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goldenmelisande and her brother are engaging in this in-order XF viewing, and every so often she will be talking about whatever episode and I... will get a little bit jealous. So I maybe kinda bullied veils into watching "Never Again" with me this week. Anyway I have been meaning to write about it for days and days but ugh life got in the way, BUT NOW IT IS THE WEEKEND, and what is the weekend for if not rambly posts about Mulder and Scully.I feel like this cap encapsulates Scully's general mood in Never Again perfectly:
That face (well, that face and an eyetwitch) is her only response to Mulder's volley of "That contact that we met last night at the Wall, who had the distinction of being present for a first, that being you abandoning me during questioning. In the future I'll make sure that all those people being interviewed provide you with a multimedia laser show to keep your interest maintained." Ugh have we talked about how much I LOVE IT when Mulder and Scully's dynamic is like, thrown, and they are weird and snippy and awkward and mean with each other?! Because it's kind of actually my favorite, I mean, there is a reason I love season 3 best. Why am I allowed to be a person, idek.
Anyway I also love this bit of blocking, it's so boyish:
Also their faces:
The X-Files is that show where no one ever ever gets laid, except for that one time. "Never Again" is, as I'm sure you recall, Scully's "one time", although I guess like everything on the X-Files, it's ambiguous in that somewhere on the internet there are people saying "BUT SHE DIDN'T" and there's just not quite enough textual proof for you to say completely, definitely that she did. (But she did.) And a lot of people across the internet will say they hate this episode because it's out-of-character for her to, idk, have a one night stand with a murderer? (Not that she knew he was a murderer at the time.) But I actually love what this episode (and a handful of others) imply about Dana Scully, which is that even though 97% of the time she is this prim, poised, rule-abiding, perfect daughter figure, every so often she will start to feel trapped and she will do something monumentally self-destructive and then (usually) run away from it. Obviously there is only so much textual proof but sometimes I kind of feel like all of her previous relationships ended that way? She's fine and she's fine and she's fine and she's fine and then she just snaps. And then the cigarette-smoking, sleeping-with-her-med-school-professor part of her comes out for a bit and then regular Scully just kind of leaves in her wake.
Love how completely Mulder just doesn't understand this about her though, idk she's so completely the "good one" to his wild one that he just cannot wrap his head around the part of her that doesn't play that role. In the scene where she's in the hotel room he pushes her buttons twice, completely by accident, and basically completely triggers her whole Ed Jerse thing by being a dumbass, all "I checked where we always stay in Philadelphia, I knew you wouldn't abandon me" (because you're predictable) and then the derisive way he says "what have you got a date?" (because you never have dates) when she's trying to brush him off. I love how even though their phone conversation is a fight on both sides Mulder finishes off with a stupid dance, enjoying his ~vacation~:
But Scully finishes it all THAT DICK I HATE HIM:
But I don't think the point of this episode is that she gets prickly and weird and runs off and gets a tattoo and possibly-probably sleeps with this dude who tries to kill her the next morning, the point is that... she stays afterwards. Even though she feels trapped by her life, even though she fucks up, even though the whole thing with Ed Jerse is basically her big metaphorical way of setting fire to what she feels like X-Files has made her life become, she chooses to deal with the damage. Even if it takes them like a zillion years probably because they never ever talk about anything, UGH THESE TARDS I LOVE THEM.
But seriously I feel like Mulder's maturation over the course of the series is like, obvious: in many ways his life stopped that night he lost Samantha when he was twelve, and the guilt associated with that moment makes him put his life in standstill. He's not allowed to want a life, or a relationship, or a family, or a freaking bed until he's put his old family back together again. That is the Mulder we meet in season one, and he is vastly different from the Mulder of later years, who slowly comes to believe that he can want things, he can deserve things. But sometimes it feels like everyone thinks Scully was already a grown-up in everything but looks and fashion sense when she walked into the basement in the Pilot. She wasn't. She has stuff too. And the point is that they grow and change and screw things up with each other and then fix them.
CAN YOU BELIEVE I JUST WROTE AN ENTIRE POST ABOUT NEVER AGAIN WITHOUT MENTIONING A) EPISODE RE-ORDERING OR B) THE DESK? I can't. I am impressed with myself.
Also this has nothing to do with anything but:
That's "(p.s.) vampire diaries staff I know they are working hard but.. the next episode please hurry.. "
LOL FOREVER HE IS THE MOST RIDICULOUS PERSON
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Date: 2011-06-05 06:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-05 06:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-05 04:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-05 06:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-05 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-05 06:24 am (UTC)and OH GOD, THE WORLD THANKS YOU
I personally love Never Again, but the whole ordering thing... JUST ACCEPT OUR NON-LINEAR CANON, Chris Carter and his staff made it and you are expecting too much.
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Date: 2011-06-05 06:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-05 06:28 am (UTC)Dang this show was so much better than all the other shows. I miss them. I wish I could watch them again for the first time! Literally the only thing I miss about high school was that Mulder and Scully were the whole world to me. Good times.
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Date: 2011-06-05 06:38 am (UTC)I FEEL LIKE THIS TOO. Sometimes I really wish it were possible to just go back to that early 2008 feeling, that general hum of excitement, because whatever happened in that theater... transmogrified everything, it hasn't been the same since. And I don't know if it's me or if it's other people: it's probably both, I guess. I still love them, I do, but it feels so much more distant now than it used to feel. It's weird!
BUT I KNOW, I know. Still kind of baffled that Chris Carter managed to make these two up sometimes, they're so weird and subtle and real somehow.
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Date: 2011-06-05 06:53 am (UTC)BUT UGH I AGREE WITH YOU SO HARD (...obviously) and you said all the things I would say but with better words than I would have used. Honestly, Never Again explains so much about Scully to me that I get offended that people don't like it, or that they get caught up in whether or not she slept with Ed Jerse (it doesn't fucking matter, and I always feel like there's this gross judginess to the way people sometimes talk about this episode idk), because in my mind, it's so important to who she is and I don't like it when people dismiss it/go on and on about how out of character it is. Because it's not, I read this quote from Gillian Anderson where she said that it's not that this isn't Scully, it's just that this isn't a side of her we've seen before, and that is exactly how I feel. Also now that I'm thinking about it we kind of see this side of Scully in Syzygy too, when she's smoking in the motel room? It's that same idea of rebellion/frustration, just on a much smaller scale.
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Date: 2011-06-05 07:03 am (UTC)and I always feel like there's this gross judginess to the way people sometimes talk about this episode
Oh my god that's exactly it, it's always like "well it didn't happen because Scully is above that" (/not that slutty, that's the part that always goes unsaid) ughhhhh does she really have to be perfect all the time?
I don't think I've ever read that quote! But she is magnificent as usual, because that is exactly it. Idk though it really does baffle me that people always have to dismiss this episode because they don't like it, like it's fine if it's not your thing, but... it makes sense. And yeah you are right, it just happens on a lesser scale in Syzygy I suppose because that situation is less about her feeling trapped by Mulder and more about her being mad at Mulder.
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Date: 2011-06-05 07:20 am (UTC)ugh and the part that always makes me feel grossest is that I kind of think that's how Chris Carter feels, to some degree? it seems like she gets put on a weird pedestal a lot, idk. the idea that by having sex she's somehow becoming "less" in any way is so fucking skewed, and that's basically the idea that's almost always expressed when it comes to this episode, even if it's not stated explicitly. and it's really not even about that, sex isn't even the important thing in the end, it's about her as a person who has flaws and who deals with her problems in a wildly immature, stupid way, and then it's about her coming back and (well, presumably, it's not like we actually see this) trying to fix it like an adult instead of just running, and that is what makes her so incredible.
"Afterward, a lot of people told me that in that episode I was so ‘unlike’ Scully. I don’t think that what I did here was out of character for Scully. The only thing different is that the audience hadn’t seen it before."
That's the quote, lol I got it from that pretentious wordy girl's tumblr (I have no idea why I keep reading that shit omg why am I like this). But yyy in Syzygy it's a really different situation but you can kind of see the same type of response, lol she is so bad at dealing with things oh my god I love her.
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Date: 2011-06-05 07:36 am (UTC)Reaaaaaaaally? (Brb looking up who wrote this episode, it wasn't him, was it? Nooooo oh right it was Morgan and Wong, how could I forget.) But ugh exactly, I hate how the sex becomes the focal point of discussion of this episode, because it so very much isn't about that, it's about what drives it.
t's about her as a person who has flaws and who deals with her problems in a wildly immature, stupid way
Ugh Scullir I love her so much ;___;
WHEN I GROW UP I'M GOING TO MARRY GILLIAN ANDERSON
Seriously can't believe you can read that though, I thought I was a queen of XF wordvomit and I couldn't get through a paragraph of her.
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Date: 2011-06-05 07:43 am (UTC)oh my god she is seriously so perfect, I love that honestly so much of this is her own damn fault, like... Mulder is totally a douchebag but at the same time she makes herself so hard to read, and she bottles everything up until instead of talking about it or trying to make a real effort, she just ends up bitching at him about the desk and telling him "no." like a two year old.
NOT IF I GET THERE FIRST
only when I'm really really bored... and I really only skim it... I FIND IT SO WEIRDLY ENDEARING AND I DON'T KNOW WHY.
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Date: 2011-06-05 07:51 am (UTC)Oh my god I honestly hadn't focused on the thing I quoted in this post ever before, about her like getting up and LEAVING WHATEVER BAR THEY WERE MEETING THIS DUDE AT IN THE MIDDLE OF THEIR INTERVIEW, what a brat. Mulder is totally douchey in this episode but all the same I feel bad for him because you get the impression she's just been SUPER TESTY for awhile and there's just nothing he can really do about it?
>:(
lololol aw.
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Date: 2011-06-05 07:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-05 07:58 am (UTC)I LOVE THEM
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Date: 2011-06-05 12:59 pm (UTC)agreeeeeeeed siwon, agreeeeeeeed ♥
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Date: 2011-06-05 06:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-05 11:29 pm (UTC)♥ SIWON. SO CUTE
T.T SJ-M had a fan meeting in Taipei a couple of days ago and I couldn't go. SIGHHHHHHHHHHH. Not that I should be going to those things anyway... but still. I had planned to. Really excited for Siwon and Donghae's TW drama to come out.
THEY ARE SO ENDEARING.
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Date: 2011-06-06 09:58 pm (UTC)BUT I KNOW, he's ridiculous. They all are, idk, lameness is kind of their charm. That's too bad you couldn't go though, that would have been fun... but idk, it seems like the crowd at those things would get weird/scary, so maybe you're better off.