The Cave's X-Files Commentary Archives:  Episodes:  Two Fathers

The above title, by the way, is not a value-judgment passed on the episode, but rather a reflection of my current philosophical focus. Have you ever stopped to consider how much of The X-Files is caught up in the concept of expectations--family expectations, scientific expectations, social or professional expectations? We have seen expectations continually turned awry in this show, and I think they bear a closer look.

FAMILY EXPECTATIONS:
From the very beginning, the story behind The X-Files evolved from Fox Mulder's search for his sister, his quest to recapture the little girl who had been mysteriously taken from the family home and whose disappearance became the topic of a studied, deliberate silence on the part of his parents. While his unflagging search speaks to Mulder's passion and humanity, it is obvious (though not really to Mulder, I think) that he is never going to be able to find what, deep in his soul, is actually missing. Samantha, should he ever really find the real her, will not be the 8-year-old he has missed so sorely. Like the fake Samantha presented to him in Redux II, she will be grown, with her own life now--a life he hasn't been a part of, a life that forces them apart by its sheer lack of shared experience. If he does find her, I don't believe the hole inside him will be filled. I agree with Sara Stegall's view (sorry, can't remember which one of her episode reviews this was in) that what Mulder is seeking is wholeness; he wants to restore the wholeness of his family... or at least, the concept (expectation) of family that he carries in his head, one that includes a sister and caring parents who can provide the emotional nourishment he obviously craves. 

Unfortunately, from the snippets of it we have been privy to, this idealized family is one he has never actually experienced. We have seen him in the middle of the typical sibling back-and-forth with Samantha, we have seen his parents arguing over something not made clear--something obviously very important (flashback in Demons.) There are intimations that Mulder's mother had some sort of relationship with the Cigarette Smoking Man. In essence, Mulder is searching for something he is destined never find. His family was never whole in the way he needs it to be.  His father is dead; his sister has been gone for 23 years. Wholeness is not to be had within the family he has been born to, but, much as Hamlet grieves for the supportive family life that has been taken away from him by his father's murder, Mulder continues to shelter the flame of hope in something he has not even experienced. It is something he has only yearned for, but it drives him nonetheless.

Even his relationship with his parents shows his reaching out for this idealized vision. Though he presses his mother on many occasions for information that may help him to discover what happened to his sister, he doesn't really comprehend that she could have been part of it. In *Paper Hearts, when he goes to her house in search of the vacuum cleaner John Lee Roche had purportedly sold to his father, his attitude toward his mother is very warm. Her stroke and the near loss of her--his only remaining family--is obviously on his mind and he hugs her warmly. But overall she has not repaid his continuing patience with her. She has repeatedly refused to answer his questions, acted hurt by his insistence, seemed worn and offended by his asking. How, something inside me screams at times like these, can a mother be so cold to her son? How can she not bleed for the anguish that so obviously fills him?  But I guess this is where audience expectations come in, too. We want her to be a good mom, someone we can like, but she continues to evade our sympathies. (In *Demons, Mulder and Scully drive to her home and her first words when she sees her son are, "Why did you come here?") In the end, though, Teena Mulder is only a reflection of real life. While we would like all mothers to be warm and nurturing, in fact not every one is.  But still, like Mulder, we stick to our hopes and expectations.

Mulder also appears to make repeated overtures to his father. In *Colony, he arrives at Bill Mulder's home at a point of family crisis. He reaches out to his dad, to embrace him, and is bluntly cut off my his father's stiff offer of a handshake. In *End Game, Mulder must face his father with the news that he's traded the Samantha clone for his partner. Bill Mulder shows no emotion or compassion for the overwhelming distress this has obviously caused his son; he simply stands at Mulder's door stone-faced and pokes his son's already raw wound by saying, "Do you know what this will do to your mother, losing her again?", as if it wasn't his fault that Samantha was taken in the first place. What father would lead--or allow--his son to believe this terrible family situation was his fault? In spite of everything, Mulder goes straight to his father's house in *Anasazi, after his father has called sounding strangely desperate. If his father is ready to open up, to let him in at this point, Mulder is ready; he shows no hesitation or bitterness over the past. It is, in essence, his chance to see his father become the man he has always expected--hoped--he would be, the layers of that other, uncaring man finally stripped away.

Scully's family, too, deals with expectations, though in a different way. The expectations here are that family members will tread socially accepted paths to socially accepted goals of success and respectability. As Bill says to Scully in *Gethsemane, " we have a responsibility to the people in our lives." My own sense of this was that he meant, beyond the general sense of helping your family members, a responsibility to be something the rest of them could be proud of, a requirement that Scully can never fulfill while working with the FBI's Most Unwanted. Scully has been so indoctrinated into her family's particular world of expectations that she often insists to crime victims, in the early episodes, that the government would never overstep it's boundaries and force its way into people's private lives. Eventually, of course, she learns that the government has been claiming many liberties with the lives of its citizens. Remember her words of disillusionment in *Redux: "Mulder, these men! You give them your faith and you're supposed to trust them with your life!"

The extent of Scully's acceptance of her family's expectations is such that it made her agonize over switching from medicine as a career to the FBI. More than anything, she wanted her father's approval. We see very little of William Scully, but in the initial short scene at the beginning of *Beyond the Sea, he asks her how work is going and she answers that it's going well, but you can see this immediate wall of tension form between the two of them. After her father dies, Scully's immediate and most pressing emotional need is to know if he was at all proud of her. Scully has upended her family's expectations by her career choice almost as certainly as Melissa upended them by shunning traditional paths.  [At a point of consideration beyond the grave, though, William Scully reconsiders his automatic acceptance of the conventional male/military premise that his fulfillment and satisfaction in life would come from his career. When he appears to Scully in a vision as she lays near death in *One Breath, he tells her that he would gladly give up all his awards and commendations in exchange for just one more second with her--a single breath.] 

Jeffrey Spender is yet another character we see motivated by his expectations of family rather than the reality in front of him. He is bitter about his father's abandonment of the family and the effect he believes it has had on his mother, yet when he finds his father again, even though he turns out to be the ominous Cigarette Smoking Man, Spender is eager to reconnect, to establish some common ground and prove himself to this newfound parent. He is willing to go so far as to endure his father's searing words "You pale to Fox Mulder" as well as the physical humiliation, and yet show up to do his father's next bidding, even when the prospect disturbs him. When he learns from Alex Krycek that his father is actually the power behind the medical experiments perpetrated on his mother over the past 25 years, he is shaken to the core. No amount of loyalty or effort on Jeffrey Spender's part will turn CSM into the father Jeffrey Spender wishes him to be. 

Even CSM himself is not immune from the pull of family expectations. In a monologue in this episode, he notes that when Jeffrey Spender realized what the situation truly was, "he turned not to me, as a father" but to Mulder. No way he has ever deported himself, and no way he has treated his son, should lead CSM to believe that Jeffrey will confide in him, and yet he is caught up in the familiar expectation/hope that Jeffrey, as his son, should have come to him first.

SCIENTIFIC EXPECTATIONS 
Scully is the character most obviously affected by the fact that her expectations of evidence and circumstances fall short of solving or explaining the phenomena she and her partner find before them. Scully has taken the tenets of physical science to heart: she believes what she can measure, test, quantify and prove to scientific standards, and rejects evidence or explanation that would lead to other conclusions, especially at the beginning of her partnership with Mulder. Her abduction, for instance, makes no sense to her, and so she refuses to delve into what it might mean, preferring to push it wrapped and sealed into some dark corner of her mind. Her diagnosis of cancer comes with no hope of successful treatment by medical science, so she resigns herself to her impending death, seeing no other avenues of hope (as opposed to Mulder, whose trust in 'extreme possibilities' leads him always to press on, believing that somehow--somewhere--he will find an answer.) Gradually though, Scully is presented with too many things unexplainable by science to be able to easily reject them out of hand, especially when she has experienced many of these things personally. Changing a world-view is risky business; it leaves you naked and vulnerable until you've built up a new structure to shelter you, and yet Scully is gradually doing this. Her expectations about how the universe behaves have simply not explained what she has experienced.

The viewers, too, as well as other 'bystanders' within the show, are continually bombarded with situations that do not mesh with their expectations. Some, like the lumber company foreman in *Darkness Falls, pay for their blind refusal to change the expectations with their lives. Others, like AD Skinner who admits to having had an out-of-body experience in Vietnam that he 'can't look beyond', secretly admire Mulder's courage in facing the unknown. The viewer, of course, can merely walk away from the TV set, shrug, and say, "It's only a TV show." But in reality, all of us suffer to some degree from this tendency to operate on expectations instead of realities, and our dependence on them can be every bit as damaging to us as it is to the characters in The X-Files.

PROFESSIONAL EXPECTATIONS
It is interesting to note how glowingly CSM speaks of the Project, how he characterizes it as noble and good, how he speaks of the scientists with apparent great respect. Dr. Openshaw, especially, has done the real research that has made a human-alien hybrid a reality after all this time, and yet at the hospital, CSM displays no hesitancy about killing his old colleague so that he can't be interrogated about his work or the incident in the train yard. He also admits, farther on in his apparent monologue, that he has killed to keep his colleagues unknowing about the importance of his ex-wife to the Project's research. The expectation here of some sort of code of ethics within the Consortium is replaced by a de facto code that CSM readily admits to be treachery ("Treachery is the inevitable result of all affairs," he says.) And yet, the members of this continuously treacherous group are regularly seen to be indignant over the discovery that they have been double-crossed, ,whether by Krycek or the aliens, their ingrained expectations having gotten the better of them. 

CSM, in this regard, walks into what could easily become another trap based on expectations ("you've never betrayed me") when he confides in Diana Fowley and asks for her help. He should know from past experience with the type of people he deals with that none of them can be trusted. Just because Diana hasn't yet betrayed him, or because he hasn't discovered that she has, offers no certainty that she won't in the future. CSM of all people should be the most distrustful, but in this case his own desperate need for a collaborator blinds him to what may seem obvious to the rest of us. He wants to trust her, just as Mulder wants to believe in the reality of alien life.

CSM also falls victim to his own professional expectations in the discovery that he is unable to kill his ex-wife Cassandra, even though the future of the project depends upon it. He has come to expect that he can and will do anything to advance the Project and that he is immune to standard human weaknesses like sentiment, which only compromise people in the end, the way Mulder's concern for Scully's well-being can be twisted into a means of controlling him.  And yet in this instance even this cold human--evil incarnate as far as the X-Files universe is concerned--finds himself tripped up by his own expectations, curiously subject to human emotion, which may prove his undoing. He is, in the end, not 'who he is'--or at least, not who he thought he would be.

Finally, Dr. Openshaw, as a physician, is first presented to us viewing Cassandra Spender and holding her hand tenderly. The other doctor comments that she must seem like an old friend, and Openshaw agrees. Here we have the typical expectations of a doctor regarding his patient--care, protection, healing. Yet later we learn--even if we didn't catch it in the confusion of the train car scene--that he and CSM had an agreement to kill her in order to ensure that she wouldn't spread word of the Project and what they had accomplished.

EXPECTATIONS CONCERNING KRYCEK 
Have you had your expectations of Alex Krycek upended lately? There seems to have been enough evidence given lately to shake up your perception of our perennial bad guy, beginning with that little visit he makes to Mulder's apartment in *The Red and the Black. Why did he give Mulder the information about the alien rebel and where he was being held? Why did he imply that Mulder must be the one to help save the world? And what was that kiss on the cheek about? (Seemed like a great way of shaking Mulder up--getting his attention--from where I sit.) 

In this episode we see Krycek essentially running the meeting of Consortium members. How and why has he worked himself back into this position of confidence, and apparently into the confidence of CSM? Why did he go into the Consortium man's house after Jeffrey Spender?  Did he realize that Spender wasn't capable or skilled enough to carry out CSM's orders? Did you notice that he calls Spender 'Jeff'--the only one who's ever accorded him that much respect?  (It occurred to me long ago that the selection of the name 'Jeffrey' for this character could be a reflection on his emotional immaturity.  Jeffrey, at least to me, seems very much the name of a little boy.) Krycek, in essence, seems to be addressing him as another adult and not as a child. Krycek also seems to want to project some compassion for what Spender is going through in this situation. He realizes that what he's just seen--the killing of the alien rebel disguised as a Consortium member--shatters the very foundation of Spender's world (or expectations--there it is again), and he comments on what a very shocking thing it is to witness for the first time. To be sure, Krycek gets good strategic mileage out of letting Jeffrey Spender in on his father's controlling role in what has been happening to his mother over so many years, but I wonder whether something else may be at play, too--whether Krycek sees in Spender an echo of what his own life with the Consortium has been, where he's been used, scorned and tossed aside, just another initiate with high expectations that the Elders see only as disposable manpower.

What also interested me was Krycek's blatant spilling of the beans in the Consortium meeting (mentioning the vaccine as a way to fight back against the invaders) when he seems to be aware of--almost playing to--the rebel disguised as one of the Elders.  And CSM finally, sharply cutting him off; he, too, seemed to know that their 'colleague' was actually a rebel.

MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS
Jeffrey Spender: 
I kept watching and wishing Spender were more three-dimensional. His character is so pitifully awkward, and though pitiable in some instances, ultimately non-sympathetic. He's immature, his capture of Mulder and Scully in the basement hallway, for instance, the epitome of a child rejoicing over two hated schoolmates getting caught. He shows himself incapable of following through on what CSM wants him to do. He's done virtually nothing with the X-files while he's been in charge of them and stubbornly refuses to believe they have any real value. I do feel sorry for him in many instances; he's definitely had a hard life and is presented with a lot of very difficult things to digest. Ultimately, though, he still makes me squirm. As I said, at first I thought it was two-dimensionality, but then I realized I've known people like this, people who can never quite make it, who get in the way of their own success, who seem to present no solid redeeming characteristics to make the rest of us sympathize. 

The presentation of CSM's seeming monologue:
I like the way this was set up. It was much more effective than having the audience realize from the outset that he was talking to Diana Fowley. 

A recurrent idea:
Near the beginning of his 'monologue', CSM says "The end is as unimaginable as your own death or the death of your children." It's this last part that stands out to me. Does it refer to something specific? Openshaw, just before his death, reiterates by saying that "no man should live long enough to see his work or his children destroyed." That one keeps sticking with me like a thorn.

Technical points:
-I liked the effect of the quickly-healing laser-cut across Cassandra's stomach. Nice work there.
-I loved the green jello! Great way to start that scene.

Mulder and Scully:
We saw evidence again of the softening Mulder has gone through in regard to Scully; his tone is very often quite soft where in the past it might have been harsh or contentious. He definitely does not want to attack this woman, no matter how they may disagree in interpreting evidence or motivations. 

We see a lot of evidence of Scully doing the digging for evidence here while Mulder shoots baskets. I think this is another instance of the way they function like pistons, one up when the other is down. At this point, I think Mulder is in a temporary limbo. They are being thrown out of the Bureau and where does that leave him? Sometimes it takes a while to regroup mentally--the same phenomenon any one of us may have experienced after a heavy push of studying for finals and then all of a sudden when the last one is over...what do you do? All the intense, familiar up-close-in-your-face markers are suddenly swept away and you have to begin again from scratch and reinvent your life. (And remember, this job is Mulder's whole life; we still see him sitting at his desk late at night in the otherwise deserted bullpen.) Also, Mulder's reticence to take the 'not exactly an offer' from Jeffrey Spender re looking into this mother's disappearance stems from the realization, as he states clearly to Scully, that it's just too convenient a setup, that the Bureau is just waiting for an opportunity to catch him at something and throw him out. And he's not about to bite.

Scully, for her part, is motivated to dig into this case because it offers her a possible way of finding out exactly what happened to her when she was abducted, so she provides the investigative muscle that propels them forward in their knowledge while Mulder is mentally 'sidelined'. 

In the end, Mulder must decide quickly to take action of one sort or another when Cassandra Spender shows up at his apartment begging him to kill her in order to keep the invasion from beginning. This scene seems to me very analogous to the one I related in my post "Skinner as Vietnam Vet", of the soldier faced with two napalmed children running at him. While Scully's gut instinct--like the reporter's in that account--is to preserve the life of the apparent and immediate victim (Cassandra) Mulder, like the soldier, realizes that conventional logic may not bring the desired result here, and that circumstances may force him to do what she asks.

Nuanced acting:
Lots of it here, in everyone from Jeffrey Spender to CSM to Krycek to--of course--Mulder and Scully. Gillian did a great job with Scully's puzzlement over Mulder's inertia, and her immediate concern in the darkened room in the hospital when Cassandra mentions Samantha to Mulder.  She immediately looks to him, knowing how the reference will affect him and wondering what Cassandra's motivation may be in mentioning it. David, for his part, was completely transparent as a Mulder deeply affected by his father's involvement in the evils of the Project. In the end, who needs dialog when you can speak so eloquently with your face?

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