Rewatch Extra: 6x21 Field Trip
This episode is one of the many great things invented after sliced bread. Top ten, definitely. Top five, maybe.
“I don’t know what they did with the screen for this thing.” They being Spender and Fowley. It’s a nice little nod to the fact that their office was otherwise occupied for a large part of the past year.
Scully, unamused, quietly wondering how many more slideshows she has to sit through before they start doing it.
Scully’s theory (remember these words): Well, I’d say it looks like a double murder, possibly one with ritualistic overtones. The bodies may have been stripped, then skeletonized, possibly by boiling or by the use of some kind of acid solution. Maybe the arrangement has some meaning for the killer or killers. But at any rate, I’d term it ritualistic.
Mulder’s theory (remember these words): The Brown Mountain lights? It’s a famous atmospheric phenomenon dating back nearly 700 years, witnessed by thousands of people, back to the Cherokee Indians. Strange, multicolored lights are seen to dance above the peak of the mountain. There’s been no geological explanation, no scientifically credible explanation at all.
“Extraterrestrial visitors from beyond who have nothing better to do than buzz one mountain, over and over again for 700 years.”
“Sounds like crap when you say it.”
Here we get to the crux of it:
Scully: Mulder, can’t you, just for once, just…for the novelty of it, come up with the simplest explanation, the most logical one, instead of automatically jumping to UFOs or Bigfoot or…
Scully acts like he believes things, concocts strange theories, just to bother her. Like his mind does go to the “simplest” explanation first, but he rejects it in favor of a crazy one, just to give her a hard time.
Mulder: Scully, in six years, how often have I been wrong? No, seriously. I mean, every time I bring you a case we go through this perfunctory dance. You tell me I’m not being scientifically rigorous and that I’m off my nut, and who turns out to be right, like, 98.9% of the time? I just think I’ve…earned the benefit of the doubt here.
And Mulder completely minimizes her contribution, acting as though his initial theory is always proven perfect and right, and that the science and “logical” theories she injects into their investigations don’t have any effect at all.
Apart from that, the nature of the show demands that Mulder be “right.” Who would watch a show about the paranormal that ended each week with something like, “Well, you were right, Scully. It was totally a serial killer.” So I think it’s easy to say, well, Mulder’s right when he says this. But the trick of the show is that he would never actually get there-he wouldn’t be “right” 98.9% of the time-without what Scully brings to the table.
This also reminds me of “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas.”
“Not that my only joy in life is proving you wrong."
“When have you proved me wrong?”
“Well, why else would you want me out there with you?"
“You didn’t want to be there?”
Mulder, for some reason, has decided to go all casual and wear a fleece, while Scully's wearing work clothes.
The guy who plays the coroner is terrific.
Mulder has a great look on his face when Scully holds up her fingers to show them the bog sludge.
I love the shot of the squirrel next to the mushrooms, and not just because it reminds me of the middle panel of a Mark Trail cartoon. I also love the sound of the mushroom exploding and puffing out its spores when Mulder’s tire drives over it.
Mulder finds some more bog sludge and obviously sticks his fingers right in it. Then he gets a look on his face like, “Why do I keep sticking my hands in shit?”
When Mulder spots Wallace Schiff (aka, Roy Anderson, formerly of Dunder Mifflin Scranton), he looks incredibly similar to the famous Bigfoot photo: hulking past, his face turning, his right arm swinging. And of course, Mulder gives chase, which is the mushroom’s way of luring its prey (Mulder) into the cave, where he can be eaten.
So here we’re in the first section of the hallucination: Mulder’s. He wants the answer to the mystery of these deaths to be alien-related, and that’s what his brain and the mushroom give him.
Wallace: No! Don’t you get it! They faked our deaths! They have that kind of technology. Who the hell would look for us if they thought they’d already found our bodies?
This is kind of similar to the theory I came up with while re-watching “Within,” that all of the bullshit brain disease/headstone/secret trips stuff had been planted by the aliens to make it look as though Mulder had run off of his own volition, not been abducted, so then they wouldn’t look for him, or would look in the wrong places.
There’s a really nice rotating shot down from the trees as Scully drives up. There are actually TONS of low angle shots in this episode. I’m sure it’s deliberate--Kim Manners directed, after all. It kind of has a visually dizzying effect, which echoes the hallucination, and sort of puts the viewer on the ground, essentially, where the mushroom is.
Scully’s navy coat is cute, even though it always seems a bit weather-inappropriate.
Angela Schiff (aka, the girl from Teen Witch) tells Mulder about her abduction, with a little help from his incredibly leading questions:
“There was a light. A bright light.”
“Over Brown Mountain. There were strange lights dancing over the peak and…and they took me. And Wallace, too.”
“It all went black. And when I woke up, I didn’t know where I was and I couldn’t see Wallace anymore.”
“It was white. A white place. It was featureless. I was lying on a table and I couldn’t get up. I mean, nothing was holding me down but I couldn’t move.”
“Yes, there were men standing over me, but I couldn’t see their faces.”
“They did tests. Terrible tests.”
“The drill. I remember the drill. I couldn’t see it at first. That was the worst part. But I could hear it spinning and it was coming out of the light…oh, what did they put in me?”
Wallace: Maybe they’re like the cattle mutilations you hear about. Maybe they’re somehow related. Maybe they’re part of their tests.
Mulder: I had that thought, but there’s not precedent for it. It’s in none of the literature.
Wallace: Well, they didn’t want anybody to find us. I guess they didn’t want you to know the truth.
Mulder is essentially having a conversation with himself here. Several of the things Angela and Wallace say are lifted from what Mulder said to Scully in the office: “strange lights dancing over the peak,” maybe it’s like cattle mutilations. And the rest is lifted from, among other things, Scully’s hypnotic regression in “The Blessing Way.” Angela also has a scar on the back of her neck.
And from "Jose Chung":
Mulder: The description of the aliens, the physical exam, the mindscan, the presence of another human being that appears switched off, it’s all characteristic of a typical abduction.
Scully: That’s my problem with it, Mulder. It’s all a little too typical. Abduction lore has become so prevalent in our society that you can ask someone to imagine what it would be like to be abducted and they’d concoct an identical scenario.
When the “aliens” show up, Wallace and Angela hide, telling Mulder to do the same. “They’ll take you, too!” But Mulder walks straight into the light. NO, MULDER!
I love how the glowing light from outside the cave turns into the 42 on Mulder’s door.
It’s ADORABLE how she ducks under his arm to enter the apartment.
And kind of hot when he squats down next to her chair to talk to her, their heads close, Angela and Wallace blurry and out of focus in the background, their low, mumbling voices.
“What I’m going to tell you is going to change your life forever. Your life, my life, the life of every man, woman and child on this planet.”
“Mulder.”
“I found it.”
“What?”
“The truth.”
His hallucination has given him what he’s always wanted: physical representation of The Truth, capital T, closed up in the "specific earthly confines" of his bedroom.
When Angela says she had an implant put in her neck, Gillian does this slight, subtle move where she sort of tenses up her neck. It’s something she always does when implants are mentioned, and it’s terrific.
Oh, Mulder, clean up your room! Scully’s not going to stand for this level of slovenliness in a few short months, so chop, chop.
Mulder’s housekeeping skills aside, the bedroom scene is amazing. He gently pulls her in, even though she’s still skeptical. Until she sees it, and that quavering, almost translucent little hand reaches out from behind the box. (That shot may be my favorite of the entire episode.) I remember someone theorizing that Mulder’s constantly trying to get back to that moment in the graveyard in Oregon, that ecstatic moment where she’s briefly converted and they’re on the same wavelength. He reaches it here. In his hallucination. His hand’s on her arm, their faces are close, they’re sealed together in this bubble of trance-like wonder. (Oddly enough-or maybe not oddly at all-Mulder’s reaction here kind of reminds me of his reaction at the end of “Existence” when he’s holding William. Finding proof of an alien is sort of…their metaphorical baby.)
I love the (low angle!) shot of Scully’s hand pulling the door closed.
“You were right. All these years, you were right.” This is all Mulder wanted, and it’s the moment where his hallucination starts going bad, when he starts clutching at his head, feeling strange, seeing goo. He even starts asking the questions Real Life Scully would, because his brain somehow knows they should be there. But she dismisses them, like he thinks he’d want her to in reality.
Then we see Mulder in the ground, and now it’s part two of the hallucination, Scully’s turn.
“Mulder’s” skeleton, both in the grass and on the black plastic in the morgue, kills me. It looks so lonely.
Scully's hair looks really great.
Scully keeps it tamped down pretty well, but her voice gets all thick and teary as she’s talking to the coroner about lack of digestive secretion on the skeleton. She picks up a piece of gauze and swipes at the bones, coming up with nothing, and sort of…halfway starts to bring it up to her face. To smell it? To press it to her mouth? I don’t know, but there’s something nonsensical and desperate about it that I’ve always loved.
As in Mulder’s hallucination, Scully has someone else parroting her own words back to her.
Coroner: I just think we need to look for the simplest explanation. The most logical.
Scully: What is the most logical explanation?
Coroner: I’d say we’re looking at a murder-one with ritualistic overtones. I think his body was stripped, then skeletonized. Possibly by boiling or use of an acid solution.
The close-up of Scully’s report makes me sad, because there will be another, real report on Mulder’s death in the not-so-distant future.
Scully questions what her role in the X-Files has been: “How many X-Files has my scientific approach fully and satisfactorily explained?”
“That’s what Agent Mulder would have thought.” Shades of season eight! They cannot work without the other. Despite the fact that she thinks she’d love it if he came up with “logical” conclusions, take him away from her and she’s suddenly throwing crazy theories out there, in the same way he started asking rigorous questions when she said he was right.
She wipes away her tears.
I love the shot of Scully standing stoically in the elevator when it dings and the door slides open. When she gets off of the elevator and enters the wake, it reminds me of “Redux,” when she goes there to ID the body.
Here, she’s very clearly playing the part of the widow. Everyone’s watching her.
I love Langly’s tuxedo T-shirt.
Even the Gunmen feed her her own lines: Byers says it’s clear it was a ritualistic murders, that they think his body was “stripped, then skeletonized.” She cannot believe it.
Then she finally hits her breaking point, freaking out, shouting. “Where is Mulder? Where is he? What have you done with him?”
When Mulder shows up at his own door, I think we’re in part 3a of the hallucination: they’re in it together, but it’s kind of from Mulder’s POV.
Mulder dreamily tells her about his abduction.
“Aliens brought me back here.”
“From North Carolina direct to your apartment door?”
Hee, I love that line. It’s like there’s some alien spaceship airport shuttle. You have to wait while they drop other abductees off, but eventually, you’re taken right to your doorstep.
“Either I am having it, or you are having it, or we are having it together.”
I say this part is from Mulder’s point of view because after we leave his original hallucination, he basically needs Scully to be her bossy, scientific self, and that’s what he gets here. Plus, at the end of it, he sees her dissolve into the goo, after getting a glimpse of him in the cave, both of which seems to be trademarks that tells us who’s showing us the hallucination.
So they escape from the ground and make it back to Skinner’s office, and then we’re in part 3b, in it together, from Scully’s POV.
“It’s a rare day when the two of you sign off on one report.”
“Scully. We never escaped. We’re still underground.” As the opposite of Mulder’s POV, in which he needed Scully to get all scientific about fungi, she needs him in this part of the hallucination to get completely crazy and test his theory by shooting their boss in the chest three times. Then Scully watches Mulder drip away into the yellow ooze.
I love how Mulder says, "No, I'm not!"
I guess they’d been missing long enough that the FBI started a search? I don’t know how long they could’ve been underground without being completely eaten, like the Schiffs.
Ow, don’t dislocate her shoulder, yanking her out of the ground like that!
In the Ambulance of Secret Love, with room for two stretchers, Mulder reaches his hand out to her, and she takes it without even looking. It's crazy-romantic--hand holding after almost being digested together by a giant fungus!--and it's also a concise way of bringing them back together.
“I don’t know what they did with the screen for this thing.” They being Spender and Fowley. It’s a nice little nod to the fact that their office was otherwise occupied for a large part of the past year.
Scully, unamused, quietly wondering how many more slideshows she has to sit through before they start doing it.
Scully’s theory (remember these words): Well, I’d say it looks like a double murder, possibly one with ritualistic overtones. The bodies may have been stripped, then skeletonized, possibly by boiling or by the use of some kind of acid solution. Maybe the arrangement has some meaning for the killer or killers. But at any rate, I’d term it ritualistic.
Mulder’s theory (remember these words): The Brown Mountain lights? It’s a famous atmospheric phenomenon dating back nearly 700 years, witnessed by thousands of people, back to the Cherokee Indians. Strange, multicolored lights are seen to dance above the peak of the mountain. There’s been no geological explanation, no scientifically credible explanation at all.
“Extraterrestrial visitors from beyond who have nothing better to do than buzz one mountain, over and over again for 700 years.”
“Sounds like crap when you say it.”
Here we get to the crux of it:
Scully: Mulder, can’t you, just for once, just…for the novelty of it, come up with the simplest explanation, the most logical one, instead of automatically jumping to UFOs or Bigfoot or…
Scully acts like he believes things, concocts strange theories, just to bother her. Like his mind does go to the “simplest” explanation first, but he rejects it in favor of a crazy one, just to give her a hard time.
Mulder: Scully, in six years, how often have I been wrong? No, seriously. I mean, every time I bring you a case we go through this perfunctory dance. You tell me I’m not being scientifically rigorous and that I’m off my nut, and who turns out to be right, like, 98.9% of the time? I just think I’ve…earned the benefit of the doubt here.
And Mulder completely minimizes her contribution, acting as though his initial theory is always proven perfect and right, and that the science and “logical” theories she injects into their investigations don’t have any effect at all.
Apart from that, the nature of the show demands that Mulder be “right.” Who would watch a show about the paranormal that ended each week with something like, “Well, you were right, Scully. It was totally a serial killer.” So I think it’s easy to say, well, Mulder’s right when he says this. But the trick of the show is that he would never actually get there-he wouldn’t be “right” 98.9% of the time-without what Scully brings to the table.
This also reminds me of “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas.”
“Not that my only joy in life is proving you wrong."
“When have you proved me wrong?”
“Well, why else would you want me out there with you?"
“You didn’t want to be there?”
Mulder, for some reason, has decided to go all casual and wear a fleece, while Scully's wearing work clothes.
The guy who plays the coroner is terrific.
Mulder has a great look on his face when Scully holds up her fingers to show them the bog sludge.
I love the shot of the squirrel next to the mushrooms, and not just because it reminds me of the middle panel of a Mark Trail cartoon. I also love the sound of the mushroom exploding and puffing out its spores when Mulder’s tire drives over it.
Mulder finds some more bog sludge and obviously sticks his fingers right in it. Then he gets a look on his face like, “Why do I keep sticking my hands in shit?”
When Mulder spots Wallace Schiff (aka, Roy Anderson, formerly of Dunder Mifflin Scranton), he looks incredibly similar to the famous Bigfoot photo: hulking past, his face turning, his right arm swinging. And of course, Mulder gives chase, which is the mushroom’s way of luring its prey (Mulder) into the cave, where he can be eaten.
So here we’re in the first section of the hallucination: Mulder’s. He wants the answer to the mystery of these deaths to be alien-related, and that’s what his brain and the mushroom give him.
Wallace: No! Don’t you get it! They faked our deaths! They have that kind of technology. Who the hell would look for us if they thought they’d already found our bodies?
This is kind of similar to the theory I came up with while re-watching “Within,” that all of the bullshit brain disease/headstone/secret trips stuff had been planted by the aliens to make it look as though Mulder had run off of his own volition, not been abducted, so then they wouldn’t look for him, or would look in the wrong places.
There’s a really nice rotating shot down from the trees as Scully drives up. There are actually TONS of low angle shots in this episode. I’m sure it’s deliberate--Kim Manners directed, after all. It kind of has a visually dizzying effect, which echoes the hallucination, and sort of puts the viewer on the ground, essentially, where the mushroom is.
Scully’s navy coat is cute, even though it always seems a bit weather-inappropriate.
Angela Schiff (aka, the girl from Teen Witch) tells Mulder about her abduction, with a little help from his incredibly leading questions:
“There was a light. A bright light.”
“Over Brown Mountain. There were strange lights dancing over the peak and…and they took me. And Wallace, too.”
“It all went black. And when I woke up, I didn’t know where I was and I couldn’t see Wallace anymore.”
“It was white. A white place. It was featureless. I was lying on a table and I couldn’t get up. I mean, nothing was holding me down but I couldn’t move.”
“Yes, there were men standing over me, but I couldn’t see their faces.”
“They did tests. Terrible tests.”
“The drill. I remember the drill. I couldn’t see it at first. That was the worst part. But I could hear it spinning and it was coming out of the light…oh, what did they put in me?”
Wallace: Maybe they’re like the cattle mutilations you hear about. Maybe they’re somehow related. Maybe they’re part of their tests.
Mulder: I had that thought, but there’s not precedent for it. It’s in none of the literature.
Wallace: Well, they didn’t want anybody to find us. I guess they didn’t want you to know the truth.
Mulder is essentially having a conversation with himself here. Several of the things Angela and Wallace say are lifted from what Mulder said to Scully in the office: “strange lights dancing over the peak,” maybe it’s like cattle mutilations. And the rest is lifted from, among other things, Scully’s hypnotic regression in “The Blessing Way.” Angela also has a scar on the back of her neck.
And from "Jose Chung":
Mulder: The description of the aliens, the physical exam, the mindscan, the presence of another human being that appears switched off, it’s all characteristic of a typical abduction.
Scully: That’s my problem with it, Mulder. It’s all a little too typical. Abduction lore has become so prevalent in our society that you can ask someone to imagine what it would be like to be abducted and they’d concoct an identical scenario.
When the “aliens” show up, Wallace and Angela hide, telling Mulder to do the same. “They’ll take you, too!” But Mulder walks straight into the light. NO, MULDER!
I love how the glowing light from outside the cave turns into the 42 on Mulder’s door.
It’s ADORABLE how she ducks under his arm to enter the apartment.
And kind of hot when he squats down next to her chair to talk to her, their heads close, Angela and Wallace blurry and out of focus in the background, their low, mumbling voices.
“What I’m going to tell you is going to change your life forever. Your life, my life, the life of every man, woman and child on this planet.”
“Mulder.”
“I found it.”
“What?”
“The truth.”
His hallucination has given him what he’s always wanted: physical representation of The Truth, capital T, closed up in the "specific earthly confines" of his bedroom.
When Angela says she had an implant put in her neck, Gillian does this slight, subtle move where she sort of tenses up her neck. It’s something she always does when implants are mentioned, and it’s terrific.
Oh, Mulder, clean up your room! Scully’s not going to stand for this level of slovenliness in a few short months, so chop, chop.
Mulder’s housekeeping skills aside, the bedroom scene is amazing. He gently pulls her in, even though she’s still skeptical. Until she sees it, and that quavering, almost translucent little hand reaches out from behind the box. (That shot may be my favorite of the entire episode.) I remember someone theorizing that Mulder’s constantly trying to get back to that moment in the graveyard in Oregon, that ecstatic moment where she’s briefly converted and they’re on the same wavelength. He reaches it here. In his hallucination. His hand’s on her arm, their faces are close, they’re sealed together in this bubble of trance-like wonder. (Oddly enough-or maybe not oddly at all-Mulder’s reaction here kind of reminds me of his reaction at the end of “Existence” when he’s holding William. Finding proof of an alien is sort of…their metaphorical baby.)
I love the (low angle!) shot of Scully’s hand pulling the door closed.
“You were right. All these years, you were right.” This is all Mulder wanted, and it’s the moment where his hallucination starts going bad, when he starts clutching at his head, feeling strange, seeing goo. He even starts asking the questions Real Life Scully would, because his brain somehow knows they should be there. But she dismisses them, like he thinks he’d want her to in reality.
Then we see Mulder in the ground, and now it’s part two of the hallucination, Scully’s turn.
“Mulder’s” skeleton, both in the grass and on the black plastic in the morgue, kills me. It looks so lonely.
Scully's hair looks really great.
Scully keeps it tamped down pretty well, but her voice gets all thick and teary as she’s talking to the coroner about lack of digestive secretion on the skeleton. She picks up a piece of gauze and swipes at the bones, coming up with nothing, and sort of…halfway starts to bring it up to her face. To smell it? To press it to her mouth? I don’t know, but there’s something nonsensical and desperate about it that I’ve always loved.
As in Mulder’s hallucination, Scully has someone else parroting her own words back to her.
Coroner: I just think we need to look for the simplest explanation. The most logical.
Scully: What is the most logical explanation?
Coroner: I’d say we’re looking at a murder-one with ritualistic overtones. I think his body was stripped, then skeletonized. Possibly by boiling or use of an acid solution.
The close-up of Scully’s report makes me sad, because there will be another, real report on Mulder’s death in the not-so-distant future.
Scully questions what her role in the X-Files has been: “How many X-Files has my scientific approach fully and satisfactorily explained?”
“That’s what Agent Mulder would have thought.” Shades of season eight! They cannot work without the other. Despite the fact that she thinks she’d love it if he came up with “logical” conclusions, take him away from her and she’s suddenly throwing crazy theories out there, in the same way he started asking rigorous questions when she said he was right.
She wipes away her tears.
I love the shot of Scully standing stoically in the elevator when it dings and the door slides open. When she gets off of the elevator and enters the wake, it reminds me of “Redux,” when she goes there to ID the body.
Here, she’s very clearly playing the part of the widow. Everyone’s watching her.
I love Langly’s tuxedo T-shirt.
Even the Gunmen feed her her own lines: Byers says it’s clear it was a ritualistic murders, that they think his body was “stripped, then skeletonized.” She cannot believe it.
Then she finally hits her breaking point, freaking out, shouting. “Where is Mulder? Where is he? What have you done with him?”
When Mulder shows up at his own door, I think we’re in part 3a of the hallucination: they’re in it together, but it’s kind of from Mulder’s POV.
Mulder dreamily tells her about his abduction.
“Aliens brought me back here.”
“From North Carolina direct to your apartment door?”
Hee, I love that line. It’s like there’s some alien spaceship airport shuttle. You have to wait while they drop other abductees off, but eventually, you’re taken right to your doorstep.
“Either I am having it, or you are having it, or we are having it together.”
I say this part is from Mulder’s point of view because after we leave his original hallucination, he basically needs Scully to be her bossy, scientific self, and that’s what he gets here. Plus, at the end of it, he sees her dissolve into the goo, after getting a glimpse of him in the cave, both of which seems to be trademarks that tells us who’s showing us the hallucination.
So they escape from the ground and make it back to Skinner’s office, and then we’re in part 3b, in it together, from Scully’s POV.
“It’s a rare day when the two of you sign off on one report.”
“Scully. We never escaped. We’re still underground.” As the opposite of Mulder’s POV, in which he needed Scully to get all scientific about fungi, she needs him in this part of the hallucination to get completely crazy and test his theory by shooting their boss in the chest three times. Then Scully watches Mulder drip away into the yellow ooze.
I love how Mulder says, "No, I'm not!"
I guess they’d been missing long enough that the FBI started a search? I don’t know how long they could’ve been underground without being completely eaten, like the Schiffs.
Ow, don’t dislocate her shoulder, yanking her out of the ground like that!
In the Ambulance of Secret Love, with room for two stretchers, Mulder reaches his hand out to her, and she takes it without even looking. It's crazy-romantic--hand holding after almost being digested together by a giant fungus!--and it's also a concise way of bringing them back together.
