2×08 – ONE BREATH
by foxestacado
Recap by As An Amoeba
I’ve procrastinated sooooo much on this because, well, I love this episode, more than any other, which is why I snatched it up, and I don’t know how I’m going to do it justice and also be funny. A lot of the things that TXF is dumb about, and most TV is dumb about, this episode gets right. Despite my frequent irritation with Morgan and Wong, they are unquestionably sharp writers, with a real talent for ducking cliches and avoiding bullshit, and they care about characters, and if they occasionally take those characters places that would probably better be visited by fanfic writers or by stories that didn’t involve an already established TV show, I guess that’s the price we pay for the good stuff. I’d rather have to sit through a “The Field Where I Died” and a “3″ to get a “Beyond the Sea” and a “One Breath” than have an entire series made up of nothing but “Born Again”s and “The Walk”s.
But if they’d really had Melissa Scully sleep with Mulder the way they allegedly originally planned, I’d be taking all this back, rolling it up into a bat shape and beating them with it. Editing! It’s a good thing.
We open on a shot of clouds, high up above them actually, the camera speeding across them, and a very pretty bit of Mark Snow music that makes me tear up like a bell makes Pavlov’s dog drool. Ma Scully’s voice starts telling us a story: “Once, when she was a girl…a very little girl…Dana was in the woods…it was autumn…she had always been a tomboy, unlike her sister Melissa…” Apparently in the original script for this there was a shot of teenage Melissa, sitting on a log or something reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which is pretty perfect. I remember being enraptured with that book for about ten minutes when I was 14 or so. I thought it was very deep. Until I decided it was dumb and didn’t make any sense. I can see Melissa being into it. The ’70s. Ma Scully tells us that Dana and her brothers — we see a pudgy Bill Jr. (who looks nothing like adult Bill Jr. — or any other member of the Scully family, past or present; is that the FX guy’s nephew or something? — but he sure has an impressive bowl cut, so that’s something) and a skinny little Charlie (who may or may not look like adult Charlie, who might be a gay sea monster for all we know) — in their dungarees and striped shirts. Dana looks like she’s around 9 (so she’s not THAT little of a girl, Ma Scully — when she was really little, she was busy discovering dead maggotty bunnies in lunchboxes, THANKS AGAIN, BILL JR.), and I love the little girl they found to play her — I can really see preadolescent Dana like this, freckles and curls with the little braids holding them back, and sort of dorky overalls and a round little face. Her brothers got her a BB gun for her birthday, and they’re going around shooting stuff like kids who have woods to play in always do, if they’re psychos or future FBI agents or…whatever Charlie turned out to be, I guess. They’re only supposed to shoot cans — we pan up the impressively large tum of Pa Scully, a.k.a. Ahab, putting a can on a log and shaking his finger meaningfully at them. But Bill Jr. (of course! Seriously, it’s a wonder that kid didn’t grow up to be a serial killer with all the dead animals he was responsible for) finds a snake and tosses it on the ground so they can shoot it. This is a great story, Maggie! This is really making me feel better about Scully’s abduction. Dana, wearing quite the gleefully bloodthirsty expression, “wanting to fit in with her brothers,” shoots too, but then she actually hurts the little bugger, and her face falls. OK, I’m being very light about all of this, but truly, this little story makes me frickin’ cry every time.
Despite her fear of snakes, little Dana picks this one up and holds it, tearful and devastated, “as though sheer human will could keep it alive. The snake, its blood on her hands, died…there was nothing she could do to bring it back,” Maggie says. Well, isn’t that nice! And then they went back home and ate milk and cookies, and then they found out the neighbor child had a blood disease and could never see sunlight again. And then they played Monopoly! And then they learned about homelessness. Thanks, Ma Scully!
We’re back in the present, the music is backing off, and Maggie has a beatific look on her face. Cut to a fuzzy-haired Mulder sitting beside her: “It’s too soon, Mrs. Scully.” Ma Scully looks up, and she does have those big sad blue eyes just like Gillian. They must have searched up and down to find this actress — nope, she’s the director’s wife. Sometimes nepotism is good!! Seriously. I adore Sheila Larken. Ma Scully can be a bit much in some future episodes, but she is nothing but awesome all the way through this one.
“We can’t give up,” Mulder says. Ma Scully finishes the story: “That day in the woods…I felt for my daughter. But at this moment…” Her voice darkens. “I know how my daughter felt.” The music darkens too. We pull back a bit; they’re sitting in a waiting area in an office of some sort. A door opens, and a guy in a jumpsuit emerges from a back room, holding a flat box. Mulder and Maggie get up and go to look; Mulder turns away after a moment, looking upset. Inside the box is Scully’s gravestone. Geez, Ma Scully! I take back what I said about your awesomeness. It is too soon, both to bury her and to tell embarrassing stories about how she cried after shooting a snake. What’s next, you pave over her bedroom and tell Skinner all about the time she got her period on the bus to church camp?
Credits. I try to pull myself together, since we’re only 2:29 into this thing.
Mulder’s lying on the couch in his apartment. The camera passes over Scully’s X-file, and the picture of her in Duane Barry’s trunk, and some sunflower seeds, and then we see Mulder, lying on his couch. He’s lit a candle, and he’s reading a little poetry and weeping quietly while softly caressing the petals of a rose — oh, no, actually, he’s watching porn. That Mulder! (cue laugh track) (OK, actually I think it’s awesome that he’s watching porn, and this is one thing I love about M&W — they don’t go for the easy thing; it’s disturbing to see Mulder watching porn when he should be mourning for Scully, but we all know Mulder’s a weirdo, and he deals with things in his own creepy way, and it makes total sense that he’d try to deaden his emotions by flooding them with some sex. But do NOT tell them I said that. P.S. Awesome tube socks, Mulder.)
Mulder’s phone rings. His sad dark eyes turn in its direction.
Cut to Northeast Georgetown Medical Center, Washington, DC, and Mulder in a black turtleneck and jeans (I know I always say this in the early eps, and it’s sure not like he’s any tub of lard now, but man is he SKINNY here), striding with carefully held blankness down the hospital hallway, then breaking into a run. “Sir, you can’t go in there!” says a nurse (hmm, there’s something familiar about her), but he does go in there, and there’s our Scully, lying on a bed in a blue hospital gown, looking horrifying — tubes in her mouth, wires everywhere, tape everywhere, her eyes taped shut, a big black balloon filling with air over and over again, presumably part of whatever elaborate contraption is helping her breathe. And, um.
Look, there’s no polite way to describe this. Gillian’s breasts are humongous. The woman’s just had a baby, she gained a bunch of weight while pregnant, we haven’t had a clear shot of her in months, and I’m pretty sure that those suckas are chock full of milk, because they are sticking straight up. And, like, man. It’s really, really, really noticeable. It’s hard to look anywhere else. You have to look OVER them to get to her face. And it’s kind of hard. I’m not intending to dwell on this. But, like, not mentioning it would be lying by omission. Quite honestly, I wish they’d found another way to stage this — like, would it have killed them to throw a blanket on her? Maybe it wouldn’t be a hundred percent accurate (or maybe it would, I don’t know), but this IS a show about aliens and vampires and man-sized flukeworms. I’m just saying. If I were Gillian I’d have been annoyed, once I got out of my post-partum stupor and remembered that I’d actually done an episode that week. I guess it’s more dramatic to have her all vulnerable in the bed, but, again, it’s…undermined somewhat by her current physical appearance. By which I mean her giant, giant boobs. OK. Moving on.
Mulder leans over the bed, his mouth slightly open in shock, I’ll assume over her condition and not her new rack. We get a closer shot on Scully’s face, which is even more relentless because we can really see all the tape and the wires and *cough* not be distracted by the boobs. Sorry — really moving on now. She looks bad. This isn’t a pretty swoon or polite, damp-browed whimpering. She looks scary bad. Mulder looks up; Mrs. Scully is sitting by the other side of the bed, grim-faced. Mulder starts to ask her a question, then changes his mind and stands up to redirect it to the medical personnel floating around. “Who brought her here?” he asks, calmly at first. “How did she get here?” The nurse tries to get him to simmer down, but he snaps the same question at her, much louder. He’s directed to a Dr. Daly, who is lurking outside the door, and he angrily turns on him, demanding to know what the hell is going on here, how Scully got here, and who did this to her. All pretty understandable, you must admit. Finally security drags him out, as he screams at the poor doctor that if he’s hiding anything Mulder will find out. It’s pretty terrific, this scene, the way he starts out so calm, so in check, and he just explodes. He’s yelling, he’s dropping shit, he’s firing questions at everybody; it’s great. Go David go.
Cut. Mulder’s calm now; I guess they skipped the part where they put him in a straitjacket and gave him horse tranquilizers. He and Ma Scully are seated in some sort of depressing hospital lounge with Dr. Daly, who for some reason hasn’t quit his job in disgust and moved to Florida to write grumpy novels about all the crazy shizznit doctors have to put up with. Good man. He’s doing a sitrep. Basically, Scully’s in critical condition, in a full-on coma, no response to stimuli. He admits, haltingly and apologetically, that no one can figure out how she got here or who took care of her when she did. Mulder doesn’t respond to this other than with some drawn-out blinking, but the tension is apparent. Because he doesn’t know what’s happened to her, Dr. Daly has no idea what to tell them. There’s nothing apparently wrong with her. Mulder asks that she be examined for trace evidence; Daly sheepishly replies that she’s been “bathed and cleaned” (eww, creepy. You know CSM made a special trip in here to do that, since he loves putting pajamas on her and all that) since her arrival. Mulder finally registers emotion, breathing out sharply and looking away. Daly goes on: he needs to inform them about Dana’s living will. Oh, crap. “What did she say?” Ma Scully asks. Daly starts to explain: Dana’s a doctor, she understands about comas, she has all this specific medical criteria and… “She doesn’t want to live in this condition,” Mulder interrupts quietly. Daly looks at him, realizing: “You signed the will as her witness.” Jiminy Christmas, people. This episode kills me. KILLS me. I’m halfway to dead right now. I’m lying in a coma with no blanket and my ta-tas sticking straight up in the air.
All right, finally, some damn comic relief (or what passes for it in this episode — it’s no fake buck teeth or double entendre about light sabers, but I’ll take what I can get). We’ve got a closeup on a huge crystal dangling from a chain, and there’s some kooky lady in a red dress, eyes closed, holding it over Scully. Mulder comes in, looks at the crystal, looks at Scully, looks at the newcomer, who turns her head towards him as if sensing something in a Counselor Troi-ish fashion, then opens her eyes. She’s got another crystal on a black ribbon around her neck. Oh boy. “I’ve been told not to call you Fox,” she says. Geez, but Scully took that “I even made my parents call me Mulder” thing seriously. You know, I always wondered if he just said that in “Tooms” to deflect the awkwardly intimate moment they were having, and then forgot about it, and then wondered why for the following nine years that they were together she never ever called him anything but Mulder, even while he occasionally called her Dana and like nine hundred other people who were not his parents called him Fox. It so seems like a throwaway thing that she took with deadly seriousness. Such seriousness that she’s apparently communicated it psychically to her moonbat sister while in a coma. Think before you speak, won’t you, Mulder? “By who?” he asks, nonplussed. I’ll give him a pass on the grammar of that phrase under the circumstances. “Dana. Just now,” she replies, and I think one thing that is kind of cool about Melissa, and I’m not sure how much of this is the actress and how much the writing, but she just has this air of SMUGNESS about her — she’s not mean, she’s not a brat, but she is so ineffably self-satisfied that you can just tell how she must have driven straitlaced, anal-retentive Dana up the effing wall when they were kids. I can see her just turning multiple shades of red and grinding her teeth while Melissa calmly tossed off some wacko hippie platitude like it was gospel. Hey, wait a minute. Mulder, look — it’s Girl You!
“If she’d talked, the EEG would have moved,” Mulder says skeptically (my irony — let me show you it), and Melissa gives a condescending little chuckle and replies with that same infuriating calmness, “Her soul is here.” Oh…boy.
Mulder is saved from his dropped-jaw stupor by Maggie coming into the room; Melissa turns to her and says calmly, “Hi, Mom.” Mulder swings around to her like he’s watching a tennis match. “I’m glad you could come, Melissa,” Ma Scully says. “You’re Scully’s sister?” gapes Mulder, like the fine investigator he is. He processes that. And puts it aside for an assload more processing later.
“Dana’s choosing whether to remain or move on,” Melissa pontificates, and Maggie kind of shuts her eyes for a second and leaves the room, clearly done with this. Melissa watches her go resignedly, then takes Mulder’s hand and holds it over Scully: “You can feel her.” Well, yes, he CAN feel her, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t exercise some restraint, for more reasons than I…oh, she means metaphysically. Ah. Of course. Crazy Pants and Other Crazy Pants hold their hands suspended over Scully, and we zoom in on Scully’s face and then…suddenly it’s Scully, awake (more or less) and healthy, no tubes, no wires, wearing a black overcoat and sitting up in a small wooden boat that floats on a lake. What the! There’s a comfy pillow supporting her back, at least, which is a nice concession to a woman who had a Cesarean ten days ago. Poor Gillian. She looks pretty zonked in these scenes, which…totally works, so it’s all good. Still, I guess the sitting up in a boat parts were more taxing than the lying down in a bed parts. Frankly, that is true of my life as well, not that I do a whole lot of sitting up in boats, but nothing beats lying down in a bed, I must say. I wish I could come to work and do that. I’d let them tape whatever the hell they wanted all over me.
Anyway. The camera spins around to reveal a dock, the boat tied to it by a single rope, and…Mulder and Melissa are on the dock, staring out at Scully, who stares back. Some lady in white is standing a bit behind them. Hmmmm. Paranormal activity alert! “She’s not here,” says the Mulder on the dock. But! She totally is! This scene haunts me, honestly, the way Scully is just staring right at them and they’re staring right at her and Mulder’s like, “Nah, this is all crap, she can’t hear us” as her eyes bore right into him. I love how they did this. I also like that Coma!Scully can tell that Mulder’s wearing a turtleneck and Melissa’s wearing a long red velvet dress. Or maybe she just assumes.
Back in the hospital, Melissa tells Mulder that his anger is blocking the positive vibes Scully needs. Mulder declares that he needs to do more than wave his hands in the air. Ironically, it’s because he does, in fact, care. So very much! So instead he goes home and puts a masking-tape X on his window. Because that’s not in any way the exact same amount of magical thinking.
Montage! Mulder sits on a chair. Mulder bounces a basketball. Mulder sprawls on his couch. Now it’s morning, and he wakes up on the couch, the X still on the window. He checks his front door — there’s a newspaper, but there’s nothing in it, no magic clue, no answers. He rips the tape off angrily, wads it up, and smacks his desk hard in frustration.
Cut to a hobgoblin — oh wait, it’s our old buddy Melvin Frohike, bless him, here at the hospital in a full-on tuxedo, carrying a bouquet of bedraggled-looking flowers. “Dana Scully, please,” he says, causing a nearby Mulder, who’s diddling with the phone, to turn around in bemusement. He shows Fro to Scully’s bedside, where our girl is looking about as good as she did the last time, which is to say, not. Frohike looks unsettled. He rifles through her charts while Mulder gazes sadly at Scully (yes, another documented case of gazing — this all goes on your permanent record, Mulder, so you might just want to note that, coughRainKingcough). Frohike calls Mulder over — he’s spotted something weird on Scully’s charts.
Back at the LoneGunCave, Byers compliments Fro on his chart-stealing mojo. “Tucked ‘em in my pants,” he boasts. “Plenty of room down there,” Mulder zings feebly, heart not in it.
Now we’ve got the bit that was a shot back at all the total total geekholes who spent all their time on alt.tv.x-files and the Delphi board and other creepy, seamy underground online hangouts, doing nothing but eat Doritos, drink Red Bull (or whatever it was in those days — the Dew, I suppose), and use their greasy virtual fingers to tear down the delicate filaments of Carter’s most wondrous creation. (/me takes a bow) And yes, I learned that “/me” thing from IRC, where I used to go on Friday nights — YES, FRIDAY NIGHTS — to talk about The X-Files with others of my kind. SO SUCK EEEEEEEEEET.
Anyhoo. I’m not really annoyed about this because it’s all in good fun, but it’s just so ham-handed: “You look down, Mulder,” Langly says. “Tell you what, you’re welcome to come over Saturday night. We’re all hopping on the Internet to nitpick the scientific inaccuracies of Earth 2.” OH MY GOD! THE BUUUUUURRRRRNNNN, I feel it. IT BURNS US! That’s from Lord of the Rings, BTW. On the Internet, we call it LOTR, because that is just HOW WE ROLL. Are you scared, Carter? ARE YOU SCARED? Hee hee. It’s so totally dorky (if you’ll pardon the stone-throwing) — “We’re all hopping on the Internet”? It sounds like they’re going to the malt shop or something. I guess you did have to do some hopping back in those days, when you had to actually sit down and dial the modem, but I’m willing to bet that even way back now the Gunmen have a T1 line or something, and the Internet isn’t something you have to make an appointment for. “I’m doing my laundry,” Mulder says. Za-zing! Doing laundry is less boring than you geeks and your geekiness! Hey, speaking of that, we’ve got this new show called Harsh Realm. It’s full of nerd stuff like virtual reality and computers and other lamewad shit like that. You guys love all that crap. Don’t you want to watch it? WHAT? WHY NOT? Ah, damn it.
So, moving on. Are you ready, fellow geeks who still enjoy talking about The X-Files on the Internet? I thought so. Personal ax ground (mine and theirs, I guess — high five), it’s back to sadness as the Gunmen — along with their satellite guy, The Thinker, whom we won’t meet in person until “Anasazi” — explain that Scully’s blood is full of something called branched DNA. This could mean just about anything, from making human-alien hybrids to burning the face of Hello Kitty into a piece of toast, as far as I can tell, but whatever was being done to Scully, it’s now over, and now the branched DNA is doing nothing but kill her. Awesome.
“Will she live?” Mulder asks, and it’s one of the saddest moments in the episode as Byers’s eyes turn up to him, and then he exchanges worried glances with the other two before admitting that Scully’s immune system has been decimated, and that even if it hadn’t, she’d still probably die. “There’s nothing you can do,” he tells Mulder. Poor Byers. He’s such a good guy, and he so does NOT want to be telling Mulder this. I think the reason this part kills me so much is that everyone else on this show walks around all emo all the time so it’s not such a big deal generally, or at least not a novelty, but seeing the Lone Gunmen sad? Sucks. They’re the comic relief. It’s like when Jon Stewart got teary on The Daily Show after 9/11. It just drives it home that something’s really, badly wrong.
Back from commercial, there’s Scully in the boat again, on the same misty lake. This time the woman who was standing behind Mulder and Melissa before is speaking, telling Dana her name is Nurse Owens and she’s there to watch over her, and help her find the way home. Cut to the hospital again; Nurse Owens is leaning over Scully’s bed. Mulder sidles in, and Nurse Owens gives Scully a forehead kiss (bow chicka bow bow! Oh, sorry, just habit with forehead kisses on this show) and slips out. Mulder doesn’t freak out and slam her up against a wall and demand to know what the hell she’s doing and who she’s working for, so if you’re wondering why, as you might well be, you might just want to put that aside for later. The other, grumpier nurse — who, by the way, is otherwise known as the Howard Graves Is Very Dead lady (see “Shadows” for more on that) — tells Mulder to move it so she can take some blood. Oh, I’m sure nothing will go wrong here. Taking blood on TXF is always so innocuous.
Next bed over, half-hidden behind a curtain, is some other guy in a suit, looking down sadly at whoever’s on that side. Just a bland, nondescript dude, sort of hanging around, not at all suspiciously. Mulder exchanges a glance with him — nothing more than two sad suit-wearing guys in a hospital — and looks back to Scully. Nurse Howard Graves Is Very Dead takes the blood and, in an extreme closeup, puts it carefully and showily down on a table, and just then some other lady crashes and she rushes off. While some attempts at ER-style dialogue are going on in the background, Mulder looks back at the test tube of blood — which is suddenly gone OH NOES. Guess who else is gone? You got it — Mr. Totally Not At All A Secret Government Agent Of Any Sort. The door is swinging closed. Mulder springs into action, bolting out the door and down the hall, where he sees the guy strolling ahead of him. As Mulder chases him, the man breaks into a run, heading for an elevator, which starts to close behind him. Mulder’s juuuuuuust too late to get it open (except for the take on the bloopers where he does get it open, heh). Stupid blood-taking jerk! He takes off down the stairwell. Nobody in the X-ray department! What’s next? Parking garage! Mulder runs through it, or I think it’s him; it’s hard to tell. Hey, you know what’s hard to watch at the gym, when you don’t have a great angle on the TV to begin with because you’re short and it’s very bright inside and you keep going up and down because you’re on the elliptical and so the angle keeps changing? The X-Files. Just a by-the-way. Mulder slides out from behind a concrete wall, gun drawn, looking for Blood-Stealing Man — and is jumped by Mr. X, who shoves him against the wall, his own gun in Mulder’s face.
“I didn’t expect you here until after visiting hours,” says Mr. X, which is a line I have never really gotten. Mulder babbles, “There was a man — he took Scully’s blood — ” Mr. X tells, nay, ORDERS him to leave it alone. Mulder is still put out that Mr. X never answered the tape telephone, and says as much. Mr. X snarls back that Mulder got “him” killed, and “her” killed — I’m assuming “him” and “her” are Deep Throat and Scully, respectively, though I guess we never really got any definitive proof that Deep Throat wasn’t a woman — and Mr. X isn’t going to let that happen to himself. “You’re MY tool!” he hisses. “I come to YOU when I need YOU.” If Mulder doesn’t cut out the indiscreet MIB-chasing, he’s going to “lead them right here.” “What the hell are you talking about?” Mulder growls. Excellent question, Mulder. “You’re not supposed to know. That’s the point,” Mr. X says. Oh, for the love of little apples. That just doesn’t make any sense. Mulder not knowing is “the point”? In what way? Grumble. Mulder brokenly says that he owes Scully more than just sitting around pouting and watching porn and turning down offers from the Gunmen to hop on the Internet and nitpick the scientific inaccuracies of various 1994-ish sci-fi programs, though he doesn’t say that specifically. Mr. X acknowledges that Scully was a good soldier (aww), but says there’s nothing Mulder can do to bring her back. “She’s not dead,” Mulder grits, and Mr. X laughs in his face. Then he says my favorite Mr. X line ever: “You’re a damn schoolboy, Mulder,” which simply rules. I used to say “You’re a damn schoolboy, Mulder” a lot. Usually when Mulder was doing something dumb on the show. Try it, you’ll like it.
So, why is Mulder a damn schoolboy again? Oh, OK, it’s because he has “no idea. No idea!” That makes total sense. These informants! Sheesh! Mr. X further tells Mulder that he used to be Mulder, but Mulder basically doesn’t have the stones for what lies in the future for him if he doesn’t walk away now. He tells him to grieve for Scully and then get out and don’t look back. “You will be able to live with yourself…on the day you die,” he says. Mulder’s all, I just want my partner’s stolen vial of blood back, for pete’s sake, so you don’t have to be such a drama queen about it. He fakes Mr. X out, escapes, and runs some more around the parking lot while Mr. X backs up against the wall. And — who should Mulder see but Blood-Stealing Man, sort of jogging among the cars. What was he doing all this time, reading a magazine? Writing “WASH ME” on all the dirty cars between the elevator and the exit? Mulder crouchingly runs after him, yells “Federal agent!” and gets shot at for his trouble. He jumps behind a column that says “E” on it, and “225,” and I’m sure that means something but…I got nothing. Or it could mean that they found a parking garage to film in that had a column in it that had an “E” and a “225″ on it. The mysteries on this show are boundless.
Now Mulder’s like, inside the hospital again? I guess? No, maybe still the garage. Still pointing his gun all over the place, while some crazy “tense chase” music plays. Suddenly, some footsteps (”Footsteps,” the closed captioning says helpfully), and a very out-of-nowhere closeup shot of Blood-Stealing Man holding his gun aloft someplace that could be right here or could be in some other building. Back to Mulder, who’s skulking around some more — and then he pops up behind BSM. He tells him to put his gun slowly on the ground and put his head on “the machine,” which is some sort of…machine that you might find in a hospital parking garage, or basement or something. Laundry room maybe? IT IS DARK, OK? I’m not sure Mulder knows what it is either, but he’s a smart boy so “the machine” covers it without any betrayal of the ol’ cool exterior. Mulder pats him down, finds the vial of blood and gives it a once-over. “Face me,” he orders, and, holding up the vial, demands to know who wants it. When he doesn’t get an answer, he tells BSM to start walking. They don’t get very far before BSM upsets a laundry cart…or something…and knocks Mulder’s gun out of his hand. Fisticuffs ensue, and end with Mulder on the ground, the blood vial also knocked out of his hand. You might want to do some wrist exercises or something, Agent Butterfingers. Just when it seems like curtains for Mulder, Mr. X pops up out of nowhere, and very loudly and cringe-inducingly breaks some of the guy’s arm bones or something, then kicks the gun out of the way. He tells Mulder, who’s still writhing on the floor, to stay put, then tosses BSM off to the side. “Wait!” Mulder says, but Mr. X shoots him anyway, sending him flying offscreen.
“You want to see what it takes to find the truth, Agent Mulder?” Mr. X says. “You want to know the things I know?” YES, YES, A THOUSAND TIMES YES! Mulder screams, but only in his mind, because it seems imprudent at the moment somehow. See, even Mulder has some filters. Mr. X turns back to the fallen BSM, who’s still moaning creepily offscreen. Now we see their silhouettes — BSM hunched over, Mr. X standing in front of him, and we can see the gun raised, and — yup. Mr. X shoots BSM right in the head — or it looks like it, anyway — and he falls. DAMN, MR. X. Man, he is such a total badass. He does not fuck around with the appearance of kindliness like Deep Throat did. “I’ll attend to this,” he tells Mulder, and walks away. Again I say: DAMN.
Back to the Hospital Room of Depression and Sadness and Hippies. Actually we’re only there for a moment, checking in on Scully, who’s still taped and tubed and wired and unconscious. Then it’s the hospital lounge — maybe the same one as before, I’m not sure — where Mulder, Ma Scully, Melissa, and Dr. Daly are discussing, as we soon realize, whether to turn off the breathing machine. Oh, hooray! This will be more fun than a basket full of tiny, fluffy kittens. Daly and the Scullys are sitting; Mulder’s standing up, agitated. Maggie’s hair is in a French braid, which I always like to think Melissa did for her in an attempt to distract her a little. “Discontinuing the respirator does not necessary mean pulling the plug and ending her life,” Dr. Daly is saying, trying his best to be understanding and compassionate and frank and encouraging and thorough and oh my God, I could NEVER be a doctor, and it wouldn’t be the blood and poop and guts and everything, it’d be this part. However, he believes that in Dana’s case, she probably won’t last long after turning off the respirator; he thinks she’s been like this since she disappeared (which was, you know, either five months ago or four weeks ago, depending on which episode you’re watching) and her condition isn’t going to change. Melissa asks if her sister is below the criteria established in her will. Yes, she is. Mulder, who’s pacing around as they talk, says maybe branched DNA can be treated with designer antibiotics. “Agent Mulder, I don’t know where you’ve developed this bizarre diagnosis,” Daly starts, sounding tired, “but I do believe you’re in no position to continue here.” Ouch. Teeth gritted, Mulder says they need to study her. Melissa says she’s not a piece of evidence, and that it’s not natural to prolong her life this way when it should end. She’s tearing up as she says this — I mean, Melissa has a point; she’s not really the total asshole that some make her out to be. If you guessed, however, that Mulder does not agree with this assessment, you would be right. “That’s very politically correct,” he grits out. “That’s very human,” Melissa shoots back.
Maggie sits in the middle of it, and finally takes a deep breath: “Dana has made our decision.” Mulder turns toward the door at this, very upset, and she calls him back: “Fox.” I just love how she delivers that, and how he obeys her right away, turning back. I am such a sucker for Ma Scully/Mulder interactions. WELL, NOT LIKE THAT. Eww. She says that he and Dana had a friendship built on respect (yes, respect, and hot hot sexual tension). She’s lost her husband this year, and doesn’t want to lose her baby girl (sob), but she respects her too, and therefore — this part’s unsaid — her wishes as stated in the will. Mulder looks defeated. “Fox, this is a moment for the family,” she continues, standing up, “but you can join us if you want.” He just shakes his head, staring at her with those puppy-dog eyes. Oh, poor, poor Mulder. Can I just point out, by the way, what a much better, more nuanced, and more genuinely wrenching portrayal of a should-they-pull-the-plug situation this is than the one in “Audrey Pauley”? It’s true, the decision to pull the plug on Scully does turn out to be the “wrong” one in this case, but at least in this one there’s no EVIL DOCTOR WHO’S LURKING AROUND WAITING TO STEAL PEOPLE’S ORGANS BEFORE THEY’RE REALLY DEAD. Like there’s not enough drama in this situation without having to add that kind of bullcrap. God, I have no patience for that episode. Though Lucy Householder is good in it, I guess.
Maggie and Melissa walk out, leaving Mulder alone in the room (I guess Dr. Daly split already). Mulder keeps staring into space, as we hear the sound of Scully’s respirator.
It’s the boat again, Nurse Owens standing on the dock. The water’s a little more choppy now. Scully’s staring blankly, looking tired (I guess being almost dead and/or having just had a baby will do that to you). The rope holding the boat to the dock snaps. The boat and Scully drift away — no worried trumpets, no screaming in horrible pain (I’m looking at you, “Audrey Pauley”), just Scully floating backwards in the boat, away from the dock and Nurse Owens and everything else she’s ever known. Commercials.
Hey, I remember these people! We’re in Skinner’s office, and good ol’ Cigarette-Smoking Man is there, his pack of Morleys on Skinner’s desk presaging his appearance. He tosses a folder on the desk: “Read it. It’s all there.” Suuuuuuuure it is. In Season 2? Please. CSM starts to light up a C; Skinner jerks his head defiantly at the “Thank You for Not Smoking” sign on his desk. Oh, Skinner, that’s adorable. Nice try. CSM doesn’t even flinch, lighting up, taking one puff and putting it out in an ashtray on a table (uh, Skinman? If you don’t allow smoking in your office, you probably shouldn’t have an ashtray at the ready in there. Mixed messages, my friend), just to be an asshole, I guess. He leaves out the secret door (I guess — I’ve never seen anyone other than CSM use that door), and just as it shuts there’s a knock on Skinner’s regular door. It’s Mulder, who grumpily takes a seat in front of the desk. He’s been called in because Skinner heard about the “incident” at the hospital. “Is this about the tooth that was found in the cafeteria Jell-O?” Mulder asks innocently. No, no it is NOT about that tooth, and you might want to watch your smart MOUTH, young man. Skinner mentions the killin’ in the laundry room — ah, so that’s where it was. We were definitely in a parking garage for at least a little while though. Mulder denies it wholesale. Skinner tries to get him to fess up, but Mulder keeps up the deny everything routine until Skinner gets pissed and tells him to knock it off. Mulder asks him how it feels. Skinner just wants to know what happened, damn it! “Him,” Mulder says, indicating the butt in the ashtray. “Cancerman. He’s responsible for what happened to Scully.” I think this is one of the only times CSM is actually referred to as “Cancerman” on the show. We used to call him that all the time, though I don’t anymore because it makes me uncomfortable to be flippant with the word “cancer” over and over again; it just feels like bad vibes. Mulder demands to know who he is. Skinner balks, and Mulder interrupts: “You can have it all. You can have my badge, you can have the X-files. Just tell me where he is.” Skinner sneers that they’re not the Mafia. Mulder says he just wants justice. Skinner inadvertently twists the knife a little by saying that he respected Scully, and then uses a sports metaphor that I’m too lazy to transcribe. Mulder looks stricken — damn you, cruel sports metaphor! “What if I — I knew the potential consequences, but I — never told her?” Poor little Mulder. He’s hurting so badly. And he’s somehow managed to make this his fault, as usual. Skinner says, “Oh, Mulder. It’s not your fault. Scully knew what she was getting into; she’s a big girl, and sometimes bad things just happen that no one could have prevented. She knew you always had her back.” Oh, no — my bad, I’m sorry. He says, “Then you’re as much to blame for her condition as the Cancerman.” Goddamnit, Skinner! Mulder runs off crying. Well, he may as well have.
Ohhh dear. OK, yeah. I don’t really understand this choice either, but, I just report it. Scully’s lying on a wooden table in an empty white room, in a long white dress, her eyes closed. We see her first from above, and then the camera swoops around so we’re alongside her. And…yup. They’re still there. They’re higher than her face. Like, SIGNIFICANTLY higher. People…seriously? There was no other way you could stage any of this? REALLY? You’re all a bunch of pervs. I just want you to know that. Anyway, none of that means that this scene isn’t moving as hell. But still. We circle around her, so we can get every angle. Of them. Sigh. I’m not imagining this, people. Also, that table is really fingerprinty. Hee hee. Ah, DVD quality. One side of the room opens into a tunnel, which I assume is actually a large blue screen, and down it walks a figure in a white uniform, carrying his hat. It’s Ahab! Otherwise known as Scully’s dad. He stops in front of her: “Hello, Starbuck.” Awwww. We’ve been nicely and unobtrusively set up for this moment, BTW, because we saw Pa Scully in the teaser and we were reminded a couple of scenes ago by Mrs. Scully that he died last season. (For the record, the Ahab/Starbuck thing has always struck me as a little precious, but that’s OK.) With a Star Trek-y halo of light around him, Pa Scully starts to talk to his unconscious daughter. He says that despite people’s warnings, he never felt that life went by too fast — until the moment he knew he was dying and he’d never be able to tell his daughter how much he loved her: “Then, my life felt as if it had been the length of one breath…one heartbeat.” Title alert! Sad, sniffly title alert. He finishes by saying, “We’ll be together again, Starbuck. But not now. Soon. Also, that evil doctor wants to steal your organs, so you’re RUNNING OUT OF TIME!” Action! Adventure!!! Except he doesn’t say that last part. I just WISH he did! Ahab walks off, into the nothingness, Scully still lying on the table.
Back in the hospital, Scully’s still lying in the bed, looking somewhat less terrifying — she still has wires everywhere (and is it really necessary to tape wires to her hair? Like, is that really secure? God, you are the worst nurse ever, Nurse Howard Graves Is Very Dead), and an oxygen tube in her nose, but her eyelids aren’t taped anymore and all the scary crap that accompanied the respirator is gone. Nurse Owens is leaning over her: “I know death is at arm’s reach tonight. But Dana — your time is not over.” Her nametag, by the way, reads G. Owens. What does the G stand for? GOD!?!?!!? Holy crap, I just freaked myself out!!! Or maybe it’s Gertrude. EITHER WAY! Oh, and she’s wearing an angel pin. Subtle. Must! Nitpick! Scientific! Inaccuracies! Hee.
Hospital cafeteria. Melissa is squeamishly holding a doughnut the way I might hold an old piece of toast that I found behind the refrigerator. Mulder’s face is on his hands, which are on a cup of what I’m certain is some extremely delicious coffee. “You know, Fox — ” Melissa says, then interrupts herself. “Sorry. Mulder.” You know what — I bet she actually read Scully’s diary or something. Faker. I love how Morgan and Wong only reference their own episodes, by the way. Honestly, I’d probably do that too. Melissa says that chasing after the men who hurt Scully won’t solve anything: “Whoever did this to her has an equal horror coming to them.” Like being Yielded on The Amazing Race, in a way completely within the stated rules of the game! That would show them! Karma. It never fails. Melissa’s no dummy. Mulder looks at her with haunted eyes. “Including myself?”
Before Melissa can answer — or, more likely, smirk and not answer, which is what she likes to do — some creepy lady in a purple suit comes over and asks if Mulder has change for the cigarette machine. Mulder doesn’t. Ha ha, cigarette machine. Did those still exist when this was filmed? I can’t remember when they were phased out. Wait, do they still exist now? Maybe that’s a Massachusetts thing. We love to engage in liberal hijinks like that. Melissa’s just asking Mulder what he meant by that last remark when the lady speaks again, now at the cig machine: “There’s a pack already here. Morleys. Not my brand.” She gives Mulder a Significant Look and slinks out. Mulder finally clues in and rushes over there. He snatches up the pack, rips off the cellophane (!) and opens the carton. Tucked inside is a Post-it, which has an address on it: 900 W. Georgia St. Do you think it’s a clue?
OK, let’s just review this one more time. (It was louloublu, BTW, on the TWoP XF board who recently got me thinking about the implausibility of this whole scenario, and this expands on her musings, so: hee, and props to you, louloublu.) It’s Skinner who gives Mulder this address, right? So let’s really think about how elaborate this setup had to be. It’s one thing that he pays off some lady to enact this rather goofy scene with Mulder, and also probably to wait around for two days until he happened to be in the hospital cafeteria. I guess she could have palmed it down there after talking to him, so at least we don’t have to worry about MIBs hovering around the machine in shifts in case some other stressed-out person, of which there might be more than one here in this, you know, hospital, spied a free pack of cigs and went to grab it, whether it was their brand or not, so that’s good. And who is this lady anyway, since Skinner doesn’t really have access to the MIB pool? His neighbor? A starving art student who couldn’t turn down the money? Someone from the local community theater? But all that is the easy part. This isn’t just any pack of Morleys with a Post-it tucked inside it. IT WAS WRAPPED IN CELLOPHANE. I’m not talking wads of Saran Wrap, here. It’s shrink-wrapped. Does Skinner have a shrink-wrapping machine? Does he work in a candy factory part-time? Maybe he knows someone at a cigarette factory and he bribed them to sneak in after hours and shrink-wrap this one pack? Alternatively, maybe the cellophane was breached at the bottom, which means we get the mental image of Skinner with the Scotch tape painstakingly sliding the plastic it back on and taping it up. Did he do it in his office? His apartment? My point, here, is that THIS IS A HELL OF A LOT OF TROUBLE TO GO TO to get Mulder this address. He couldn’t have slid it under his door, or paid the art student to do it if he didn’t want to be seen? I know they want to be secretive, but this one-act guerilla-theater piece about the cigarette machine isn’t exactly LESS conspicuous than just sticking something inside Mulder’s morning paper. Anyway. Skinner apparently needs some busywork to do or something.
I think we can all figure out whose address this is. Sure enough, here’s CSM in his sad shabby apartment, watching a war movie on TV, drinkin’ beer and smokin’ Morleys, several of which are in the ashtray already. He hears a noise and is immediately on alert, but it’s too late — Mulder’s behind him, screaming at him to sit down and shut up. CSM actually looks a little nervous. (I also think it’s kind of neat how they shoot CSM at an angle that makes him look like a sort of awkward, not especially attractive middle-aged man, which is what he is.) “Don’t try and threaten me, Mulder,” CSM says, getting his poker face back. “I’ve watched presidents die.” Well, la-dee-da! I saw Yul Brynner in a touring production of The King and I, so suck on it! He tries to light a cigarette, but Mulder knocks it out of his hand. “Why her?” he asks, and David’s voice cracks really awesomely on that line, which I love. “Why her and not me?” Oh, Mulder. At CSM’s non-response, he screams “ANSWER ME!!!” Wisely, CSM starts bullshitting: he likes Mulder; he likes Scully, which is why he gave her back. Lord, you’re so full of it, CSM. Mulder’s too far gone to really see this, though; he rasps that CSM should be the one to die. Being the improv master that he is (man, would I have enjoyed seeing CSM go head-to-head with Ryan Stiles on Whose Line Is It Anyway?), CSM works with what he’s got, which is the obvious pitifulness of his apartment and his general lame life. He points out to Mulder that he’s got no wife or family, just “some power.” He doesn’t even have to mention that he’s also a failed novelist. He says he believes what he’s doing is right. “Right?” hisses Mulder. “Who are you to decide what’s right?” “Who are you?” CSM counters, quite reasonably. Damn, you’re good, CSM! Look at you, you totally just played Questions Only right there without even meaning to. You would KILL in Scenes From a Hat.
“If people were to know of the things that I know,” CSM continues, “it would all fall apart.” I still think he’s completely bullshitting — like, that may be true, but he’s not particularly feeling it; he just wants to throw Mulder off. It is, however, a cool line, and this is one of my favorite of the Mulder/CSM scenes, which are so often overblown and repetitive. Probably the fact that this one is so early on doesn’t hurt either. Mulder looks unsure. CSM presses the advantage, saying he told Skinner that Mulder shot the man in the hospital but didn’t really believe it, but look at him now with a gun to his head. He tells Mulder he’s becoming a player. Oh no! Just what Mr. X said not to do! It’s like this whole episode is about the battle for Mulder’s soul or something. (Internal conflict, I [heart] you.) Mulder looks even more unsure. Oh, shit, Mulder. You just don’t have the balls for this, sweetheart. And you shouldn’t; it isn’t you. Knowing he’s got him, CSM pulls out his usual trump card: If Mulder kills him, he’ll never know the truth. STUPID FRICKIN’ TRUTH! That’s how they always get you, damn it! Mulder’s finger tightens on the trigger, but we already know this little confrontation is over. As he lets it go, CSM says, “And that’s why I’ll win.” He lights up a cig. Hey, you know what would be awesome? If sometimes they used those cigarettes in like, kind of a symbolic manner. Like say, CSM could light one up and it would sort of indicate something significant, like a symbol of his power. I don’t know, I think that could be kind of cool. Of course there would be a danger of overdoing it and having every single fucking shot of this man involve him either lighting or stubbing out a cigarette in some overly meaningful way, but I don’t think that would really happen. CSM tells Mulder that this will be their secret. Mulder is eating it up like pudding. You just don’t have a chance, Mulder. In this game of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, CSM is Ryan Stiles and you are the girl from the audience sitting on the stool being sung to in the style of Motown about her name and occupation. Or maybe, on a really good day, Drew Carey reading the suggestions from the hat.
Back in his stupid pathetic dumb office, Mulder is sort of randomly mashing letters on the keyboard (David? You do know how to type, don’t you?), then he hits print. It’s his resignation letter, and he signs it determinedly, so upset that his signature doesn’t look anything like the one on his ID that we see in the credits every week. Also, he’s typed his name in the signature line with a period after it for some reason, and when he signs his name, he also puts a period. For…some reason. Who does that? There are other typos/weird formatting things in this one-sentence letter that I’ll not address, even though my proofreading finger is a little itchy. Mulder sits back in his desk chair as we go to commercial, staring into the middle distance and thinking about what he’s wrought, or maybe about how your name is not a sentence.
Back in on Mulder, different shirt and tie so I assume different day, packing up his crap. Skinner opens the door. He looks around. “When I started out this room was where they kept the copier,” he quips. Funny line, but it also kind of makes it sound like the whole FBI has one copier, which they kept in the basement. Now, granted, that is true of my office, but we have ten people working there. I can just imagine hordes of secretaries going up and down the jammed elevators all day and standing in hour-long lines to use the copier. Mulder shoots back, “At least then it wasn’t just wasted space.” Oh, give it a reeeeeeeeesssssssst, Mulder. Seriously. Sometimes the martyr complex he’s got going on is kind of noble, but a lot of times it’s just really irritating. Not everything is about you, which you’ll have pointed out to you a couple seasons from now in another Morgan/Wong ep. Skinner decides to play enabler today, fortunately for Mulder and his career, and makes a big show of ripping up the resignation letter, saying it’s unacceptable. Mulder continues poutily packing up books. “Look, I know you feel responsible for Agent Scully,” Skinner says, “but I will not accept resignation and defeat as self-punishment.” Seriously. Thanks, Skinner. With all the work they’ve done, says Mulder, “to still know nothing…to lose myself, and Scully…I hate what I’ve become.” Nicely played, CSM, you ass.
Naturally, Skinner decides this is the time to tell a ‘Nam story. Which is a good one, actually. In a nutshell, he joined the Marines because he believed it was the right thing to do. A kid showed up covered with grenades, and Skinner shot him. (Mulder actually looks up at that point.) After that, he lost faith in everything. He was shot and had an out-of-body experience. He saw everything from above his body, the usual (Mulder’s eating it up, of course). Two weeks later he woke up in the hospital. He tells Mulder that he’s afraid to look beyond that experience, but Mulder isn’t. He says again that Mulder’s resignation is unacceptable. I’d venture to say that this might be the first time a big studly ex-Marine has told geeky emo Mulder how much braver he is, and it seems to make an impression. Mulder’s at attention, or at least all the hair on the left side of his head is. He makes the connection that Skinner was the one to give him CSM’s address, endangering his own life. “Every life, every day is in danger,” Skinner says. “That’s just life.” Mulder soaks it all in, big-eyed; you can just about see the hamster wheel turning.
While Mulder’s carrying a box down to the parking garage, who should pop out of the shadows but Mr. X, who apparently LIVES in parking garages, connected by an underground network of tunnels or something. He’s like the Beast. (Remember that show? I barely do, but I had a friend who was completely obsessed with it. In seventh grade, mind you.) He’s got a plane ticket for Mulder, which I guess he picked up at the Underground Parking-Garage Tunnel American Express Travel Agency. He explains that he can’t tell Mulder why Scully was taken, but he can give him the men who took her. Because of this plane ticket, “they” believe Mulder will be out of town, because, apparently, “they” are total suckers. Tonight at 8:17 (oh, evil conspiracy people, you’re such tools — what is wrong with picking 8:15 or even 8:00 if the person’s out of town anyway?) they’ll search Mulder’s apartment for information about Scully that they believe Mulder has. Mr. X’s plan is, Mulder will be there and, because the intruders will be armed, Mulder will “defend himself” by shooting the shit out of all of them. When he hears this, Mulder closes his eyes in what looks like physical relief. As if there was any chance of him hesitating, Mr. X underscores that this is the only way these people will be punished because, much like Steven Seagal, they are above the law. He tells Mulder that they can’t make contact for several weeks.
A very dark place. A gun sits on a table. It’s Mulder’s apartment, and he and his blue shirt (he took off the wacky gumdrop tie he was wearing earlier, which seems only fitting for this occasion) are staring into nothingness. Someone appears outside the door, but it’s too early — only 7:30, at least as far as I can tell from Mulder’s ridonculous watch of geeked-out insanity. It’s Melissa. Mulder opens the door pissily, looking around all nervous. The 2 in 42 is missing from Mulder’s apartment door, and — ready for this SRE? I actually believe this one, kinda — if 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything (as any nerd worth his salt knows), then I believe the 2 is missing because This Is Not The Answer. Yeah, OK, I know in my heart that probably no one noticed that the number of Mulder’s apartment had any nerd significance until a bunch of nerds told them, and that probably no one noticed that the 2 had fallen off until…ever, but I like it anyway. Revenge is not the answer, Mulder! Turn back! Anyway, Melissa wants to come in. Mulder is NOOOOOOOT in the mood, but he hustles her in quickly and shuts the door. “Why’s it so dark in here?” Melissa asks, and Mulder monotones back, “Because the lights aren’t on.” “Ooookay,” says Melissa. Hee. She tells Mulder that the doctor says Scully’s getting weaker, and “it could be…any time.” Sob. So she thought Mulder would like to know so he could go see her. “Well, I can’t,” Mulder says impatiently, because the bad guys that he is going to FUCKING RIP FROM LIMB TO LIMB are going to be here ANY MINUTE, man, and he cannot fucking WAIT and he is going to tie his underpants around his head and dance in the streets and howl when he’s done, it is going to be so fucking sweet. “Well — I’d think that you would,” says Melissa, surprised. “Well, I would,” Mulder grits. “I can’t. Not right now.” Melissa gets in his face: “I don’t have to be psychic to see that you’re in a very dark place,” she snarks, “much darker than where my sister is.” That’s great until she ruins it by starting to babble on about the light, and this is one thing I don’t think works a hundred percent with Melissa — the sort of sarcastic, no-nonsense way that Melinda McGraw plays her doesn’t really fit all that well with the idea of Melissa as flitty New Ager. I really believe her when she’s glaring bitchily at Mulder; not so much with the light-and-crystals stuff. So, I guess it’s interesting contradictions, but sometimes contradictions are…just contradictions. Mulder snaps and tells her to cut it out. Undaunted, Melissa asks, “Why is it so much easier for you to run around trying to get even than just expressing to her how you feel?” and despite the questionable grammar there this is, in a nutshell, kind of the whole episode. “I expect more from you,” she snaps. “Dana expects more.” Ouch! And, yeah. On her way out, she delivers the parting shot: “Even if it doesn’t bring her back…at least she’ll know. And so will you.” Slam! Mulder locks the door tight behind her. He sits down at the table. He grabs his gun. And he stares into the dark and waits for revenge.
Except…something happens, and we don’t see it happen, and as much as I complain about offscreen important stuff, I think this was way the right call: there’s no “…Pizza….The pizza guy….MULDER!!” revelation moment, which we so do not need in this episode because it would be so corny, and the fact that the whole episode is about non-climaxes and how they sometimes hold the most meaning is just a bonus. But here we are in the ICU, Scully in the bed, and here’s Mulder, sitting down beside her and taking her hand. “I feel, Scully, that…you believe you’re not ready to go. And you’ve always had the strength of your beliefs. I don’t know if my being here…will help bring you back. But I’m here.” You know, it’s simple but it really works. And here he is, settling back in the chair, watching her, with her. Even though he doesn’t know if she can hear him. Even though any minute the people he wants more than anything to tear to pieces are going to be in his apartment, unguarded, vulnerable to surprise. Even though Scully’s not doing anything — or he can’t tell if she is, because maybe she’s in a rowboat right now, paddling hard to get back to the dock, and maybe seeing Mulder there just made her paddle a little harder, but he doesn’t know that. He just knows that he loves her, and he gives up that visceral, guaranteed revenge — his need for it so strong because it’s driven by that very same love — just in case being with her instead will help her. Now that is faith, and that is love, and that is sacrifice. On the wall, the hospital clock reads 8:17.
Next morning. Mulder goes home. His apartment is ransacked. The table where he was sitting with his gun is overturned. Mulder closes the door. He takes it all in. Birds are chirping outside, but he doesn’t hear them. He stands in a doorway, and his breath hitches. He slowly sinks down, and cries softly. He holds out his hands, empty. Anyone who says David can’t cry, I direct them to this scene, which to me is one of the single most moving of the series.
A clearing in a forest (a Canadian forest, I’m just wildly guessing). Sunlight, and here too, birds chirping. There might be a lake through the trees, though you can’t really tell. A beautiful spot, not all that different from the place where, as a child, Dana Scully shot a garter snake (probably because it’s the same forest, but that’s neither here nor there). Here in the clearing is a hospital bed, and in the bed is Scully; the point of view is basically hers. Beside the bed, an IV pole fades slowly into view. Next is a chair. Then an orderly, and the nurses’ station, and we can hear them talking, and then the rest of the room appears and the forest is gone. Last of all are the birds, which fade out under the ambient hospital noise, and the dappled leaf shadows on the bed. Someone stops and looks at Dana, then looks again — it’s Nurse Howard Graves Is Very Dead. “Call Dr. Daly,” she says to someone offscreen. “Now.” The camera rotates. Dana is blinking slowly. She moves her head a little. She’s awake.
Mulder’s in his dark place, and he’s changed his shirt but, as far as we can tell, the apartment is still a shambles. The phone rings. He ignores it, but when the machine picks up he grabs it impatiently, cutting off his own voice: “I’m here.” We don’t know who’s on the other end of the phone or what they’re saying, but there’s no mistaking the expression that spreads over his face.
Back at the hospital, now in a rosy private room, Melissa and Maggie by Dana’s bed. Everything that was lit cold and blue before is now warm and yellowy. (I have been hugely remiss, by the way, in not mentioning this episode’s director, R.W. Goodwin, except in the context of his being married to Sheila Larken, and that’s only because I’m ign’ant and don’t know exactly which things directors are responsible for and so it’s not easy to pick on them like it is to pick on the writers. But it’s safe to say that he did a phenomenal, beautiful job with this episode.) The door opens and there’s Mulder, a shy yet no less shit-eating grin on his face. “Hello, Fox,” Maggie says. There’s movement on the bed, and Scully pipes up: “Not Fox. Mulder.” See, Mulder? Way to give her a complex! She gets out of a coma and it’s the first thing she says. Also, Scully, now that you’re not dead you might want to buy a lock for your diary. Just a word to the wise. Hee hee, I’m as giddy as they are that she’s awake. She turns her head, and focuses her big blue eyes on her partner, smiling at him. Mulder? Looks tired. Hee. He smiles back. “How you feeling?” he mumbles, his glee — for Mulder — written all over his face. Her face clouds a little as she says that she doesn’t remember anything. He interrupts her, waving his hand: it doesn’t matter. Right now, he really believes that. Scully closes her eyes. She is very, very freckly. Aww, this is Gillian’s most strenuous scene of the episode, although on second thought it might actually be tied with the boat thing, since here she gets to lie down and it’s inside and like, not in a boat, even though she has to actually act and say lines. May I point out that, right now, she is wearing a baggy pale-yellow hospital gown and is tucked under a sheet, and there is NO noticeable gazonga barrier between the camera and her face, so I ask again, would it have been so hard to do this for the whole episode? Mulder, because he is a dumbass (I say with total affection), reaches into a blue plastic bag and pulls out a present: a video, Super Stars of the Super Bowls. But he’s our dumbass. He hands it to her, and gets what he wanted: Scully jokes back, voice quavering, “I knew there was a reason to live.” Yay! Scully’s OK!! (There’s something else in the bag, which some of us scientific-inaccuracy-nitpicking Internet types know is Hockey’s Hardest Hitters, for Melissa, but it’s probably good they let that go.) Mulder looks like he just won a million dollars (again, for Mulder). He mumbles that he’s going to let her rest; he just came by to see how she was and say hi. He holds her hand, then lets go, and as he’s going she says, “Mulder?” and he turns around, just like he did when her mother said “Fox” when they were deciding to turn off the breathing machine. “I had the strength of your beliefs,” Scully says softly. Mulder blinks. He nods. He looks like he’s just thought of something, and he feels around in his pockets and pulls out her cross necklace, which if you’ll recall Ma Scully told him to give to her when he found her, in “Ascension.” “I was holding this for you,” he says, handing it to her. That is a MUCH better present, Mulder. If you’d remembered you had that you could have saved the $9.97 you spent on the video. We get one of TXF’s traditional glowing extreme closeups of the cross necklace in Scully’s hand. She looks at her mother, than back at Mulder, and moves her lips a little bit, not really saying anything that we can hear. He moves his own lips back at her. I love them and their secret languages. Mulder exchanges a glance with Melissa, then turns and leaves and closes the door. See, Mulder? See?
One MORE glowing cross closeup, for good measure, and then we fade to the cross around Scully’s neck. She fingers it. Now Nurse Howard Graves Etc. is there with some pills for her to take, and Scully asks her if she can see Nurse Owens: “I’ve got something I’d like her to have.” Hmmmm, I kind of don’t approve of Scully regifting the cross after Mulder just gave it back to her, but since it’s completely moot anyway I won’t worry about it. “Nurse who?” asks Nurse HGIVD, and Scully takes the pills and swallows them before answering (which is a scene I sort of enjoy watching in complete awe, since it takes me like five minutes to swallow a pill, not the short pause between asking a question and answering it), then repeats, “Owens.” She describes her and says she watched over her in intensive care and she’d like to thank her. Nurse No, Seriously, He’s Dead, I Removed His Organs Myself, You Basementy Freaks says that she’s worked at the hospital for ten years, and there’s no one here named Nurse Owens. She goes out, leaving Dana alone, looking off into the middle distance and thinking about the mystery of who helped her, or possibly about why Mulder always writes a period after his name when he’s signing a letter. Such things were not meant for man to know.
There we go. I hope this wasn’t too boring and bombastic. I do love this episode so very, very much. The only thing that would have made it better would be if they could have put some white tights on Scully while she was in the ICU. As a bonus, it really would have drawn some attention away from the boobs. The end.
Recap by As An Amoeba