The Cave's X-Files
Commentary Archives: Episodes: Emily
Title: In the wings: Mulder in *Emily Author: LoneThinker
For as much as the action in 'Emily' involves Scully
most directly, I found myself more and more conscious of Mulder in this
episode. He sees the pain Scully is in and he longs to be able to
comfort her the way she has so often filled the empty spaces in his own
life. Beyond that, he has lived this experience himself. He, too, has
lost a little girl in his life. He has also been confronted with the
disturbing scenario in which someone he though was blood kin turned out
to be a human-alien hybrid. No one in the world understands the
situation Scully is in better than her partner, and yet in spite of her
conscious desire (as related to the social worker) not to continue to
hold others at emotional arms-length, Scully continues throughout this
episode to shut her partner out.
In one respect, Scully cannot help herself; the habit is simply too deeply engrained. In addition,
she is the person on whom this tragedy is focused, and the fact is that when you are in this position (been here, done this) you simply cannot afford to fall apart. Others around you may have the luxury of doing so, but if you are going to get through the tragic experience when it is happening to
you, you just can't lay down in the middle of the road and wait for whatever may come, because you're almost guaranteed to get run over. I think Scully distrusts her ability to pull the pieces of her armor back together to shield herself against the world if once she lets them down for anyone, including
(or perhaps especially for) her partner. I don't believe she is unaware or unappreciative of his desire to help her; it is simply an offer she cannot afford to accept.
Mulder is left, in consequence, to do what he can to ease Scully's way from behind the scenes. But we can read his anguish as he watches what she goes through--knows all too well what she's going through--and yet strives to stay in the wings. Perhaps the gift he gives that she can most appreciate is just this: that he stays back and doesn't press her to accept his help.
But he does so at an emotional cost to himself. We can see this when he first enters the room where Scully is watching Emily play. He stops and has to steel himself for what is to come before he can approach them. Being accustomed to reading clues, he realizes almost immediately what Emily means to Scully when he sees Emily wearing Scully's cross. This must be particularly poignant for him, since he wore
Scully's cross himself when she was missing. Emily is an unknown quantity to him as a personality, and as far as that goes she seems marginally responsive to those around her. But she is not an unknown quantity on a broader canvas. Mulder knows where she has come from--that Scully's eggs were harvested for the purpose of creating hybrids like the Samanthas he met in Colony and the Kurt Crawfords working to save their mothers in Memento Mori. And he knows that she has been created to serve a purpose,
one that does not include being allowed to grow up as a normal little girl in the company of a loving mother. Mulder realizes at the outset that not only will Emily not be allowed to have the life Scully envisions for her, but that whatever does happen will undoubtedly bring Scully pain and heartache. This is why
he appears somewhat brusque when he asks Scully why she didn't call him sooner, and when he asks her, "But who's going to protect YOU?" As he says later, referring to Scully's ongoing effort to adopt Emily, "I should have declined, if I never wanted to see you hurt or harmed in any way." But of course he completely understands Scully's feelings for her daughter; if the child were his, I can see him following the exact same path.
So he does come to speak on his partner's behalf, and defends her to the judge by saying that nobody has the right to stand in the way of giving Scully custody of her own daughter.
Mulder walks a careful line throughout this episode, striving to help Scully whenever possible, backing off enough not to crowd her, never confronting her with her obvious need for comfort. Because Scully needs the support, Mulder goes with her to Bill's house, though we can be sure he would rather be almost anywhere else than at the home of this brother who despises him so vehemently. When the mysterious phone call comes, Mulder immediately puts a trace on it. When they discover Emily ill in her bed at the Children's Center, the worker goes to call 911, but Mulder picks Emily up, a more immediate (and personal) expression of help. He confronts Dr. Calderon ("I want everything to help that little girl!"... and, though he does not say so, her mother.) He shadows the mysterious doctor and investigates the elderly women who turn out out to be the birth mothers. He offers to stay with Scully when she knows for certain that Emily is dying (and I believe he sees this as an offer, as well as a way to save Scully the embarrassment of having to ask if she does feel the need to have him there.)
In the end, of course, there is nothing he can do to save Emily; he can only continue to offer himself to her mother, the partner for whom he would do anything, who finds herself unable to accept his comfort. "Alone, as ever" are her words from the opening soliloquy, and yet the aloneness is clearly the product of the wall she constructs herself. (The only time she has actively tried to take down this wall was for Emily, who offered the promise of a child's unconditional love, a love that doesn't judge you the way adults often do, or as members of her family have done in the past. But that opportunity gone, the wall is in place once more to shield what she considers her too-soft interior self from the hurt of personal involvement.) Mulder, still striving to offer her what he can, says softly, "You found her. You were able to love her. Maybe she was meant for that, too." Though she may find herself unable to acknowledge it, I'm sure Scully is not unaware of her partner's support, and that she is grateful for it.
Great credit goes to David in this episode for repeatedly showing us Mulder's pain and frustration without the need for words: his hesitation on first entering the room at the Children's Center, the way he purses his lips when Scully says she'd like to be alone, the discomfort he goes through when she is about to open Emily's casket. Perhaps most telling is the way he reacts when the doctor asks if he and Scully are Emily's parents. He forces himself to get out of the way, to leave her clear to speak with the doctor, and yet there is this... something, almost indefinable, as he looks through the window into the room where Emily is, a sudden surge of something inside him saying yes, he would like to be more to this woman, something closer, if only she would open that too-sealed door and let him in the way he has welcomed her into his own private inner self.
