april 13 2023 - introduction/first post
hello to everyone who's here from my tumblr blog or twitter page; most of the stuff here is going to be copied from those places, i just wanted a place to put all my actual serious stuff without all the goofy memes and everything. i'll denote when i'm quoting or reproducing the words of friends. if you're not here from my tumblr blog or twitter page, hi! i'm twenty and i live in michigan and i really like the x files. thanks for visiting my page
april 21 2023 - ice
ice is like obviously a fucked up gross episode which comes with the territory of being based off of that EVIL carpenter movie but it's also sort of weirdly tender in places. even outside of the "checking each other for parasites" scene with which we are all intimately familiar. at the end when they have to wrestle the infected girl (dasilva?) to get teh worm in her ear and she's screaming and squirming and then she just stops and goes limp. and mulder and scully are sort of holding her really gently. it sticks with me
a classmate and i also had a minor argument over whether or not krycek was gay after class yesterday. conclusion not reached. to be clear we weren't arguing over whether or not he was attracted to men, since we both agreed there's no real way to describe whatever was going on with him and mulder in any way other than "strange homosexual entanglement". what we were arguing over was whether or not he was legitimately attracted to women. i brought up the kiss from the red and the black as part of my argument and my classmate just sort of crossed her arms and angrily went "whatever."
april 24 2023 - misc
do you think scully ever consoled herself every time mulder "died" with the knowledge that he couldn't be dead of an alien abduction or a fucked up disease or what have you because clyde bruckman implied that he would die as a result of autoerotic asphyxiation. and then every single time she was right
also as i'm addicted to narratives i think the krycek/covarrubias thing could have been salvageable if they'd actually taken it to its logical conclusion of setting them up as like, nega-mulder and scully. but because they didn't do that it ended up being goofy and out of place. plus i think scully and covarrubias should have had a thing but that's just me. everyone knows it's not gay if it's with your shadow self from the mirror world
april 25 2023 - apocrypha/pusher
i just know that mulder was coping and seething and malding over the fact that he didn't catch that he talked to an alien. if i was for all intents and purposes possessed by a demon and someone who i know personally sat next to me on a twenty hour transcontinental flight and didn't notice at all i would be so fucking angry if i'm being honest
also after ruminating on pusher and looking up some people's reviews of it from the time of airing i feel like the last human being on earth to realize that modell's "worthy adversary" may have been scully and not mulder
april 28 2023 - colony/end game
i think the best thing about these episodes is the way they masterfully build uncomfortable tension. miscommunication/missed connection usually isn't a trope i particularly care for but mulder and scully's increasingly nerve wracking game of phone tag had me biting my NAILS in this one all the way up to the ending of part one, where scully lets mulder into her motel room and then gets a call on her cell phone from... mulder. it's just such a perfect scare
may 01 2023 - misc
the well manicured man is to krycek what skinner is to mulder in that whenever he looks at him you can see in his eyes just how badly he wants to tell him that he's grounded. skinner is mulder’s extremely disillusioned and wearily authoritarian dad but krycek is like the well manicured man’s hateful nephew he got custody of somehow. i think if krycek wasn't an adult man the well manicured man would dress him in little edwardian boy clothes and send him off to some sort of strict catholic boarding school in england so that a bunch of nuns can beat him with rulers
may 05 2023 - s2/misc
you kind of can't beat season two in terms of mulder's patheticness. not that he ever CAN really catch a break but especially not then. and i can say this and get a bit of a giggle out of it but early season 2 is so insane in terms of mulder patheticality like not even as a slight against his character or his writing but just like. the amount of things that keep on happening to and around him are insane. he loses his work and he loses scully first metaphorically and then literally and he just wants someone to believe him so fucking badly. trusting the one guy that outright tells him he’s willing to believe comes back to bite him so bad that he never fucking does it again. it’s almost comical in a really disgusting way like every time he thinks he can get ahead or catch some sort of break someone sticks their foot out to trip him. his trust capacity grew with scully and then the literal atomic second he tries to exercise it again the syndicate destroys it it’s literally evil
may 06 2023 - ascension
somehow i always forget that the first "religion into a crusade" dialogue was between krycek and the cigarette smoking man in krycek's stupid ugly car. imagine having that conversation in your goofy little maroon lincoln at 6:15 in the morning and then you just have to go pretend to be at work after. it IS a great scene though and i think it's primarily because nick lea is a good facial actor...you can see that his eyes are gigantic and he keeps nervously looking around and stuff like that. very good
may 12 2023 - misc
scully and krycek are like mulder's little shoulder angel and demon to me. i can't explain it. just whispering in his ear and giving him conflicting advice. every post cold war FBI agent has a little american on one shoulder saying stuff like "aliens aren't real. quit your job and go into hiding. you should father a child" and a little russian on the other shoulder that says shit like "you should have killed that guy and ate his body"
may 16 2023 - 3
i was kind of surprised to find out this was an episode that everybody hated. i liked this episode, the vampire shit was cool. like of course it was unfortunately scullyless and coming on the heels of arguably the most utterly soul draining dread-inducing two parter of the entire show but it was a good story and GOD was it pretty. they should light all nightclubs like the vampire rave club
may 17 2023 - existence
the thing about mulder is that he is such an obsessive and yet guilt-ridden person that it gives him a lot of irreconcilable troubles with the revenge thing. and this is why they had to have skinner kill krycek because if mulder had done it he would have gone crazy. he would have started hearing a heartbeat from under the floorboards. i think the hate and the desire to see krycek pay for his actions even with death were definitely there but the ability to actually do the deed is out of mulder's capacity when it comes down to it. and we see this with the fact that mulder has had several opportunities to do it before and never has
may 18 2023 - misc
in storytelling there’s a difference between a parallel, a foil, and a mirror. a parallel is someone who is similar to you in a narrative sense (let’s use the example of like. samantha mulder and ruby morris from conduit), a foil is someone who plays against you in a narrative sense (this is obviously mulder and scully). a mirror is someone who represents the other side of you, they’re not the same but they’re not different. they’re like your shadow self. THIS is what i think krycek is to mulder and michelle bush does a great job of explaining this in myth-x:
“alex krycek represents the shadow of fox mulder...he embodies all the qualities of mulder’s darker nature; violence, vengeance, disloyalty and betrayal. he’s not mulder’s opposite--that’s scully--because all of these qualities show up periodically in mulder when his darker nature comes to the forefront.”
they’re the same person! at least in terms of the show’s writing. and it’s made more obvious as the show goes on--there always seems to be a sense of like “why did he do that? i wouldn’t have done that” from both of them with regard to the other, because even though they’re often enemies they kind of fall into a pattern of assuming the other thinks like they do and then getting surprised when they don’t. i think it’s part of the reason they have such a weird attachment to each other and keep rewinding the trust-betrayal-trust cycle for literally no reason; they don’t have a choice! there is no person on earth with the same relationship to one as the other
characters also don’t tend to kill their own mirrors the way they sometimes do their foils or their parallels. mulder knows that krycek isn’t going to kill him, and krycek knows that mulder knows that krycek isn’t going to kill him, but mulder also knows that he isn’t going to kill krycek. so they’re stuck at an impasse. there’s a sense of betrayal even though, by all rights, there shouldn’t be, because mulder knows exactly the kind of person krycek is, but he still has that sense of “why are you doing this thing that i don’t think that i would do?”
and this is also, again, why it had to be skinner that killed krycek, not only because mulder is not written as the kind of person who could do it, but because, out of universe, skinner holds a different position than mulder in terms of how his character relates to krycek’s. he’s not backed into the same corner that mulder is, where he can’t kill someone because for all intents and purposes it would be the same as killing himself
may 19 2023 - misc
95% of x files characters are physically incapable of being in love normally but at least mulder and scully are in love with each other in an understandable way. yeah sure it's transcendental and life-spanning and everything but it's still obviously recognizable as love. mulder and krycek are in love with each other in a way that literally cannot yet be understood by modern science it's like the difference between a human brain and a fucking mycelium network
may 22 2023 - never again
the x files is so awesome because mulder is this tragic character whose life is an endless repeating cycle of being in love with a person/thing/idea and then having it continually denied or tainted or ripped away from him that he can never truly escape because on some level it’s ingrained in his psyche and he’s doing it to himself. and also there’s just a tattoo of a snake eating its own tail representing this cycle forever etched on the back of the love of his life
may 24 2023 - misc
i think the number one problem with the myth arc getting worse progressively is that it got too big in scope. instead of Holy shit Extraterrestrial invasion Galactic war etc etc i feel like it would have been tighter and arguably more horrifying if the Conspiracy was centered around the shadowy consortium guys trying to cover up the existence of aliens so they can exploit them for money or something. when the stakes get too high the story loses its oomph and i think keeping the conflicts themselves more down-to-earth (lol) would have maybe helped with that. but that's just me
may 25 2023 - sleepless/ascension
can you talk about krycek's kill in sleepless?
i don't know if this is like. #controversial or whatever but i don't actually think he was faking his reaction to killing augustus cole, i do think that was baby's first murder.
in the LSG media x-files podcast, one of the hosts points out that, at the end of sleepless, krycek kind of has no choice but to kill cole. cole wants to die, and was going to die either way (he was clearly planning to jump off the ledge of the vehicle yard building before being confronted by mulder)--but he knows that mulder isn't going to do it, so he puts it on krycek by manipulating him into seeing the gun where the bible was. there's obviously no way for krycek to fake that, it's external. so if he thinks that his partner is about to get shot, what does he do? if he wasn't a spy, he'd do what he's supposed to do according to what they teach you at the FBI, which is to shoot cole (the hostile suspect) before cole can shoot mulder (the LEO). he is a spy, but he still has to do what he's supposed to do, because if he doesn't, it'll blow his cover
the conversation between krycek and the cigarette-smoking man in ascension makes it pretty obvious that krycek is, at this point, basically an errand boy. a foot soldier AT MOST. the cigarette-smoking man tells krycek, among other things, that he "has no rights, only orders to be carried out," and that if he has problems with that, they'll "make other arrangements," which is very obviously a threat that krycek seems disquieted by, placing him in what is probably a relatively low position in the syndicate's hierarchy. he's a mole, someone who watches and passes along information--not yet the kind of operative that assassinates people
we get basically nothing on krycek in terms of backstory/what he was doing before being introduced into the story (which in almost all cases i think is a plus) but to be honest i don't think there would have been any reason for him to have killed anybody before cole. krycek mentions in ascension that the cigarette-smoking man "had" him do something--we infer that this is related to the death of duane barry at the least, if not also what happened to the tram operator at skyland mountain--so we know that he wasn't doing that of his own accord, he was receiving orders. we see him doing the same thing in anasazi (before the cigarette-smoking man decides he's a loose end that needs to be tied), except now he seems to be being specifically ordered to carry out hits; likely because somebody, somewhere, saw what he did in ascension and decided that he could handle it. i don't believe that was always his job, and i definitely don't think that it was anywhere NEAR his job during the period of time he was assigned to be mulder's partner. the confrontation the end of sleepless puts him in the position to kill someone when he wasn't intended to be, and he does it, and after they realize he can do it, he's put in positions where he has to do it more. if it helps the government cover up the fact that they've been doing fucked up experiments on people, that's an added bonus
so yeah, i do think augustus cole was the first time he ever killed anyone, and i think his hesitations and reactions were real. frankly i think most of his reactions to things regarding the case were real; he might be part of the alien cover-up conspiracy but i feel like maybe that doesn't prepare you for war veterans that can kill people with their minds. i guess it's the sort of thing where it's like. he COULD have been faking it? "it" being the fear and anxiety and immediate shock of killing a person for the first time. even though i think the emotions that you must be experiencing after you kill someone for the first time, especially if you didn't necessarily want to do it--residual fear, sick adrenaline, some kind of fucked up relief--would be pretty difficult to fake, particularly if you're trying to fool one of the best psychologists in the bureau, i don't doubt that he could have gotten away with faking it if he'd had to. but i just think it's a little more interesting and also much funnier if he didn't
for all i know he'd been whacking people for years before the cole case but that seems less engaging somehow. he has his own character arc, his own moral degradation, his own downfall, we just never see it because of course neither do mulder and scully, our POV characters. and he never seems to take joy in it really but he also has an air of being...desensitized to it, like he's found out how the world works and has lost his capacity to care
"i have of late (but wherefore i know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory"
june 02 2023 - misc
since i’m technically not old enough to buy my own cigarettes and i have to bum them off of people i have to ration them and it’s a whole process. whenever i see the CSM on the show smoke in his stupid shitty way i get VIOLENTLY angry because he’s wasteful as shit. that scene in ascension where he’s in the parking garage after he hangs up with krycek and he takes like one drag off of a cigarette before flicking it out the car window sends me into a fucking blind rage
june 04 2023 - misc
msr exists in this weird limbo where i think the show is a bit worse off for never making it satisfyingly canon until the very end but i also think the show would have been worse off as well if it had been canon all along. the show is about mulder and scully but it shouldn’t be About Mulder And Scully if you know what i mean...the romantic relationship is good and important but it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) the center of the show. it’s about this fucked up government alien conspiracy and these two people investigating it and MAYBE those two people are in love with each other but it’s not really the point. i think the show keeps a pretty decent balance between the overall story carter wanted to tell which mulder and scully are auxiliary to AND the separate personal lives of mulder and scully AND the actual relationship between mulder and scully. however i agree that carter wholeheartedly fumbled the bag by not taking advantage of duchovny and anderson’s very clear willingness to get silly with it
june 07 2023 - misc
the x files was a nine year long social experiment to see how many times they could dangle an ally under mulder's nose and rip them away before he kills himself
june 08 2023 - misc
i ascribe to the headcanon of scully being mildly psychic/precognitive but i like that there is also arguably an equal amount of evidence that mulder is one of the few people that can see ghosts. it’s sort of an established character trait that he has periodical visions of dead people. it's definitely kinda gay to hallucinate your dead nemesis but i feel like if your dead nemesis is handing you things and slamming doors and stuff then at that point maybe you're not hallucinating. i enjoy the idea of there being cases where MAYBE someone has something a little weird going on but it's not important...scully seeing her father in her living room fifteen minutes before he dies, scully's "gut instinct" almost always accurately predicting future events, mulder always knowing when scully's in danger even if they're miles apart, mulder being able to see ghosts. it fascinates me a little
june 09 2023 - the red and the black
need you to talk about the red and the black scene like what are your first thoughts
first of all this scene is gay. just to get that out of the way now. i know we all know it is but it’s worth reiterating
second of all even outside of that particular connotation this scene is also just extremely visually and impressionally odd. it’s intense! it’s charged! it’s creepy and weird! the entire sequence has a delightful strangeness to it--the almost nonexistent lighting turns mulder and krycek into living shadows, both their voices are hushed and quiet as if they’re afraid someone else is going to hear them even though they’re in mulder’s apartment alone, it’s shot in a way that makes them look like they’re across the room from each other even though they can’t be more than a foot apart. it makes it seem not real, like a dream that mulder is having that he won’t be able to wake from until it’s done with him; mulder’s night-dark living room becomes his tired mindscape, krycek a warped reflection of himself
the cryptic note that “things are looking up” lends an air of delicious cinema to it all—it’s so incongruous it loops back around to being perfectly in keeping. it’s the sort of thing you’d expect from a spy novel, a murder mystery, a point-and-click escape-the-room video game. it’s really not the kind of thing that the syndicate does but it IS something you get the sense that the well manicured man would do, which is cool, because it makes it seem like krycek’s new boss is sort of... monitoring the entire interaction, which in turn makes the fact that mulder and krycek are acting like they’re being watched even more interesting. there’s a sort of surreal quality to the entire scene that is very obviously and abruptly shattered by the arrival of scully to mulder’s apartment--she turns on the lights, breaks the spell, brings mulder back down to earth by injecting the situation with a syringe full of reality like she always does
you and i have definitely tossed this around before but the emotional crux of this scene i think very heavily leans on the sort of like. bizarre innate Understanding that mulder and krycek have with each other, even though it sort of feels like neither of them WANT to have it? krycek isn’t here of his own accord--we can infer that the well manicured man has sent him--but his boss is probably not ordering him to present the information to mulder in this specific weird way. i doubt the well manicured man cares how krycek tells mulder anything as long as he does it. krycek is here because he was told to be, but he’s here in this way, as the silhouette in the dark corner, the monster under the bed, the man-upon-the-stair-who-wasn’t-there, because... of course he is. he has to be. neither he nor mulder have a choice in the matter--they can’t just walk up to each other and have a conversation the way they may have used to, because they’re literally no longer capable of it within the confines of the story. they have to play mind games, they have to lunge from the shadows and leave cryptic clues and beat the shit out of each other over and over because something, in a weird cosmic way, is always demanding it
krycek gives mulder a kiss--an action which has several purposes, one of which IS definitely to fuck with mulder. i think krycek thinks that mulder will be more likely to believe him if he does something that throws mulder off balance, because unpredictability is paradoxically what mulder has grown to expect from krycek, to the point where it reassures mulder (who’s currently mentally kind of off balance anyway) that this is, like, still the same person he thinks it is. i think it’s probably a taunt on some level, and maybe also a legitimate expression of... not affection exactly, but comraderie? in whatever weird way krycek is experiencing it. even though mulder has no idea yet what they’re now comrades in or why. it feels like a joke that krycek is having with himself
he then gives mulder his gun and proceeds to fully turn his back on him to leave--it’s another game he has to play, and he knows mulder isn’t going to shoot him. mulder can never be straight with krycek because metanarratively speaking krycek is mulder, and mulder is historically not good at being straight with himself, but mulder also could never. like. i think he’s CAPABLE of doing that to himself but i don’t think he would be able to rationalize it. just like he couldn’t rationalize the idea of killing krycek, and in fact, he never does! it’s actually kind of funny how they’re physically not allowed to be honest and stop fucking with each other (even if it’s for one of them to kill the other!) because something will not let them, and they know this, and it’s making both of them visibly insanely angry. this is where they always end up, somehow, for some reason, in endless different permutations forever, until someone else shoots one of them. destiny and fate and how to throw a curve ball
they (being mulder and scully) talk about this in quagmire, sort of, and i think something that contributes to the sort of vaguely tragic nature of mulder as a character is the fact that for him, sometimes the pursuit of truth is what he lives for, not so much the truth itself. catching big blue would have invoked the same emotional response as catching the giant alligator, because big blue itself is not what matters. what matters is the mystery, and either way, the mystery is over. that phenomenon is what krycek is representing in this scene; that’s his metaphorical purpose, independent of his relationship to mulder as a character and as a person. it’s a very interesting parallel to the scene of scully and jeffrey spender in the x files office, which we can assume even might be happening concurrently. scully’s disquiet over the situation with ruskin dam, her experience with regression hypnosis, etc is leading her closer towards finally starting to believe, but spender showing her that tape pours a pitcher of water over the burgeoning spark. at the same time, mulder thinks he’s finally found the truth (the truth being that it’s all a lie) and it’s left him disappointed, empty, cold. his flames have gone out. krycek brings news that the mystery might not actually be solved, holding a match to the cooling embers, rekindling the fire that mulder has lost. the episode casts both spender and krycek less as men and more as metaphors, agents of thought, and it ends, maybe disappointingly, with mulder and scully back where they started, in the places the powers that be always seem to want them--mulder the believer, scully the skeptic
lastly, independent of the feeling of the scene, i want to mention the stuff that’s actually being talked about. obviously i haven’t finished the show yet so YMMV on how much you agree with me at this point, but in my opinion this part of the show (i.e. mid season five) is where they seem to start losing their handle on the myth arc. the stuff about planned alien colonization, “interstellar war”, it’s kind of cartoonish and dumb and i don’t really like it. i’ve mentioned before that i wish the central conflict of the myth arc was slightly more down to earth (lol); i would have preferred something a bit less, i don’t know, fantastical. maybe instead of the aliens planning to invade and colonize the earth, they’re just exploring. they’re not harmless by any means (i think the whole idea of the black oil was absolutely marvelous and arguably i think that sort of thing is scarier when it’s not something actively malicious but rather something that just causes harm by existing) but they don’t care enough about us to gun for us. the conflict maybe comes even from the government; they’re picking up the stuff the aliens leave behind (technology, biomatter, etc) and using it for their own purposes (human experimentation, military applications), probably in ways that benefit them politically or financially, and the conflict comes from what they’ve done to people in their efforts to cover it up. just stuff i think about
tl;dr great scene with a very fascinating vibe from a great episode with a very fascinating vibe. alexa, play “i’ve got all this ringing in my ears but none on my fingers” by fall out boy
june 19 2023 - misc
i'm watching the secret x files which is about interpersonal relationships between characters. today's topic of musing is marita covarrubias because she interests me a lot, particularly her relationship to mulder. she's his source, but she's more than his previous sources were, but she isn't a love interest for him or anything (at least not that i noticed). so they're sort of in this weird limbo of--i trust you, i don't trust you, you don't trust me. i have your phone number. i fell asleep on your couch. when you stole evidence, i was the first one you called. i can't help you when you're in trouble. you won't help me when i'm in trouble, unless you can, and then you will. it's a very fascinating and strange dynamic
june 20 2023 - sleepless/ascension
sorry for talking about this again but the way mulder spends almost all of sleepless holding krycek at arm’s length right up until krycek finds the magic sequence of words “i want to believe” and then mulder almost immediately does a 180 and starts to trust and rely on him to the point of bringing him to skyland mountain to help look for scully is so crazy. genuinely it’s so insane to me because mulder always brushes it off when people make fun of him, but truly he is so desperate to be believed instead of ridiculed, ESPECIALLY at this point in the series where he doesn’t even really have scully anymore. he is starving to death for anyone who even LOOKS like an ally. the second krycek shows a hint of taking him seriously it’s like entering the fucking konami code
the fact that if mulder hadn’t brought krycek to skyland mountain he might have been able to get to scully in time but he did bring him because he’d come to rely on him and trusted him to help is a microcosm of the wider truth of mulder’s character which is that his willingness to trust people even though everything about his life demands the opposite will always be his downfall 👍
june 25 2023 - ascension
three weeks ago i watched ascension with my stepdad and posited to him the "why did krycek leave the cigarettes in the car's ashtray" question and he replied "maybe he just forgot they were there". and i was basically pulling my hair out over it because that literally CANNOT POSSIBLY be all it was, but i couldn’t come up with an ACTUAL reason why i thought he did it so i just had to sit there and mald
i mentioned there’s like a specific three second long shot of him watching CSM stub out a cigarette in the ashtray, so why would they have that if he just forgets about it later? but then my dad asked why would he leave them there on purpose and then lend mulder his car if they told him explicitly to preserve mulder’s trust. because mulder is obviously smart enough to make the connection immediately. and it was making me crazy because i literally don’t KNOW. assuming he did it on purpose HOW was he still a consortium operative after being told not to tip off mulder and then literally immediately within the HOUR going against that order? i can’t earnestly make myself believe he just forgot or that he just thought mulder wouldn’t notice, he’s kind of bad at his job but not THAT much. but any possible reason for him to do it purposefully doesn’t make sense in the long run. i've lost sleep over this
june 29 2023 - misc
i don’t care about little green men or shapeshifters or whatever. the black oil is cool because it’s just so blatantly not human. something interesting about an organism that causes harm not out of malice but just by existing because it’s so different from you it can’t help it
july 19 2023 - misc
the answer for “why does mulder, a famously nonviolent man, lose his shit whenever krycek is within fifteen feet of him” is threefold and goes as follows:
1. part of it definitely comes back to the awareness both of them seem to have of their narrative relationship to each other. allegorically speaking mulder and krycek are the same person and they both get super weird about it, but especially mulder. “i hate you because you’re me and i hate myself.” he’s fully aware of the fact that krycek is his evil twin from the mirror dimension and it makes him SOOOOOO mad
2. i think another huge part of it is the aspect of personal betrayal. the syndicate have been doing cocomelon shit to mulder trying to make him jesus since he was like twelve years old, he’s used to it, but the thing with krycek being sent to spy on him was like. personal. getting jerked around by faceless nameless people you’ve always known are enemies is way way way different than getting terribly betrayed by someone you know and consider an ally and have come to rely on. alex can i borrow your car keys et cetera. i always felt that mulder was less mad about his father being killed than he was that it was krycek that did it
3. this is your brain on repressed homosexual desire
july 20 2023 - ascension
i believe the point of ascension as an episode is to showcase the fact that nobody in it is actually the man with the red right hand. it’s obviously not mulder or scully, it’s not skinner or krycek or X, it’s definitely not duane barry and i would argue it isn’t even the cigarette smoking man. absolutely everyone in the episode is a microscopic cog in the catastrophic plan. X’s line that “everyone can be gotten to” is referencing the fact that the syndicate is everywhere and everything and potentially everybody; with the right amount of manipulation or entrapment or threats on your life it’ll be you too, and your boss will have a boss will have a boss and on and on forever, because it’s by design that there is no one truly in charge. there is no one person who you can eliminate to bring the syndicate down. there is no such thing as the man with the red right hand
august 06 2023 - misc
i have no respect for mulder/skinner or scully/skinner shippers. those are his son and daughter who he has to keep picking up from the principal's office because they're getting into fights at school
august 07 2023 - misc
gillian anderson and david duchovny shouldn't have birthdays. i feel like they were grown in test tubes nesxt to each other in a laboratory in 1992 and promptly unleashed upon an unsuspecting vancouver
august 08 2023 - ascension
was krycek trying to kill mulder when he restarted the cable car?
it’s pretty obvious that krycek was told to stall mulder, not to do anything else to him, and he didn’t really have any direct personal reason to want to kill mulder (obviously this all depends moderately on how you interpret krycek’s character at this point in the story because there are several different ways to do that) so in my very honest opinion, i think he kind of just panicked. he stopped the car to stall mulder but (reasonably) didn’t expect mulder to start climbing out of it and onto the cable wire like a crazy person, and he just did the first thing that came to mind to try and stop him from making it to the top of the mountain of his own volition, which was to start the car up again. i don’t think he did it with the specific intention to kill mulder but i do think stopping mulder from getting to scully was the most important thing in the equation (since this is before the cigarette-smoking man explains to him why they’re not supposed to kill mulder) so in krycek’s mind it was just like. well. these aren’t my orders but if he dies he dies. it wasn’t a “murder attempt” per se, i think he just saw that mulder was taking it into his own hands and he went “oh fuck” and did whatever he thought of in that second to try and stop him
august 11 2023 - misc
fic writers (usually not msr fans) that try to act like mulder is the only one with psychological problems and he’s holding scully back and preventing her from living the life she wants is so funny. who’s gonna tell them that she’s obsessed with him. truly cannot imagine the type of brain needed to believe that she would be better off if he just fucked off forever. if he left she would start killing people
august 19 2023 - misc
in april of 2005 scully wakes up shaking and drenched in sweat from a nightmare where in a moment of weakness she asked mulder if he and krycek ever hooked up in 1994 when they were partners and he said yes. due to the trauma of this imagined scenario she never asks him about it in real life and thus never finds out that the answer actually is yes. mulder on the other hand is unfazed because he had prozac-induced stress dreams about scully and krycek hooking up without him once a week for like five years
september 02 2023 - ascension
ascension is like the one situation i can’t get behind fix-its for because everything is so dread-inducingly unchangeable. we talk about how no matter what mulder did differently he wouldn’t have been able to save scully but it’s literally like that for everyone in the equation. all the events are on a completely fixed path, it’s so evil. this was always going to happen, this was set in motion from the beginning, and there is no version of this scenario where everything turns out alright 😁
september 03 2023 - ascension
re; the nick cave needle drop
the term “red right hand” comes from paradise lost and is used by milton to refer to the vengeful hand of god; colloquially it’s sometimes blended with “right hand man” to refer to a person that acts as a trusted weapon for somebody else
the use of the needle drop in ascension while the camera’s in the car with duane barry identifies barry not as the man with the red right hand but as the red right hand itself--the weapon, the person who carries out the orders he doesn’t even really know he’s being given
the red right hand is real; we can see it, touch it, understand what it’s doing. the mistake comes when you start trying to look for who’s giving the orders, which is as futile as trying to understand the actions of a vengeful god
the man with the red right hand remains forever the mysterious unseen figure the song describes him as. he’s a god, he’s a man, he’s a ghost, he’s a guru--he doesn’t exist, other than as a boogeyman for people like mulder to pin blame onto so that their crusade has a focus
there is no such thing as one person in charge of the syndicate (even the CSM has peers he has to answer to) and the catastrophic plan has been in motion since before most of the microscopic cogs--mulder, scully, krycek, barry himself--were even born
to look for the man with the red right hand is to chase mirages into oblivion while the people that are actually pulling the strings escape scot free. a shadow is cast wherever he stands because the whole point is to trick you into thinking he was ever real to begin with
"the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that there was only one of him"
september 05 2023 - paper hearts
thinking about how john lee roche did live in boston in 1973 and did sell bill a vacuum cleaner in october and did case for victims that way and how samantha was probably always gone, one way or another
september 09 2023 - misc
personally i believe that if you can conceptualize relationships involving mulder or scully that aren’t necessarily BETWEEN mulder and scully you have a more well developed psychological profile. to gauge this in others all you have to do is ask them if they think mulder and krycek OR scully and reyes kinda had a weird gay thing and see how they respond. the least insane romos will respind with a big sad breath through their teeth and a despondent "yeah......."
september 12 2023 - misc
mikaela is right that the collapsing singularity of all the bizarre freudian entanglement surrounding mulder would have been for krycek to sleep with diana. what if you hated a guy because he was you and he worked for your dad who isn’t your dad who is also his dad and you wanted to fuck him but you couldn’t because he was fucking your ex wife who is also your mom