SEASON 1

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SEASON 3

SEASON 4

SEASON 5

FIGHT THE FUTURE

SEASON 6

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SEASON 8

SEASON 9

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"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.