X-Files And Consent, Part 2: Scully's Abduction and A Different Kind of Bodily Violation

 

One of the most revolutionary things – among the many, many revolutionary things about The X-Files – was how for the lion’s share of the series Dana Scully was the more dominant character. Part of this is due to incredible work of Gillian Anderson who almost instantly figured out her character whereas David Duchovny needed most of Season 1 to figure out Mulder. But there’s also the fact that throughout the series first seven seasons  - and certainly during the series peak which I’m going to discuss in great detail in this section – Scully was a very different kind of female lead. There were no men in her life, she and Mulder did not engage in anything resembling a romantic relationship during this period and more importantly Scully was the grownup in the relationship.

Scully was almost certainly sent to debunk Mulder’s work on The X-Files and she refused to do so. However I don’t think any viewer of the show would argue that if she’d hadn’t been assigned to the unit Mulder would have been kicked out of the FBI long before it finally happened. Scully did everything in her power to keep Mulder in check  not just with her scientific theories but by bailing him out of all the trouble he got into over the years. Yes Scully was abducted by strong men more than two or three times a season but I think far more often Scully had the job of getting Mulder out of government custody. It more than balanced it out and for a series in the 1990s that was unheard of for a female character.

The backbone of the series and what transformed into one of the greatest shows of all time was Scully’s abduction. I’ve gone over this before in several previous articles but in this case I want to dive into the consequences. Scully was not violated in the traditional sense of the word. There’s an argument in fact that what was done to her was infinitely worse. And because the violation of her bodily autonomy was critical to the series – and probably led to some of the most searing moment’s in the history of the mythology I think it’s time to go over them.

As I mentioned in my previous reviews of One Breath Scully had been experimented on immensely and left in a hospital bed at the point of death. When she recovered at the end of the episode it would have been easy for Carter and his writers to just have the show leave this part of it alone. That they not only chose not to do but actually did so to go to some of the darkest territory imaginable – not just for sci-fi but almost any series in the 1990s – was one of the bravest things the writers ever did.

We first get a sense of it in the Season 2 finale Anasazi. In that episode Mulder has received access to the MJ Files which he believes has the complete history of all our government secrets involving aliens since World War II. During this episode Mulder’s credibility is being undermined in a way that involves some of the darkest machinations of the series to date. Mulder spends much of the episode in a daze, hot-tempered and angrier then we’ve seen him. He gets in a fight with Skinner during the opening that leads to his suspension from the Bureau. He gets into arguments with Scully about the initial distrust between why she was sent. By the end of the episode he is on the verge of killing Alex Krycek, the man who murdered his father and in order to save him Scully shoots him in the shoulder. By the end of the episode we learn that the water supply in Mulder’s apartment complex has been dosed with LSD in order to discredit him. This shows just how ruthless the conspiracy can be – earlier in the episode a woman murdered her husband after thirty years without any explanation.

By the end of the episode Scully has managed to translate the files which were used by Navajo in World War II. It involves a series of experiments going back to that point – and Scully’s name is in the files. The final scene of the episode takes place in a buried boxcar and the images are among the most shocking in the series to date. There are alien bodies – stacked floor to ceiling. And there are what appear to be small pox vaccination scars on each one. The metaphor to the Holocaust can’t be denied  - and rather than back away, in the first half of Season 3 the show doubles down on it. Brilliantly.

During the Season 3 premiere The Blessing Way Scully, who has been suspended from the FBI, returns to the Bureau to meet with Skinner. She sets off the metal detector both times and the second time she’s actually curious. She has an X-ray done and she finds a small implant in the back of her neck. She has it removed and its something resembling a microchip. We forget about it when Mulder reappears and what follows in the next two episodes. But rarely for the show Chris Carter has not.

Paper Clip, the culmination of the opening of Season 3, represented what might be the most daring steps in the mythology that Carter ever tried. He takes what is in fact a legitimate government conspiracy. Operation Paper Clip was in fact our deal with the devil. After World War II we gave amnesty to several German scientists in order to win the space race from the Soviets. (Werner Von Braun, the inventor of the V-2 rocket, is the most well-known of these scientists.)  In the X-Files version Mulder has a photograph of a group of men taking sometime in the 1970s. One of them is his later father. The other is a man named Victor Klemperer, who the Lone Gunmen call “the most evil of all the Nazi scientists” worse even then Mengele. Klemperer is still alive at the start of the episode (Walter Gotel, famous from many Bond films plays him) and in his one scene he makes it very clear he has no remorse for his actions.

In this episode the X-Files makes its more daring statement yet. There is no such thing as alien abductions; it’s just a coverup to experiment on humans. This may be the most frightening storyline the show ever attempts mainly because not only is it more terrifying than the idea of aliens behind everything but because its backed up by historical evidence. That Scully might not have been the victim of an alien abduction as Mulder has spent the last year believing but was in fact the victim of our government’s own personal science project is honestly more frightening than anything the series has ever tried. The X-Files was always superb when it came to dealing with the banality of evil – as I’ve mentioned Vince Gilligan was best with his very human monsters – but to do so with the mythology itself was even more unsettling. And all the more frightening because it’s now clear that Mulder’s father himself was a party to it – and that it may have been the reason Scully was taken.

The second two-parter ‘Nisei/731’ may be the most satisfying mythology two parter the show ever did. There’s great disagreement as to when the mythology fell apart exactly – no two fans have the same opinion – but everyone agrees Season 3 was the last time it was fully satisfying. Mulder spends most of this two parter following the trail of an alien autopsy video that leads him across the country and on to a train. It’s thrilling stuff and Duchovny is superb in it. But the reason its an unquestioned masterpiece is because Scully is following her own trail – and its far more terrifying because of how personal it ends up becoming.

During the episode Scully goes to the address of a MUFON meeting in Allentown, looking for a woman named Betsy Hagopian. When she rings the doorbell, the woman who answered Penny Northern looks at her with recognition. “She is one,” she tells this group of women. Scully has no memory of them (she has no clear memory of what happened to here) but all of the women in this group know her instantly.

Scully tries to deny it and then they ask her about her implant. One of the most frightening scenes in the entire series comes when one by one each of these women removed a small vial from their person, each of which contain an identical implant to Scully’s. It looks like the world’s weirdest book club – and then it takes an ever darker turn. Betsy Hagopian is in the oncology ward suffering from cancer. Northern then tells Scully matter-of-factly that they all have it. “We’re all dying,” she says. “Because of what they did to us.”

The series has basically told us in no uncertain terms what is going to happen to Scully. It’s a measure of the pace of the show that we’ll have forgotten about by the time it actually happens. (If you’ve read my first piece of Vince Gilligan’s work, you remember that they chose to reveal it to the public in an episode that aired after the Super Bowl nearly a full two years after this episode.) Scully does what she has done so often, she buries what might happen to her. But she can’t deny what she sees before her eyes.

In the midst of Mulder’s inquiry he has been told of the story of four Japanese scientists who worked during World War II in a unit called 731. This is also based in reality: Japanese scientists also engaged in the similar kind of experiments that the Nazis did during World War II. Four of these scientists were killed on American soil doing the autopsy. But then Scully looks at the picture of one still alive: Shiro Zama and she recognizes him, even though he’s been missing for twenty years. She looks at the autopsy video where he is clearly pictured – and she has a flashback to her abduction and sees him standing over her.

All of this perhaps plays out the best in 731. The teaser may be the most terrifying one in the entire roster of them, mainly because the only monsters we see are human ones. A group of military go to a camp in Virginia which is populated entirely with people suffering from facial deformities. We will learn they are all diagnosed with Hansen’s disease, formerly called leprosy. They are hauled into bused by soldiers carrying guns and driven out to the middle of nowhere where a giant pit has been dug. They are executed at gunpoint in a mass slaughter. The soldiers causally look over to make sure there are no survivors and then walk back away.

I don’t think there’s any series in the 20^th century – hell, maybe not even now – that would have dared to show what amounts to a concentration camp on American soil. (Perhaps The Handmaid’s Tale has.) But more shocking is when Scully learns about it and finds the few survivors there and what has happened to them. Later on, she meets one of the Elder’s who tells her casually: “Today the greatest nations are not built on who has the best weapons but the best scientists.” He then tells her there’s something she needs to see.

And in that episode Scully calls Mulder and tells him where she is. A boxcar where the autopsy was performed. “Only I’ve been here before. This is where they took me.” She then tells Mulder that the government has been conducting biological experiments on human subjects for the last twenty years after denying it in the 1970s. And then she says perhaps the most frightening thing possible: “What I’m saying is that there is no such thing as an alien abduction. It’s a smokescreen for tests on humans.”

This is something that would resonate more powerfully today then it did in the 1990s because we know that corporations as well as the government are more than capable of doing such insidious things to the disenfranchised and the sick. And sadly Carter didn’t have the stomach to follow through with it for the mythology. In the next mythology episode Piper Maru, we are introduced to the black oil, the first thing that makes it impossible to deny that there are aliens at the center of the series.

You can’t exactly blame Carter for it; he’d already been using aliens at the center of the show quite a few times previously and he might have figured he’d been cheating the fans had he backed away from it now. But it’s hard to pretend it wouldn’t been braver and definitely more interesting had he followed through. As has been written before the idea that aliens are behind everything is the most logical explanation for what’s going on – and by the standards of The X-Files the least interesting.

Still he deserves credit on one thing. He didn’t back away from this part of it when it came to both what happened to Scully and the consequences of it. For the next year and a half the mythology began to dive in to become increasingly alien as well as far more global in scope. While these ideas were ambitious for the show they also increasingly made the mythology unstable and harder to keep up with. The mythology was always at its best when it was personal for our heroes something that Carter had clearly forgotten by the time the series started filming in Hollywood rather than Canada. And this was driven home all the more forcefully in Memento Mori one of four episodes nominated for Best Dramatic Teleplay and the only one directly related to the mythology.

As brilliant as the episode is, it suffers from incredible burdens and I don’t just mean the purple prose that Gillian Anderson does her level best to deliver in the narration. No the problem is the fact that The X-Files had dug itself a hole with Scully’s cancer that was going to be impossible to dig out of in 1990s TV. Because while the world of television was changing (the same year of this episode Buffy the Vampire Slayer and OZ debuted) the rules were hard and fast: you didn’t kill of the lead character on a network drama unless the actor playing the role was about to leave. This might still have been plausible on another network drama but when the opening credits only had two characters the idea one would be killed off would require a suspension of belief not even most X-Files fans were willing to give into. I certainly wasn’t even at eighteen.

And the writers didn’t help themselves that much after this episode. Scully did spend several episodes clearly feeling the symptoms – the makeup team made her look increasingly pale and she went to the hospital more than once for tests  - but mostly the writers ignored the elephant in the room, which seemed impossible since she was onscreen all the time. Scully was the kind of person who often worked to escape her traumas – she went back to work after both her father’s death and her sister’s very quickly – so it was plausible that she was doing so in the face of impending death. But the decision to basically not deal with it after Memento Mori as something that needed to be solved was a bigger problem that the show never truly resolved.

That doesn’t take away from the power of how it began and ended. Memento Mori is a messy and often ponderous episode and at the same time one of the most emotionally brilliant in the entire canon. Gillian Anderson won her only Emmy for The X-Files because of this episode and while the voiceovers do her no favors, everything else in the show works for it. Duchovny matches her scene for scene, particularly in the opening when Scully tells him of her diagnosis of a tumor in her naval cavity and that there is no real chance of recovery. Mulder reacts with denial and Scully once again has to be the realist.

In order to pursue an avenue of inquiry Scully and Mulder go back to Allentown to visit Betsy Hagopian and the MUFON chapter that suffered similar symptoms. She is stunned to learn that Hagopian is dead – as are all the women save for Penny Northern who is in the final stages of her own cancer. Now Mulder has to be the strong one and tell her to face the truth of what she has in common with these women and she’s in denial, clinging to Northern being alive.

Scully goes to see her in the hospital and again brings up recognition of her during the tests, something that Scully is denying. Then she goes to see Dr. Scanlon, Penny’s oncologist and she faces a brutal fact. In a heartbreaking scene she calls Mulder and tells her to bring her bags to the hospital. “Mulder, whatever you might think the truth is in me,” she tells him.

While this goes on Mulder is following his own lead: Kurt Crawford, who we later learn has a connection to Scully. A hack into files reveals something horrifying that her name is on the list of a fertility clinic, even though he’s pretty damn sure she’s never been treated for infertility.

The scene that follows is shocking as Mulder wants Skinner to set up a meeting with the Cigarette Smoking Man. He’s asked for one before and he knows the man is behind it – but this time he’s ready to deal.

“Find another way,” Skinner pleads. “You deal with that man – you offer him anything – and he’ll own you forever.”

“He knows what they did to Agent Scully! He may even know how to save her!” Mulder shouts.

“If he knows, you can know, too” Skinner points out. “But you can’t ask the truth of a man who trades in lies. I won’t let you.”

There are many ironies of the scene above; the most immediate is that by the end of the episode Skinner himself has made a deal with a man he himself calls the devil in one of the most brilliant scenes in all of Season 4.

Mulder follows a path during the episode that is shocking – and leads indirectly to one of the more critical stories of the final two seasons. He breaks into the Lombard Facility and its there he finds Kurt Crawford – several of them. Kurt Crawford is the adult version of a male clone we’ve seen earlier this season. (The female clones were young Samantha Mulders, but I’m not going into that here.) The important part is that the Kurt’s lead him to a large stainless steel room with hundreds of drawers that contain human ova – taken from, among others, Scully.

The episode doesn’t call what happened to Scully rape either but the fact that her ova were harvested from her through high doses of radiation for the sole purpose of harvest for making these alien clones reveals just how horrible these men are. The fact that these women have been discarded once it has been done – thrown away to rot from within – is one of the most insidious things the series has discussed. To drive the point home when Mulder realizes that the Crawfords are trying to save them, one says simply: “They’re our mothers.”

The X-Files would deal with motherhood more directly in its final seasons (I’ll deal with them later) but it’s hard not to look at this particular storyline as their most direct statement of reproductive rights. It’s an inverse of the usual narrative – the women’s right to have children has been stolen from them – but the results are, if anything, far more devastating. Perhaps its understandable that the series doesn’t deal with this particular plot point for more than three seasons; the show was already dealing with heavy material with Scully’s cancer.

And while I have extreme issues with how the cancer storyline was ‘resolved’ – something I won’t spoil because the show is nebulous when it comes to saying exactly how it happened – I have to say that the season 5 premiere that resolve it – Redux II – almost makes up for the mess of the mythology that comes for most of Season 5.

We’ve learned at the end of last season that Scully’s cancer has metastasized and that she has at most days to live. Mulder has pulled Scully away from her family to pursue what appears to be another lead on extraterrestrial life and is told not only that his life’s work is a lie but that Scully was given this cancer in order to make him believe it. This is a huge burden for Mulder to bear and during the first two episodes he goes to desperate measures to find answers – and seems more than willing to make the deal with the Smoking Man in order to do so.

During this episode Bill Scully, one of Dana’s brothers, has shown up for a visit from the Navy. Dana has been hiding the truth of her diagnosis from anyone but her mother and Bill is angry when he learns what happened – through Scully’s mother.

Bill Scully is one of those characters who fans loathe just when you bring up his name because he’s always upset both with his sister and Mulder. But that’s because we’ve spent four years considering Mulder the hero of this story and while we suffer with him when he fails in the conspiracy we forgive him because he follows a noble truth. It doesn’t change the fact that this pursuit has very real consequences – and the biggest one has been his partner.

In ‘One Breath’ when Dana is lying near death he meets Melissa, the more spiritual older sister, who is compassionate during the process while Mulder spends most of the episode trying to find out what happened to Dana. “I can’t just wave my hands in the air,” he shouts at her at one point. At the climax of the episode Melissa goes to his apartment where he’s waiting in the dark to kill the two men who took Scully. Melissa tells him it could happen at any time and Mulder refuses to leave. Melissa has been remarkably calm during Mulder’s hostility but here she loses it and tells him he’s being a prick. “I expect more of you. Dana expects more of you,” she tells him. And that sinks in and he spends the night by Scully’s bedside.

Now three years later Scully again is facing death, Melissa has been killed as a result of Mulder’s search for the truth and Mulder is still essentially waving his hands in the air. Bill’s attitude may be somewhat hypocritical  - where was when either of his sisters were in comas – but his anger toward Mulder is fully justified when he calls him a piece of crap.

Mulder is initially belligerent: “Because I’m not playing by your rules? Because I’m not part of your family tragedy?”

“Because you’re causing it,” Bill says simply. “I’ve already lost one sister to your quest. Now I’m losing another. Has it been worth it? I mean, for you. Have you found what you’ve been looking for?”

And Mulder can only answer no. When he points out that he’s lost his sister and father as a result, he can’t even argue that he knows why he lost them. Bill might be stretching it when he calls Mulder one sorry son of a bitch but when the phone rings – and he responds with that as his greeting with no humor at all –  the weight of what he’s feeling on his shoulders is absolutely apparent.

And just as with One Breath Scully makes a miraculous recovery – her cancer goes into complete remission at the end of the episode and it is only mentioned in passing for the rest of the series. But in a sense while Scully’s health will not be the center of her crisis going forward her life will be – and it will start in Season 5.

In the next part of this series I’m going to deal with Scully’s first child. (No you didn’t miss that storyline. It’s more complicated than that.)