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 20th 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.)
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