Rewatch Extra: 4x08 Paper Hearts
There are IWTB spoilers in here. You've been duly warned.
The music in this episode is gorgeous, like a jewelry box being halfway opened, the bent ballerina struggling to turn.
I’m trying to separate myself from the movie to think about just this episode, but Mulder sleeping on his lonely little couch is killing me. I’ll try my best not to type “I LOVE THEM SO MUCH” randomly throughout, because that’s kind of the head space I’ve been in. But know that I do. Love them so much.
Would it be unnecessarily dirty of me to say that I hope Scully puts a look very close to this on his face on a regular basis these days?
I love the way he touches her arm when he’s telling her how he got to the park, like he’s trying to tether himself to her, or her to him. Afraid she might float away, needing her to understand.
He’s almost embarrassed by his profile of Roche being so good.
She’s so quiet and sweet and tender with him in the office. And it continues through the whole episode, like she knows he’s at his rawest and she just wants to take care of him.
She quotes him back to himself. “A dream is an answer to a question we haven’t learned how to ask.” He seems surprised that she might remember something he’d said to her, like she might not always be listening to him. I love it when they quote each other, because honestly, one of the hottest things about them really is how they listen to each other and absorb it all.
“You do good work, Mulder. Let’s identify this girl so we can put her to rest.”
This shot of Mulder behind the skeleton is gorgeous. "Directed by Rob Bowman" comes up on the screen during this shot.
“Are you up for that?” God, he’s such a sad puppy.
This certainly isn’t the only time either does this, but here, Scully introduces them both because it seems she has to take charge because he’s so wounded at the moment. He makes me hurt.
The guy who plays Frank Sparks is really great.
“I used to think missing was worse than dead because you never knew what happened.” God, this line. Here, it resonates for Mulder, but little does poor, poor Scully know, it's something she's going to have to contemplate in a few years.
“Don’t you think the car might’ve been searched at least once already?” “Not by me.” I love how he can simultaneously be cocky like this, and bashful when Scully’s telling him what a great profiler he is. Mulder, you complex, sexy man.
I love how unimpressed they are with the car’s dopey new owner. “Honest to God serial killer owned my car? For real?” He’s totally going to use that line on the ladies and then get confused when they think he's a freak.
This is one of my absolute favorite moments, ever. It just perfectly encapsulates that THING, that thick, heavy, crazy thing between them that’s perhaps never MORE a thing than when their shared focus is pointed in the same direction.
“Thirteen sounds more magical.” God, Vince gives Roche the best lines. They’re lovely, almost poetic, which makes them even more horrific.
I could watch Duchov play ball all day long.
They should go hang out in gyms together all the time. I don't know why, but it makes them extra hot.
They have their own fax machine in the basement, which pleases me for some reason. It looks junky and beat up and like you probably have to stand there for twenty minutes, redialing, to get two pages to send, but it’s there! Maybe the Bureau just wanted to give them fewer reasons to leave their underground lair.
Duchovny’s delivery during the Samantha dream is AMAZING. He’s going through the motions, like he’s in a trance. He knows his lines, he knows what happens, and he's powerless to affect a different outcome.
Twelve-year-old Mulder is watching the Watergate hearings. Even if Samantha hadn’t been abducted, he would’ve turned out pretty weird, anyway. I love that.
What’s more horrifying? When the door flies open and Roche is standing there, backlit by his El Camino, or when the door opens and an alien’s there?
He tries his hardest to keep it together, composing himself for a moment before asking Roche what he meant when he said that Mulder takes this very personally. His voice is quietly strangled when he asks, “What do you know about my sister?”
Oh God, Scully’s “I did” after Mulder slugs Roche and the guard says he didn't hear it. Nowhere is Scully more the keeper of the castle than here. She manages to make those two words not shrewish or bossy or “I’m telling on you.” It’s almost like she’s saying…I am your conscience and I am disappointed in you for doing that.
I can’t explain why, but I love the line, “Is it a state secret that you lived on Martha’s Vineyard?” It kind of…deflates his sense of self-importance or something, but without cruelty. It’s not saying “why do you think you’re so important that this would all connect back to you?” it’s saying “Mulder, pull it together and use part of that big old brain of yours.” She’s the only one who gets away with this, who can successfully call him on his shit without him getting defensive and angry.
People on this show are SO GOOD at finding out stuff about Mulder and Scully on the internet.
“Look, he is playing with you, Mulder. He is committing emotional blackmail and you are letting him. You walked into that room with your heart on your sleeve. He saw vulnerability, and he took advantage of it.” He is raw like hamburger meat this entire episode. Mulder's emotional honesty and vulnerability make him a good investigator, but they're also a liability.
“Scully, do you believe that my sister Samantha was abducted by aliens? Have you ever believed that? No. So what do you think happened to her?” This is serious business. And it’s like, what does it say about Scully? About Mulder? That she has been willing to “follow” him, to accompany him on the journey, when she has doubted the main thrust of it. And Mulder has been able to overlook the knowledge that she doesn't believe him. LOVE, people.
Mulder glances at Scully like she tattled on him about hitting Roche, and Skinner’s all, “Agent Scully didn’t tell me. But she should have.” He’s piiiissed. Do you know how pissed he is? “You’re lucky I don’t have your ass in a sling!” Vince Gilligan, marry me. You can start putting my name in all your episodes! It’ll be great fun.
But even though Mulder thinks Scully told on him, she’s got his back. You know how every thug needs a lady? Yeah, Mulder’s the thug and Scully’s his lady. Ride or die, etc, etc.
“You tread very lightly. And you see that he does.” She’s not his babysitter, Skinner.
Roche makes me want to puke with his poor, pitiful me “you’re not going to hit me again, are you?” bullshit. But it’s a brilliant character choice by Gilligan. When I was a kid and my mom had yelled at me for something, and I knew she felt badly about it, I’d totally do the same thing to try to make her feel worse. "I'm sorry, just don't yell at me like that again." I guess I was an emotionally devious child.
This whole scene with Roche, Scully’s watching Mulder, making sure he’s okay. Roche is so awful. Scully wants to, like, stab him in the heart.
“Help me, Scully.” And she does. She gets down there, their hands digging through the dirt together. Compare this to the scene in “Conduit,” where he wants her to do the same thing and she refuses. Four years'll do a lot.
Mulder alone with the body. His face is utterly bereft. It’s really well-done that we don’t actually see the remains for quite a bit, they remain under the sheet while he works up his nerve.
“It’s somebody, though.” THIS is what I love about Mulder and about this episode. That despite being driven by his sister, he is never completely single-minded and selfish about it. He wants to ID this girl. Give her back to her family. Even if Samantha can’t be returned to her family, he has the power, right now, to give that to this girl and to her family.
I love this cap, Scully behind and to his side, like they're conjoined.
“I stood outside her window atop sprigs of mint.”
“And more than that, I... I can't wait to see your face.” Scully’s off-screen, exhaled “Oh, God” kills me every time. It’s like she’s physically in pain. And now, Roche knows he has Mulder. He wrapped up his sales pitch and Mulder’s buying. It’s just a matter of time.
I love Mulder in his suit, on his couch.
Every time I watch, I want Mulder to tell Roche to just hold it and skip the in-flight drink. It’s a damn flight from DC to Boston. I hold it on four hour flights because I hate airplane bathrooms so much.
“Where were you while this was happening?” Dude, is she supposed to be on him 24/7? Let the woman go pee, grab a bite to eat! (Or: maybe Skinner just thinks they’re already doing it and that they’d be, like, watching Nova at Mulder’s apartment or something. Naked. I know, Skinman, I know. No one understands why they’re not. They both recently got super, super hot.)
“And you’re in the wrong house, you stupid son of a bitch!” Look at his eyes. Does he wants Roche to be telling the truth or not?
I love that whirring spaceship noise Roche makes while he twirls his cuffed hands.
“It's like your world will be okay as long as you can believe in, like, flying saucers. But I’m telling you the God’s honest truth. I can see you’re not as open-minded as you think you are.”
Mulder's empty arms after "Samantha" disappears just break my heart. So much more will be taken from him.
“You don’t think he took Samantha?” “None of that really matters now, does it?”
The moving of the bar on top of the car is sickening. When Mulder gets to them, they're just sitting there, but just the notion that Roche is in that bus with Caitlyn and the bar is rocking, is horrifying.
“My name’s Fox. I’m going to take you home.”
He does what he has to do. He doesn't know, for sure, that Roche didn't kill Samantha. And when he kills Roche, he kills the chance of extracting information from him. He sacrifices that, his selfish need for that, for the living girl in front of him. His face...his face.
Look how fucking sad he is. Shit, Scully, take that man home and make it all better! Mulder, you cannot save all the lost little girls in the world! And look at her. She really does want to just make it all okay. She really does want to quiet his noisy brain and give him a little peace.
“How?” “I don’t know. But I do know you.”
Their laughter is so sad and so happy and so bittersweet.
THIS. HUG. Think there are any other agents in the building hugging their partner’s ass at the end of the day? Yeah, me neither. In that moment, when she's there, and they're touching, he's okay. She's holding him down, sanity in check. As soon as she leaves, he loses any peace that he just had.
NOW.
As I was watching, I was struck by several similarities to IWTB. I have another movie post brewing, I think, with some ideas on plot and theme, but this'll do for now.
1. The psychic visions come through a “nexus.”
In “Paper Hearts,” Roche can see Mulder’s memories because Mulder profiled him. “I got into your head, and you got in mine.” When you think about it, profiling’s the closest thing to being psychic someone can be without actually having some kind of supernatural power. It’s mysterious, how it happens, especially in someone like Mulder, who often seems to intuit things like a savant.
In IWTB, Father Joe can see what the man sees because he abused him long ago. But there is, of course, a question with him about whether or not he's actually become a conduit for other messages than those "sent" by the dying man.
2. The "psychics" are both child molesters.
Why would you trust them? Roche even asks Mulder, “You trust a child molester?” For Roche, his badness goes to the core. Why bother to do one thing right when he’s already gone so wrong? Father Joe seems to truly want to gain forgiveness, gain the “one moment of decency” that Mulder offers to Roche.
But they both have reasons to manipulate investigators, reasons to be doubted. Roche wants to get out of prison, “at least for a day or two.” Father Joe wants to be granted earthly forgiveness by the Church.
3. The Samantha connection.
In “Paper Hearts,” Mulder thinks he might literally find her, or at least her remains, and put her to rest. “The big mystery revealed.”
In IWTB, it’s like he’s still atoning, punching his Lost Girls card. How many does he have to save before he can be washed clean for “losing” Samantha?
But like I said above, even though he’s chasing after a memory, a ghost, good comes from it. In “Paper Hearts,” he’s able to identify long-missing, long-dead girls, put them to rest and give their families some peace. In IWTB, they save the second woman.
4. Looking into the darkness/ Scully as Mulder’s minder.
In “Paper Hearts,” Mulder allows himself to manipulated, despite Scully’s best efforts to protect him. Heart on his sleeve. Skinner actually tasks her with watching over him, being his babysitter, his guardian. It’s sort of a “when don’t I?” situation, but it somehow feels cumbersome to hear it said out loud. I feel exhausted for Scully when this role is actually named, out loud, rather than just seen and felt. And she does watch him. Not because it’s her job (unless we’re talking in a cosmic sense), but because she loves him. She’s the barrier, the protective skin, between Mulder and the world that just might rip him to shreds without her there. And not only that, but she goes down into the darkness with him, digging in the dirt to bring up a skeleton instead of calling in a forensic team.
In IWTB, I don't necessarily get the feeling that Scully thinks he's going to lose his shit and stare down into the darkness in the same way he did in the past. He has matured. He seems more peaceful, like he could actually have a kind of necessary detachment to live that life in a healthy way, without losing himself completely in it. But I think she wants to banish that life completely. Even if he's not a man possessed, obsessed, it would be there. The death, the horror, the tragedy, the danger. They would be there. And even if he didn't let himself drown in it, little bits and pieces would still seep in. It would take a toll. And she's had enough of that bullshit in her life, senses that she probably won't avoid it for the rest of her life. (What with the impending alien invasion and all. You know, that kind of thing.) So why court it? Why allow Mulder to? She doesn't want it in their home, any of it, wants to keep this chapter of their relationship as pure as possible.
Likewise, I think Mulder recognizes that he can't step back into that old life without Scully. Recognizes that he wouldn't want to. Because as much as I think there's certainly a question to be asked and answered about Mulder finding some kind of intellectual engagement, not sitting around all beardy, clipping newspapers, he doesn't want to get sucked back into the work without Scully by his side. It's not the work, really, that seems to be the draw, but doing the work with Scully. There's a flash in both their eyes in that scene outside Father Joe's apartment, and when Mulder says he's "only half of the team," and in the locker room scene where she's suggesting black market organ sales and they're riffing off each other, an old spark reigniting as their brains rejoin in the dance of the investigation. That's one of the many things we love about them, that interplay.
But Mulder now, I think, by the end of the movie, comes to recognize that he can't somehow recapture that era of their relationship. Obviously, there were wonderful things about it, but those, what, 7-8-9 years, they came with a huge price. He doesn't, it seems to me, want to risk what they have now to try and revive that "FBI-intellectual banter-let's put our lives in danger and stare into the abyss together" thing. It brought them together, but they've moved past that, and at the end, they're willing to keep going. To keep looking forward, not back. Together.
The music in this episode is gorgeous, like a jewelry box being halfway opened, the bent ballerina struggling to turn.
I’m trying to separate myself from the movie to think about just this episode, but Mulder sleeping on his lonely little couch is killing me. I’ll try my best not to type “I LOVE THEM SO MUCH” randomly throughout, because that’s kind of the head space I’ve been in. But know that I do. Love them so much.
Would it be unnecessarily dirty of me to say that I hope Scully puts a look very close to this on his face on a regular basis these days?
I love the way he touches her arm when he’s telling her how he got to the park, like he’s trying to tether himself to her, or her to him. Afraid she might float away, needing her to understand.
He’s almost embarrassed by his profile of Roche being so good.
She’s so quiet and sweet and tender with him in the office. And it continues through the whole episode, like she knows he’s at his rawest and she just wants to take care of him.
She quotes him back to himself. “A dream is an answer to a question we haven’t learned how to ask.” He seems surprised that she might remember something he’d said to her, like she might not always be listening to him. I love it when they quote each other, because honestly, one of the hottest things about them really is how they listen to each other and absorb it all.
“You do good work, Mulder. Let’s identify this girl so we can put her to rest.”
This shot of Mulder behind the skeleton is gorgeous. "Directed by Rob Bowman" comes up on the screen during this shot.
“Are you up for that?” God, he’s such a sad puppy.
This certainly isn’t the only time either does this, but here, Scully introduces them both because it seems she has to take charge because he’s so wounded at the moment. He makes me hurt.
The guy who plays Frank Sparks is really great.
“I used to think missing was worse than dead because you never knew what happened.” God, this line. Here, it resonates for Mulder, but little does poor, poor Scully know, it's something she's going to have to contemplate in a few years.
“Don’t you think the car might’ve been searched at least once already?” “Not by me.” I love how he can simultaneously be cocky like this, and bashful when Scully’s telling him what a great profiler he is. Mulder, you complex, sexy man.
I love how unimpressed they are with the car’s dopey new owner. “Honest to God serial killer owned my car? For real?” He’s totally going to use that line on the ladies and then get confused when they think he's a freak.
This is one of my absolute favorite moments, ever. It just perfectly encapsulates that THING, that thick, heavy, crazy thing between them that’s perhaps never MORE a thing than when their shared focus is pointed in the same direction.
“Thirteen sounds more magical.” God, Vince gives Roche the best lines. They’re lovely, almost poetic, which makes them even more horrific.
I could watch Duchov play ball all day long.
They should go hang out in gyms together all the time. I don't know why, but it makes them extra hot.
They have their own fax machine in the basement, which pleases me for some reason. It looks junky and beat up and like you probably have to stand there for twenty minutes, redialing, to get two pages to send, but it’s there! Maybe the Bureau just wanted to give them fewer reasons to leave their underground lair.
Duchovny’s delivery during the Samantha dream is AMAZING. He’s going through the motions, like he’s in a trance. He knows his lines, he knows what happens, and he's powerless to affect a different outcome.
Twelve-year-old Mulder is watching the Watergate hearings. Even if Samantha hadn’t been abducted, he would’ve turned out pretty weird, anyway. I love that.
What’s more horrifying? When the door flies open and Roche is standing there, backlit by his El Camino, or when the door opens and an alien’s there?
He tries his hardest to keep it together, composing himself for a moment before asking Roche what he meant when he said that Mulder takes this very personally. His voice is quietly strangled when he asks, “What do you know about my sister?”
Oh God, Scully’s “I did” after Mulder slugs Roche and the guard says he didn't hear it. Nowhere is Scully more the keeper of the castle than here. She manages to make those two words not shrewish or bossy or “I’m telling on you.” It’s almost like she’s saying…I am your conscience and I am disappointed in you for doing that.
I can’t explain why, but I love the line, “Is it a state secret that you lived on Martha’s Vineyard?” It kind of…deflates his sense of self-importance or something, but without cruelty. It’s not saying “why do you think you’re so important that this would all connect back to you?” it’s saying “Mulder, pull it together and use part of that big old brain of yours.” She’s the only one who gets away with this, who can successfully call him on his shit without him getting defensive and angry.
People on this show are SO GOOD at finding out stuff about Mulder and Scully on the internet.
“Look, he is playing with you, Mulder. He is committing emotional blackmail and you are letting him. You walked into that room with your heart on your sleeve. He saw vulnerability, and he took advantage of it.” He is raw like hamburger meat this entire episode. Mulder's emotional honesty and vulnerability make him a good investigator, but they're also a liability.
“Scully, do you believe that my sister Samantha was abducted by aliens? Have you ever believed that? No. So what do you think happened to her?” This is serious business. And it’s like, what does it say about Scully? About Mulder? That she has been willing to “follow” him, to accompany him on the journey, when she has doubted the main thrust of it. And Mulder has been able to overlook the knowledge that she doesn't believe him. LOVE, people.
Mulder glances at Scully like she tattled on him about hitting Roche, and Skinner’s all, “Agent Scully didn’t tell me. But she should have.” He’s piiiissed. Do you know how pissed he is? “You’re lucky I don’t have your ass in a sling!” Vince Gilligan, marry me. You can start putting my name in all your episodes! It’ll be great fun.
But even though Mulder thinks Scully told on him, she’s got his back. You know how every thug needs a lady? Yeah, Mulder’s the thug and Scully’s his lady. Ride or die, etc, etc.
“You tread very lightly. And you see that he does.” She’s not his babysitter, Skinner.
Roche makes me want to puke with his poor, pitiful me “you’re not going to hit me again, are you?” bullshit. But it’s a brilliant character choice by Gilligan. When I was a kid and my mom had yelled at me for something, and I knew she felt badly about it, I’d totally do the same thing to try to make her feel worse. "I'm sorry, just don't yell at me like that again." I guess I was an emotionally devious child.
This whole scene with Roche, Scully’s watching Mulder, making sure he’s okay. Roche is so awful. Scully wants to, like, stab him in the heart.
“Help me, Scully.” And she does. She gets down there, their hands digging through the dirt together. Compare this to the scene in “Conduit,” where he wants her to do the same thing and she refuses. Four years'll do a lot.
Mulder alone with the body. His face is utterly bereft. It’s really well-done that we don’t actually see the remains for quite a bit, they remain under the sheet while he works up his nerve.
“It’s somebody, though.” THIS is what I love about Mulder and about this episode. That despite being driven by his sister, he is never completely single-minded and selfish about it. He wants to ID this girl. Give her back to her family. Even if Samantha can’t be returned to her family, he has the power, right now, to give that to this girl and to her family.
I love this cap, Scully behind and to his side, like they're conjoined.
“I stood outside her window atop sprigs of mint.”
“And more than that, I... I can't wait to see your face.” Scully’s off-screen, exhaled “Oh, God” kills me every time. It’s like she’s physically in pain. And now, Roche knows he has Mulder. He wrapped up his sales pitch and Mulder’s buying. It’s just a matter of time.
I love Mulder in his suit, on his couch.
Every time I watch, I want Mulder to tell Roche to just hold it and skip the in-flight drink. It’s a damn flight from DC to Boston. I hold it on four hour flights because I hate airplane bathrooms so much.
“Where were you while this was happening?” Dude, is she supposed to be on him 24/7? Let the woman go pee, grab a bite to eat! (Or: maybe Skinner just thinks they’re already doing it and that they’d be, like, watching Nova at Mulder’s apartment or something. Naked. I know, Skinman, I know. No one understands why they’re not. They both recently got super, super hot.)
“And you’re in the wrong house, you stupid son of a bitch!” Look at his eyes. Does he wants Roche to be telling the truth or not?
I love that whirring spaceship noise Roche makes while he twirls his cuffed hands.
“It's like your world will be okay as long as you can believe in, like, flying saucers. But I’m telling you the God’s honest truth. I can see you’re not as open-minded as you think you are.”
Mulder's empty arms after "Samantha" disappears just break my heart. So much more will be taken from him.
“You don’t think he took Samantha?” “None of that really matters now, does it?”
The moving of the bar on top of the car is sickening. When Mulder gets to them, they're just sitting there, but just the notion that Roche is in that bus with Caitlyn and the bar is rocking, is horrifying.
“My name’s Fox. I’m going to take you home.”
He does what he has to do. He doesn't know, for sure, that Roche didn't kill Samantha. And when he kills Roche, he kills the chance of extracting information from him. He sacrifices that, his selfish need for that, for the living girl in front of him. His face...his face.
Look how fucking sad he is. Shit, Scully, take that man home and make it all better! Mulder, you cannot save all the lost little girls in the world! And look at her. She really does want to just make it all okay. She really does want to quiet his noisy brain and give him a little peace.
“How?” “I don’t know. But I do know you.”
Their laughter is so sad and so happy and so bittersweet.
THIS. HUG. Think there are any other agents in the building hugging their partner’s ass at the end of the day? Yeah, me neither. In that moment, when she's there, and they're touching, he's okay. She's holding him down, sanity in check. As soon as she leaves, he loses any peace that he just had.
NOW.
As I was watching, I was struck by several similarities to IWTB. I have another movie post brewing, I think, with some ideas on plot and theme, but this'll do for now.
1. The psychic visions come through a “nexus.”
In “Paper Hearts,” Roche can see Mulder’s memories because Mulder profiled him. “I got into your head, and you got in mine.” When you think about it, profiling’s the closest thing to being psychic someone can be without actually having some kind of supernatural power. It’s mysterious, how it happens, especially in someone like Mulder, who often seems to intuit things like a savant.
In IWTB, Father Joe can see what the man sees because he abused him long ago. But there is, of course, a question with him about whether or not he's actually become a conduit for other messages than those "sent" by the dying man.
2. The "psychics" are both child molesters.
Why would you trust them? Roche even asks Mulder, “You trust a child molester?” For Roche, his badness goes to the core. Why bother to do one thing right when he’s already gone so wrong? Father Joe seems to truly want to gain forgiveness, gain the “one moment of decency” that Mulder offers to Roche.
But they both have reasons to manipulate investigators, reasons to be doubted. Roche wants to get out of prison, “at least for a day or two.” Father Joe wants to be granted earthly forgiveness by the Church.
3. The Samantha connection.
In “Paper Hearts,” Mulder thinks he might literally find her, or at least her remains, and put her to rest. “The big mystery revealed.”
In IWTB, it’s like he’s still atoning, punching his Lost Girls card. How many does he have to save before he can be washed clean for “losing” Samantha?
But like I said above, even though he’s chasing after a memory, a ghost, good comes from it. In “Paper Hearts,” he’s able to identify long-missing, long-dead girls, put them to rest and give their families some peace. In IWTB, they save the second woman.
4. Looking into the darkness/ Scully as Mulder’s minder.
In “Paper Hearts,” Mulder allows himself to manipulated, despite Scully’s best efforts to protect him. Heart on his sleeve. Skinner actually tasks her with watching over him, being his babysitter, his guardian. It’s sort of a “when don’t I?” situation, but it somehow feels cumbersome to hear it said out loud. I feel exhausted for Scully when this role is actually named, out loud, rather than just seen and felt. And she does watch him. Not because it’s her job (unless we’re talking in a cosmic sense), but because she loves him. She’s the barrier, the protective skin, between Mulder and the world that just might rip him to shreds without her there. And not only that, but she goes down into the darkness with him, digging in the dirt to bring up a skeleton instead of calling in a forensic team.
In IWTB, I don't necessarily get the feeling that Scully thinks he's going to lose his shit and stare down into the darkness in the same way he did in the past. He has matured. He seems more peaceful, like he could actually have a kind of necessary detachment to live that life in a healthy way, without losing himself completely in it. But I think she wants to banish that life completely. Even if he's not a man possessed, obsessed, it would be there. The death, the horror, the tragedy, the danger. They would be there. And even if he didn't let himself drown in it, little bits and pieces would still seep in. It would take a toll. And she's had enough of that bullshit in her life, senses that she probably won't avoid it for the rest of her life. (What with the impending alien invasion and all. You know, that kind of thing.) So why court it? Why allow Mulder to? She doesn't want it in their home, any of it, wants to keep this chapter of their relationship as pure as possible.
Likewise, I think Mulder recognizes that he can't step back into that old life without Scully. Recognizes that he wouldn't want to. Because as much as I think there's certainly a question to be asked and answered about Mulder finding some kind of intellectual engagement, not sitting around all beardy, clipping newspapers, he doesn't want to get sucked back into the work without Scully by his side. It's not the work, really, that seems to be the draw, but doing the work with Scully. There's a flash in both their eyes in that scene outside Father Joe's apartment, and when Mulder says he's "only half of the team," and in the locker room scene where she's suggesting black market organ sales and they're riffing off each other, an old spark reigniting as their brains rejoin in the dance of the investigation. That's one of the many things we love about them, that interplay.
But Mulder now, I think, by the end of the movie, comes to recognize that he can't somehow recapture that era of their relationship. Obviously, there were wonderful things about it, but those, what, 7-8-9 years, they came with a huge price. He doesn't, it seems to me, want to risk what they have now to try and revive that "FBI-intellectual banter-let's put our lives in danger and stare into the abyss together" thing. It brought them together, but they've moved past that, and at the end, they're willing to keep going. To keep looking forward, not back. Together.