Rewatch Extra: Fight the Future Part Two (2/2)
So they've been driving across Texas ALL DAY and neither one of them took off their jacket? Mulder didn't even loosen his tie? Come on. Listen, I'll buy a lot of things. I'll buy a 12-month pregnancy. I'll buy a man being buried for three months and coming back to life with no ill-effects. But I REFUSE to believe that they would spend hours in a car, fully dressed for work. Comfort, people.
"This is great. This is fitting."
“What are you not telling me?”
“The virus may be extraterrestrial.”
I love how he sheepishly shuffles the map around, looking at something on the ground that’s apparently incredibly riveting.
As the white tanker trucks fly past, Mulder’s shadow is thrown against them.
Train chase! As he crosses over the tracks, he shoots her a look that seems to say, “Impressed with my driving?”
Look at them! They’re, like, tramping through brush. The LA years will provide us precious few little trips to the forest, so we must enjoy this while we still can. I might love it more that they’re doing this in their full-on work clothes, as opposed to outdoor gear.
“This is weird, Mulder."
“Very weird.”
The part of my brain devoted to lyrics always supplies Rent’s “fucking weird” after these two lines.
So these gigantic, glowing bee domes? They are not, as Scully once said, an exercise in subtlety.
Hi, Mulder. You are really, really hot. And maybe dashing. And heroic. (You're lookin' good, too, Scully.)
I have many favorite shots in this movie, and this is one of them: the overhead shot of Scully looking up, while Mulder crouches on the floor, ear to the ground, listening.
“Scully?”
“Yeah?”
“Run.”
I love the clunking of the building as it prepares to open the vents and release the bees. It sort of aligns with the ship “awakening” when Mulder gives her the vaccine. Mulder and Scully are the vaccine that breaks down the machinations of the conspiracy.
Scully! Shake your coat out a LOT MORE, please! This woeful situation could’ve been prevented, had you not insisted on keeping your coat on in the car.
So much of this is stating the obvious, but I’ll just state it and we can all think about it together and enjoy it, okay? “SCULLAY!” I swear to God, I could listen to the two of them say each other’s names in different ways for hours and hours, like some weird acting class exercise, and be perfectly happy.
It’s sweet how she quickly fixes her hair in the hallway picture before going in to meet her doom, shooting Skinner a semi-defiant look as she does so. If she’s going to keep up appearances as the sane front of the X-Files, she needs to, you know, keep up appearances.
This bee has fucking moved in and made himself comfortable. He’s thinking about what color to paint the walls and he ordered a futon from Ikea. The cable guy’s coming Monday. Maybe if her jacket didn’t have so many damn belts and straps and buttons to hide under and behind, he would’ve already flown off to do some cross pollination at the nearest rose garden. Speaking as a person who often leaps around, swatting at pieces of dust and string, thinking they’re bugs, I CANNOT FATHOM having a bee crawling around for hours without noticing.
“Working with?”
“With Agent Mulder.”
For such a paranoid guy, Mulder is awfully free and easy with his front door.
“What’s wrong?"
“Salt Lake City, Utah. Transfer effective immediately.”
“I debated whether to even tell you in person.” Yeah, that phone call would’ve gone really well, Scully.
“We are close to something here! We’re on the verge."
“YOU’RE on the verge, Mulder.”
FYI, Scully, Mulder has been on the verge since approximately 1973.
“I have, I did. It’s done.”
“I need you on this, Scully.”
“You don’t need me, Mulder. You never have.”
I think she wants and needs him to tell her she’s needed, to pull her back. I don’t think it’s manipulative; Scully isn’t like that. It’s not like she’s rationally thinking, “I’m going to make Mulder work for this.” But I often feel, especially in the early years, that for all of his casual affection and devotion, Mulder can be a bit hard to read sometimes. She probably never QUITE knows what footing she’s on with him.
Still, she’s having a bit of a pity party. Not that I blame her. She deserves it. Things are bad. And it’s the only kind of party Dana Scully ever gets to attend, so she should do it up while she can.
I love how, after she leaves, he stands there for a second, kind of getting his courage up before walking after her. And she knows he’s coming. She spins around immediately, not out of surprise, but like she’s ready to rumble. Like she was already playing this out in her head on the drive over and now it's starting.
Okay, here we go. Hold on.
“Why did they assign me to you in the first place, Mulder? To debunk your work, to rein you in, to shut you down.”
“But you saved me. As difficult and as frustrating as it’s been sometimes, your goddamn strict rationalism and your science have saved me a thousand times over. You’ve kept me honest. You’ve made me a whole person. I owe you everything, Scully, and you owe me nothing. I don’t know if I want to do this alone. I don’t even know if I can. And if I quit now, they win.”
So you know how I said she needed him to say this? It’s like, a million times more than she ever expected, and she’s clearly losing her shit a little bit as he talks. This conversation is not going how she thought it would.
He's sad. She's sad. They're both gorgeous.
She sighs like she’s been holding her breath for years and years, like she’s finally able to let it all out. And then they fall together, because there's nothing left to say with words.
HIS ARMS...are the most perfect arms that ever armed. Also, when she presses her face into his chest, I imagine that he smells really nice. (This is not weird, because at least one other person agrees with me about this, okay?)
God, the eyebrow she shoots as he holds her just kills me.
Hot forehead action! They just can't help it.
OH GOD, you guys, the look on his face when he pulls back to stare at her, his hand on her neck. It’s heavy and I think she’s kind of scared. He is intense and she doesn't know what to say to his hungry eyes.
Almost, almost, almost...
I say lips are touching.
I love how he immediately apologizes, assuming that the kiss has been a miscalculation, but I love even more that she says “No,” immediately. Like, “No, don’t apologize for that! I wasn’t interrupting that!”
When she says something stung her, he gets this look, like, hm…how can I get this back on track without being too obnoxious?
He pulls her close, rubs her neck, pets her hair. For one moment here, the near-kiss allows them a new level of intimacy where he can do that.
Wait, wait. THIS is my absolute favorite shot, the low dolly back from Scully on the scummy hallway floor, as he races to his apartment to call 911.
He never takes his eyes off her, staying close to the gurney, putting his jacket on.
How is it dark already? It seemed to be late afternoon when Scully got to his apartment, and no more than a few minutes have elapsed. Plus, it’s summer, so even if it had been 4 or 5, we’d still have several hours of daylight.
Here’s the deal, though. Why would they need to do THIS to take away “that with which he cannot live without”? Why not just shoot her or something, right? Why not rig her car with an explosive? Why go to the trouble of kidnapping her and letting an alien gestate inside of her? It seems excessive and elaborate and like the manpower could be used more effectively. I guess that's why I'm not running a worldwide syndicate that's in cahoots with extraterrestrial beings.
Mulder’s first thought upon waking: “Where’s Scully?”
Since I know from the bloopers that Mitch Pileggi is actually speaking the words to “Greased Lightning,” I SWEAR you can see him mouth “fuel injection cutoff.”
Yes, he’s running through the street! Discarding Byers’ jacket! (Sorry, Byers!) Disregarding his head injury and leaving against medical advice! Leaving without even signing the “leaving against medical advice” paper! ALL FOR HER.
Well-Manicured Man is smooth as silk. It’s too bad he’s going to die. SPOILER ALERT. (PS. Everyone in the engine room drowns.)
So, if WMM gives Mulder the vaccine and the location, which is going to bring down the project, why bother killing Kurtzweil, who is presumably in the car’s trunk?
“The virus is extraterrestrial. We know very little about it except that it was the original inhabitant of this planet” At least we kind of pick up this thread again in the Biogenesis arc.
“But he sacrificed my sister. He let them take Samantha.”
“Without a vaccination, the only true survivors of the viral holocaust will be those immune to it-human-alien clones. He allowed your sister to be abducted, to be taken to a cloning program for one reason.”
“So she would survive. As a genetic hybrid.”
“Your father chose hope over selfishness. Hope in the only future he had-his children. His hope for you was that you would uncover the truth about the project. That you would stop it. That you would fight the future.”
This is all very poetic, but good thing Mulder decided to go into the Conspiracy-busting business, and didn’t want to be a dentist or something. That’s a pretty big gamble on old Bill Mulder’s part, isn’t it?
(Also, the part about choosing hope over selfishness is kind of heart-wrenching, considering Scully will eventually do the same thing.)
Only British people can convincingly say things like “Driver.” I mean, really. Try it, Americans. (And Canadians. Sorry.) You’re going to sound like a jackass, I promise.
“The upholstery’s already ruined.” He’s determined that his last words be a sophomoric quip.
Ew, a rat scurries across the street.
“Hi, I need a ticket to South 83 lat, East 63 long? Direct flight, if you’ve got it. A window seat would be great. And a Sno Cat rental waiting at arrivals.”
He is driving a Sno Cat across Antarctica for her.
Mulder doggedly fighting evil in cold climates DOES ME IN. I think it’s the big coats and the dampness.
A love affair between a man and a necklace.
So here’s the thing. CSM and company KNOW Mulder is madly in love with her. That’s the whole basis of the plan. That he’ll lose his shit if they take her away from him. So why wouldn’t they assume he’d go to Antarctica? They thought it would somehow be the last straw, the one thing, Meatloaf-like, that he just wouldn’t do for love? Because even IF WMM hadn’t given him the location, Mulder would have punched and pistol-whipped his way through D.C. to find out where she was. AND: was the ambulance driver supposed to kill Mulder? Because that’s exactly what they wanted to avoid, crusades being what they are and all. I know, I know, say it together: "don't think."
We get it, it’s a spaceship, MOVE ALONG.
Yeah, so that would’ve just broken both of his legs. Luckily, Mulder drinks a lot of milk, so his bones are okay, and he’s able to immediately track down Scully’s pod. Probably by scent. (Strawberry shampoo, OBVIOUSLY.)
It charms me when he ineffectually slaps his palm against the pod, trying to get to her. It’s like a little kid at an aquarium, trying to get to the fish.
Yum, I love it when he pulls the cap off with his mouth, then discards it with his tongue.
Oh, Mulder. He’s oddly intrigued by the way the virus leaves Scully’s body. Later, he’ll be all, “Scully, let me just tell you about the way the oil left your body and then this cord shriveled up before I pulled it out of your throat! It was awesome!”
CSM is so impressed when he says, “Mulder has the vaccine.” A worthy adversary.
The lackey flailing from the ladder as the alarms blare will never not be funny to me. This is high comedy.
He’s dressing her in his extra clothes! And carrying her! With her little sock feet sticking out! (He wore extra pairs of socks for her!)
Do you think Mulder had all of these winter clothes? I bet he had to stop at Sports Authority and hit up the ski section before he left. “Okay, so I need Antarctica-appropriate clothes that will work for me AND for a cute little 5’2” lady. I’ve got less than 96 hours, so make it quick.”
Honestly, the perverse English major in me loves that intention plus action equals kiss. YOU WIN, CARTER.
You guys! This is no time to be flirty goofballs, okay? The ship is melting and the aliens are chomping at the bit. They want to eat you. Get to safety, then make eyes at each other.
The snow cracking and crumbling as the ship rises from the ground is a really nice effect.
Scully says “I saw it.” Yea or nay?
Mulder's face as he watches it is so full of genuine wonder. And he looks at her with a grin, not an "I told you so" grin, but rather a "there's no one else I'd rather be collapsed on the ice with, watching this spaceship fly away" grin.
After it’s gone, whisking off into the foggy sky, Mulder just collapses, spent. He can’t give any more. And they switch, Scully immediately going into protector mode.
The way she presses her face into his hair! And then she hugs him until he is not frozen anymore.
“Crater Hug” is epic and it makes me get all teary, without fail.
“What is it you find incredible?” I love it when Scully gets defiant with her superiors about crazy, Mulder-y things!
Whenever the Attorney General is mentioned, I picture Will Ferrell’s Janet Reno sighing dreamily: “Biiiill Clintonnnn….”
Oh, settle down, Mulder. Just because you guys weren’t mentioned in the paper? Just because everything was totally covered up? Come on. Stop freaking out. As Snoop once said, "this type of shit happens all the time." Apparently he’s been reading bad fanfic and thinks that he needs to feel EXTREMELY GUILTY about all of the AWFUL things he’s caused in Scully’s life. (Note: he will forget about this by the fall.)
“My work is here with you now.”
“If I quit now, they win.” Scully’s casually trying to jog his memory, like: hey, remember when you said that to me? Right before you were going to kiss me? Remember that? If you wanted to try that again or something...
So...he's hard core in love.
"This is great. This is fitting."
“What are you not telling me?”
“The virus may be extraterrestrial.”
I love how he sheepishly shuffles the map around, looking at something on the ground that’s apparently incredibly riveting.
As the white tanker trucks fly past, Mulder’s shadow is thrown against them.
Train chase! As he crosses over the tracks, he shoots her a look that seems to say, “Impressed with my driving?”
Look at them! They’re, like, tramping through brush. The LA years will provide us precious few little trips to the forest, so we must enjoy this while we still can. I might love it more that they’re doing this in their full-on work clothes, as opposed to outdoor gear.
“This is weird, Mulder."
“Very weird.”
The part of my brain devoted to lyrics always supplies Rent’s “fucking weird” after these two lines.
So these gigantic, glowing bee domes? They are not, as Scully once said, an exercise in subtlety.
Hi, Mulder. You are really, really hot. And maybe dashing. And heroic. (You're lookin' good, too, Scully.)
I have many favorite shots in this movie, and this is one of them: the overhead shot of Scully looking up, while Mulder crouches on the floor, ear to the ground, listening.
“Scully?”
“Yeah?”
“Run.”
I love the clunking of the building as it prepares to open the vents and release the bees. It sort of aligns with the ship “awakening” when Mulder gives her the vaccine. Mulder and Scully are the vaccine that breaks down the machinations of the conspiracy.
Scully! Shake your coat out a LOT MORE, please! This woeful situation could’ve been prevented, had you not insisted on keeping your coat on in the car.
So much of this is stating the obvious, but I’ll just state it and we can all think about it together and enjoy it, okay? “SCULLAY!” I swear to God, I could listen to the two of them say each other’s names in different ways for hours and hours, like some weird acting class exercise, and be perfectly happy.
It’s sweet how she quickly fixes her hair in the hallway picture before going in to meet her doom, shooting Skinner a semi-defiant look as she does so. If she’s going to keep up appearances as the sane front of the X-Files, she needs to, you know, keep up appearances.
This bee has fucking moved in and made himself comfortable. He’s thinking about what color to paint the walls and he ordered a futon from Ikea. The cable guy’s coming Monday. Maybe if her jacket didn’t have so many damn belts and straps and buttons to hide under and behind, he would’ve already flown off to do some cross pollination at the nearest rose garden. Speaking as a person who often leaps around, swatting at pieces of dust and string, thinking they’re bugs, I CANNOT FATHOM having a bee crawling around for hours without noticing.
“Working with?”
“With Agent Mulder.”
For such a paranoid guy, Mulder is awfully free and easy with his front door.
“What’s wrong?"
“Salt Lake City, Utah. Transfer effective immediately.”
“I debated whether to even tell you in person.” Yeah, that phone call would’ve gone really well, Scully.
“We are close to something here! We’re on the verge."
“YOU’RE on the verge, Mulder.”
FYI, Scully, Mulder has been on the verge since approximately 1973.
“I have, I did. It’s done.”
“I need you on this, Scully.”
“You don’t need me, Mulder. You never have.”
I think she wants and needs him to tell her she’s needed, to pull her back. I don’t think it’s manipulative; Scully isn’t like that. It’s not like she’s rationally thinking, “I’m going to make Mulder work for this.” But I often feel, especially in the early years, that for all of his casual affection and devotion, Mulder can be a bit hard to read sometimes. She probably never QUITE knows what footing she’s on with him.
Still, she’s having a bit of a pity party. Not that I blame her. She deserves it. Things are bad. And it’s the only kind of party Dana Scully ever gets to attend, so she should do it up while she can.
I love how, after she leaves, he stands there for a second, kind of getting his courage up before walking after her. And she knows he’s coming. She spins around immediately, not out of surprise, but like she’s ready to rumble. Like she was already playing this out in her head on the drive over and now it's starting.
Okay, here we go. Hold on.
“Why did they assign me to you in the first place, Mulder? To debunk your work, to rein you in, to shut you down.”
“But you saved me. As difficult and as frustrating as it’s been sometimes, your goddamn strict rationalism and your science have saved me a thousand times over. You’ve kept me honest. You’ve made me a whole person. I owe you everything, Scully, and you owe me nothing. I don’t know if I want to do this alone. I don’t even know if I can. And if I quit now, they win.”
So you know how I said she needed him to say this? It’s like, a million times more than she ever expected, and she’s clearly losing her shit a little bit as he talks. This conversation is not going how she thought it would.
He's sad. She's sad. They're both gorgeous.
She sighs like she’s been holding her breath for years and years, like she’s finally able to let it all out. And then they fall together, because there's nothing left to say with words.
HIS ARMS...are the most perfect arms that ever armed. Also, when she presses her face into his chest, I imagine that he smells really nice. (This is not weird, because at least one other person agrees with me about this, okay?)
God, the eyebrow she shoots as he holds her just kills me.
Hot forehead action! They just can't help it.
OH GOD, you guys, the look on his face when he pulls back to stare at her, his hand on her neck. It’s heavy and I think she’s kind of scared. He is intense and she doesn't know what to say to his hungry eyes.
Almost, almost, almost...
I say lips are touching.
I love how he immediately apologizes, assuming that the kiss has been a miscalculation, but I love even more that she says “No,” immediately. Like, “No, don’t apologize for that! I wasn’t interrupting that!”
When she says something stung her, he gets this look, like, hm…how can I get this back on track without being too obnoxious?
He pulls her close, rubs her neck, pets her hair. For one moment here, the near-kiss allows them a new level of intimacy where he can do that.
Wait, wait. THIS is my absolute favorite shot, the low dolly back from Scully on the scummy hallway floor, as he races to his apartment to call 911.
He never takes his eyes off her, staying close to the gurney, putting his jacket on.
How is it dark already? It seemed to be late afternoon when Scully got to his apartment, and no more than a few minutes have elapsed. Plus, it’s summer, so even if it had been 4 or 5, we’d still have several hours of daylight.
Here’s the deal, though. Why would they need to do THIS to take away “that with which he cannot live without”? Why not just shoot her or something, right? Why not rig her car with an explosive? Why go to the trouble of kidnapping her and letting an alien gestate inside of her? It seems excessive and elaborate and like the manpower could be used more effectively. I guess that's why I'm not running a worldwide syndicate that's in cahoots with extraterrestrial beings.
Mulder’s first thought upon waking: “Where’s Scully?”
Since I know from the bloopers that Mitch Pileggi is actually speaking the words to “Greased Lightning,” I SWEAR you can see him mouth “fuel injection cutoff.”
Yes, he’s running through the street! Discarding Byers’ jacket! (Sorry, Byers!) Disregarding his head injury and leaving against medical advice! Leaving without even signing the “leaving against medical advice” paper! ALL FOR HER.
Well-Manicured Man is smooth as silk. It’s too bad he’s going to die. SPOILER ALERT. (PS. Everyone in the engine room drowns.)
So, if WMM gives Mulder the vaccine and the location, which is going to bring down the project, why bother killing Kurtzweil, who is presumably in the car’s trunk?
“The virus is extraterrestrial. We know very little about it except that it was the original inhabitant of this planet” At least we kind of pick up this thread again in the Biogenesis arc.
“But he sacrificed my sister. He let them take Samantha.”
“Without a vaccination, the only true survivors of the viral holocaust will be those immune to it-human-alien clones. He allowed your sister to be abducted, to be taken to a cloning program for one reason.”
“So she would survive. As a genetic hybrid.”
“Your father chose hope over selfishness. Hope in the only future he had-his children. His hope for you was that you would uncover the truth about the project. That you would stop it. That you would fight the future.”
This is all very poetic, but good thing Mulder decided to go into the Conspiracy-busting business, and didn’t want to be a dentist or something. That’s a pretty big gamble on old Bill Mulder’s part, isn’t it?
(Also, the part about choosing hope over selfishness is kind of heart-wrenching, considering Scully will eventually do the same thing.)
Only British people can convincingly say things like “Driver.” I mean, really. Try it, Americans. (And Canadians. Sorry.) You’re going to sound like a jackass, I promise.
“The upholstery’s already ruined.” He’s determined that his last words be a sophomoric quip.
Ew, a rat scurries across the street.
“Hi, I need a ticket to South 83 lat, East 63 long? Direct flight, if you’ve got it. A window seat would be great. And a Sno Cat rental waiting at arrivals.”
He is driving a Sno Cat across Antarctica for her.
Mulder doggedly fighting evil in cold climates DOES ME IN. I think it’s the big coats and the dampness.
A love affair between a man and a necklace.
So here’s the thing. CSM and company KNOW Mulder is madly in love with her. That’s the whole basis of the plan. That he’ll lose his shit if they take her away from him. So why wouldn’t they assume he’d go to Antarctica? They thought it would somehow be the last straw, the one thing, Meatloaf-like, that he just wouldn’t do for love? Because even IF WMM hadn’t given him the location, Mulder would have punched and pistol-whipped his way through D.C. to find out where she was. AND: was the ambulance driver supposed to kill Mulder? Because that’s exactly what they wanted to avoid, crusades being what they are and all. I know, I know, say it together: "don't think."
We get it, it’s a spaceship, MOVE ALONG.
Yeah, so that would’ve just broken both of his legs. Luckily, Mulder drinks a lot of milk, so his bones are okay, and he’s able to immediately track down Scully’s pod. Probably by scent. (Strawberry shampoo, OBVIOUSLY.)
It charms me when he ineffectually slaps his palm against the pod, trying to get to her. It’s like a little kid at an aquarium, trying to get to the fish.
Yum, I love it when he pulls the cap off with his mouth, then discards it with his tongue.
Oh, Mulder. He’s oddly intrigued by the way the virus leaves Scully’s body. Later, he’ll be all, “Scully, let me just tell you about the way the oil left your body and then this cord shriveled up before I pulled it out of your throat! It was awesome!”
CSM is so impressed when he says, “Mulder has the vaccine.” A worthy adversary.
The lackey flailing from the ladder as the alarms blare will never not be funny to me. This is high comedy.
He’s dressing her in his extra clothes! And carrying her! With her little sock feet sticking out! (He wore extra pairs of socks for her!)
Do you think Mulder had all of these winter clothes? I bet he had to stop at Sports Authority and hit up the ski section before he left. “Okay, so I need Antarctica-appropriate clothes that will work for me AND for a cute little 5’2” lady. I’ve got less than 96 hours, so make it quick.”
Honestly, the perverse English major in me loves that intention plus action equals kiss. YOU WIN, CARTER.
You guys! This is no time to be flirty goofballs, okay? The ship is melting and the aliens are chomping at the bit. They want to eat you. Get to safety, then make eyes at each other.
The snow cracking and crumbling as the ship rises from the ground is a really nice effect.
Scully says “I saw it.” Yea or nay?
Mulder's face as he watches it is so full of genuine wonder. And he looks at her with a grin, not an "I told you so" grin, but rather a "there's no one else I'd rather be collapsed on the ice with, watching this spaceship fly away" grin.
After it’s gone, whisking off into the foggy sky, Mulder just collapses, spent. He can’t give any more. And they switch, Scully immediately going into protector mode.
The way she presses her face into his hair! And then she hugs him until he is not frozen anymore.
“Crater Hug” is epic and it makes me get all teary, without fail.
“What is it you find incredible?” I love it when Scully gets defiant with her superiors about crazy, Mulder-y things!
Whenever the Attorney General is mentioned, I picture Will Ferrell’s Janet Reno sighing dreamily: “Biiiill Clintonnnn….”
Oh, settle down, Mulder. Just because you guys weren’t mentioned in the paper? Just because everything was totally covered up? Come on. Stop freaking out. As Snoop once said, "this type of shit happens all the time." Apparently he’s been reading bad fanfic and thinks that he needs to feel EXTREMELY GUILTY about all of the AWFUL things he’s caused in Scully’s life. (Note: he will forget about this by the fall.)
“My work is here with you now.”
“If I quit now, they win.” Scully’s casually trying to jog his memory, like: hey, remember when you said that to me? Right before you were going to kiss me? Remember that? If you wanted to try that again or something...
So...he's hard core in love.
