sense of "What about me, dammit?" and the anger at all those men-in-authority whom one works so hard to please.
Her relationship with Mulder is especially interesting in this respect; she came on board with the X-Files as Mulder's nominal subordinate, pretty clearly, and for all that's happened since, she still functions in that role much of the time, doing the scutwork, making nice with the bosses, covering his ass. Her absent desk is the recurring metaphor for the enduring inequalities in their relationship, and his complete cluelessness about what that means to her is--wow, that's beautiful, that is so *exactly* the kind of thing I've seen in lots of relationships, personal and professional. "What are you so upset about? Jeez, it's just a desk!"
I absolutely love it that when she does crack and go off the rails, it's with a guy who really is a kind of Mulder doppelganger. Ed Jerse is a weirdo, an outcast, a loner, with an ambiguously troubled past, a loser by conventional standards, dark, intense, possibly dangerous. He's Mulder without any of Mulder's brilliance and obsessive passion; a Mulder without a mission, and without any need for her to be support crew for the mission. He has no expectations for her to live up to. She has no need to be strong with him, to hold everything together, she can let everything fall apart.
And it matters to me that her rebellion is sexual, the most traditionally condemned-by-male-authority form of female rebellion. Whether or not she and Ed actually Did It, the consequences are, literally, written on her flesh.
It kills me that in the aftermath she's left sitting, blank-faced and tight-lipped, back in her rigid putty-colored suit, being swarmed with Mulder's anger and guilt-tripping. (His jab about her "making a second personal appearance in the X-Files" is damn near unforgivable.)
Then her famous line, "Not everything is about you, Mulder. This is my life." Which is perfectly and gorgeously ambiguous, because -- yeah, on one level it is about him (there's a reason she chose Ed), but it's not subjectively about him, in the way he thinks. It's not that she's a moon circling Planet Mulder, but rather that he's one of the moons circling her, capable of causing perturbations and tidal shifts, but not the central thing. This is her life; she gets to fuck it up, just as he gets to fuck up his, but he's merely an element in her fuck-up, just as she is in his.
And Mulder, lovely clueless Mulder, starts to say, "But it's my--" At which moment, you can see the vestige of a glimmering of a clue get through to him, because he just. Shuts. Up. He realizes there's absolutely nothing he can say at that moment, to complete that sentence, that has any significance whatsoever for her. And so they sit. There's nothing more that can be said between them. Pull back, fade to black. Silence.
As I recall, the original intention was that this episode would air just before the launch of the Scully-cancer arc, preceding Leonard Betts and Memento Mori, but that the order got shuffled and it got shown between them. I have mixed feelings about that; Scully's awareness that she has terminal cancer gives some additional resonance to this episode, but at the same time I kind of want all the resonances here to be about her life and her life choices, not about impending death; I'd rather her realizations weren't weighted by that kind of baggage.
But in any event, I love this episode. And getting rid of Morgan and Wong, making this their last XF episode, is definitely on the list of Stuff For Which I Will Never Forgive Chris Carter.
And mercy, this got long. I was going to say a bunch of stuff about Indiscretions, too, but that'll have to wait for another time.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-11 07:48 am (UTC)But Scully--my, yes. We shared some building blocks: Military family. A Catholicism that both attracts and repels. She chose medical school, I chose law, but the structures are the same, the same male arrogance, the same embedded strictures. Watching her struggle, watching her try to keep all those balls in the air, holding my breath every time one of the seemed to get too close to the ground--that was my emotional connection to XF. And I loved this episode, too--of course I pinged, of course I understood, of course there was a part of me on the edge of my chair, cheering her on, reveling in the transgressions, even knowing that there would be a price, because of course there would be a price, there's always a price. Payment due upon receipt.
Nice analysis. Thanks for the reminder.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-11 08:06 am (UTC)I especially liked seeing Scully's private life without the normal trappings (like the pretty Laura Ashley apartment that she never really looked at home in).
And now that I think back, that entire episode was shot brilliantly. With the exception of Ed's office, which was harshly lit like a hospital bay, every other shot with him looked dirty, harsh and grainy, like there was a fine patina of grit over everything. It was almost shocking to see Scully in that environment of dirty desperation, yet she looked almost comfortable there, like it was a room in her home we never saw, one where empty pizza boxes and dirty dishes littered the floor. Whoever directed has my unqualified love.
And getting rid of Morgan and Wong, making this their last XF episode, is definitely on the list of Stuff For Which I Will Never Forgive Chris Carter.
Oh, my list is long, my friend. Long and bitter.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-11 09:44 am (UTC)You put this much better than I could have. And Mulder's failure to understand the parallel: he feels threatened by Scully's connection with someone else -- he recognizes that Ed was competition -- but he doesn't understand why.
Oh how I loved that show. *sigh* I hope I never see a show crash and burn like that again.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-11 11:15 am (UTC)I have nothing to add to your thoughtful post, except: yeah.
And I miss this show.
And I want to start my Scully vid *now*.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-11 07:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-10-12 09:32 am (UTC)Continuity error works for me. And I'm still sad they didn't include the take where Ed pushed Scully up against the wall in the deleted scenes on the DVDs.