The Cave's X-Files
Commentary Archives: Episodes: Memento Mori
Post: New thoughts From: LoneThinker (aka bardsmaid)
For as many times as I've seen this pivotal episode, I have a few
new/different thoughts on it having now watched it with a Season 6
perspective.
It's interesting to look back and see, in contrast, how much Scully seems
to have loosened up since this episode where her fight to control the
emotions going on in and around her is so obvious. She has cancer, but
tellingly--for herself as much as anyone else--she informs only Mulder at
first. Never one to probe the messy or confusing aspects of her life, I'm
not sure she has realized until this moment just how significant her
partner is to her in the larger realm of life outside their immediate work
assignments. "I have come to trust no other," she writes in her diary.
She does not tell her mother about her condition until it's absolutely
necessary. This may reflect the same effort at emotional control she
displays when explaining her condition to Skinner...and as far as that
goes, in the clinical detachment she uses when explaining the x-rays to
Mulder, as if they displayed evidence of someone else's condition. She
doesn't want sympathy, partly because she legitimately doesn't want to be
fussed over, but also because she has a hard time keeping the
strong-Scully armor in place when people show it (consider the force of
her, "quit staring at me!" when she gets the bloody nose in the alley
where Kurt Crawford is caught.) To her credit, I think part of Scully's
reticence to tell her mother is an attempt to hold off until the last
possible moment the obvious pain this news will cause (I don't know
whether this phenomenon is obvious to anyone else, but if you've ever been
the bearer of really bad news, you know from feeling it yourself
that it's just going to hit the hearer over the head like a 2x4, and who
could look forward to that?)
Mention needs to be made of David's wonderful acting here--the
dumbfounded, floundering, uncomprehending reaction of someone told
something they never expected to hear. His timing and hesitancy are
perfect. And yet I hadn't considered until this viewing that Mulder must
be viewing the whole unfolding of events from this point forward as a
huge, hollow echo of something he has experienced before, that slowly but
surely Scully will be leaving him--will be taken away from him--in the
same inexorable way that Samantha was taken, never to return. Imagine the
burden this must place on him. You can see his worry in the way he paces
in the background while Scully tells Skinner about her condition; his
concern spills into the gentle voice he uses with Scully when he takes her
aside in Betsy Hagopian's basement; his anger at the whole situation
explodes in the slamming of the file cabinet drawer (though he doesn't
betray any of this in his conversation with her on the phone.)
What stood out to me this time (yet another nod to Littljoe's
'Calling Out in the Dark')
is that Scully's skepticism ("...there is about zero chance of survival")
comes from her dependence on science, and on the worldview she has.
Science has told her there is no hope, no possibility of surgery, little
hope of effective treatment, and she prepares from the outset (in the
monologue) to resign herself to approaching death.
Mulder, by contrast, continues to dig
feverishly for evidence. In typical Mulder fashion, he will not give up
hope if there is any avenue unexhausted. He refuses to give up. He is, as
always, relentless. And in the same way that he will follow anyone
offering even a shred of hope of finding his sister, no matter how
improbable or dangerous, he goes so far in this quest to save his partner
as to attempt to deal with CSM. Scully, knowing Mulder at least as well as
he knows himself, admonishes him in the diary that he must never think
there was something he could have done to save her, and she tells him this
not only because she herself sees no possibility, but because she is
painfully aware of the anguish his perceived failure would cause him.
But Scully sees no hope, no way out, looking through the now-dismal lens
of science. So she sits with Penny Northern, begins treatment with Dr.
Scanlon, and finally tells her mother what is happening to her. Her
natural inclination would be to avoid the emotional turmoil of this
situation, to close it up tightly in a mental jar and put it far back on a
high shelf, out of sight. But this is the ultimate trauma: it is terminal
and she knows she must come to terms with it. She needs the
clarity. So she begins the diary, to sort out her thoughts, to make them
real--with shape and depth--to be able to come to terms with them. But she
finds herself talking not to the paper, but to... her partner. It must
take a certain courage on her part to admit--to put in visible, readable
black-and-white--just how important her partner has become to her, for
this is one of those messy, emotional areas she would normally avoid.
Nevertheless, her need outweighs her reticence to face the facts, and she
writes.
But she writes of death, of walking the same dark path as the other
abducted women. There is nothing in her scientific universe to indicate
her fate will be other than theirs. And yet at a certain point, as Penny
nears death and asks Scully to not to give up, to be the one to survive,
something awakens inside her: a desire, a strength. A mission. The
motivation to fight back. It is somehow--necessarily--stronger than her
science, the way the vision she had of Mulder in *Blessing Way was
stronger than her skepticism, strong enough to make her travel to Mulder's
father's funeral and tell his mother with conviction that he would be
alright.
In spite of her new resolution, Penny's death necessarily brings Scully to
a low point. She leaves the room, assuming she's alone, when she hears
Mulder's voice from behind her. She is tired. She is sick. She is torn
with what she has just witnessed, and we can see her desire not to
be seen like this, ragged and vulnerable, but she is too worn to protest.
When Mulder says that he's read her diary, however, she nearly cracks. She
is completely exposed, and her instinct is to draw her cloak around her.
She decides to throw the diary away, in part because she has decided to
fight back, but also because in doing so she is fitting herself with the
strong-Scully armor again and the vulnerability the diary announces, both
to Mulder and to herself, must be sealed up. Even the embrace--a
reassurance that nourishes them both--is ended by Scully detaching, not
Mulder letting go. Love--emotions--make you vulnerable, and Scully cannot
afford any vulnerability.
[The farther we go into Season 6, the more this tight control seems to be
softening. We have seen Scully afraid many times, but in The Ghosts Who
Stole Christmas (TGWSC), she actually admits to being afraid (it
used to be, "I'm fine," and a hurried look away.) Here I think we see a
gain in genuine strength; people hide from what they can't deal with, but
Scully is beginning to be able to face her fears. She is also
beginning to be able to face Mulder. At the end of TGWSC, it is Scully who
makes the first move, who shows up on her partner's doorstep in the last
scene on Christmas Eve. She could have stayed home and finished wrapping
presents, or gone to bed early so she would be up in time for the early
family gathering. But this time she chooses to take a step toward one of
the fire-breathing enigmas in her life, the possibility that her partner
may mean something much more--and much messier--than simply a companion
with whom she investigates extremely well.]
We leave this episode by being brought back to Skinner, to have it
emphasized that Skinner has made a sacrifice nearly beyond comprehension
for our agents. He has, in essence, sold himself to a man he knows could
own him forever in exchange for a promise--a devil's promise--of help for
Scully. Do we really grasp what this man has done? Does he?
Finally, I couldn't help seeing the hallway scene here through the lens of
Littljoe's post mentioned above. Mulder shows his own perceptiveness in
this scene, at a time when his partner is obviously extremely vulnerable,
by speaking directly to her unvoiced fears with his own more
hope-encompassing world view. He knows that behind her newfound hope, her
re-commitment, she has nothing solid to help her hold the ground she is
gaining/will gain. "No matter what you think as a scientist or a doctor,"
he begins, "there is a way, and you will find it, to save
yourself." Here is Mulder making Scully whole, wrapping her in the warmth
of his own hope when her own has turned to tatters.
