Rewatch Extra: 3x22 Quagmire
This episode was one I continually went back to during the dark and terrible late seasons of my rewatch. It's like my comfort food episode.
The trees, the water, the overall wetness! Vancouver, I love you.
The Big Blue billboards are gorgeous Americana. I love painted billboards like that, advertising strange little things instead of nationwide restaurant chains. One of my favorite examples of that isn't on a traditional billboard at all. The Meramec Caverns logo and directions are painted on the sagging roofs of dilapidated barns all over Missouri and surrounding states.
Mulder hates Queequeg! And I love it! Sorry, animal lovers, but I hate animals. So it tickles me that he has absolutely no interest in "that thing" in the backseat.
Is it just me, or does Queequeg remind you of someone?
“…and you know how I feel about kennels.” I’m incredibly fond of the idea of them having this conversation. As much as I love the non-work-related conversations we actually get to see, like the one later in this episode, I would really love to see them grabbing some sandwiches for lunch and talking about mundane things like the relative merits of dog kennels.
You know, I love Mulder. But God bless Scully for her saintly patience in the face of being tricked into investigating things like lake monsters. Although, despite travel inconveniences, you know her dirty little secret is that she loves this shit almost as much as he does.
Look at how gorgeous Scully looks in her His Girl Friday pinstriped suit! It’s seriously classy, especially against the rustic backdrop. She's working up to suddenly being incredibly hot in season 4.
“Has anyone ever told you two you have a great problem coming to the point?”
“See, whenever an issue requires any real thought, any serious mental effort, people turn to UFO's, and sea serpents and Sasquatch.” Scully's reaction to this is priceless: she looks both amused, for obvious reasons, and horrified, that Mulder's views might be reduced by a stranger to a lazy joke. And poor Mulder. He just can't catch a break.
I love that Scully was an amateur cryptozoologist as a child! Mulder likes it, too.
They don't even care that it's raining, they just stand there under their umbrella, continuing to talk. They're the Postal Service of intellectual courtship. Inclement weather will not stop them.
This is neither here nor there, but I love that she says “urinated,” as in “While urinating over the sides of boats, docks or whatever, they lose their balance, fall in and drown.” She’s very matter of fact in using the actual term, and it’s not a line of dialogue used to ridicule her for being a nerdy scientist. I just can't imagine that word being said on any other show without another character commenting on its use. My parents were not big fans of cutesy words for children, so I apparently once came out of a restaurant bathroom as a toddler and announced to my grandma, “I just urinated!”
Their casual clothes are so wonderful. Not wonderful in the sense that I want to wear them, but they look really cute. They’ve certainly improved since the giant parkas of season one, and Mulder’s even wearing his Tims. I want them to go live in the wilderness together, chopping wood for their fireplace, reading out loud from "Moby Dick" after dinner.
“Dude, what’s wrong with you? You made me drop my toad.”
I love the way the snorkeler’s head surfaces upright, like it might still be attached to a body, and then slowly rolls to the side, revealing its neck. Which, you might say, appears to have been “gnawed on.”
“Oh, is that the psychological approach to crime solving? He's too embarrassed?” Sometimes I think Mulder forgets what he got his degree in. Also, I love how Duchov says “embarrassed.”
Their camp site is lovely. I want to go there and be cozy in a cabin while drinking apple cider with a cinnamon stick in it.
“Look at this, could this be a tooth?”
“Yeah, it could be a lot of things, Mulder. Fifteen years of fruitless hunting and the only thing the guy comes up with is a blurry picture of the monster's tooth?”
This episode makes my heart ache a little for Mulder.
He asks her if she wants him to come with her to walk Queequeq! She shows him her gun! They’re so cute I’m dying. They’re on vacation together.
Aw, Mulder tries to be caring for a second, even though he clearly doesn’t understand why she’s so upset about Queequeg's untimely demise. (Do you think Clyde Bruckman knew this is how he would meet his end?) I feel your pain, Mulder. There’s nothing more awkward to me than having to be all “there, there” when someone tells a sad story about a pet.
She’s sadder about this dog than about giving their miracle baby up for adoption.
“Could you repeat the last part again? I kind of faded out.”
“Which part?”
“After you said I'm sorry?”
To which Mulder replies, as anyone would: “Can you drive a boat?” The answer, obviously? Yes. Is there anything Scully can’t do?
“I know the difference between expectation and hope. Seek and ye shall find, Scully.”
Scully says they’re not getting their $500 deposit back on the boat. Can you imagine the number of deposits they didn’t get back over the years? Clearly, neither of them are getting a penny back on their apartments.
MULDER: Scully, some of the things that we investigate are so intangible. But this creature, it exists within the specific earthly confines of this lake, and I want to find it.
SCULLY: What for?
MULDER: You're a scientist, why do you ask that question? I mean, it would be a miraculous discovery. It could revolutionize evolutionary biological thinking.
SCULLY: Is that really the reason why? You know when you showed me those pictures that the photographer took? You wanna know what I really saw in them?
MULDER: A tooth?
SCULLY: No. You. That man is your future. Listening only to himself, hoping to catch a glimpse of the truth, for who knows what reason.
MULDER: I did read in his journals that he was hoping to live off the copyright fees from a genuine Big Blue photo.
SCULLY: Well, as dumb as it sounds, at least it's a legitimate reason.
MULDER: You don't think my reasons are legitimate?
SCULLY: Mulder, sometimes I just can't figure them out.
But she wants to figure it out, and that's what this whole conversation means to me. Apart from the content of the actual conversation, the fact that Scully feels comfortable enough to broach the subject with Mulder is huge. And it really is something that they should discuss: why are we doing what we're doing? It's also key that he doesn't really take it as an attack, doesn't shut completely down, and attempts to explain himself, even if Scully thinks his peg leg explanation is "flippant."
“I’m still tempted to fire.” I love Scully’s little whimper and the way she nudges him.
Mulder just wanted to tell her she looked hot after losing some weight, but he couldn’t figure out a better way than to bring up the idea of cannibalizing her on an island. Sweet talker.
“Though it is amazing what some animals will do to guarantee the continuation of a species isn't it?” Scully, he wants to guarantee the continuation of the species with YOU!
“It’s a bizarre name for a dog, huh?” Really, Fox? Is it?
SCULLY: No, how much you're like Ahab. You're so consumed by your personal vengeance against life, whether it be its inherent cruelties or its mysteries, that everything takes on a warped significance to fit your megalomaniacal cosmology.
MULDER: Scully, are you coming on to me?
SCULLY: It's just--the truth or a white whale. What difference does it make? I mean, both obsessions are impossible to capture, and trying to do so will only leave you dead along with everyone else you bring with you. You know, Mulder, you are Ahab.
I honestly get his peg leg argument, and have thought similar things about the weight of expectations. These are things he would never say to anyone else, only to Scully. I don't believe that he cares what anyone thinks in a way that would ultimately make him change his behavior or his quest. But I like that he opens himself up enough here to admit that he is at least aware of outside pressures, aware of what was initially expected of him at the FBI--wear a necktie, get a raise, follow the traditional Bureau path for an ambitious and talented agent. "Make something" of his life. It also occurs to me that he's thinking, not necessarily seriously, but thinking nonetheless, that it would probably in some ways be easier to have a visible disability. He looks like perfection, you know? He is, as Modell says, an "all-around bright young man." That's what the world sees. They don't see the fucked-up stuff inside, so they expect him to carry on as if those "disabilities" weren't there.
So proof, tangible proof, would at least be validation for those dark nights when it must sometimes seem that he's on a fruitless quest, doomed to end up with nothing but a picture of what may or may not be a tooth. But he's still nervous about opening up and offering this piece of himself to Scully, and he breaks out in a stutter again: "So-so-so."
“Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling.” Look at how delighted they both are when Scully can finish his favorite line!
They just can’t win. I love the absurdity of them wading from the island to the shore. There's something about it that visually blows my mind, when I have to shift from thinking of the island as being in the middle of the lake, to being nothing but a rock in shallow water. Because even though I know what's coming, there's something jarring about them being able to trek to the shore.
“Agent Mulder, you are taking my legitimate research and basic biological principle, and stretching them both way out of proportion, in an effort to give some kind of validity to an entirely ludicrous theory.” That’s what the FBI pays him to do, okay?
When Dr. Faraday is shooting Mulder's theories down, Scully looks like she just wants to take him back to the cabin, tuck him into bed and make him some cocoa.
Aw, Mulder’s quiet “thanks” is so sweet after Scully gets bossy with the sheriff. One of the many things I love about him is the fact that he doesn't ever seem to mind when Scully takes care of him like that. It's not emasculating that she intervenes for him, it's just getting his back like he gets hers.
"I know. I guess I just wanted Big Blue to be real. I guess I see hope in such a possibility."
"Well, there's still hope. That's why these missing stories have endured. People want to believe."