"Only Connect": Scully and Season Four
"These many years since we began to be,
What have the gods done with us? what with me,
What with my love? they have shown me fates and fears,
Harsh springs, and fountains bitterer than the sea,
Grief a fixed star, and joy a vane that veers,
These many years."
--Swinburne, "Rondel"
So I've been watching season four of the X-Files (thank you, shanith) just a little bit out of order. Having read all the reviews and spoilers ahead of time, I was unable to keep myself from seeking out all the episodes that I'd been waiting to see. So far I've seen "Herrenvolk," "Teliko," "Unruhe," "Tunguska," "Terma" (not quite all of it), "Paper Hearts," "Leonard Betts," "Never Again," "Memento Mori," "Kaddish," and "Small Potatoes."
After having seen all of the episodes in season three several times over, you would think that I'd be jumping up and down with joy at having new material. And I am, I think. But somehow the season has a very different emotional tone than the previous one. Season three had its dark and troubling moments, with the death or near-death of several Scully/Mulder family members and pets, not to mention death row killers, maggots, cockroaches, child abductions, and both Mulder and Scully teetering on the brink of insanity (and "Grotesque" really did make me feel he was going there). Despite all this, though, the overall tone of the season was upbeat. There was a string of great (or at least very entertaining) comedy/parody episodes: "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," "War of the Coprophages," "Syzygy," "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," and "Quagmire," the last of which had some beautiful character development in among the ridiculousness of small dogs being eaten by giant alligators. Mulder and Scully may have bickered a lot, but they bickered as only they can do, and Scully got to roll her eyes in the background of more scenes than I can count.
Maybe it's just because "Never Again" was the first episode I saw (thanks again, shanith!), but the emotional tone of season four seems completely different to me. It's melancholy, subdued, reflective, pained, and most of all it shows a deep emotional disconnect between the two characters. For me, the defining scene of the season is the last one from "Never Again":
(SCULLY picks rose petal off his desk. MULDER watches her. Then rises uncomfortably and goes back to file cabinet.)
MULDER: The uh, field office in Dallas is uh, receiving reports of the image of a missing child appearing on a blank billboard outside of Arlington... (Sits again, opening new file.) ....so.... All this, because I’ve ... because I didn’t get you a desk?
SCULLY: (Looking up at him) Not everything is about you, Mulder. This is my life.
MULDER: Yes but it’s m - -
(SCULLY looks at him questioningly. He starts to speak again, then sighs and fiddles with things on his desk. Uncomfortable silence in the room.)
It's not that they don't care about each other. It's not that they don't try to reach one another. Scully tries to tell Mulder that she feels she's lost sight of herself. Mulder, on his forced vacation at Graceland, calls Scully during a tour of the King's mansion just so he can share the experience with her. But, simply, they're just not able to connect. They don't know how to do it. Scully, after years of repressing her emotions, simply can't show them when she needs to, and Mulder isn't able to pursue a connection with her (whether romantic or simply emotional) except through using the language of the X-Files. And he doesn't really get through to her.
"Small Potatoes" seemed at first glance to offer some comedic and shippy gold, and indeed it does, as long as you don't look too deeply beneath the surface. Once you do, though, you discover that it, too, is all about missed chances and emotional disconnection. Eddie van Blundht may only be a janitor, but he perceives the essential emptiness in Mulder's life. He may sound like he's joking, but he isn't: "I was born a loser, but you're one by choice." While Scully reassures Mulder that he isn't a loser, he responds not with gratitude but with a jab at Scully, who did grasp at the chance that the false Mulder offered: "Yeah, but I'm no Eddie Van Blundht either. Am I?" And so another episode ends with disconnection, with Mulder and Scully left dangling, too afraid to tease and too afraid to say more.
Having failed to get any sort of satisfaction from "Small Potatoes," I turned to "Paper Hearts," which the redoubtable Autumn Tysko says demonstrates the closeness between Mulder and Scully, and the depth of her empathy for him. Well, I didn't see it. Or rather, I did see it, but not in a way that was satisfying to me. Scully is clearly affected by Mulder's pain in this episode, but she shows it by retreating into the hard-edged FBI agent persona that she has put on so often during this season. The short embrace at the end of the episode is just too little, too late. Throughout this episode I was waiting for Scully to reach out to Mulder, to comfort him in the ways that he's so often comforted her, and she just didn't do it. I could only conclude that she wasn't capable of doing it.
As a character, Scully follows a much more pronounced arc than does Mulder. At the beginning of the series, she is young and inexperienced in the field--while far from credulous or naieve, she is new to the sights and ideas that Mulder exposes her to through the X-Files. By season three she's been through a lot, and changed a great deal: she's a mature agent, cynical, a bit world-weary, no longer the fresh-faced and unpolished young woman who was assigned to debunk her partner's work. In season four, though, she's changed again. The polish and poise that she's gained have begun to look more like a shell, armour that she needs to protect her from her vulnerabilities, from all the things that she doesn't want to acknowledge or feel. Scully is a survivor, but in surviving, she's lost a lot. For one thing, Mulder ends up on the wrong side of Scully's armour--the outside.
This process, I suppose, begins earlier. An important scene comes at the beginning of "Piper Maru" in the third season. Skinner tells Scully that the Bureau has given up on solving her sister's murder... news that affects Scully deeply. Yet when she goes down to the basement office, she naturally brushes off Mulder's concern: "No. It's nothing. What did you want to talk to me about?" After that, Mulder is off and running on his latest conspiracy theory, and although she may regret not opening up to him, Scully has missed her chance. And she keeps missing her chances all through the fourth season.
The exception is "Memento Mori," when we finally see Scully letting her vulnerable side show. When she finally has no choice. Yes, there is a deep connection between the two of them. Yes, she understands how much she needs him, and by reading a diary that she didn't intend him to see, Mulder understands it too. The truth, Scully finally understands, is within her as well as "out there," and the truth will save them both. Yes, it's satisfying and yes, it's a wonderful episode.
Yet I still think that these Scully angst episodes serve a deeper purpose than allowing Gillian Anderson to show how beautifully she cries. Quite simply, Scully has gotten so good at burying and repressing her emotions that the writers can only bring them to the surface by breaking her down completely. It makes for wonderful drama, but in character terms it can only be destructive (and remember that I'm writing as someone who hasn't seen any more of the series). With every trauma, every loss, every grief, every trial that Scully survives, the wounds only get deeper, the scars only get worse, and Scully never lets her guard down long enough to allow herself to heal. Outwardly she gets more competent, more controlled, harder, tougher, stronger... and inside, she builds the walls ever higher.
With the words of EM Forster, I'd like to offer season four Scully a simple piece of advice: "Only connect."
All quotes and transcripts from the fantastic X-Files Transcripts site:
http://www.insidethex.co.uk