Dr. B., I have to agree to your points here. I think she was deeply fearful of being stalked, and her tears in the church were not gratitude for his understanding. I think she's quite horrified that someone has been able to observe and decipher her life in this way and to predict her movements such that he actually *brought her to that place. This is Scully, after all. She wants to decide who knows what about her and when. Why would she be glad to have a stranger take that away from her? What have we seen in her character that would lead us to think that? And, after the encounter, his writing shifts from observation and analysis to manipulation of her character, reflecting his own surrender to narcissistic obsession. The two quotes Hobrock has kindly supplied show the contrast. The first ("She was a marshal of cold facts. Quick to organize, connect, shuffle, reorder and synthesize their relative hard values into discrete categories. Imprecision would only invite sexist criticism that she was soft, malleable, not up to her male counterparts...") seems really to get into her head; the second ("...But if she'd predictably aroused her sly partner's suspicions Special Agent Dana Scully herself was simply aroused. All morning the stranger's unsolicited compliments had played on the dampened strings of her instrument until the middle 'c' of consciousness was struck square and resonant. She was flattered...") is Padgett's fantasy gone awry. Look at how much more florid the language of the second is, as if the very words are less true as the thoughts are less true and more wishful.

Her encounter with Padgett in the apartment reminded me of the scenes in Beyond the Sea with Boggs. She is there not because she is lonely, IMO. She is fascinated that he can know these things and wants the key to it. Hers is an almost morbid fascination one that offers a thrill of danger balanced by her ever-rational wariness. (And as he reassures her, "You have a gun, right?")

I also agree, Dr. B, on the "Agent Scully is already in love." My guess is that he is primed to figure this out from the gesture she makes in the cell. As a writer he is concerned with what works in his story, what doesn't. As we see later in his encounter with his villain, he knows that something is not working, something is forced. I'm going to hazard that this is in his mind in the prison (after all, he has already written the pretzel ending, he has already seen the encounter in his apartment not work the way he had imagined). Coming just at that moment, the gesture tips him off to what he had missed earlier, that she has already made a commitment in her own mind, but that she keeps it so well-hidden that all his previous observation had not allowed him to put it together. His power to observe her seems astounding; it is when he tries to make her into someone else that loses the touch.

Finally, a question I am pondering: Who is the comment "Agent Scully is already in love" directed at? Stated in the third person, aren't we supposed to think that it is directed at Mulder? I'm wondering about this. If it was told to Mulder, was it because Padgett saw in him a like soul in his ability to probe character? Was it a one-up, "I figured this out, you didn't"? Was it an apology for what he supposed Mulder had read in the book? Was it a gift to Mulder (and Scully) that he knew Scully could not give directly?