Rewatch: 9x16 William
Production number: 9x17
Logline: Sarah cries for 42 minutes straight.
The Episode: As soon as that Wyoming flag started flapping, I started crying. You thought I was exaggerating.
Mrs. Van de Kamp’s line, “This is what we dreamed about. What we prayed for,” is eerily similar to Mulder and Scully’s situation. There’s some terrible symmetry in that.
Scully singing “William was a bullfrog” might be the first time we see her really seem to enjoy being a mom. Plus, I hold the continuity close to my heart.
I love William’s little floppy hat. And his outer space sleeper at the end.
Doggett doing push-ups, “1,492, 1,493...20,” is a really charming character moment.
Since I seem to be noting “flashlight in the mouth” occurrences, Spender (I’ll just call him that throughout, since we all know who it is) holds his flashlight this way when he’s going through the filing cabinet.
MARRY ME, DUCHOVNY. I could just go on and on about how good he is at the little things, like having Gillian do that little hop as she pulls her pants leg out of her boot. Also, I feel like having him right over there somehow magically made Gillian light up on screen in a way we haven't much seen this season. Maybe it sounds crazy, but it's like their magic chemistry was there, even though he was behind the camera, not in front of it.
Spender gives them the fake name “Miller.” Which, in Dutch, is what “Mulder” means.
As we pan up Spender’s horribly scarred body on the exam table, he sort of jostles his feet nervously. It’s a lovely touch.
The flashbacks to Spender’s torture are filmed similarly to Mulder’s torture chair scenes. At the end of one of them, you can see one of the “doctors” ripping a black hood off of his own head, but even with pausing, you never see his face.
Spender seems like a corpse on the bare metal exam table at Quantico. It's especially true when Scully leaves the room to talk to Doggett and Reyes, leaving him lying there by himself, a sheet over his torso.
Gillian’s reaction after Doggett says he thinks it’s Mulder is so good. She half laughs, but at the same time, something flutters behind her eyes. Doggett: “What is true and what we want to be true aren’t always the same.”
Both Gillian and Chris Owens do a fucking amazing job during the exam scene. The direction and framing are so good. It’s claustrophobic and intimate at the same time. The idea that it might be Mulder makes it a little hot, their faces that close together while her gloved hands carefully press across his chest and shoulders. Gillian does this wonderful job here and throughout the episode of, even while about 99% of her believes it isn’t Mulder, showing that the 1% is underneath at all times, needling her, saying “what if what if what if.”
The little tiny Mulder mirage makes me happy.
After the exam scene, when Scully comes out and tells Doggett and Reyes it isn’t Mulder and the blood test will prove it, we then see Spender in the exam room by himself, quietly putting his fake nose back on. It’s…heart-wrenching. Spender certainly does many questionable things in this episode, but you can’t deny how badly he’s been fucked over. And unlike Mulder and Scully, he’s going it completely alone. I can’t even imagine what the last couple of years of his life have been like, since the office shooting. It made me start crying again, that little floppy nose piece. It's like this little flap of silicone is all that's holding his dignity together. I feel the same way when he self-consciously runs a hand over his terrible wig a few times during the episode.
The crying then continued when we cut to Ticonderogas in the basement ceiling.
I love the inside the closet shot of Scully getting the box of files for Spender.
Skinner finally asks a question that makes sense before I can ask it for him: if he’d actually been in contact with Mulder, why didn’t Mulder just give him the information, rather than direct him to the files at the FBI? Go, Skinman! Then, of course, we all find out that he pretended not to know where the files really were so Scully would bring them to her apartment, where he could see William.
There’s a truly awesome overhead shot of Doggett in the alley as he chases after Spender, with his shadow stretching out behind him.
After the test results come back, Doggett and Reyes are being really sweet to Spender because they believe it’s Mulder, while Scully won’t even stay in the same room with him or look at him.
When Reyes leans back on the couch, Doggett has his arm stretched out behind her and he kind of taps her on the back of the head. It’s cute.
The aquarium gets some time to shine in a close up as Spender sneaks into William’s room. (With this scene, the floor plan of Scully’s apartment gets as officially confusing as Mulder’s.)
After William’s taken in at the hospital, Scully looks down at his crumpled little jacket and her face is just broken. Despite how dubious the rest of the episode is, Gillian does a lot to get me into Scully’s mindset here. She’s completely fucked up. If Mulder could've seen this, he'd know that if her spirit wasn't crushed here, nothing was going to crush it.
The Mytharc, Mulder and Scully: Spender tells them that the original conspiracy has failed and has given rise to a “new conspiracy in the government now by men who are alien themselves.” By this, I suppose he means the “created” Super Soldiers we’ve seen. He says that he was a guinea pig, a failed attempt to make a Super Soldier. I’m not sure…if that works. Time-wise. Because these attempts on Spender have to take place after “One Son,” which aired in February 1999. Earlier this season, Xena said that she and Knowle Rohrer were recruited out of Bravo Company. In "Within," we learn from his documents that Doggett was in the Marines from 1977 to 1983, and part of a Multinational Peacekeeping Force in Lebanon from 1982 to October of 1983. I'm speculating that he worked with Xena and Knowle in Lebanon. Of course, it's entirely possible that both of them stayed in the Marines longer than Doggett, but I don't get the feeling that they stayed in that much longer, as long as 1999. So I'm guessing, if they were "turned" shortly after leaving the Marines, the Super Soldier process was, if not perfected, at least usable before early 1999, when Spender was shot. So why was he a failed attempt? In any case, he says that the plans are to do this to everyone. Why, I do not know. Perhaps we're now saying that all Super Soldiers are created equal, and becoming a Super Soldier will protect you from the coming alien apocalypse.
Okay, this whole scene breaks my heart.
SPENDER: I’d heard so much about William. Mulder told me how he missed him.
SCULLY: Well, if that’s true, then where is he? Just tell me where he is!
SPENDER: You don’t want to know.
SCULLY: I have to know.
SPENDER: He’s in pain--terrible pain.
SCULLY: Then let me go to him.
SPENDER: There’s nothing you can do.
SCULLY: That’s not for you to decide!
Spender, of course, is fucking with her this whole time, trying to plant this seed of doubt in her head so it grows enough that he can get close to William to inject him. But: OH, SCULLY. My heart is breaking for her. And then, and then: Spender asks to hold William, saying that he wants to hold him “for Mulder.” As he holds him, saying, “He’s so beautiful,” Scully just looks like she’s about to lose her shit. If this is Mulder, oh my God, it’s Mulder, he’s holding our kid. If it isn’t Mulder, oh my God, why can’t Mulder be there to hold our kid? And despite everything, you almost DO want it to be Mulder, want him to be holding his child, at least for a minute.
Then, Spender tells her this:
SPENDER: I know what Mulder knows. I know they used you to create the child. I know they continue to use
you to take care of it and raise it.
SCULLY: What are you saying?
SPENDER: You know what I'm saying. Your son -- your child is part alien.
I know that there’s a strong component of denial here, but this should not be a surprise to Scully. Not only because of Mulder’s infection with the black oil in Tunguska, and his later illness from the African ship, but because Scully was exposed to an alien virus in FTF. I would also imagine she would’ve made at least a basic connection between William and Gibson Praise.
From “The Beginning”: she tells Mulder that they ran blood tests on Gibson and found evidence of the virus in his system. Mulder asks if it’s “the same virus [she] was exposed to,” and she says yes. Later in that same episode, she shows Mulder test results showing that the DNA from the claw nail matches exactly the “DNA from the virus you believe is extraterrestrial.” She then continues on, saying it also matches exactly the DNA found in Gibson. But he’s not infected with it, but rather: “It's a part of his DNA. In fact, it's a part of all of our DNA. It's called a genetic remnant. It's inactive junk DNA. Except in Gibson it's turned on.” Mulder: "So if that were true, that would mean that Gibson is, in some part, extraterrestrial." Scully: "It would mean that all of us are."
Not to mention everything they learn in the "Biogenesis" arc. In my entry about that, I postulated that the black oil virus is "activated" by the rubbing. After Mulder's trip to Russia, there were parts of his DNA that were alien, but were “switched off.” The same thing Gibson had, only not working at the time. The rubbings/artifacts activate the alien parts of his DNA. But the important thing is, I think, that his DNA is able to be activated now, because of the black oil. If everyone has this inactive, junk DNA, the difference has to be that once the virus invades your body, it will then lay dormant until activated by something like the rubbings. And presumably, since it's altered DNA, that would be passed to William.
Doggett comes back with the test results and tells Scully that it's Mulder. She repeats that it isn’t him. “He wouldn’t say these things,” she says. I love how the 99% sure part of her is dominant when she’s talking to Doggett and Reyes, but when she’s alone with Spender, the other 1% takes over and she waffles back and forth, even saying things to him like, “Don’t do this to me. Not you.”
I adore the whole conversation they have after putting Spender to bed. “You know a person in so many ways. Ways that a test can't even begin to know.” and “If that was Mulder, I wouldn’t care.” Would you believe if I told you this made me start crying again? I know, shocking. It’s kind of funny, though, how Reyes is very gingerly trying to say, “Listen, Mulder was super, super hot before. He might feel a little bummed that he’s not anymore.”
The doctor tells Scully that they found nothing but some slight bruising and elevated iron levels. Other than that, William is perfectly normal.
Scully finally confronts Spender, knowing that it’s him. We get a quick flashback to “One Son,” CSM shooting him. He tells her the only thing that couldn't be destroyed was his hatred of CSM. He admits that he used the shared DNA to trick them, and that he hasn’t seen Mulder, hasn’t talked to him at all. He says the injection he gave William was magnetite, and it was “a gift.”
Basically, after the Syndicate failed, CSM wanted the world at large to fail. Which is the ultimate expression of pettiness: if my alien-human hybrid can’t save the world, then no one’s can! CSM: what a dick. Spender says the one thing the aliens need is William (with his “powers” intact), so he took revenge on CSM by taking William away from the aliens when he took that power away. He also helped out the Earth, but I guess that pales in comparison to sticking it to his dad.
Scully initially thinks this means that it’s over, William is safe. Spender tells her that they’ll always know what William was, they’ll never accept that he’s not that anymore. That he’s not what they need. Scully says she’ll keep protecting him, then, and Spender tells her to take a gander at him. Does she want that for her son?
You guys, this is royally fucked up. It doesn’t make any sense. If Scully and her FBI pals can’t protect him, what makes her think these two regular people in Wyoming can? And if it’s all a matter of location, why didn’t she go on the run with William, while trying to contact Mulder? If neither William nor Mulder can live there safely, then what’s left for her in D.C.? There’s no reason for her to stay there. So that would’ve worked perfectly to have this episode lead directly into “The Truth.” Instead, William is gone and we have to sit through two more episodes before we get to "The Truth," one of which is "Sunshine Days."
Random: When did Scully buy a million houseplants?
We see a white buffalo on the Wyoming flag and on William’s new mobile. Albert Hosteen’s voice over from the teaser of “Paper Clip”:
At the end of the ceremony, when the F.B.I. man had been healed, we heard the news from other Native Americans in the northern plains that a great event had taken place. Like the Navajo, these people have their own stories and myths. One of these stories tells of the white buffalo woman who came down from the heavens and taught the Indians how to lead virtuous lives and how to pray to the creator. She told the people she would return one day, then she turned into a white buffalo and ascended into the clouds, never to be seen again. But on this day, when the holy people had given the F.B.I. man a miracle, a white buffalo was born and every Native American knew, whether he believed the story or not, that this was a powerful omen and that great changes were coming.
Logline: Sarah cries for 42 minutes straight.
The Episode: As soon as that Wyoming flag started flapping, I started crying. You thought I was exaggerating.
Mrs. Van de Kamp’s line, “This is what we dreamed about. What we prayed for,” is eerily similar to Mulder and Scully’s situation. There’s some terrible symmetry in that.
Scully singing “William was a bullfrog” might be the first time we see her really seem to enjoy being a mom. Plus, I hold the continuity close to my heart.
I love William’s little floppy hat. And his outer space sleeper at the end.
Doggett doing push-ups, “1,492, 1,493...20,” is a really charming character moment.
Since I seem to be noting “flashlight in the mouth” occurrences, Spender (I’ll just call him that throughout, since we all know who it is) holds his flashlight this way when he’s going through the filing cabinet.
MARRY ME, DUCHOVNY. I could just go on and on about how good he is at the little things, like having Gillian do that little hop as she pulls her pants leg out of her boot. Also, I feel like having him right over there somehow magically made Gillian light up on screen in a way we haven't much seen this season. Maybe it sounds crazy, but it's like their magic chemistry was there, even though he was behind the camera, not in front of it.
Spender gives them the fake name “Miller.” Which, in Dutch, is what “Mulder” means.
As we pan up Spender’s horribly scarred body on the exam table, he sort of jostles his feet nervously. It’s a lovely touch.
The flashbacks to Spender’s torture are filmed similarly to Mulder’s torture chair scenes. At the end of one of them, you can see one of the “doctors” ripping a black hood off of his own head, but even with pausing, you never see his face.
Spender seems like a corpse on the bare metal exam table at Quantico. It's especially true when Scully leaves the room to talk to Doggett and Reyes, leaving him lying there by himself, a sheet over his torso.
Gillian’s reaction after Doggett says he thinks it’s Mulder is so good. She half laughs, but at the same time, something flutters behind her eyes. Doggett: “What is true and what we want to be true aren’t always the same.”
Both Gillian and Chris Owens do a fucking amazing job during the exam scene. The direction and framing are so good. It’s claustrophobic and intimate at the same time. The idea that it might be Mulder makes it a little hot, their faces that close together while her gloved hands carefully press across his chest and shoulders. Gillian does this wonderful job here and throughout the episode of, even while about 99% of her believes it isn’t Mulder, showing that the 1% is underneath at all times, needling her, saying “what if what if what if.”
The little tiny Mulder mirage makes me happy.
After the exam scene, when Scully comes out and tells Doggett and Reyes it isn’t Mulder and the blood test will prove it, we then see Spender in the exam room by himself, quietly putting his fake nose back on. It’s…heart-wrenching. Spender certainly does many questionable things in this episode, but you can’t deny how badly he’s been fucked over. And unlike Mulder and Scully, he’s going it completely alone. I can’t even imagine what the last couple of years of his life have been like, since the office shooting. It made me start crying again, that little floppy nose piece. It's like this little flap of silicone is all that's holding his dignity together. I feel the same way when he self-consciously runs a hand over his terrible wig a few times during the episode.
The crying then continued when we cut to Ticonderogas in the basement ceiling.
I love the inside the closet shot of Scully getting the box of files for Spender.
Skinner finally asks a question that makes sense before I can ask it for him: if he’d actually been in contact with Mulder, why didn’t Mulder just give him the information, rather than direct him to the files at the FBI? Go, Skinman! Then, of course, we all find out that he pretended not to know where the files really were so Scully would bring them to her apartment, where he could see William.
There’s a truly awesome overhead shot of Doggett in the alley as he chases after Spender, with his shadow stretching out behind him.
After the test results come back, Doggett and Reyes are being really sweet to Spender because they believe it’s Mulder, while Scully won’t even stay in the same room with him or look at him.
When Reyes leans back on the couch, Doggett has his arm stretched out behind her and he kind of taps her on the back of the head. It’s cute.
The aquarium gets some time to shine in a close up as Spender sneaks into William’s room. (With this scene, the floor plan of Scully’s apartment gets as officially confusing as Mulder’s.)
After William’s taken in at the hospital, Scully looks down at his crumpled little jacket and her face is just broken. Despite how dubious the rest of the episode is, Gillian does a lot to get me into Scully’s mindset here. She’s completely fucked up. If Mulder could've seen this, he'd know that if her spirit wasn't crushed here, nothing was going to crush it.
The Mytharc, Mulder and Scully: Spender tells them that the original conspiracy has failed and has given rise to a “new conspiracy in the government now by men who are alien themselves.” By this, I suppose he means the “created” Super Soldiers we’ve seen. He says that he was a guinea pig, a failed attempt to make a Super Soldier. I’m not sure…if that works. Time-wise. Because these attempts on Spender have to take place after “One Son,” which aired in February 1999. Earlier this season, Xena said that she and Knowle Rohrer were recruited out of Bravo Company. In "Within," we learn from his documents that Doggett was in the Marines from 1977 to 1983, and part of a Multinational Peacekeeping Force in Lebanon from 1982 to October of 1983. I'm speculating that he worked with Xena and Knowle in Lebanon. Of course, it's entirely possible that both of them stayed in the Marines longer than Doggett, but I don't get the feeling that they stayed in that much longer, as long as 1999. So I'm guessing, if they were "turned" shortly after leaving the Marines, the Super Soldier process was, if not perfected, at least usable before early 1999, when Spender was shot. So why was he a failed attempt? In any case, he says that the plans are to do this to everyone. Why, I do not know. Perhaps we're now saying that all Super Soldiers are created equal, and becoming a Super Soldier will protect you from the coming alien apocalypse.
Okay, this whole scene breaks my heart.
SPENDER: I’d heard so much about William. Mulder told me how he missed him.
SCULLY: Well, if that’s true, then where is he? Just tell me where he is!
SPENDER: You don’t want to know.
SCULLY: I have to know.
SPENDER: He’s in pain--terrible pain.
SCULLY: Then let me go to him.
SPENDER: There’s nothing you can do.
SCULLY: That’s not for you to decide!
Spender, of course, is fucking with her this whole time, trying to plant this seed of doubt in her head so it grows enough that he can get close to William to inject him. But: OH, SCULLY. My heart is breaking for her. And then, and then: Spender asks to hold William, saying that he wants to hold him “for Mulder.” As he holds him, saying, “He’s so beautiful,” Scully just looks like she’s about to lose her shit. If this is Mulder, oh my God, it’s Mulder, he’s holding our kid. If it isn’t Mulder, oh my God, why can’t Mulder be there to hold our kid? And despite everything, you almost DO want it to be Mulder, want him to be holding his child, at least for a minute.
Then, Spender tells her this:
SPENDER: I know what Mulder knows. I know they used you to create the child. I know they continue to use
you to take care of it and raise it.
SCULLY: What are you saying?
SPENDER: You know what I'm saying. Your son -- your child is part alien.
I know that there’s a strong component of denial here, but this should not be a surprise to Scully. Not only because of Mulder’s infection with the black oil in Tunguska, and his later illness from the African ship, but because Scully was exposed to an alien virus in FTF. I would also imagine she would’ve made at least a basic connection between William and Gibson Praise.
From “The Beginning”: she tells Mulder that they ran blood tests on Gibson and found evidence of the virus in his system. Mulder asks if it’s “the same virus [she] was exposed to,” and she says yes. Later in that same episode, she shows Mulder test results showing that the DNA from the claw nail matches exactly the “DNA from the virus you believe is extraterrestrial.” She then continues on, saying it also matches exactly the DNA found in Gibson. But he’s not infected with it, but rather: “It's a part of his DNA. In fact, it's a part of all of our DNA. It's called a genetic remnant. It's inactive junk DNA. Except in Gibson it's turned on.” Mulder: "So if that were true, that would mean that Gibson is, in some part, extraterrestrial." Scully: "It would mean that all of us are."
Not to mention everything they learn in the "Biogenesis" arc. In my entry about that, I postulated that the black oil virus is "activated" by the rubbing. After Mulder's trip to Russia, there were parts of his DNA that were alien, but were “switched off.” The same thing Gibson had, only not working at the time. The rubbings/artifacts activate the alien parts of his DNA. But the important thing is, I think, that his DNA is able to be activated now, because of the black oil. If everyone has this inactive, junk DNA, the difference has to be that once the virus invades your body, it will then lay dormant until activated by something like the rubbings. And presumably, since it's altered DNA, that would be passed to William.
Doggett comes back with the test results and tells Scully that it's Mulder. She repeats that it isn’t him. “He wouldn’t say these things,” she says. I love how the 99% sure part of her is dominant when she’s talking to Doggett and Reyes, but when she’s alone with Spender, the other 1% takes over and she waffles back and forth, even saying things to him like, “Don’t do this to me. Not you.”
I adore the whole conversation they have after putting Spender to bed. “You know a person in so many ways. Ways that a test can't even begin to know.” and “If that was Mulder, I wouldn’t care.” Would you believe if I told you this made me start crying again? I know, shocking. It’s kind of funny, though, how Reyes is very gingerly trying to say, “Listen, Mulder was super, super hot before. He might feel a little bummed that he’s not anymore.”
The doctor tells Scully that they found nothing but some slight bruising and elevated iron levels. Other than that, William is perfectly normal.
Scully finally confronts Spender, knowing that it’s him. We get a quick flashback to “One Son,” CSM shooting him. He tells her the only thing that couldn't be destroyed was his hatred of CSM. He admits that he used the shared DNA to trick them, and that he hasn’t seen Mulder, hasn’t talked to him at all. He says the injection he gave William was magnetite, and it was “a gift.”
Basically, after the Syndicate failed, CSM wanted the world at large to fail. Which is the ultimate expression of pettiness: if my alien-human hybrid can’t save the world, then no one’s can! CSM: what a dick. Spender says the one thing the aliens need is William (with his “powers” intact), so he took revenge on CSM by taking William away from the aliens when he took that power away. He also helped out the Earth, but I guess that pales in comparison to sticking it to his dad.
Scully initially thinks this means that it’s over, William is safe. Spender tells her that they’ll always know what William was, they’ll never accept that he’s not that anymore. That he’s not what they need. Scully says she’ll keep protecting him, then, and Spender tells her to take a gander at him. Does she want that for her son?
You guys, this is royally fucked up. It doesn’t make any sense. If Scully and her FBI pals can’t protect him, what makes her think these two regular people in Wyoming can? And if it’s all a matter of location, why didn’t she go on the run with William, while trying to contact Mulder? If neither William nor Mulder can live there safely, then what’s left for her in D.C.? There’s no reason for her to stay there. So that would’ve worked perfectly to have this episode lead directly into “The Truth.” Instead, William is gone and we have to sit through two more episodes before we get to "The Truth," one of which is "Sunshine Days."
Random: When did Scully buy a million houseplants?
We see a white buffalo on the Wyoming flag and on William’s new mobile. Albert Hosteen’s voice over from the teaser of “Paper Clip”:
At the end of the ceremony, when the F.B.I. man had been healed, we heard the news from other Native Americans in the northern plains that a great event had taken place. Like the Navajo, these people have their own stories and myths. One of these stories tells of the white buffalo woman who came down from the heavens and taught the Indians how to lead virtuous lives and how to pray to the creator. She told the people she would return one day, then she turned into a white buffalo and ascended into the clouds, never to be seen again. But on this day, when the holy people had given the F.B.I. man a miracle, a white buffalo was born and every Native American knew, whether he believed the story or not, that this was a powerful omen and that great changes were coming.