A family of cheetahs sleep with the forest guard every night. When the Forest Dept. heard about it, they decided to check the veracity of the claim by installing a CCTV camera. This is what the camera recorded! Just amazing.
okay like on one hand i’d like to reply to this with some funny one-liner bc on a surface level it is funny… but due to the amount of time i’ve devoted to thinking about mulder and scully and what they believe and how they believe in it, i just can’t read this ask without wanting to argue with it.
mulder doesn’t believe in everything but god. he believes in many things that he thinks would make the world a more tolerable place, by sheer force of will. by trying incredibly hard, even though it doesn’t come naturally. he wants to believe in everything but god, because the concept of god doesn’t give him any feasible answers at all. the concept of god simply demands yet more blind faith, as well as acceptance of the things that have happened to you as fated to be so by god’s will.
he wants to believe in folklore, because that means that people before him have looked past the obvious successfully, that there’s a lineage of secret knowledge waiting to be uncovered. he wants to believe in monsters, because he’s spent years studying the very worst in man and holding out hope that there are things too evil for any man to do. he wants to believe in aliens, because that means a greater mystery behind what’s happened to him and countless others than monstrous men. but mulder doesn’t want to believe in god, because believing in god would mean that rebelling against the whims of fate is futile, because fate is all god’s plan.
scully doesn’t believe in god and nothing else. on the contrary, scully’s very nature is to believe, and to trust. i would say that it is her instinct to believe in everything, and i think that it’s very evident in the way she reacts when caught off guard. unlike mulder, believing isn’t a struggle for her: it’s her default state of being. she is trained in believing. she practices it, faith in god and belief in the methodology of medicine, of science. she has been raised to trust the process, trust the wheels of fate.
but that doesn’t mean she does trust in those things. she’s too smart for that. she understands the fallibility of the human mind, especially her own. because of her implicit ability to believe, she can move past the believing almost immediately and into the questioning, the explaining. she believes in a thing, and then she proceeds quickly through the scientific method of trying to disprove her own theory, trying to explain it in every other possible way. she believes from the start, but belief means nothing on its own. she needs proof to admit her belief out loud. she needs it to be fact, not just faith. and the surest way to prove something, she’s learned, is by ruling out every other possibility. and she does this with god, too, i know she does. she did it for years, and that’s why we see her cut off from her faith for awhile at the start of the show — because she couldn’t find a way to rule out other explanations for any given miracle. because there was no proof.
mulder wants to believe in things that make the world he lives in a kinder place, that make someone other than men the monsters. scully believes in everything, good or evil, but gives those beliefs no weight if she can’t prove them. once she eases up on that practice of needing to prove, she can trust her belief in god again. but mulder never has any space for that belief, useless as it is, until he wants to believe for her. relightsher candle and extends her prayers through his own.
He said Dana Scully, your hipbones are a revelation. And he lay there with his head cradled in the center of her body while she taught him to name her bones.
One of my favorite things about X-Files is that they never tried to sell Mulder or Scully being in an outside relationship with someone. Sure, they had their weaker moments, but never a season-long relationship resulting in a painful love triangle. I of course enjoy shows where that does happen, adds a bit of drama, but Mulder and Scully are so codependent and intertwined that it would have been wrong to force them into some angsty storyline like that in the show. I think the closest it got was Diana, but that was more about miscommunication than denial of feelings.
I just love how you can really say they were practically in a relationship that whole time. There was no one else for either of them, as soon as their paths crossed, their destiny had been settled. And I’m so glad the showrunners never tried to mess with that.
No woman would ever put up with Mulder’s “plutonic” relationship with Scully. He says her name when he first wakes up, they will never come before the brilliant Scully, and the one time Diana kissed him- Mulder’s reaction was to literally run off with Scully.
As for Scully dating another man, at a certain point in season 1 Mulder put Scully in some perpetual state of dibs. It would have been funny to see another man react to Mulder’s complete lack of boundaries and possessiveness over Scully though. Dorks in love.
Today I randomly remembered the time Mulder called Scully while she was on a date. This was before she had a cellphone, the man literally found out what restaurant she was going to be at and then had the audacity to ring the restaurant and ask the staff to find her for him. Mulder’s lack of boundaries clearly spiraled from there. I’ve come to realize my plutonic coworkers have never asked me where and what time my dates are taking me and then phoned me at the restaurant during the date, I feel neglected..,
So I have a question for @randomfoggytiger and all the other smart analyzers out there.
In the directions here, what do you all really think is meant by the second to last line? “If it were ever going to happen, it would be now.” If WHAT were going to happen? What’s that referring to?
Is it a reference to MSR (as it kind of seems like it could be)? Or to having a real conversation? Or what? I’m just curious what people think. Every time I reread it I become less certain.
I did a little writeup on the episodehere if you’re curious; but reading it is completely unnecessary, and my thoughts below should cover it.
If I recall, Morgan and Wong wanted Season 4 to create distance between Mulder and Scully because of that throwaway line: Scully, seeing that Mulder won’t act, won’t reassure, won’t say that “it’s my life, too”, feels second to the quest and withdraws. It’s not until the finale that Morgan and Wong would have reconciled them and, if I recall correctly, taken their relationship in a new direction.
As much as Scully denies her actions aren’t “about you” to Mulder, Never Again isn’t solely about daddy issues or feeling trapped– it’s feeling trapped by being second best. Romance was explicitly written into the dna of this episode: she takes the rose from the grave– someone’s lasting legacy on their loved one’s life– extrapolates meaning from it behind Mulder’s desk, and deflates when Mulder runs off to his vacation that even he rates as secondary to his quest (Mulder missed her entire point: needing his reassurance and reinforcement, needing his speech in the FTF hallway; and Scully missed that he missed it.) When she meets Jerse, she’s flattered by his sole focus on her, takes his card, but still plans to leave; Mulder has been calling, but when he reconnects and hides the fact he missed her behind “how’s the quest going?”, it kicks Scully in the shins and she decides to change plans and meet up with Ed. “The tattoo you deserve” and one night stand with Ed drags down Scully’s view of herself, in hindsight– how did she not see that he was psychotic?– and the final scene in the basement is tinted with second guesses of her own character: more specifically, what Scully thinks she has the right to ask from Mulder, doubting her own judgment (a theme she continually struggles with throughout the series.) If she sits and remains in the basement, Scully has to accept that Mulder won’t move them forward; and she does, choosing to be Starbuck to this (in her perspective) doomed (relation)ship because at least Mulder needs her… which is why The End and Fight the Future hit her so hard, convincing her she has no use in his life, period.
It’s not until Mulder’s “you made me a whole person” speech that Scully starts to push harder, again, for more: “settle down, live something approaching a normal life” in Dreamland, her speech in Rain King, her romantic crisis in Milagro and open flirting in The Unnatural, and her outright hostility and jealousy– undisguised– with other women (Kersh’s secretary, Diana Fowley, Karin Berquist) form the backbone of S6.
Everything and everyone else being second best– including Scully– to Mulder’s newest hyper fixation is a Morgan and Wong episode staple (or can be read into most of them): even in One Breath, M and W wrote Melissa Scully in to be a romantic option for Mulder (which, if I recall, Chris Carter nixed. Obviously.) Even Home, their shippiest episode (so to speak), deconstructed the happy ending Mulder wanted and Scully was, not-so-subtly, working herself into. Not only that, but there’s a clear moment in Home where Mulder himself barricades the door between their two motel rooms (not trusting a broken lock and his daydreams of a normal life in this seemingly idyllic small town, yes, but also explicitly setting up barriers even when there are none.)
To conclude, the line definitely meant romance, or the realization that there would be none because Mulder won’t act on it; and because Scully, as a person, needs to feel appreciated, sought after, and first place in someone’s life– hence her “was he proud of me?” with her father, hence her attraction to Ed Jerse, hence her almost return to Daniel Waterston– and because Mulder is in (at this time) no place or headspace to actively pursue healthy romantic attachment (limiting himself by his search for the Truth) he stops talking, she gets it, and they coast.
That’s why, personally, I like Leonard Betts after Never Again: just when Mulder and Scully recalibrate– him choosing a case directly tied to her expertise (likely for her sake), she feeling in her element and vital to the work– bam, cancer.
Dana Scully being assigned to the X-Files certainly took her down a path with a lot of pain. Not only pain, she has also known happiness, love, and some excitement, but she has lost so much.
Dana Scully being assigned to the X-Files was probably one of the best things to have happened to Fox Mulder. He found a partner in every sense of the term. After years by himself, surrounded by neglecful parents, mocking classmates, shitty exes, and nasty coworkers, he met her at last.
rewatching amor fati for fic reasons and i literally just noticed how after scully says about diana “i know she was your friend” when mulder says “you… were my friend and you told me the truth” he stresses and emphasizes the you. he’s finally telling scully what she wanted to hear for all of season six, that she is his priority, that neither diana nor anyone else takes precedence above her in his life, and i think that’s just really beautiful and special
I think X Files did a great job balancing how intelligent and capable Scully is while also showing that she is not exempt from female targeted violence throughout the show - like she is NOT a damsel in distress stereotype but she still experiences misogynistic attacks.
Like…he can just curl around her. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that his chin rests just perfectly on top of her head when he hugs her. Mwah. Perfection.
Big hands that cup her cheeks when he has to bend WAY down to smooch her. Long legs that she can clamber over when she wants a little kiss on the couch. He outweighs and out-heights Scully in every way but he’s so gentle and so respectful of her space that he never, ever makes her feel small or weak. He knows (and loves) that she could probably kick his ass anyway. 🥹
He is DEFINITELY the one who retrieves her special tea tin from the top shelf in her pantry. Even if Scully is perfectly capable of reaching it herself. Maybe she just likes that he likes feeling useful.
Scully is not a snuggler, I will die on that hill. But she loves, loves, LOVES being held by Mulder. He’s warm and comfy and smells so good, and she loves that when she falls asleep on him on the couch during movie nights he’ll just scoop her up and carry her to bed.
Scully loves the stretch, even if it aches just a little. No man has ever made her feel so full.
Sometimes when the sex is REALLY good Mulder gets a little sappy and misty and he’ll get super cuddly and touchy. He’ll either wriggle awkwardly into the little spoon position or he’ll lay partially on top of Scully with his head tucked under her chin so she can pet his back. 💕
