SEASON 1

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SEASON 5

FIGHT THE FUTURE

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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!