The Scully-goes-missing bit

Duane Barry/Ascension, 3, One Breath

Gillian Anderson’s pregnancy forced the writers to rebuild late Season One and early Season Two around Mulder/Duchovny, with the happy knock-on effect of forcing them to create a more densely interlinked ‘mytharc,’ starting to push on from the Fortean/paranormal anthology approach of Season One. The episodes around the birth of Anderson’s daughter, from which the actress is mostly absent, are a major turning point for the show: they bring Mulder’s character and his relationship with Scully into clear focus and considerably raise the show’s emotional stakes, while incidentally showing how much Anderson (who by all accounts took a while to adapt to the demands of weekly TV) was bringing to the show in the occasionally-thankless female lead role.

‘Duane Barry’ is acclaimed as a classic episode, for good reason, while ‘Ascension’ seems to’ve been praised out of proportion to its actual quality. ‘3' is as terrible as its reputation; ‘One Breath’ is even better than its own. The three ‘mythology’ eps in this brief arc extend the emotional insights of ‘Fallen Angel’ (the crucial Max Fenig episode) to bring home the expanded scope of the Conspiracy in order to deepen the two hero characters—now they start to take on their own mythic quality.

2x05: Duane Barry

An insane ex-FBI agent/abductee takes hostages at a travel agency. Mulder offers himself in exchange for the hostages. Scully enters the episode on a flimsy pretext. CCH Pounder is hardass. Scully goes to the supermarket and something funny happens in the checkout line. The titular abductee nabs Scully.

About 25 minutes into this episode, Duane Barry begins to describe to Mulder the ‘tests’ that the extraterrestrials perform on him, and in flashback (or fevered imagination?) we see their laser-powered dental experiments in clinical detail, with a clear view of the Greys conducting the experiments. The language does a lot of work: when he talks about his captors ignoring his words, violating his person, taking everything from him, he’s obviously also talking about the FBI overseers who took no care of him after he was wounded on duty, and the psychiatric workers who just want to drug him into oblivion. But this is the first ‘documentary’ presentation of an alien abduction in the series so far (did I skip one?).

For that reason it’s also The X-Files’s most metaphorically rich treatment of an abduction so far — during that scene I experienced a shock of revelation, and thought, This is the moment when the full potential of the ‘alien abduction’ material opens up. Only when it’s presented as unadorned fact does it begin to work as a fantasia on everything else.

Or to put it another way: along with ‘Fallen Angel,’ this episode perfectly connects the (actually all in their heads) abductee mythos, this dreamworld that opens up beneath the increasingly(!) mundane surface world, to everything else, precisely by making it matter-of-fact and intimate and merely human. Max Fenig and Duane perfectly capture the human cost of what They do — not for nothing are we shown Men in Black, with Mulder leaning forward and seemingly about to ask for their names. As much as the show is about the visionary universe, it’s also about the paranoia that comes of an unexpected/unwanted encounter with that universe — the invasion of the human by an unfathomable Will…vast, cool, and unsympathetic.

Meaning the government. The networked world. The cosmic. The aftermath of breakdown (remember when the Berlin Wall fell and the entire post-WWII master narrative collapsed, seemingly overnight?). The post-‘supernatural’ but (of course) still utterly antirational.

The Alien, for every possible meaning of that word.

The nice thing about the X-Files aliens is that they’re nothing at all like us. That’s the essential (mythic) point. We and they are incompatible, and so between us is the dreamworld — the buffer/process within in which you either accept that some Wrong things are real and try to go on living in this mundane shit, or else you build an ever more complicated network to keep the miraculous/unknowable/occult/hypercomplex at bay, and hope it doesn’t come down around you.

In other other words, this is the show’s second Montauk Project moment, in which the possibility that the radically (thrillingly) Alienis the merely mundane is brought home in all its horror. The first, I think, was Mulder’s second conversation with Max Fenig in the trailer, about his epileptic fit.

Honestly, I didn’t think Chris Carter had it in him. But this was a superb hour of television, just about flawlessly written and ably directed. Kudos to him. (And to Duchovny, who carries much of the episode with nothing but his voice.)

2x06: Ascension

Much faffing about after Scully’s abduction.

I don’t even have the heart to write a proper summary of this turgid, hamfisted hour. Suffice it to say it’s a poor followup to ‘Duane Barry,’ the highwater mark of the series so far.

They say there’s no improvisation on a Joss Whedon TV series, because he’s so specific about the music of the scene — word to word, line to line, shot to shot. The X-Files manifestly has no one with Whedon’s mastery of storytelling craft, and it’s a problem. I can’t imagine Whedon would’ve tolerated such a boring hour of TV as ‘Ascension,’ which includes:

• a suspenseless faceoff between Barry and a highway cop
• two staggeringly flat-of-affect meetings between Scully’s mother and Mulder
• an interrogation scene in which it never feels like Barry’s in jeopardy, because Duchovny never approaches boiling — not even when he’s strangling Barry
• a vision of Scully being experimented on, whose creepiness is somewhat undercut (rather than bolstered) by the fact that it was seemingly filmed for $10
• more jaw-clenching from Pileggi as A.D. Skinner in a climactic scene where we goddamn well ought to be seeing some kind of character transformation (after all, he must know he’s making what might well be the biggest mistake of his life, with almost no character setup)
• no sign of Mulder’s agony, because maybe David Duchovny’s face can’t register emotions that deep

I desperately want to believe that Duchovny’s a good actor who’s underplaying the part of Mulder the way Jamie Hector underplayed Marlo (until his ‘My name is my name!’ outburst at the end of Season Five). But episodes like this make it hard to believe, because there’s no way a professional director told him to play this episode, with the only person he has any feelings for in the world apparently abducted just like his martyred sister, as if on Ativan.

That I can’t quite believe.

Whatever. The plot’s moving, that’s nice. But then I’m not here for the plot, are you? It’s the world I want.

2x07: 3

Mulder meets some vampires and has sex and wears his shirt unbuttoned in this clear inspiration for both The Bronze and Californication. It is terrible.

Vampire: The Masquerade: The X-File.

The only other thing to say about this bit of arrant nonsense is that you have to sympathize with a writing staff that’s built a show around a combustible pairing of actors, now forced to generate heat without one of their leads, i.e., without the whole reason for the continued existence of the show. Nearly everything about this episode is terrible (other than Duchovny’s obvious pleasure at getting to crack a joke and make out onscreen with his real-life then-girlfriend) and the script is very very obviously a leftover bit of freelance work (googling, googling…yep). I wish I hadn’t seen it. I wish it had never been made.

I also, by the way, wish that vampires had been excluded from the show’s mythology, because despite the mild thrill of seeing the ‘Ra’ restaurant and the explicitly mythic dimension this shit is supposed to impart to the show, everything about ‘3’ trivializes its subject matter — including (by the way) the lead actress’s monologue about getting beaten by both dad and boyfriend. The faintest glimmerings of insight there, of a story.

Pissed on.

Worse than ‘Ascension,’ which was pretty bad. I can just picture the 1994 audience now, impatiently tapping their feet waiting for the real story to kick back in…

2x08: One Breath

People would say to me, “Life is short.” “Kids, they grow up fast,” and “Before you know it, it’s over.” I never listened. For me, life went at a proper pace. There were many rewards… until the moment that I knew, I… understood that… that I would never see you again… my little girl. Then my life felt as if it had been the length of one breath, one heartbeat.

There it is.

I’d gotten really worried that the restraint and seeming boredom of Duchovny’s performance has actually been unnaturally good-looking woodenness (and…boredom). After this episode I’m a believer. He’s superb here.

As is Scully’s father’s speech in the White Room. Whoever wrote that speech can go through life having done at least that one perfect thing.

Among other things, this seems to be the show’s first somewhat positive portrayal of ‘New Age’ beliefs. That’s a big deal — the ‘New Age cult’ intersects with the conspiracist underground, sharing distrust for (some) institutional authority and a dangerously credulous attitude toward comfortable strangeness. I have no great affection for New Age folks; the benignly credulous anti-GMO/Whole Foods/’holistic healing’ folks are all over Cambridge, but a related and much deadlier strain of New Age-descended pseudoskepticism infects the anti-vaccine types, who put everyone’s kids, not just their own, at great risk. Melissa Scully here is your run-of-the-mill Reiki(tm) believer — she gets a couple of good-though-obvious shots off at Mulder, and serves the vital thematic purpose of recasting him as something more depraved and destructive than Heroic Seeker.

In the scheme of the show, Mulder’s openness to ‘extreme possibility’ (dreadful phrase) is the source of his power — uniquely among his peers, his eyes are truly open. It’s a handy disposition toward investigation, but also a moral force, not to mention a bit of epistemological bravery. He might seem like the Fool (Slothrop), but his is a deeper light.

The Lone Gunmen admit that Mulder’s ideas are ‘weirder’ than theirs, and they’re right: they see the full complication of the System, but he viscerally experiences it all within himself. This will come up over and over in the series, I can already tell: Mulder is a visionary, not just a believer. The piece of him that’s missing — his sister Samantha — is replaced by this empty space which echoes with the Weird. The alternative to those darkest reverberations, to that heightened awareness, is Scully, i.e., love; i.e., mere life. And so there’s the engine for your serial story, twinning and extending the believer/skeptic dramatic engine that powers individual investigations: does Mulder pursue knowledge at the expense of life, or form a human connection that creates a whole different sort of vulnerability? (Remember thatBuffy asked the same question of its protagonist, only about Strength rather than Knowledge, in Marti Noxon’s harrowing alternate-universe story ‘The Wish.’ Same with the twins Swearengen and Bullock on Deadwood, Dexter in a less compelling register, etc. It’s an important story, maybe the fundamental story about powerful spirits aging into merely human beings.)

Anyway, Mulder has no time for Melissa’s literally handwavey nonsense, living as he does in the Underworld (dig that mythic schema). But here’s where the psychology of the show breaks through the (cultural) politics: he has to mourn for his sister, after all, needs to reckon with his culpability there. The kind of knowing called for has nothing to do with his X-Files investigations; he just has to sit and tell Scully what’s really between them — to become more of a human being, and put the ‘mytharc’ on hold. It’ll find him eventually. A deeply human and narratively sly arc to this episode, as audience satisfaction is put aside willingly, by the hero, thereby affording hero and audience a deeper fulfillment — that bedside speech, and Mulder’s breakdown at his apartment. A long time coming.

Our sickness, meanwhile: there’s something so comforting about Mr X’s reassurance that he’ll take care of the dead body in the garage. As if he weren’t just one more of Them. The writers keep wrongfooting us that way, feigning sympathy and then completing a social/epistemological sidestep. Not only the things you think you know about your family, but your whole personal notion of how families are supposed to work, is hopelessly flawed.

Maybe the last remaining Master Narrative is ‘Mommy and Daddy are getting a divorce and you won’t have a home to come back to during Winter Break. Maybe just stay in the dorms? Good luck kiddo.’

Of course, Melissa does in (narrative) fact briefly manifest psychic powers, knowing not to call Mulder ‘Fox,’ and — more to the point — Scully does in fact have a vision of the kindly nurse visiting her during her coma. ‘Vision’ doesn’t need scare quotes there: she really does have an ‘otherworldly’ experience (a term that does need at least note-the-complexities-of-this-word quotes) that she’ll misattribute to spooky metaphysics, and from her perspective there’ll be no difference between, say, a fabricated memory stemming from some neural misfire (e.g., deja vu), a misremembered real encounter, a misperceived sensation, or an actual haunting. So much of the show is about POV conflict (cf. ‘Jose Chung’s From Outer Space’), and I mean that two ways: not only do problems of perception often drive episodic plots, they’re a big part of the show’s worldview. In our world, ‘Roswell’ and ‘Area 51’ (an area known, by the way, as ‘Dreamland’) likely boil down to nothing more than the Dept of Defense’s isolated desert site for ‘black budget’ projects, but in the world of The X-Files — a documentary rendering of a dark dream many in America didn’t realize they were having as the millennium approached — Groom Lake is both a DoD black site and an alien crash site and a focus for psychic phenomena (‘sensitives all over…’) and a kind of shared hallucination, and the characters are defined partly by their eagerness to foreclose certain POVs toward its nature, or the nature of ‘paranormal’ events more generally.

A visionary, after all, would be gifted not with one additional sight (an event) but with a whole kaleidoscopic work of seeing. A way of being-in-the-world, a method.

‘Psychic powers’ aren’t real. ‘Magic’ isn’t real. Humanoid organic life from other planets surely hasn’t visited earth and built pyramids. (The idea is charming, but it’s the kind of notion that you can’t think about in any depth without completely undermining.) Yet people really do have what they are only capable of understanding as ‘psychic’ experiences. And magic often works. Understanding the purpose and nature of magic as something deeper and more intimate than its enclosing fictions (talking to the dead, making someone fall in love, conjuring evil spirits) helps you see the Weird as a matter of fact.

I take great pleasure in seeing this story in these terms. Trying to turn the things I see into something like a working method is the major point of these essays. (Making fun of the show’s bullshit is the minor point.)