#also would being an fbi agent mean knowing how to develop film for the job?

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

s1 episode 6 thoughts

this was definitely my favorite episode so far! i really enjoyed it. i thought the concept was compelling and well-executed. i'm a sucker for unsolved cases involving paranormal evidence as a trope.

now within the first 5 seconds our duo walked into the screen i once again noticed that mulder is physically incapable of keeping his hands off the small of scully's back. i am simply noting this fact and certainly drawing no conclusions from it!

he put on his glasses for a split second and it was a very good look. but then of course they were spy glasses! classic trickster. also loved his insistence he's not a liar but instead "a willful participant in a campaign of misinformation" very fox coded for a guy named... fox

he also did NOT have to pull her in like that for the fingerprint reveal on the glasses but. this is becoming a recurring motif. they Will be touching.

in referring to the idea of psychokinetic powers scully compares it to the book/movie carrie. we love a well read queen! she seems like she would read the book and THEN watch the movie and talk at length about the differences.

upon reaching the door of the potentially psychic girl, mulder displayed his bountiful social skills by asking if they could come in and then not waiting for an answer at all. i love a man who is off-putting.

(for those who have been around in this fandom longer than me: was mulder initially seen as a cool guy? because to me he is deeply nerd coded)

also when scully reached back for his hand while she was looking through the records...... yeah. side note i wish those contraptions were still easily accessible! it's become a pain to access microfilm. bring it back. and let them clasp hands.

mulder casually saying that only one man has faked his death and that man is elvis is not acknowledged at all so i want to acknowledge it here. he also did an elvis impression while saying this. again. did the kids think this man was cool.

when scully came in with the emotional play, telling the girl that she has to use the spectral evidence to take down the man that killed her loved one, i was shocked! even more so when she told mulder that it was more important to bring justice to the case than find evidence of paranormal activity. i'm team scully here. i like that they stepped away from making her just the Logic and Facts queen. give her some emotions as a bonus! we CAN write complex female characters if we set our minds to it!

mulder is soooo funny wanting to see the liberty bell after all of that... truly never beating the nerd allegations (i assume that he was paranormally influenced in this decision due to the repeating ben franklin quote shown as significant to the murdered man, but still. this is very funny. his Tourist Mode Activated)

and last but not least, the girl that was the guest star for the episode looked so much like my friend i was shocked. perhaps this contributed to my high ranking. that is Literally the power of friendship!

[kateeorg]

National Treasure Edge of History - Positives (And Some Minor Gripes) Up to 1x06

Okay, so here's the thing.

I've really been liking this show so far. I think a lot of the jokes are funny and the main mystery is fascinating, and I love that we are tackling more of the Americas (although... that does in a way subvert the title "National Treasure"... but I'll let it slide).

Also, I mean, we got Riley back. Do you see me complaining about more Riley?

But...

At this point, I think the series should have been shorter.

Now maybe this is just me being an adult who saw the first National Treasure as a kid, but I think this style of family-friendly mystery action adventure works better in the short-form than the long-form, at least when adult characters are in the lead.

In the short form of a 2+ hour movie, it's easy to get swept up in the adventure and the mystery, with just enough character development to want to root for the good guys and against the bad guys. You're maybe one step ahead of the characters, but only just. It's easier to overlook how overly simple some of the clues are for the adult characters to figure out, because this is made for viewers of all ages.

But in the long form of the series, I'm finding it harder to overlook some of these flaws.

Like, how could Agent Ross not look into the male nurse first thing after she realized Sadusky may have been murdered?! I called that early on. And the love triangle really feels unnecessary at this point, though I'm happy to be proven wrong later on. Oren and Tasha encouraging Ethan and Jess to do the dance in a place where they weren't supposed to be drawing attention to themselves?! Why??? And how could Jess go from having learned her lesson about jumping to conclusions... to almost immediately jumping to conclusions again. About the same guy. When she was the one who was running late because she was dancing?

It's all manufactured to increase the tension across a longer run. But it means the audience (or at least I myself, as an audience member) is quite a few more steps ahead of the characters in terms of tropey plots, which can get frustrating to watch.

The saving grace here is them fleshing out the villains and using a mystery that doesn't draw on commonly-known history for most American audiences (Because "Valley Forge" as a passcode in the super secure National Archive in the first film is, in retrospect, a bit on the nose). And that wouldn't have happened if this was just a movie.

I also do like the vibe that our main group, save Liam, all have a shared history. Ben and Riley were great, but they only got to know each other through the job, they didn't grow up together. That vibe gives us some nice moments and chemistry between characters, which with the performances fleshes out these broadly-drawn characters. And I like that we're exploring what it means to be an American from other perspectives than in the original series - Ben is an idealist and we love that for him, but people like Jess and Tasha have different experiences, and that colors how they approach the treasure hunt.

I'm also exicted to see Jess and Agent Ross to meet again, once everything is on the table. There are some fascinating parallels between the two: young, intelligent women with something to prove. Agent Ross is what Jess likely would have been if her background wasn't in the way: An FBI agent. But Ross is still a fresh recruit with her own struggles to overcome. Ross didn't take Jess seriously when they first met, only to follow Jess's tracks and uncover what happened to Sadusky. And considering how much Sadusky looked out for Ben in the films, it'd be nice to see Ross take that role for Jess, maybe pull some strings to get Jess a citizenship.

It doesn't feel like a carbon-copy of the films, and I like that. There's enough of a similar vibe that they are clearly related, but still feel like their own things. I just wish they'd tone down on some of the "hip modern" dialogue and the character drama a bit, drop certain plot bombs a bit sooner so the audience isn't too far ahead of the characters.

Thoughts?

[where-theres-smoak-2]

Future Episode Titles

 So I have just discovered that the episode titles for 5x10 through 5x13 have been released so I figured and see if there are any clues as to what might happen in those episodes. All of these titles are in reference to various movies so be warned there are spoilers for all the movies the titles have. So if you see the name of movie and don’t want to be spoiled stop reading. 

With 5x10 we’ve got a bit of an advantage as we also have the synopsis for that one. But the title is ‘The Pincushion Man’ the title is a reference to a 1935 animated short film. It is also known as ‘Balloon Land’. The story is set in a land where everyone and everything is made of balloons. Two young balloon children are given the warning to beware the Pincushion Man who lives in the forest. The Boy and Girl don’t heed the warning and travel into the woods where they end up leading the Pincushion man back to Balloon Land. He pops a load of the residents before he is finally brought down by the army. So I actually have alot of theories around this one. Obviously in Riverdale I think the Pincushion man is going to represent a serial killer, in the cartoon when he pops the residents he essentially kills them. But who in the episode could be the Pincushion Man. I mean we have a couple of serial killers at the moment. There’s the Truck Killer, TBK and even potentially The Mothman, though we don’t know for sure if they are killing people. So which one could be presented as the Pincushion Man. Well I don’t think its any of them or rather it could be all of them. The Pincushion Man could be more of the idea of a s serial killer terrorizing a town and so could be represented by a number of different characters/ killers. I actually think it could also be in reference to either Chic or Charles or both of them. The synopsis says that Betty and Alice get unexpected visitors and my theory is that this is Charles and Chic. I also think there are clues in that short film that support this theory though obviously like with all the titles that Riverdale episodes share with films I don’t think they will follow the plot exactly but there might some common themes or symbolism.

 Like I said the Pincushion Man is lead to the town by a young boy and girl. In the episode 9 synopsis it says Betty has to make a difficult decision, which if you read my previous post I said that I thought that she would find out that Charles worked on cases relating to the the Truck Killer and is trying to decide on whether to reach out to Charles. It’s also worth noting that in this episode we know from released stills that Betty and Jughead will be interacting and maybe even investigating together. So as Charles is brother to them both Jughead might also be involved in reaching out to Charles. In this scenario Betty and Jughead would be the boy and girl that leads the killer to town whilst trying to escape. Also the title of episode 9 is Destroyer. There is a 2018 film of the same name. This film is about a detective who ends up investigating a case from their past and a criminal that re-emerges after 16 years. Again this could support my theory of Charles’ old cases being reopened as the killer has reappeared. Also in the film the law enforcement officers (a LAPD officer and an FBI agent who are partners working undercover) investigating the crime fall in love and decide to legitimately join in on the crime. Again this to me seems really similar to Charles and Chic with Charles being an FBI agent who becomes a criminal. 

Going back to the 1935 short film, another reason why I think the Pincushion Man might be in reference to Charles is because in the short film the Pincushion Man gains entry through the gate and into the town through hypnosis. He hypnotises the guard at the gate to gain entry. We know that Charles has an interest/ skills in hypnosis.  

But there is something else that is interesting. In the short film the Pincushion Man is finally stopped by the army. The synopsis talked about how Archie’s former general shows up in town with some surprising news. Now I do have a theory that its to do with the Military Base outside of Riverdale but now I have another theory on what it could be. There is a department called the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command aka CID. Now I am not going to pretend I’m an expert on this department but I did some research and what they basically do is investigate felony crimes where the Army is or may be a party of interest. So maybe the surprising news is that the Army or someone in the army is being investigated by the CID in Riverdale. We know that both Archie and Betty were doing stunts for episode 10 and I’m pretty sure this might be the episode Archie is wearing a Kevlar vest so we know its likely to be a pretty action packed episode. So maybe the FBI and CID investigate together. As to who they might be investigating I think it could be one of two. Either Eric Jackson really goes off the deep end and does some crazy stuff. Or it could still be to do with the military testing theory that Pop’s had.  

Episode 5x11 is titled Strange Bedfellows. This again could reference a 1965 film of the same name. In this one a couple impulsively get married then when they realise they have nothing in common and always fight they separate. Seven years later they reunite to finalise their divorce and end up rekindling things. The next day they are right back to fighting and so decide to carry on with the divorce. But then the male protagonist finds out his promotion relies on him being married. So he woos her back. Meanwhile the female protagonist is constantly getting involved in public protests. To me this just screams Chad and Veronica. So here’s what I think is going to happen. I think Chad and Veronica will have a big bust up in the next episode 5x08. They will end up separating at the end of the episode. Then Chad will reappear in episode 11 to finalize their divorce. We know that in those episodes in between that Veronica will likely continue fighting against her father and working to save Riverdale. I think Hiram will come up with a scheme and will offer Chad this amazing job but will tell him he can only have it if he stays married to Veronica and helps distract her/ keep her away from trying to save Riverdale.   

Episode 5x12 is titled Citizen Lodge. This one is actually really interesting to me. It is obviously to do with the 1941 film Citizen Kane. What’s interesting to me is the film has this theme about trying to solve a mystery/ find the truth but failing. The film is about a man named Charles Foster Kane who on his death bed whispers the words Rosebud before dying. A man is tasked with finding out what the significance of the word Rosebud was. He is never able to solve the mystery and resigns himself to the fact that they will never know the truth. I think this part will be to do with Jughead and his search for the Aliens/ Mothmen. It is worth noting that whilst in Citizen Kane the characters never find out the true meaning of Rosebud the audience does. I think this will be what happens in this episode we will find out something really important about the Mothmen but Jughead and the other characters won’t and maybe they will temporarily give up on finding the truth. It’s the idea that not all things can be explained. 

The other thing that’s interesting about this film is that it is also about the rise and fall of a newspaper magnate. How he rises up from nothing to become one of the most powerful men in his business before then falling back into obscurity. I actually think this will be in reference to Hiram. I have heard some rumours, though to be clear I don’t think this is confirmed, that episode 12 will be a Hiram flashback episode. So I think we will see how Hiram came to be as powerful as he is. But I also think this will be the episode where it either all falls apart for Hiram or at the very least begins to. But I do think Hiram is going to take a drastic hit in this episode. 

So lastly episode 5x13 is titled Reservoir Dogs. Again another film this time from 1992. This one is about a jewellery heist that goes badly wrong and leads those involved to think that one of them is a police informant. Here’s my theories about this one and they could be seen as a little out there but it makes sense to me. We know that Veronica is opening a jewellery store by episode 13 she should have that up and running. I reckon if I am right about Hiram taking a big hit in episode 12 then Veronica probably played a part in that. Hiram is known to take out revenge on her when she gets in the way of his plans like when he had her liquor license cancelled and smashed all the rum she had. So I think he will organise a raid on her jewellery store and this will go badly wrong. Some or more characters might get hurt. As to who might be the part of the police informant well in the film the informant gained the trust of the gang and become friends with one of them, they become really close and have a father/son like relationship and when that friend finds out he is a cop he is naturally devastated at the betrayal of his friend. I actually think Reggie is a double agent and will betray Hiram to protect his friends. Also I think Ted confirmed that episode 12 covers some of Reggie’s backstory so that would line up with this episode if in the one before we get to see how Reggie came to work with Hiram. I mean to me they seem kind of close. Reggie is clearly someone that Hiram trusts and he listens to his advice which we saw last episode when Reggie convinced him to delay the turnpike and let the Coopers search the swamp. To me it would make sense for them to show us how Hiram and Reggie developed a bond in episode 12 and then for us to see it be betrayed in episode 13. In the film major spoiler alert here but I think all but one of the thieves is killed. I am hoping that the story doesn’t go exactly the same way though because if it does it could lead to a situation where Hiram kills Reggie. In all honesty I don’t think they are going to kill a whole bunch of characters like they do in Reservoir Dogs but I could see either Hiram or Reggie dying maybe even both if Riverdale are feeling really ballsy. Personally I really hope that Reggie doesn’t die because I love his character as for Hiram I don’t know if Riverdale will kill him off but I also feel like there’s not much else they can do with his character. I mean we’ve already seen him in jail and we’ve already seen him as a villain about million times by now giving him an emotional death where he’s betrayed by someone he trusts could be a good way of bringing his story to a close. 

 As for who could be representing Mr Pink the only one to survive in the movie and who tries to sneak off with the jewellery I think this could potentially be Chad. In the film its a bit ambiguous what happens to Mr Pink but if you listen closing in the ending scene you can hear him struggling to start the car, and then police yelling at him. It seems to me like he gets arrested but does survive. I think Chad will attempt to get away with the jewellery but will ultimately get caught and sent to jail.

So yeah those are some theories I have based pretty much purely on the titles of the next few episodes and the plots of various movies.                        

[agentelmo]

Post in Which I Talk At Length About A Video Game Couple I Love and How I Wish Mulder and Scully Were Allowed The Same Character Development

I once wrote a really short post about how I wished Mulder and Scully had got a “Nate and Elena” ending.  That being Nate and Elena from the video game series Uncharted.  Spoiler alert for the Uncharted games here, but I was referring to how Nate and Elena were able to successfully adapt their dangerous lifestyles to include a family and settle down and have a child and live a happy life together.

Today I realised there is another huge parallel between these two couples that, again, I wish Mulder and Scully got to experience in the way it was done in Uncharted.

It really says something about the state of the X-Files’ handling of Mulder and Scully’s relationship when a video game of all things does it better!

I’m going to talk a lot about the Uncharted series in this post, so if you’re not down with comparisons to a video game, probably best to turn back now lol.

So in the Uncharted series, Nathan Drake is a treasure hunter and thief.  

Over time we get to learn that Nate isn’t just driven by greed, he’s in it for the adventure and for the discovery.  He genuinely cares about the history and legacy of the artefacts and lost cities he searches for.  

He has several moments of impressive dialogue where he demonstrates that in his heart, he’s more of a historian than a thief.  He reminds me of Mulder in that way.  He can go on and on about any number of historical events and recalls it all with impressive detail in the same way Mulder can talk endlessly about paranormal phenomena, obscure world religions, folklore, myths and legends with the same impressive zeal.

In the first game Nate enlists the help of a journalist called Elena Fisher.  She is a treasure hunter of another sort -- she’s trying to create a historical documentary series and hopes that by helping Nate she will make a huge discovery that will bolster her career.  

She’s not a criminal, but quickly adapts to Nate’s world. In fact, she adapts so well she starts to love it too.  With time, Elena sees there’s more to this man than meets the eye.  She sees how passionate and intelligent Nate is, and that’s when she starts to feel for him romantically.

Over the next few games things are rocky between them.  Elena decides she’s had enough of the danger and illegality of their adventuring lifestyle.  She wants a normal life.  

At the end of the second game, they get married and try to balance their dangerous lifestyles with being a couple, but their opposing moral compasses get between them.  Nate will do just about anything for the next big treasure, illegal or not.  Whereas Elena is more about the righteous cause.  She loves the adventure and the danger as much as Nate does (although she tells herself she doesn’t) and is not above breaking the law, but not for personal gain. 

So of course it doesn’t work.  By the third game they are split up.  Nate can’t seem to leave his old life behind, Elena calls it his “obsession”.  But Nate has been entrenched in this world since he was a child, it’s the only life he’s ever known.

By the end of the third game, Mulder, I mean Nate, recognises that his obsession has put everyone he cares for in danger, that if he keeps going he’s going to lose everything that’s important to him.  He decides he would rather give that life up than lose the people he loves, he puts his wedding band back on and vows to give up treasure hunting for good.  The two of them go try and live a normal life.

Open on the fourth game and the parallels between Nate and Mulder in I Want To Believe are pretty strong.  Nate has managed to keep his promise to leave his old life behind.  He’s holding down a normal job and goes home every night to his wife.  But he’s clearly unsatisfied and bored in this life.  He loves Elena, but everything else has turned grey for him.  He’s existing, coasting along... the passion and drive we once saw in previous games has fizzled out.  He even has a little hidey-hole in the house where he has all his treasure hunting stuff, similar to how Mulder has that office in the unremarkable house with all his clutter and newspaper clippings in it.

It’s at this point in the 4th game that something happens with Nate and Elena that I feel should have happened with Mulder and Scully in I Want To Believe, but didn’t.  

Much like Mulder is by Scully in I Want To Believe, Nate is encouraged by Elena to take on “one last job”.  Scully does this so that Mulder can secure his freedom from being a fugitive, but also because she worries about Mulder living cooped up in a house with only her for company.  

Elena does it because she can tell Nate isn’t fully happy with their normal life together -- something is missing -- so she encourages him to take a semi-legal treasure hunting job with his boss. but he refuses.  Claims he’s happy as a clam.  *cough*

As is the case for Mulder in I Want To Believe, this job becomes more than it started out being and draws Nate completely back into being the criminal treasure hunter he once was.  He does it for noble reasons, but he hides the truth from Elena and she is understandably angry at him when she finds out he lied to her.

In a similar vein, Scully gets upset with Mulder because he is drawn so completely back into being the FBI Agent Fox Mulder, he walks headlong into the darkness of that world and thrives in it.  The normal life they have eked out for each other hanging in the balance.  

In I Want To Believe, Mulder says that this is who he is, this life is a part of himself that he can never truly get away from.  He is meant to be out there, searching.  But he loves Scully more, so is prepared to give it up... and Scully lets him.  

This is why, in a way, it’s not surprising their relationship didn’t last.  Scully doesn’t have the moment Elena does, and she really should have.

In Uncharted 4, Elena reluctantly agrees to help Nate with the mess he’s gotten into.  They partner up again and Nate comments on how he’d forgotten how good she is at this -- the adventuring, treasure hunting life.

Wouldn’t it have been so much better if in I Want To Believe Mulder took on the FBI kidnapping case without Scully’s knowledge, and that he tries to hide it from her, then when she finds out she’s upset but then -- as Scully always does -- reluctantly helps him out.  They start working together again, just like old times, and they rediscover their passion for the work together.  That they realise this life is part of their DNA, they were meant for it, and that in fact, their shared passion was a big part of why they fell in love with each other.

That’s what happens in Uncharted 4.  You see Elena subtly watching Nate as he beams with excited energy and wonder at the discoveries they’re making together.  She sees how he comes to life when he’s out there living this life.

It’s a great scene, and incredible to achieve in a video game.

Anyway, I would have loved to have seen Scully have a similar moment.  Where we see her watching Mulder, almost like she’s falling in love with him all over again as she sees his true self reemerge as he works the case, puts forward theories and uses that beautiful mind of his to make incredible leaps.

In the scene in Uncharted 4, (see above clip) Nate suddenly stops and realises what he’s doing and apologies to Elena.  She tells him its okay and they move on. But in that moment she’s realised something important.  That they can’t live just a normal life.  It’s not just him either, she loves this life too.  She knows that when this is all over, something has to change.

In Uncharted, Nate and Elena don’t go back to their normal lives, they become treasure hunters, but the legit kind.  You know, the type that gets permits and makes documentaries about their exploits.  Elena finally coming full circle in that sense.

I would have loved to have seen Mulder actually verbalise that he got drawn back into that life but that he’s prepared to give it all up because he’d rather have Scully.  But then have Scully tell him no, they can’t go back to a normal life.  That she’s realised too that it’s what they were meant to do.

What an amazing end to I Want To Believe would it have been to see Mulder and Scully return to their basement office?  But without the professional distance.  Maybe Scully walks in there with the professional boundaries up, and suggests it will be just like old times.  But then Mulder stops her, pulls her in for the big kiss scene and tells her not everything will be just like old times.  For them to have the kiss scene in that office would have made that film for me.  

I think that would have been a much more hopeful ending for the pair of them than seeing them on a little boat in the middle of nowhere.  Seeing them get back to being Mulder and Scully again and then fade to black as we see them milling about the office.

So yeah, I wish they’d had that same moment of clarity and realisation that Nate and Elena had.  They ended up back on the X-Files anyway, so doing it in I Want To Believe but in a more emotionally resonant way, where it’s a choice they make for themselves, and not out of some weird sense of necessity against their will as it was in My Struggle I, could have been such a moving ending to I Want To Believe.

Also, lets be real... the MSR would have been freakin’ lit.  lol!

[aion-rsa]

How Clarice Continues Agent Starling’s Story

https://ift.tt/37cOLgW

In 1991 The Silence of the Lambs became a phenomenon; cleaning up at the box office, winning all five major Academy Awards (Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Actress, and Actor) and turning both of its lead characters into overnight icons. But while antagonist Hannibal Lecter has scarcely been away from our screens, the steely yet vulnerable hero of the film, Clarice Starling, only reappeared in the poorly received 2001 sequel Hannibal. Even Bryan Fuller’s cult classic TV adaptation of Thomas Harris’ source material novels couldn’t use Clarice due to complicated divisions of the rights.

But now Clarice is back, headlining a new CBS drama that picks up where The Silence of the Lambs left off and charts the next stages of the young agent’s career. For fans of the film it’s an enticing proposition, albeit one that has to contend with the inverse of the rights situation that plagued Fuller’s show; Clarice can use any character that originated in The Silence of the Lambs, but none from the rest of Harris’ works, meaning that Hannibal Lecter is nowhere to be seen. 

In some ways this is a blessing in disguise, allowing Clarice to chart its own path. The early episodes of the show demonstrate a commitment to Clarice’s point of view, paying tribute to what came before but never losing sight of whose story this is. We sat down with showrunner Elizabeth Klaviter to explore the genesis of the show, how she interpreted Thomas Harris’ world and characters, the challenges of reimagining a beloved icon, and what the series has in store going forward. 

Den of Geek: Seeing Clarice Starling back on screen is a real thrill. Can you talk us through the genesis and development of the series? 

Elizabeth Klaviter: Creators Alex Kurzman and Jenny Lumet both started asking themselves the question, “Where’s Clarice Starling now? What happened to her after The Silence of the Lambs when she was no longer in Quantico? And how did she deal with the trauma of Buffalo Bill’s basement while she was still a cadet?” Jenny is the most obsessed, amazing Thomas Harris fan and has an encyclopedic knowledge of all of his books completely available to her at any moment, just through her brain. It’s incredible. She was like, “I want to know what it looks like if Clarice and Ardelia live together? I want to know if they share shoes? Who does Clarice love? What does that look like? What does she eat for breakfast? How does she go through the world being Clarice Starling?”

So the two of them were really asking themselves that question in a deep and rich way. And then we were in the middle of a feminist revolution with the #MeToo movement and those things intersected. When Jodie Foster talks about reading the script and deciding to take the role, she has said “this is the story of a woman who is saving a woman in a well.” And that was revolutionary. That is revolutionary. It goes against the stories that we’ve heard since the dawn of time, since human beings were telling stories to each other. 

It seemed like the cable space would be the most logical place for the advancement of Clarice’s journey, but David Nevins at CBS was really interested in putting it on network television, where it could shine and be unique. And he said, “if you will be our partner in putting this on network television then we’ll give you guys creative freedom.” And that has definitely been true. They’ve been our true partner; incredibly collaborative, incredibly generous, and really supportive of Alex and Jenny’s vision of the show moving forward.

Outside of The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice has previously only reappeared in the novel/film Hannibal, which is largely built around her getting kicked down again and again. How important was it to you guys to see Clarice have some genuine successes?

One of the most fascinating junctures in a person’s life, but especially a woman’s life, is moving forward from being in school to being a professional. What does that look like? How do you carry yourself? How do you answer the questions of your childhood? How do they inform who you are? And then you get pushback to be maybe a different kind of person, to work harder, or to make sacrifices that maybe you don’t want to make as a professional, let alone an FBI agent who is constantly dealing with morality, ethics, and justice. So, I think that’s a particularly exciting time for a woman’s life.

It translates to the year that we set the show in, in 1993, but also really to today, particularly as it affects both our Clarice storyline, but also Ardelia’s storyline, which grows and becomes much more significant, both in relation to Clarice and also in her own right as the series progresses. In The Silence of the Lambs Clarice was still a student, still studying; she was close to graduation, but she wasn’t there yet. And this is the first time we’re really getting to see the beginning of who she is as an FBI agent. 

This is the second TV adaptation of Thomas Harris’s properties, and Hannibal did garner quite an intense cult following. Did you feel any pressure following not only that series, but also being a direct sequel to one of the greatest films of all time?

Thomas Harris created amazing characters who are complex, who have a variety of drives and nuanced motivations. So I feel like anybody who gets to play in the Thomas Harris sandbox has to A) be a fan, and B) feel the pressure and the responsibility that brings. But there’s another thing that it brings, which is pure joy and delight. 

Read more

TV

Clarice: How Does The Show Compare to Hannibal?

By Gabriel Bergmoser

Everybody who is involved in this show on every level, from our costume designer to our production designer, have all studied in the library of Thomas Harris. And also Jonathan Demme and his extraordinary visuals and filmic language. We really wanted to bring to life all of the textures of Thomas Harris’s work; the opulence, the extraordinary lavish visuals of his imagination, and most importantly, I think, the characters.

On that, let’s talk about Paul Krendler. In the source material Krendler is a lot more overtly slimy and antagonistic towards Clarice, particularly in the novel Hannibal. At least in the first three episodes of the show, he comes off more as a tough but fair boss who Clarice is slowly warming towards. Can you talk a little bit about the change to his character from the text to the show and what the impetus for that was?

I think a lot of it had to do with the question of who we’re spending time with. Certainly fans know where Krendler ends up; we all know his outcome in Hannibal, that his character gets progressively more awful and he ends up having a fitting demise. So we’re putting together this team on the show and have to ask if we want this awful, badly intended character in such close proximity to Clarice while she’s fighting monsters. 

We honor his history having been in the Department of Justice, but now we’ve brought him back to the FBI and given him a backstory that he was formally in that FBI before he went to the DOJ. Then we explored “what drives this man? When is he wrong-headed? And when is he right-headed?” And the answer that we all really enjoyed is, this is a man who is trying to keep his unit safe, who wants everybody to come home tonight. 

That means that Clarice can’t explore this case in the way that she wants to; to just run off and use her intellect to solve the crime and get an audience with the bad guy in a potentially unsafe way. Now she’s in the bigger world, and she’s having to learn what the rules are and how she has to function within them. Now when we talk about Krendler and his future, we’re not certain where we’re going. We don’t know who he will become in seven seasons because we have seven years until he ends up being the man in Hannibal.

So, in the minds of the writers’ room, are the events of Hannibal still off in the future, or is this potentially a re-imagining of where Clarice might have gone next after The Silence of the Lambs?

We don’t have the answer to that question yet. Nothing is out of the realm of possibility right now. We definitely are going to honor Thomas Harris, look at the path and see how it goes. I mean, Ardelia is in the book Hannibal, and there are some really interesting details. She and Clarice end up living together in that book, or not living together, but owning condos that are like a duplex together. And so there are definitely moments of characterization that we draw from, from that book. Then we’ll see where we get. And we should be so lucky that we have seven seasons to fully answer that question.

The show so far moves between more a traditional case of the week stories and this overarching conspiracy plot. How do you work in the writers’ room to balance that? 

It’s my favorite kind of storytelling to have a balance between those two things. I’m a huge X-Files fan, and they definitely had their overarching serialized plot. But the episodes I always responded to the most were the monsters of the week. I’m a sucker for a good monster of the week story. I’m also obsessed with, not just seasons, but series-long arcs for characters; with personal growth and character relationship growth. So, putting those two things together is my personal sweet spot. I feel like as long as the story that you’re telling for your case of the week is truly compelling and you’re honoring where the character journey is, you can organically bring the audience on a journey that includes both. It just takes some attention.

Rebecca Breeds does such a fantastic job as Clarice. Her work feels of a piece with what Jodie Foster did, but also very distinct. Was there a lot of discussion about where the line should be drawn between impersonating Foster but doing something new as well? 

Rebecca had her finger on the pulse of that from, really, her audition. She was stunning. I think it was a last-minute decision for her to add an Appalachian accent. She added the accent and then she said, “I just found Clarice.” And for all of us, the reason why we’re all showing up to work every day is because we’re incredible fans of Thomas Harris’s universe. His novels, yes, but also the movie. Jodie Foster is an incredible actor who gave an incredible performance and really embodied this character. So, honoring Jodie and her performance has always been paramount in all of our minds and yet we need to move forward and fully embrace Clarice as our own. And for us; for Alex, Jenny, myself, and Rebecca, the answer to that question has always been a truthfulness in writing and then a truthfulness in acting. That if the moments are real and genuine and fully present for all of us, then it becomes its own thing. It takes on its own life.

Due to the rights situation Hannibal Lecter is a notable absence, but in some ways a bigger one is Jack Crawford, who fulfilled the mentor role to Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs. Did you feel in any way limited by not being able to use him?

It’s interesting to look at the events of The Silence of the Lambs and the relationship with Crawford purely from Clarice’s point of view. For me, that relationship became caught up in the trauma. I feel like we are honoring his presence in her life, but in a very unpredictable way. When she went to see Hannibal, I feel like she was being given, yes, one of the most exciting opportunities of her life, but also being thrown into the deep end of the pool. And that’s part of what she carries with her. One of the definitions of trauma is “too much too fast”.

Clarice got too much, too fast, and now she’s unraveling that. So to my mind Crawford is a part of that. And that is how we’re paying tribute to him in our show. That’s how we’re thinking of him. And then to your point earlier, I feel some of the more mentor pieces of Crawford have become part of the Krendler character and will grow their relationship. It’ll have a lot of ups and downs, of course. But I think there are pieces of him in her relationship with Krendler.

One of the complex things about the relationship with Crawford is the fact that it is inherently built on an act of manipulation. He sends her in without giving her an agenda so that he can try to coax information out of Lecter. 

And later when she needs back up they’re all the way across the nation. To me, that’s also part of the male gaze. They asked her to go do this thing and then they didn’t listen to her. They just missed a lot of it. The way that has translated into our world is in the exploration of bosses asking young women to do things, and then maybe not listening to all of the answers or the pieces of the answers that are inconvenient for them even though they’re honest and truthful. It’s definitely something that we explore in the series.

Something that’s refreshing about the show is the fact that it’s a period piece but never feels like it’s hitting you over the head with the 90s setting. What kind of discussions did you have about engaging with the time period? 

We talk about it quite a bit. And of course there are all the practical conversations about making sure that the items that we’re using are accurate and the cars for those periods are correct. As we’re moving forward, there are more details that we’re drawing specifically from the FBI in 1993. We talk a lot about how our world view has and hasn’t shifted since 1993. An example would be how does the Waco siege inform the standoff at Novak’s in episode two. Who are these FBI agents, were they at Waco, were their friends at Waco, were they heard at Waco? What were their feelings from there and how did those attitudes inform this? 

Read more

Movies

The Silence of the Lambs and Clarice’s Lifelong Battle Against the Male Gaze

By David Crow

Movies

Hannibal: Did Author Thomas Harris Try to Destroy Dr. Lecter?

By Don Kaye

In the world of the show Ruth Martin is the first female Attorney General, and that creates more pressure for her. And the FBI has a legacy that was started with J. Edgar Hoover, which is filled with white supremacy. It’s hard to succeed there if you aren’t a white man. So, those are ways that it informs it. Lucca De Oliveira (Tomas Esquivel) showed up on-set one day and he called me and he’s looking around and seeing all of our extras being white and said; “it makes me feel so other”. Those are the ways that we started really exploring what it means to be in 1993. And we’re shooting those from the perspective of the non-white characters.

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Going forward, what can fans expect to see from the show? 

We will watch all of our characters get to know each other better and get to know themselves much better, particularly Clarice. Clarice goes on quite a turbulent journey of self-discovery. We really enter very deeply into Clarice’s relationship with Ardelia and what the differences in their worlds are as they’re learning. What it means to be a Black female agent, and what it means to be a white female agent, and how those two things are very different. We get to meet some more monsters and some of those monsters are vanquished quickly within an episode, and some of them will be around with us for the entire season.

The post How Clarice Continues Agent Starling’s Story appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3keOGit

[okimargarvez]

HURT- open wounds

Original title: Hurt.

Prompt: Luke’s dark thought, destiny, contrasted love.

Warnings: sexual content, dark thoughts.

Genre: angst, drama, romantic, smut, dark, mistery, frienship.

Characters: Penelope Garcia, Luke Alvez, BAU team, O.C.

Pairing: Garvez.

Note: multichapter.

Legend: 💏😘😈🔦🐶❗🎈👻.

Song mentioned: La tua vita intera, Tiziano Ferro.

Hurt- Masterlist

MY OTHER GARVEZ STORIES

Chapter 3-

I just I don't want to feel your Judgy McJudgerson looks on me as I daintily sip my Mai Tai.

 He continues to review her serious expression as she pronounces that sentence. The way she had raised and arched eyebrows. How her lips were curled. JJ and Emily hadn't only remained in the background: they were completely gone. There was only her. Her green dress and wacky. Her ample bosom, which seemed on the verge of exploding. Her voice seemed so childish while she strives to convince him of her ability to discern between good (maximum two drinks if the next day there was no work) and evil (drunken driving). Her attempt to stay away, avoid him, but then still question him.

How loud had caught him, the desire, once again?

But he couldn't in this case telling himself the fairytale, that he needed her, to keep his mind off, out of his mind the usual album of horrifying visions. Something slowly was changing (if it already hadn't happened).

And at that time, he wasn't victim of one of his crisis. It was just a natural necessity, physics. Or maybe something more complex, but still nuanced. And at the end of the day, however, the result was that he wanted her. He wanted to be with her, smell her hair, feel her warmth on him. Because he did feel good with her, exactly as (should be) when a mother cuddling her infant.

But the last night he had had the opportunity to enjoy this privilege, he had made a serious mistake. He had said a few words, but already were too many and too heavy. He had always thought, from the first time that his eyes had placed on her, she was very insightful, as well as sensitive, the latter term meant as a "person able to more carefully grasp the nuances of what looking ", in Enlightenment meaning of the XVII century, not only as someone who was brought to suffer and share the feelings of others. And she was both. So, she had definitely understood. And that had compromised the possibility that she would continue to heal him.

It wasn't just his impression. Since that night, the woman had done everything to avoid him, more or less openly. In the eyes of others, nothing had changed. Every now and then they had to talk, but there seemed to be a clear dividing line between what they did and were, when they were with other people, in the workplace, and their sporadic meetings face-to-face. As if they perform roles. But more in the first or in the second case? Or perhaps in both?

 Penelope observes the bottom of her glass, lost in abstruse reflections, up to estrangement from her condition and realize that she had made a double movie quotes: either Godard 2 or 3 choses que je sais d'elle, which Taxi Driver, particularly loved by Derek. But then she gets back in herself.

She can't stop thinking about him. Every night she is plagued by dreams that had never done before. And the worst is that she not only feels a physical need, purely erotic. In short, she wants not only to do sex with him. It wouldn't be such a serious problem. He has fully demonstrated the desire in that sense. But she's not that kind of woman. The mere fact of having been with a man with which she doesn't have a stable relationship, it makes her feel bad, dirty, wrong. Without wishing to judge those which are well in such situations. But she just isn't suitable for a similar lifestyle. She needs that behind there are true feeling. The pure sex, tired her. There may also be a porn star on the other side, but if there isn't something more, she can also avoid doing this type of recreational exercise.

And for fear of falling in love with him, she had decided (again) no longer see him, only at work. To resist the temptation. Although he no longer has made only one attempt to approach her in that sense. And of course, rather than be grateful to him, she hates him. What attracted her, in him?

Going beyond the physical beauty, how his amber skin is perfectly match the dark hair, slightly curly. At the deep voice, with some accent that betrays his Latin origins.

First of all, his eyes. Those dark bottomless abysses. There is no other way to better define them. They are an abyss that attracts, as well as the ravine or water or the road below, attract the suicide just before him get down. And the analogy that comes to her mind, isn't really random. In fact, there is a fear component, each time she looks out at those black holes. It's fear that brings with it the desire to push the boundaries, to discover what lies beyond. But there's always a price to pay.

In fact, the second point is his story, or rather the mystery that hovers around him. She knows very few things about him: that he was ranger, he had worked in the task force with the task of finding bad fugitives (a kind of bounty hunter, had called him Rossi). That he was been in very dangerous war zones. Stop. She, who was once far as to hack the computer of Kevin, her boyfriend, to find out if he really was intending to propose, had decided to avoid the opportunity provided by her job to find out more information about him. Even Morgan, she had been forced to investigate once about him, albeit for help him.

And he, who was practically a stranger, she had given him the privilege of showing exclusively through himself. And what had emerged was a depth greater than that which suggested by his pupils dilated while he is staring her (thanks dr. Lightman for teaching us that this is a clear sign of excitement, not only sexual).

In his life he must have seen his good number of strong images. But she, as a computer technician, was protected by a screen, had way to alienate. Instead he, he had seen those things in person, and not only seen: he had heard in the sense of noise (roar of exploding grenades, children crying, hysterical screams) but also smells (rotting, deterioration, fear). And he had probably also touched. It didn't need to be Reid, having his IQ to know that such situations brought to develop serious psychological problems.

But the fact was that the FBI agents were frequently subjected to checks, to verify their integrity (not just mental) and moral, to make sure they were still serving conscientiously their country. And let alone if someone was coming back from the center places of serious conflicts. So, he must have surely passed these tests.

In fact, he didn't seem crazy. But he was certainly not indifferent. And those few words he'd said, before fleeing, fleeing as if he were in front of his worst nightmare, had been enough to realize that she was right. Luke must have lived had traumatic experiences, which had made him the man she saw now (and this led her to wonder how him was before, and then overlook, because so much what mattered was the present). Precise, intuitive, an excellent agent, a fortuitous purchase for the BAU. Many of his perceptions led to identifying an unsub, or otherwise direct the team in the right direction. Loyal to duty and willing to let go on a few occasions. Rare and wonderful.

When they found themselves alone in the elevator, that time just minutes from sex, he had clearly done everything to provoke her. They had done that such of drama, in which she decided on the spot to use a formal tone, to determine distances. For her it was a sort of revenge against the fate that had delivered another fine piece of man instead of Derek. For him it was probably just a game, a pastime. Or so she thought then.

But he also made an important revelation, which until now she had deliberately decided to ignore.

Roxy. My girlfriend.

If he was engaged, where she lived? Why he had decided to betray her girlfriend with a colleague just met, that wasn't (the latter, i.e. her) not even the classic beauty of the film, in president's secretary style?

She hadn't found the answers. But this was one of the reasons why she was trying to show herself happy that he wasn't there at the bar with them this evening.

 Eventually he desists. He waivers. He greets with a kiss the silhouette asleep on his bed, and then takes the keys, turns it several times in the lock, make sure it's fully closed, and exits. He salts on his machine, set the browser looking for that place... what's his name? O'Keef.

And he gets there, soon enough.

He parks. What are he doing there? He had told all that he still has work to do. It was true. But he had finished hours ago. Then he had been to his house, gazing up at the blank screen of images, without understanding anything; a modern way to "staring at the ceiling."

At the same instant in which he arises thousand questions, opens the door of the room and makes his way. Nothing special, nothing particular. Every kind of person takes up more or less messy tables.

But to him it affects only one: hers. The one where is she. But he isn't going to talk to her. This didn't even cross to the hall of his brain. He wants to observe her. Spy on her. Enjoying her image without having to ask for any kind of explanation. Being a voyeur. Or the documentarian.

He identifies the perfect spot for his "shots". Where he can scrutinize her, but hardly she can see him. He makes his order without even realizing what he really bought. The eyes fixed in that direction. He first sees her chat with JJ and Emily, then one goes to the bathroom, while the other is reached by a handsome man. Probably the boyfriend of the brunette. They seem to argue for a moment; he wants to go dancing, but the woman didn't want to leave her friend alone. At the end Penelope manages to convince her and the two leave. If he wanted to get to her, this would be the perfect time.

But fortunately, it's not in his intentions, because someone is more rapid. A man, short, blond hair (the stereotype of the "Canadian boyfriend" that she wanted to make him believe that was her boyfriend), with a nice pair of blue eyes (he recognizes them despite the distance), a pair of dark blue glasses, dressed in casual way, is approaching. And from the language of her body, it's clear that she doesn't know him. But he smiles, makes clear sign if he can occupy the seat in front of her and she, after a moment, nods. They start to talk. He can't say how long goes ahead this... thing. Then the guy starts to get a little pushy, beginning touches her hand, in an almost casual gesture, but totally researched and thought. Luke tights the keys of his car until his hand bleeds, but he can remain indifferent to physical pain that he has caused alone.

And that type goes further, patting her shoulder for a split second. He would get up, have a chance to claim that thing gets his hands off her. Because she is his. This forced her to say, the last evening that they have seen each other closely. In part yes, to play, to create an atmosphere... but also because he wanted to, he wants this to be the reality. Because, again he repeats it as a kind of justification, she makes him feel good. She is helping him. And this is more than enough. He doesn’t look further. But that wretch it's threatening to ruin everything. And there is something worse than watching (helpless) another man touches her.

And it's hearing her laugh (he almost never had the opportunity to hear it, certainly not directed at him), the crystalline sound trickling from her mouth, which for now he has been able only (only!) to feel against his, to experience the feeling as her tongue moves in his skin, chasing away the ghosts. Her white teeth, just discovered, that peek at some time; he could polish them with his tongue, but this may be enough? No.

 Her head spinning a little, as she walks towards her car, and certainly not for alcohol. The glasses that she's granted herself, aren't sure enough to soak her in that oblivion that she so desired. Why, while she flirting with a man, not so bad, indeed, couldn't help but notice how different they were, he and Luke? Not just physically. The guy seemed superficial. It almost certainly was her opinion, due at the moment, after they had exchanged just a few words and then... no one seemed to be able to achieve emotional intensity that was there in every look of her colleague and pseudo lover.

She bends to insert the keys into the lock, congratulating herself for not having given the unknown her own number, when suddenly a hand grabs her wrist and forces her to turn around, resting on the car door. At that she thinks it's the blond, maybe out of the club has decided to show his true nature. She's certainly not prepared to discover that in reality it's the man who was been with her throughout the evening.

-Luke!- saying his name is no longer a taboo. It's a way to make him more real, concrete and not an abstract figure, the mysterious man who will bring her, riding a white horse. A man capable of capturing serial killer. A man capable of betraying.

He instead, doesn't pronounces hers. He has done it three times at most. At work he calls her Garcia, like everyone else. Once he apostrophe her as chica, but just to make fun of her Latinized last name, and the fact she not knows a word of Spanish (and say that years ago she had tried to learn it, just to flirt with Derek more creatively), until he discovered that she had been adopted and that her parents were dead. Then he was stunned, had been silent, surely regretting, but not apologizing.

-Did you have fun, there inside?- first he asks her. But although, read printed on a book, the phrase may seem threatening or ironic, nothing, neither his expression nor his tone betraying similar intentions. He's just extremely serious. He terrifies her. But she didn't answer. And he flies over, because that's not what he really cares. He gets nearer to her. Everything, apart from their mouths, it's in contact. -Now let's go home.- without specifying what he means by "home". -You are Joan of Arc and I the inquisition.-

Again, something inside her is broken, when she understands that she would surrender again. That neither the thought of becoming the woman she ever wanted to be, or the prospect that he is cheating on someone and that she is helping him in this, may be enough to curb her. Just as long as he is in the periods in which seems to ignore her, and they are nothing but two colleagues who pinch each other.

But as soon as he returns to make her the center of his attention, she become like wax, fully malleable clay in the hands of the sculptor.

She salts in the car. She drives. She is already regret. She has already passed this stage. So, from now on, she'll be able to enjoy anything happen.

TAGS: @theshamelessmanatee @itsdawnashlie @talesoffairies @janiedreams88 @kiki-krakatoa @yessenia993 @teyamarra @c00lhandsluke  @gcchic @arses21434 @orangesickle @entireoranges @jarmin @kathy5654 @martinab26 @thisonekid @thenibblets @perfectly-penelope @ambrosiaswhispers @maziikeen92 @lovelukealvez @reidskitty13 @jenf42 @gracieeelizabeth27 @silviajajaja @smalliemichelle99 @charchampagne14 @ichooseno  @ megs2219 @rkt3357 @franklintrixie @thinitta @chewwy123 @skisun @maba84 @saisnarry @myhollyhanna23 @thenorthernlytes

[justanothercinemaniac]

Epic Movie (Re)Watch #228 - Tower Heist

Spoilers Below

Have I seen it before: Yes

Did I like it then: Yes.

Do I remember it: Yes.

Did I see it in theaters: Yes.

Was it a movie I saw since August 22nd, 2009: Yes, #129.

Format: DVD

Disclaimer: As this is an analysis/recap/review/weird musings post about Tower Heist, I’m not really going to get into the claims against Brett Ratner or Casey Affleck. I will say though I think it’s horrible what they did and I hope they face consequences for their actions.

1) I very much like Christophe Beck’s score for this film. It really fits the heist theme. It’s cool, slick, and a gets stuck in your head quite nicely. Since we get to hear Beck’s score before we even see any visuals for the film, I thought I’d mention it here.

2) The chess scene between Josh and Shaw speaks to how the heart of their relationship is conflict ridden. Even when they’re friendly at the beginning, even when they’re civil, there is a conflict there that is very interesting.

3) Ben Stiller as Josh Kovacs.

Josh is a very strong main character. You understand that he’s not only good at his job but incredibly dedicated and focused as well. He cares, but the one thing he cares more about is people. Josh is shown to be very empathetic not only to his staff but to a number of residents in the tower. He gives Fitzhugh extra time to leave, he chases down Shaw when he thinks he’s been kidnapped, and he knows all his staff like the back of his hand. Stiller’s reserved, human (albeit very Stiller-y) performance supports this and makes Josh a nice guy to follow along through the story.

4) Going behind the scenes of the Tower at the beginning gives you a sense of not only how this place is run but also gets you invested in its employees. They’re developed in small ways to be more than stereotypes, to be people you like and care for. This is important, as the fact that they are the ones who get screwed is the main plot.

5) Michael Peña as Enrique Dev’Reaux.

Peña is in competition as the film’s ultimate scene stealer (in competition with Gabourey Sidibe). Not only does he fit will the rest of the ensemble cast, but he’s remarkably funny on his own. Peña plays the role as sweet and endearing when he could have easily come off as annoying. But there’s a sincerity and uniqueness in the performance which makes it interesting.

6) This line always stuck with me, probably because of the film’s themes.

Josh: “You’re committing a crime.”

Fitzhugh: “I understand that.”

7) Alan Alda as Arthur Shaw.

You can definitely see why people would defend, trust, and believe show in the beginning of the film. He’s friendly and polite, but it’s obviously a facade. Alda is able to switch between Shaw’s “friendliness” and his rottenness very well, making it feel like a united character instead of two foreign elements. He’s wonderfully skeezy.

8) Téa Leoni as Agent Denham.

The writing for Claire Denham doesn’t make her more than a plot device Josh likes, I think. BUT Leoni is able to breathe such personality and life into the character that you almost forget how she is on the page. There is one scene in particular which represents this well: Denham feels actually human when she gets drunk at a bar with Josh, but she’s still the sexy drunk girl trope. So it’s a mixed bag: Leoni’s strong performance but weak writing. At least Brett Ratner didn’t dress her up in stupid “sexy” costumes.

9) TW: Suicide

Lester’s suicide attempt isn’t only powerful from a storytelling standpoint, but edited very well. Particularly, the scene ends perfectly. You don’t know if he was successful or not right away, it’s 50/50.

10) I love this line.

Lester: “Truth is, people can open their own doors.”

11) Josh going off on Shaw.

It is so wonderfully cathartic to see Josh go after Shaw. It perfectly paints that Josh cares more about people than his job (something which was a little in doubt before now). It also perfectly sets up his motivations moving forward AND means there is no more question of if Shaw did it or not.

Josh [after Shaw says he cares about Lester after his suicide attempt]: “Then why haven’t you asked me if he’s alive or dead?”

I dig it.

12) The sadness we see among the staff shows how much Josh means to them and how good a boss he was.

13) Matthew Broderick as Mr. Fitzhugh.

Broderick has some of the most surprisingly memorable lines in the film, playing Fitzhugh as wonderfully timid and out of place. Broderick is hysterical in the part, supporting the cast neatly.

14) Eddie Murphy as Slide.

This is probably Murphy’s best film of the decade, but that isn’t really saying much. The part feels like a classic for him, very much in line with some of his 80s roles, and there’s a charm/appeal to that. I’ve said this about a number of other characters but he fits remarkably well with the ensemble cast, with a particularly strong chemistry with Stiller (who’s involvement lurred Murphy back to the part after years in development hell).

15) So some of these jokes you just know are not in good taste. And they’re not funny enough to make up for that. They’re not like Blazing Saddles which is bad taste but really good bad taste. Moments like the extended seizure joke just makes you uncomfortable. I think we have Brett Ratner to thank for that.

16) This film is at its best/funniest when the assembled crew is just doing shit. The tangent humor is ESPECIALLY strong. The next ten minutes (the mall scene through the heist prep) is almost exclusively this and features the best humor of the film. Some jokes (like the “gauntlet of lesbians” joke) can veer into bad taste territory, but largely they’re just funny.

17) Josh “apologizing” to Shaw really makes Shaw an even more despicable villain (the worse he is, the better). It also shows how Josh is able to work with people underestimating him to his advantage. Shaw doesn’t even blink when Josh says he’ll get, “Exactly what you deserve.”

18) Gabourey Sidibe as Odessa.

Sidibe is absolutely incredible in the part. There’s a chance her character might be a Jamaican stereotype, but she somehow steals scenes from comedy veteran EDDIE MURPHY. She’s hysterical, strong, and really interesting. If this movie had just been about Odessa, I would’ve been as interested if not more in the film.

19) So, why does Charlie get a promotion? He was at constant risk at being fired and terrible at his job. Is it because he’s a straight cis white dude? Actually, yeah. That’s probably it.

20) There’s a reason I watch this film around Thanksgiving: the entire heist takes place ON Thanksgiving! There aren’t enough Thanksgiving movies in the world so I DEFINITELY include this on the list.

21) The final act of the film, the reason the heist works as well it does is because everything that can go wrong DOES go wrong. Slide betrays them, the money isn’t there, Charlie is working at the tower, etc. It’s these constant monkey wrenches throw into the operation which makes it incredibly interesting.

22) This bugs the shit out of me, but when Slide is pointing his gun at Josh every time they cut back to Slide the painting behind him is in a different place. It bugs the hell out of me.

23) I LOVE that the Ferrari is where the money is. That it’s what they have to steal. It’s a nice surprise which completely changes the circumstances of the heist, forcing the characters to think on their feet. I love that.

24)

Slide: “I’m gonna call Ralph. [Throws up out the hanging car.]”

My brother and I saw this in theaters together. That joke had us dying the first time.

25) I will admit if you don’t find the final heist interesting you might not like the movie as much because it’s like the last half hour of the movie. So I can see how you might be bored by it. I’m not but I can understand if some might be.

26) I never got how the FBI knows EXACTLY who was in on the heist in less than a few hours, not to mention where they are os they can be picked up.

27) Hey, that’s talented character actor Zeljko Ivanek! Just randomly showing up! Sure, why not.

(That’s him. Not from this movie, but still.)

28) Josh giving himself up to save the others on his crew is a really nice ending for a number of ways. For one, it gets everyone the happy ending they deserve (except Shaw, who deserves what he gets). Also, it totally fits everything we know about Josh. Of course he doesn’t care about what happens to him. It’s about everyone else.

I like Tower Heist mainly because it’s a Thanksgiving movie and my mom really likes it, so it’s fun watching it with her. But beyond that it’s actually pretty funny. Yes, some of it is markedly insensitive (the seizure joke), but it’s supported by nice performances and solid comedy. There aren’t enough Thanksgiving movies in the world, so maybe Tower Heist is worth your time.

[jgroffdaily]

From Charlize Theron and David Fincher, 'Mindhunter' delves into the darker corners of the criminal mind

To meet Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany, stars of the Netflix series “Mindhunter,” you’d never suspect they recently spent 10 long months consumed with the darkest reaches of the human psyche.

Groff, a charmer known for playing the lead in HBO’s “Looking” and King George in the original Broadway version of “Hamilton,” laughs generously as McCallany, a seasoned character actor and gabby raconteur with a booming voice, shares a story about training to throw out the first pitch at a Mets game.

Yet given their obvious rapport, it’s easy to see why they were cast as the leads in “Mindhunter,” which debuts Friday. The psychological drama, executive produced by David Fincher and Charlize Theron, follows a pair of trailblazing FBI agents as they interrogate notorious real-life murderers in an effort to understand — and maybe prevent — the senseless urge to kill.

Groff stars as Holden Ford, a clean-cut but open-minded young agent intent on shaking up the hidebound agency, while McCallany plays Bill Tench, a cynical veteran who asks what might be the series’ central question: “How do we get ahead of crazy if we don’t know how crazy thinks?”

In 2017, when criminal profiling has long since become standard practice — and spawned an entire pop culture subgenre in the process — the need to understand the origins of violent behavior seems obvious.

But “Mindhunter” is set in the 1970s, an era when the starchy culture of the FBI still reflected the narrow worldview of longtime director J. Edgar Hoover, says McCallany.

“The FBI was one of the most conservative law enforcement agencies in the world, so empathizing with killers to try to understand the traumas they experienced in their childhoods and how that gives us insight into their behavior was not something Hoover was interested in.”

Yet the nature of crime itself seemed to be changing radically at the time. The social turmoil of the ’60s and ’70s also brought with it what appeared to be a terrifying new breed of criminal — brutal murderers like David Berkowitz (a.k.a. “Son of Sam”), Ted Bundy and Richard Speck who killed repeatedly and without apparent motive other than bloodlust. Establishing “means, motive and opportunity,” as law enforcement officers had been trained to do, was no longer enough.

The series is based on the book “Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” a nonfiction account written by John E. Douglas, a pioneering FBI profiler who interviewed and studied some of the country’s most notorious violent offenders over the course of a 25-year career. (Groff plays a fictionalized version of Douglas, who’s also said to have inspired characters in “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Criminal Minds.” McCallany is a fictionalized version of FBI agent Robert Ressler, believed to have coined the term “serial killer.” )

Theron became familiar with Douglas’ writing when she was researching serial killer Aileen Wuornos for her Oscar-winning role in Patty Jenkins’ 2003 film “Monster.”

A few years later, she optioned “Mind Hunter,” envisioning it from the beginning as a five-season television series, one that would take a more unsettling view of criminality and human nature than your standard catch-the-bad-guy-in-an-hour procedural.

Douglas and his colleagues were “really climbing an uphill battle with the FBI at that time, which just really did not function on any kind of empathy or understanding of these people,” Theron says by telephone. “I think a huge part of where we are in understanding aberrant behavior is because of his work.”

The “Mad Max: Fury Road” star, who says she’s fascinated by “any kind of severe behavior,” was drawn to the material despite its disturbing nature.

“I always want to know why. Why is it that somebody has the need to control in the ultimate way like Berkowitz did or [so-called ‘Co-ed Killer’] Ed Kemper did? A lot of people think it’s really strange, my mother included, but I think it’s healthy to want to turn the light on and want to understand something that’s scary.”

She immediately brought the project to Fincher, a storyteller known for delving into the homicidal mind in such films as “Se7en” and “Zodiac.”

“I just thought he must be somewhat obsessed with serial killers the way that I am, and I was happy to find out that he was,” she says with a note of self-deprecation.

Theron and Fincher spent several years developing the project with writers Joe Penhall and Jennifer Haley, putting together 10 scripts and a series bible and formulating an approach that blends fact and fiction. The decision was made to take creative license with Groff and McCallany’s characters, while adhering scrupulously to the real-life biographies of the killers portrayed in the series, such as Kemper.

Eventually they brought the project to Netflix, which had successfully partnered with Fincher on “House of Cards.” Fincher directed four episodes of “Mindhunter” and is, by all accounts, very much its creative leader.

“One of the amazing things about this experience is that finally a TV show that is director-friendly,” says McCallany, who was eager to work with Fincher again after small parts in “Fight Club” and “Alien 3.” “When a director is empowered on a television set the same way he would be on a film set, it's an incredible thing.”

Groff, a Fincher newbie, says the director has “no blind spots.” “Some directors are good with writers, and some directors are good with cameras, and some are good with actors. The sort of chilling thing about David is he can do everybody's job better than they can do it, so there's this immediate level of respect and hard work.”

Unlike some of his collaborators, Groff says he was “not a serial killer person. When I first picked up the book, it took me a long time to get through it because I found it so disturbing.”

Groff recalls that, from the outset, Fincher “wanted to blow up the comic-book villain idea of a serial killer” — the notion of an urbane evil genius à la Hannibal Lecter who drinks fine wine and listens to classical music.

“One of the things that is so chilling about ‘Mindhunter’ is that it humanizes the serial killlers, these sad, [messed-up] guys with damaged pasts and mental problems. It's so much scarier to look at them as human beings,” he adds.

For a show about serial killers, “Mindhunter” is a psychological deep-dive that features a lot more talking than gore — as Theron puts it, “there is nothing about this that is fast-burning.” One of its most riveting early scenes features two men conversing over egg-salad sandwiches in a prison cafeteria.

“We'll be the only two FBI agents in TV history to go multiple seasons without pulling out our guns and going ‘Stop!’” jokes McCallany. “People looking for gunfights and car chases gotta look elsewhere.”

But for anyone interested in psychology rather than splatter, “Mindhunter” may prove to be highly binge-able.

“Selfishly, I just really forced David to make me my own TV show that I, as a viewer, would want to watch,” says Theron, who is nevertheless confident there are many out there like her. “I can’t be the only freak.”

‘MINDHUNTER’

Where: Netflix When: Anytime, starting Friday Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)

[wolfy19982-blog]

Review #7 Oct. 30, 2017 “Ugly is Our Job Son”

All images are under Public Domain and information comes from Wikipedia and IMDB 

I know the only movie I reviewed from 2017 was IT, but that’s because I haven’t see that many that came out this year. However I only saw a handful of movies and if you want I can do one or the other. Anyways, what can I say about this movie? I guess I’ll do one reboot a month for now on. To me IT is not a reboot or remake, it’s a film adaptation not really using the TV miniseries except for the small Pennywise doll in the haunted house. 

This movie is a bit difficult because I was comparing it to the 1991 film, because well yeah it’s Keanu. So let’s get started on 2015′s Point Break.  Spoilers ahead.

The film starts off with Johnny played by Luke Bracey and his friend Jeff played by Max Thieriot. The two are extreme sports athletes doing the most unthinkable. This is where the two go on a thin ridgeline where Jeff uses too much power in the jump leading to his death. Cut to seven years and Johnny becomes an FBI agent on a case of different robberies, each with a tie to extreme sports. He goes undercover and meets Bodhi the leader of the gang, soon it becomes a sort of cat and mouse chase until Bodhi is caught. For Johnny though, he lets Bodhi go knowing he was going to surf a wave during a storm and he wouldn’t be coming back.

So of course many would probably want a comparing of both, but there is another remake that no one talks about, that’s that’s really my personal opinion, the first Fast and Furious film. It’s the same story though, a police officer goes undercover to see if a group were doing crimes, he falls for one of the girls (the leader’s sister), gets caught as an officer, and in the end he let’s the leader go. That is the same plot, for Point Break the only difference is well in the original the girl was the leader’s former lover, and there weren’t nine sequels after. To my defense on Fast and Furious, it stands alone as a movie even if the stories are similar, it’s still a separate film and deserves it’s own praise, even if it’s scheduled for a tenth film. 

On its own this film was missing something that was there in the middle of each frame. Motive for the criminals. The reasoning behind Edgar Ramirez’s Bodhi to commit all the crimes was a philosophical reasoning, finishing something similar to finding nirvana or enlightenment. In the very beginning the group steals money from a cargo plane and let’s it out to a small village, and they did it other times as well. Using the money as a sort of Robin Hood like motive would actually have made the story more exciting. In fact it would’ve made more sense especially because the film is set in modern day and poverty a BIG issue world wide.

What confused me was the use of “the Ex Presidents”, it was cool that they placed the images on motorcycle helmets, yet those helmets were never used again in the film, and this group didn’t really have a name. To me it felt like the people with the Ex Presidents on the helmets were a group and Bohdi’s was just a copycat. The idea of having them on helmets instead of the actual mask is original and in modern time it would be smart to use a helmet instead of a Halloween mask, not only because it’s easier to hide the identity but also for more protection. 

I can say it was odd how the only reference to the original being a surfing movie was in the beginning and in the end, but they also changed the meaning of the title. In the reboot they speak of it as the breaking point everyone has, which is pretty deep, and in the 1991 film it refers to the surfing term as “ where a wave breaks as it hits a point of land jutting out from the coastline “.

The character development, it needs work, as well as the relationship between the characters. Where Johnny meets Bodhi in the film he tries to surf the same wave Bodhi does, Bodhi even calls him out on it saying it’s disrespectful. Personally I have never surfed but if I’m right stealing a wave from someone who is already surfing on it is like stealing someone’s car, it’s like “dude wtf”. To Bodhi that should have been a red flag to completely ignore him because he was disrespected as an athlete by another athlete. But I digress, this movie has far too many plot holes that even I couldn’t list out. 

This movies, with it’s flaws it only made me want to see the 1991 film when I finished it. The 1991 film casted a shadow, that shadow grew larger because of this movie. In movies with a reboot the saying goes “The original was better” and sometimes it was wrong, but with this movie, it’s right.

Do I recommend? No, just watch the original. 

My rating? 5/10, the bonus points because of Edgar Ramirez, so 6.5/10.

I’m Arry and next week we’ll be covering Cars 3, happy movie watching!

[aloysiavirgata]

Dryad

Title: Dryad

Rating: NC-17

Timeline: AU set in 2010

Category: MSR

Summary:Family fic, meet casefile. Casefile, meet family fic

Author’s Note:Thanks to the delightful @para-amour for looking this over for me, and to @kateyes224 for the idea in the first place, and for catching a multitude of oversights.

NB: This story is set in March 2010 and FaceTime wasn’t released until almost a year later. Please excuse the liberty, but it fits well here. Everything about the 1943 case known as Bella In the Wych-Elm is factual to my knowledge. The Moscow Metro bombings also took place on the date indicated in the story.

***

Sunday morning is pancake morning, and William charges into his parents’ room just shy of 7 am. They are sleeping, his mother visible only as a tumble of red hair above the gray blankets, his father sprawled across two-thirds of the king sized bed. The cat, Scorn, is curled up between them. William cannot understand why anyone would squander a perfectly good weekend morning this way.

“Pancakes,” he says loudly, hands on his hips. He is clearly built on his father’s lanky frame, and inches of thin wrist and ankle emerge from his rocketship pajamas.

Silence from the bed. Scorn opens her green eyes to glare, then closes them again.

William lobs a few pairs of balled socks from the dresser. They bounce off of his father’s bare shoulder, but have no effect. William sighs, then focuses himself. He squints at the bed, fingers curling and uncurling at his sides.

Scorn and the bedding rise slowly into the air, then lower themselves down to the floor several feet away.

Scully yelps, then sits up. “HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD YOU NOT TO DO THAT?”

Mulder wakes now too, blinking. “Will,” he mumbles. “Not a safe habit to be in. And you know I don’t mean waking your mother up early.”

William kicks the edge of the rug, sulky. “I’m hungry.”

“It’s not even seven,” Scully mutters, squinting in the skim-milk light. “Go…go watch some cartoons and eat sugary cereal.”

“You won’t buy any sugary cereal. We have Special K and Fiber One. And hemp granola.”

“Put some chocolate syrup on them,” she suggests, rubbing her eyes.

William scowls.

“Go get the ingredients out,” Mulder says, yawning. “And we’ll be down in a minute.”

William pads out to the hallway and heads downstairs. Scorn, also hungry, winds around his ankles.

***

Scully is in yellow pajama pants and a t-shirt from a 5k race, fiddling with the coffee pot. The great love of her life, across the kitchen in boxers and a Knicks shirt, is making deformed Mickey Mouse pancakes.

“Wow,” William says. “It looks like there was a radioactive meltdown at Disney, Dad.”

Mulder swats him with the spatula. “Let’s see you do some work here, Anthony Bourdain.”

“No, I’m happy to give feedback no one asked for. Mom, I like your freckles better than your Work Face.”

Scully adds soy milk to her coffee. “Thanks. I think.”

“Never comment on a person’s appearance unasked,” Mulder advises. He blobs batter onto the skillet, his forehead smudged with flour. Eggshells litter the kitchen island, and the cat is licking them.

“First day of spring,” Scully says, ambling over with her steaming mug, barefoot on the terra-cotta tile. She strokes her son’s head. “I was thinking we could look for a new bike for you, Will. You’ve outgrown yours.”

William looks up, gap-toothed and delighted. “Yeah? Can I get a mountain bike this time?”

“Let’s see what they’ve got, okay? But we can check out the mountain bikes. And you need a haircut for school pictures on Wednesday.”

William scoops Scorn off the counter and dances around the kitchen with her. She hangs limply from his arms. “Gon-na get a moun-tain biiiiike,” he sings. “Yeah, yeah, yeah!”

Mulder sets a plate down on the counter, then frees the cat. “Eat your radioactive pancakes first.”

William pours a generous amount of syrup on his breakfast. “I hope they mutate me. I hope I can shoot ICE out of my FACE.”

“I think you’re mutated enough,” Mulder says. “I wasn’t kidding about the blankets, bucko. It’s not a game.”

“I knowwww,” William says. “Scorn, you want mousecakes?”

Scully’s phone rings, and she mouths Skinner over William’s head. Mulder wrinkles his nose, pouring more batter onto the griddle.

“Scully,” she says, relieving her son of the syrup bottle.

“Agent Scully, this is the President,” William growls. “We need you to punch some bad guys in the butt.”

Mulder claps a hand over the boy’s mouth.

“Agent Scully, we have a rather unusual situation in Baltimore,” Skinner says, like he ever calls for usual situations. “Mmm,” she replies, putting the syrup away. She looks at William, and slowly draws a line across her throat. He nods, solemn, and his father releases him.

“An unidentified woman was found in a tree at the Cylburn Arboretum this morning,” Skinner continues. “Well, her remains.”

Scully jots this down and holds it up for Mulder to see.

“In a tree? Up in the branches?” she asks. She will not put the phone on speaker with William in the room, but holds it out so Mulder can try to hear too.

“No, inside. A hollow in the tree. There was a wedding at the arboretum last night, and the grounds crew found her this morning. A piece of fabric from one of the bridesmaid dresses was in her mouth, but the victim wasn’t a guest at the wedding.”

Mulder takes the pencil and chews on it for a moment. He writes wych elm? on the pad. Scully looks confused, then her eyebrows raise in understanding. “Sir, do you know what kind of tree it was?”

There is a long pause. “That question suggests to me you have some knowledge of what I’m about to say.”

Scully gives Mulder a thumbs up. “Have the body shipped to DC and I’ll take a look tomorrow.”

“We’d like you to see it in situ,” her boss says.

His confidence flatters and displeases. She glances at William, who is feeding pancake morsels to the cat. There is so much morning left to savor, so much glorious spring weather ahead.“Sir, we really ca-”

“Agent.”

Scully sighs. “We’ll meet you at the arboretum,” she says, then hangs up. “Shit,” she observes.

“Swear pig!” William calls out.

“William.”

“Swear pig,” he repeats, stubbornly.

Scully pinches the bridge of her nose, then withdraws a dollar from her wallet. She folds it up and stuffs it into the small ceramic bank painted like a pig in a spacesuit. “We have to go to Baltimore, buddy,” she says.

William’s face falls. “A case?”

She nods. “I’m sorry.”

William drops his fork and pushes the plate away without using his hands. “Can I go? I’ll stay in the car. I’ll be quiet. I won’t look at the gross stuff.”

“I saw the plate move, William. I’d much rather we spend the day together too, but your dad and I have to check this one out. Boss’s orders.”

“Stupid FBI. Sylvie’s mom is an accountant and Max’s mom has a cupcake bakery and Juan’s mom is a cop but not a weird cop. Can’t you have a normal job?”

Scully has often asked herself the same question, though retirement’s not that far away. Two federal pensions, cushy benefits…they could do some light consulting work if they wanted to stay in the game.

Mulder begins cleaning up the breakfast mess, loading the dishwasher as he talks. “You know, your mom and I were on COPS.”

“Mulder!” Her mouth actually falls open.

William stares. “What? You were? You were on COPS, that’s so cool!”

Mulder looks smug, while Scully seethes. “Oh, yeah,” he continues.”One of our cases kind of coincided with filming, so we ended up on the show. The camera loves your mother. Knockout.”

“Ew, Dad.”

“Mulder, I swear to God…”

Mulder shrugs, plating his final pancake. “He was bound to Google us some day.”

Scully puts another dollar in the swear pig. “That’s for what I was thinking,” she says. “William, listen. I need you to get your stuff together. Grandma or Gunmen?”

William considers this. “Do the Gunmen have the COPS episode?”

Scully glares at Mulder, her arms crossed. “I don’t know.”

“You know Frohike does,” Mulder chuckles.

He stops chuckling at the look she gives him.

***

Mulder drives their Honda Pilot well above the speed limit, hoping this mystery will unravel itself quickly. He has developed a strong taste for lazy weekends and clean sheets.

Next to him, Scully sits in a navy blue suit, wide cuffs of the trousers pushed up to reveal her shapely ankles. She’s got on Bond Girl Ray-Bans, her long hair pulled back in a loose braid. She’s sucking on an Altoid with an intensity that draws her cheeks in and purses her lips out. He finds it alluring.

“That show’s going to give him nightmares, I hope you’re happy.”

“Scully. Scully my dearest, tender angel. The child has been reading Stephen King on the sly since last year. He’s the only kid in the world who thought the flying monkeys in Oz were funny instead of being Satan’s own horde.”

Scully laughs drily. She still doesn’t like the monkeys.

“William will have a good time,” he assures her. “They can take him to get the bike. You left cash, right?”

She nods, shifting the mint in her cheek. “Yeah. It’s just…”

“I know.”

“Less fieldwork. They told us there’d be less fieldwork as he got older, but this is the fourth time since January, and it’s only late March.”

Mulder rubs a hand over his hair. “I’ll talk to Skinner again.”

“I can talk to Skinner just fine on my own. But he’s William’s godfather, and he should understand that it makes such a difference as kids get older. My dad was-” Scully bites off the end of the sentence and shakes her head.

They share this, the two of them. Fathers called away by the ring of a phone, disappearing for weeks and months. They’d promised themselves it wouldn’t be like that for William, promised themselves the pretty white house in Spring Valley would be a home.

“His life is nothing like that. But he’ll always be a Bureau kid like you’ll always be a Navy kid,” Mulder says. “Even I’ll admit the tiny badge they made him is cute. Poor Skinner though, putting another Mulder man on the force. Even unofficially.”

Scully laughs. “Quantico sent enough t-shirts to get him through college.”

“Remember that time Kersh came for his fourth birthday and you asked him to take off his shoes because of the new floors?” Mulder asks.

Scully leans back and smiles at the memory. “I didn’t know there were so many Legos on the rug,” she says.

“Liiiiarrrr,” Mulder sings, falsetto.

She pats his hand. “You’ve got nothin’ on me, copper.”

***

Cylburn Arboretum sits at the northern edge of Baltimore City, just below stylish Mount Washington and across from Sinai Hospital. The manicured grounds are presided over by a stately Victorian mansion that has alternately been a private home, an orphanage, and an event hall.

Mulder parks, jolting his pretty partner awake.

“Mmmfff,” she slurs, then tidies her hair in the side view mirror. She’s become less fastidious about styling it over the years, relying on hair ties more than hairspray. She splurged on a Brazilian blowout.

“Giddyup, buttercup.” Mulder takes one of her Altoids, crunching it loudly between his teeth. He knows this disgusts her.

“Animal,” she says, then steps out of the car. She smooths her jacket over her hips, centering herself. Working with local law enforcement strains her patience and Mulder’s manners.

It’s easy to find the crime scene on the massive grounds, cordoned off by yellow tape and police. Paper lanterns still hang from some of the trees, and the grass is littered with ribbons and crushed flowers. An angry woman is shouting at an officer.

“I don’t care about the damned crime scene,” she says, stamping her foot. “We’ve had this booked for fifteen months, do you understand? FIFTEEN MONTHS. What am I supposed to say when my guests show up? What am I supposed to say to the caterer?”

“Ma’am, we need to keep this area sealed. As I said, I’m sorry about your party, maybe you can get your deposit back or something.”

“I have people in from out of town!”

“You’ve been causing a scene here for thirty minutes and we need to get a move on. Leave, or I’ll arrest you for impeding my investigation.” The officer crossed his arms, unimpressed. He turns his back on her, then steps under the tape.

The woman starts to cry, and Scully approaches her before the cop loses patience entirely and things escalate into a sideshow. “Ma’am? Excuse me, but what time is your event?”

The woman wipes her nose on her sleeve. “Two o’clock.”

Scully bites the inside of her cheek as she checks her watch. “We’ll be out of here in time for you to get set up.”

“I know I seem like a real bitch if someone got murdered and all, but I don’t even know the person and this is my twentieth anniversary party, you know? Like I have a right not to be inconvenienced like this.”

Mulder is perpetually amused by people who hold the genuine belief that this is a right.

“I understand,” Scully says. “I do.” She shows the woman her badge, which has an immediate calming effect. “I’m with the FBI, okay? These guys have to do what I say. I want to get home too, and I’ll make that happen as fast as possible. Right now, though, I need you to head out so we can get this taken care of.

The woman nods, sniffling, and walks back towards her car.

Mulder takes her spot. “I have a right not to be inconvenienced,” he chirps. “Missed that one in Constitutional Law. They all think it falls under the Eighth.”

Scully snaps her badge against her palm. She knows what big cities can do, how they can desensitize, but the callousness angers her still. “Must be nice to be so damn entitled. Sorry this rude dead woman is hassling you. You know she’d be the one screeching about victims’ rights if the shoe were on the other foot.”

Mulder makes a jerking-off motion with his hand. “Okay. Let’s go run this circus.”

He follows slightly behind Scully to diminish the size differential; she wore flats for the grass. She strides right up to Skinner, wisps of hair coming loose from her braid and blowing around her face.

“Sir,” she says, feeling eyes on her.

“Agent Scully,” their boss intones. “Agent Mulder.”

“Ahoy-hoy.”

Skinner looks pained. He introduces them to the assembled officers and the woman from the ME’s office.

“Rani Abdelnour,” she says. “You the pathologist?”

Scully nods, and the two women walk to the wych elm. Mulder follows, pulling on gloves from his pocket. It is the platonic ideal of a tree; straight-trunked with a tremendous mounded dome of vividly green leaves. Sunlight dapples the ground beneath with patches of gold as the branches sway in the light spring breeze. It’s a tree for tire swings and clubhouses, for cardinals in winter and robins in spring. Mulder is unaccountably disgusted by its desecration

In the hollow of the wych elm is the body of a slender woman, about Scully’s build, really, with a thick fall of long, dark hair. Her arms and knees are drawn into the fetal position, and blowflies buzz around her face. Her eyes are open and cloudy, lips blue. In her mouth is a piece of what looks to be pale purple satin. She’s missing her left hand below the wrist.

Scully pulls on a pair of gloves and pokes at a small, round wound in the woman’s lower abdomen. “Temp probe?”

Abdelnour nods. “Based on the weather, with her cooling, I’d put time of death around 10 PM.”

“Hmmm,” Scully says, prodding a cluster of fly eggs near the mouth. They look like tiny grains of rice.

Skinner strides over next to Mulder. “They found her about 6 this morning.”

“You didn’t call until after 8.”

They both watch Scully gently brush the woman’s long hair from her face, searching her slender neck for injury. They both wince when Scully probes the eyeballs up under the lids.

“Get you a girl who can do both, sir.”

Skinner makes a face that could either be indigestion or a smile. “I called after 8 because I’m not a damned wizard, Mulder. I got a call from a friend in Baltimore Homicide who knows your work. Right now we’re just here to lend support. It’s their investigation.” He holds out a small paper gift bag, silver and purple, ornamented with silver and purple ribbons and tulle.

Mulder takes the bag. From it he withdraws a champagne flute, a small box of chocolates stamped with the couple’s name, a flash drive similarly labeled, and a rectangular card posing the question Who put Bella in the wych-elm?

Mulder opens his mouth to speak when his phone rings. It’s Byers. “Hey,” says, glancing at Skinner. “Everything okay?”

“Sorry to bother you, Mulder. William wants to know if he can get a new helmet too. There’s one with a green mohawk on the website and I said I had to ask. Scully didn’t answer.”

Mulder glances at his beloved, who is unspooling purple fabric from a dead woman’s mouth. “Go for it,” he says. “Gotta run.” He disconnects the call.

He puts the bag and its contents on the ground, save for the card. He turns it over in his gloved hands, and sees smudges of black powder. “No prints, I take it?”

Skinner shrugs. “Nothing with powder or ALS, though it’s so bright out that doesn’t mean anything. We’ll take it and the others back to the lab for ninhydrin once they get them all in.”

“Others?”

Skinner nods. “One in every guest bag, we believe.”

Mulder groans. The amount of contamination will be staggering. Luckily, crime scene processing isn’t his problem.

“Sir!” Scully calls. “I need a tarp.”

Skinner yells for someone to fetch one, then addresses Mulder. “Tell me what the fuck is going on.”

“Swear pig,” Mulder says.

Skinner smiles genuinely this time. “Sorry I had to drag you away. I’ll get you some baseball tickets, skybox. Make it up to the kid.” His affection for William is deep, unmitigated by any prior frustration with his parents.

Mulder shrugs, knowing it’s not a matter of simple arithmetic or substitution. “You must know a bit or you wouldn’t have called.”

“Googling wych elm turned up a lot of weird conspiracy theories. Let’s hear your distilled version.“

Mulder cracks his knuckles. “In April of 1943, four boys were poaching birds’ nests in Hagley Wood. Upon climbing a tree in pursuit of a nest, the youngest of the boys looked down into the hollow of a wych elm and was horrified to see a human skeleton curled inside. The boys fled in terror, and agreed upon a pact of silence to conceal their own illegal activity.

“One of their number, however, was frightened beyond loyalty and revealed all that had occurred to his parents. The police then made their way to Hagley Wood and recovered the body of the long-dead victim. They discovered several curious facts about her.” Here Mulder pauses to watch Scully attempt to tug the woman from the tree onto the tarp.

“Like what?” Skinner asks. “Curious facts solve cases.”

“Item the first,“ Mulder says, holding up a finger. “She had a gold ring upon her finger, eliminating robbery as a motive. Item the second, there was taffeta wedged in her mouth. Item the third, despite seeming to have had recent dental work, her dental records matched none on file. Item the fourth, she was estimated to have been dead about a year and a half, but thought to have been placed in the tree almost immediately after her death. Item the fifth, one of her hands was found some ways away from her wrist.”

“But why’s she called Bella? That’s where I lost the story to subreddits and a bad wifi signal.” Skinner grimaces at the memory.

“Reddit isn’t good for you, sir. In Agent Scully’s expert medical opinion.”

“Nobel Prize for Agent Scully.”

Mulder scans the sky. He could be putting together William’s new bike right now, could be living hundreds of different lives, but here he is in this one. “Well, the story was strange, to be sure, but after the woman and her killer remained unidentified, it sort of faded away under the grim specter of World War II. But six months after the unlucky boys , found her, graffiti appeared. The first asked Who put Luebella down the wych–elm? Next came Hagley Wood Bella. Finally, our mystery artist settled on the now familiar Who put Bella in the wych-elm? And Bella she’s been ever since. The graffiti appears every few years, apparently in the same handwriting, but little more has anyone learned of her, or how she ended up in that lonely tree at Hagley Wood.”

Skinner whistles. “You must have been a son of a gun at Boy Scout campfires, Mulder.”

“Indian Guide, sir.”

Scully, sweaty and irritable, stalks over. Her braid has been converted to a messy bun at the nape of her neck. “She’s in full rigor. You’ll have to either wait or cut the tree if you want her.”

Skinner looks put out, his imposing brow furrowed. “How long?”

“It’s still cool at night, so onset of rigor was delayed some. With her mass and the shade temperature….you’ve probably got most of the afternoon before she’ll be flexible enough to pull out.”

Skinner crosses his arms. “I’m not leaving her in the goddamned tree all day.”

Scully looks at him with frank gratitude. She is protective of the dead.

“Do you have to cut the whole thing down, Scully?” Mulder asks. He doesn’t believe the tree should die for this crime.

“Goodness, no, it’s just her shoulders that won’t fit. If you can get her shoulders free, the rest will come.”

Perversely, Mulder recalls Lamaze, where they’d had a similar conversation. He couldn’t imagine an entire person passing through Scully’s narrow hips.

“Do it,” Skinner says.

Scully heads back to the officers, organizing them to do her bidding. She’s brisk and efficient, nipping at their heels like a herding dog. “So. The cards in the bags,” Mulder says. “Tell me about those. Obviously a bonus gift.”

Skinner nods, watching the proceedings at the tree. He’s always looked at Scully with a certain wistfulness that Mulder can simultaneously appreciate and resent.

Skinner shakes his head. “That’s the question. The bags were in the bride’s mother’s care until she gave them to the caterer to set out at each place.” Mulder considers this. “Putting one in each bag once they were on the tables would have been awfully suspicious. So let’s focus on the window of time they were out of her sight, unless we think Mumsie had a thing against Bella.”

“Mumsie’s a paraplegic,” Skinner replies.

“Let’s exclude her for now, then, shall we?”

“It seems polite.”

They stare across the grass a while longer, watching as Bella is drawn back into the world by the hands of the waiting doctors.

***

As the case still officially belongs to Baltimore, OCME takes the body downtown to Pratt Street. Mulder and Scully follow, with Scully grousing behind the wheel of the Pilot. She likes driving when she’s angry.

“Material support,” she says. “Honestly. Like we’re folding chairs loaned out to a friend.”

Mulder is wise enough to remain silent, though he shares her annoyance. But given their reputation, they’ve found it to be best practice for only one of them to be demonstrably irrational at a time.

“Abdelnour seems competent, at least,” she says, squealing off the ramp at President Street. “Superficially, I agree with her on time of death.”

“Jesus, Scully. She’ll still be dead when we get there,” Mulder yelps as they zip through a yellow light. He flinches as she swerves around a bus.

Scully ignores him and weaves past two garbage trucks to make a point. “I’m driving,” she reminds him.

“And God help us all. You want me in there while you’re working, or should I prowl around the labs?”

Scully considers this as she makes the left onto Penn, across from Shock Trauma. A helicopter is landing on the roof. “Stay with me, would you? We can bounce a few ideas around, plus they’re still gathering all those cards and interviewing people. There won’t be much to see yet.”

Mulder nods, unbuckling his seatbelt only after she’s parked and turned the car off. “I still think you missed your calling as a NASCAR driver,” he remarks as they step into the warm sunshine.

She snorts. “They just go in a circle.”

“Maybe you can be in the next Fast and Furious. They’ll call it Capital Drift and it can be about a daredevil suburban-mom-slash-FBI-agent who curb jumps to get a prime spot in the carpool line while also pursuing fugitives from justice.”

“You baby,” she says, as they head inside. “I didn’t even lay any rubber.”

***

Scully, scrubbed in borrowed gear, surveys Bella. The woman is curled on her side on a stainless steel table. Skinner has managed to get them into the one private room at OCME, usually reserved for decomps, and she sensed the resentment in the general bay. The room was cramped and poorly lit by fluorescent lighting, and she stalked through it with her chin up. She is not interested in making friends.

“I wish the new building were done,” she grumbles. “This place is a dump.”

Mulder does not disagree. He pulls on purple nitrile gloves and wiggles his fingers. “Whatcha need?”

Scully sighs. “She’s still in rigor, so this is a challenge. I’m going to do my best, but it won’t be great. Take notes while I talk for now. There’s no mic in here.”

Mulder poises his pen over the clipboard.

Scully crouches down behind Bella, examining her back and legs. They are lean, but not particularly muscular. “Note that livor is fixed in her buttocks and upper legs. Wherever she was killed, she wasn’t there long. All the blood pooled while she was in the tree. There’s no secondary pattern to indicate movement after significant delay.”

She examines the bloody stump where Bella’s left hand used to be. “No blood at the scene, which doesn’t necessarily indicate it was removed elsewhere. If she died there, our killer could have waited a bit, then come back and lopped it off over a bag or something. I doubt she was alive, or there would have been arterial spray.”

Mulder looks up from his clipboard. “Seems risky.”

“Yeah, it does. I mean, the timing of the whole thing is weird though. Hang on, I want to look at the wrist again.” She squints at the blunt end of the wrist, rubs a gloved finger over it. “There’s no crushing of the bone, no saw marks, and the soft tissue is cut perfectly with the bone itself. I’m going to say a limb cutter, one for thick branches, did this.”

“Probably easy to find at an arboretum. If you know where to look.”

“If you know where to look”, she repeats.

Mulder finishes writing. “So tell me about the timing.”

Scully sighs, frustrated. The timeline has been irking her since they arrived on the scene. “Well, here’s what I know. Based on her temperature, based on rigor and lividity and the insect eggs, I’m in agreement that 10 PM seems a reasonable time of death. They’re running vitreous upstairs, and Abdelnour says they’ve got the new SVM regression analysis software.”

Mulder looks at her blankly.

“The potassium levels in the vitreous humor in the eyes changes in a predictable way,” she explains, wishing he shared her appreciation for the elegance of the human machine, both in its structure and its eventual breakdown.

“Ah.”

“Speaking of her eyes, incidentally, I see no evidence of sufficient petechiae to suspect manual strangulation. But going with 10 for our TOD, even with plus or minus an hour on either side, here’s what I know. The guests finished dessert around 8:30. There was dancing until almost midnight, on an outdoor dance floor. So based on external observations thus far, she either died in the tree, or was put into it very shortly after death. There’s no way she went in there after 1:30 AM.”

Mulder is thoughtful. “The pathologist who examined Bella the First in ‘43 said she must have been put in right after she died because she wouldn’t have fit after rigor set.”

Scully shakes her head in exasperation. “That’s bad science, Mulder. It’s assuming. She might well have been put in after she left rigor; that body was skeletonized. It’s a classic case and they did a reasonable job, but forensic science then wasn’t what it is now. For all we know the original Bella was refrigerated for months and months before she was put into the tree. They estimated the PMI to be about 18 months in that case.”

“Any signs of refrigeration on this body?”

“Fresh as a daisy.” Scully examines Bella’s face and the fingertips of her right hand. She sniffs at her nose and mouth, speaking slowly as she does so. “Thus far, I see no evidence of corrosive agents, poisoning by cyanide compounds, ethers, paraldehyde, phenols, copper, endrin, phosphorus compounds, aniline, nitrates, potassium chlorate, camphor or carbon monoxide asphyxia.”

“Got it,” Mulder says, scribbling rapidly. “So what the hell did kill her? You’ve ruled out most everything I can think of.”

“Oh, we’ll tease it out.” Scully says, warming to the challenge. “She’ll tell us.” She tries unsuccessfully to pry the dead woman’s arms apart. “Might have to get you to help me dislocate her shoulders.”

Mulder grimaces, impressed that Scully can still find new ways to disgust him. “Not exactly on my bucket list. So, okay. She’s dead by 10-ish, in the tree by 1:30 at the latest. That’s a small window, but I’d like it narrowed. No one the cops talked to recognized her, including the bride and groom. She wasn’t a bridesmaid, but the fabric in her mouth, the purple taffeta, looks the same as the bridesmaid dresses. Any of the bridesmaids missing their frocks? Forget it during a quickie with the bartender?”

Scully, massaging the scalp, shakes her head. “No. And it’s hard to narrow the window on the front end. The bags were already on the tables by the time she was dead. The killer took a chance that someone would see the cards and investigate the wych elm before Bella was in it, or possibly even catch him in the the act. I guess if we put her in the tree after everyone leaves it makes more sense. The place was completely cleared by 12:15 according to the grounds crew. So we can narrow it to an hour and fifteen minutes to get her in the tree.”

Scully’s deft fingers sense an irregularity on the scalp. “Aha!” she says, and peels it open with a scalpel. Bella’s thick hair is in the way, and Scully cuts a long hank off. It drops pitifully to the linoleum floor.

Mulder looks over her shoulder. “What is it?”

“Hematoma. She got hit fairly hard with something, like a sap or a little blackjack probably. There’s blood matted in her hair. My money says she was unconscious when she died.” Scully is comforted by this development. It was sad to think of Bella alert to the festivities surrounding her.

Mulder’s phone rings. “Ah, shit,” he says. “Gunmen trying to FaceTime.”

Scully pulls off her gloves. There’s no blood on her scrubs yet. “Here, just…Mulder. Stop. Face that way because we don’t need the body on full display.” She positions them both safely, and Mulder answers.

“Hi!” William says. He is beaming, wearing a black bike helmet with a green rubber mohawk on top. “Look what they got me!”

“Mulder said it was okay!” Langley calls from the background.

Scully hides a smile. All this time, and Langley is still somewhat afraid of her. “It looks great, buddy,” she says.

“Very cool,” Mulder assures him. “Tres punk. Did you pick a bike?”

“Yeah! It’s so cool, it’s designed by this guy who was in the X Games? And it has this, like, spinny part on the handlebars? It’s metallic blue.”

“Let’s see it,” Scully says. She is happy that she can give her son these things, that Mulder’s appalling family history has done some small good after all. Her own childhood was hand-me-downs and thrift shops.

William scratches his chin under the clasp. “They’re having the guy at the store put it together. We’re home now though, at our house, and we have your COPS episode.”

Scully groans. “William, I really think you-”

“You SAID I could!”

She hadn’t, but she hadn’t said no, either.

“It’s on now. Whoa, mom! Your HAIR!”

Mulder takes the phone. “Lemme see.”

William, cackling, turns to show the television.

Mulder grins as he watches himself. Scully is pleased to see she looks as annoyed as she remembers feeling. Hand over the lens, very nice.

“We look good,” Mulder says. They were so young, he thinks. So earnest and sharp and young.

“Werewolves,” comes William’s voice, off screen. “Why are you so weird?”

“The greatest mystery of them all,” Scully remarks fondly.

William pauses the show, turning the camera back on himself. “Are you doing an autopsy?” he asks. “Is there a dead guy with with you right now? Can I see?”

“No dead guy,” Mulder says, which is, at least, technically true. “Now hang up and go do something wholesome, like watching your parents chase a werewolf with your degenerate uncles.”

“I’m not a degenerate,” protests Byers.

“I am,” Frohike says, cheerful.

“Bye!” shouts William, and the screen goes black.

“He’s going to be in therapy forever,” Scully observes. “And it wasn’t a werewolf.”

“Spoilers,” Mulder chides.

Scully returns her attention to the body. “Anyway. Where was I?”

Mulder consults his notes. “Unconscious when she died.”

“Right. So we have three scenarios. He gets a dead woman in, he gets a live woman in and kills her, he gets a live but unconscious woman in and kills her.”

Mulder considers this. “Maybe she was somebody’s plus-one? New girlfriend, and that’s why no one recognized her?”

Scully probes the scalp further, and is satisfied that there is no other damage. She peels it down Bella’s forehead to expose the skull. “Also risky. Someone might remember who showed up with her.”

Mulder sticks his tongue out. “Aren’t you a little killjoy?”

She smiles and bats her lashes. “Don’t stick it out if you’re not going to use it.”

He is delighted. “Dana Scully, are you flirting with me over a corpse?”

“I think that describes approximately forty percent of our relationship.”

“Probably more like fifty.”

“Mmm. I think this is a guy who used the wedding as a cover. Found a place with a wych elm, then made it work. Hand me that bone saw, would you?”

He passes it over, stepping back when she turns it on. “The date’s interesting. Vernal equinox.”

Scully makes quick work with the Stryker and skull key, removing a cap of bone so that she can get the brain out. “Hematoma is subdural but relatively minor and unlikely fatal,” she reports, prodding. “About two inches in diameter. Write that down.”

“Yes’m.”

“Now, why is the vernal equinox interesting? Is there some history of sacrifice? I thought that was more a solstice thing.” Scully cuts through the brainstem with her scalpel, cupping the organ gently.

“That’s mostly among Celts. Norse pagans and some Germanic tribes had four blót sacrifices a year, on the solstices and equinoxes. Equinoces?”

“Equinoctes.” She looks up, brain quivering in her hands as she chooses a knife and begins to dissect. “Blood sacrifices?”

“Blót. Actually, it’s kind of redundant. It was basically the word for sacrifice, though it’s etymologically related to the word blood. While those tribes did practice human sacrifice, there’s no evidence they did it at these four prescribed times. It was usually horses and cows, and part of a big feast.”

Scully adores his rambling esoterica, the earnest passion he applies to arcane affairs. She worries sometimes that it is unwise to love so profoundly.

“So a wedding feast might be a good place to conduct a sacrifice, if one were flexible about the particulars of the sacrificial mammal?” she queries.

“It might indeed. But Bella’s body bears no resemblance to the rites that would have been performed. No sprinkled blood or anything. And the hand is curious.”

“It is curious.” She sees a familiar twitch at Mulder’s mouth. “Let’s hear it,” she says.

He puts his hands on the table, leaning forward. “I have a theory.”

Scully grins, anticipatory. “Yeah?”

Mulder drums his fingers next to Bella’s head, grinning back. “Hand of Glory.”

She is surprised. “A Hand of Glory is the preserved hand of a dead murderer, taken from the condemned at the gibbet,” she says. “It’s believed to render light only to the holder.”

“Yeah, and also to stop time for everyone else.”

Scully considers this. “Help me move her arms while I think,” she says.

Mulder makes a face of dismay. “Must we?”

“‘Fraid so. I’m thinking….hmmm. Okay, so, I’m going to roll her over, then get on the table.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Scully’s already got the body on her back. “Now you just hold her steady so I have some leverage, okay?”

Mulder, wide-eyed, does as she asks. “Is this, like, a technical procedure you learn at pathology school?”

Scully hoists herself onto the table to kneel beside the body. She huffs an errant strand of hair out of her face. “Okay, so you hold her neck and ribcage right…yeah. Like that. And I’m going to juuuuust…”

She rotates the bent arm back, as though Bella is about to pitch a baseball. The body is incredibly stiff, and Scully puts her full weight into the motion. There is a sickening pop and the dislocated arm flops back beside Bella’s head.

“Jesus fuck,” Mulder breathes, with horrified fascination.

Scully is pleased with herself. “Swear pig,” she says. “Now the other one.” She maneuvers carefully over the body to repeat the process on the right arm. She now has nearly full access to the torso, with the arms and head block stabilizing Bella.

Mulder helps her off the table. “William thinks I’m the weird one,” he says. “That boy has no idea.”

As if on cue, his phone rings again. He answers it, exasperated. “Kiddo, this really isn’t a good-”

“The FBI has nothing to hide!” William crows. “Dad, you’re a terrible marriage counselor.” Then he hangs up.

Scully crosses her arms. “Fox. William. Mulder.”

He holds his hands up, sheepish. “It may not have been my best idea, okay? But at least it wasn’t the movie, right?”

“Do not. Ever. Speak to me. Of that.” She can feel herself blushing, even after so much time. How had they ever been convinced to play along with such rubbish? At least COPS made her look like an officer of the law.

“We had fun after though, huh? On the Bureau’s dime?”

Scully admits that this is so.

“Of course, it was the least Skinner could do after he got with my woman.”

Mulder ducks when she throws a box of gloves at him.

Scully returns her attention to the cadaver, making a Y incision that stops a bit short owing to the position of Bella’s knees. While Mulder tries to look anywhere but at the body, she removes the ribs and clavicle with the Stryker. “No evident congestion of blood,” she says, poking around at the glistening organs. She presses on the lungs to check for fluid, but there’s no evidence of that either.

She’s about to begin the organ removal when a notion strikes her. Working gently from the point where Bella’s clavicles meet, she slips her hand up the woman’s neck and frees her tongue from the floor of her mouth. She pulls the insides of her throat out through the base of her neck. Carefully, Scully slices the trachea open, reflecting the delicate tissues like unopened petals on a flower bud. And there, nestled inside, she sees it. Pale pink, gelatinous, delicately foamy, it looks like a sea creature without its shell.

“Hello, beautiful,” Scully whispers to the little plug of mucus. She looks up at Mulder, her eyes bright with triumph. “Bella drowned.”

***

It was a quiet ride home, Scully making notes in the margins of his transcripts while she chugged gas station coffee, oblivious to the road outside. 95 is a dirty grey artery down the east coast, and they’ve seen nearly every mile of it, from Florida to Maine.

Mulder kept his hand at the back of her neck, stroking the tender skin behind her ear as he drove.He parks in the driveway, beneath the gold and purple sky. The Gunmen’s van is centered in the garage.

He and Scully get out of the Pilot, stretching, and head in through the front door. William, still in his bike helmet, is playing Kerplunk with Byers and Langley at the coffee table. He jumps up when he sees his parents.

“You’re home! Did you solve it already? Did you kung fu him?”

Scully crouches down for a hug. “We’re getting there.”

Mulder waves at his friends, integral members of the family he and Scully have built. “You saved the day,” he tells them. “You’ll see it in the paper tomorrow.”

Frohike straightens up on the couch. “It’s really a badass bike, Mulder. You’ll love it.”

Mulder kneels to hug his son’s narrow frame. He rubs his hand over the nubbly rubber of the green mohawk. “Have you guys eaten? You want to order something?”

William stands up, patting his stomach. “Four guys went to Five Guys.”

“Cholesterol Castle,” Langley says.

“We can’t thank you enough,” Scully says, shrugging out of her jacket. Her white blouse gaps across her breasts as she does, and the Gunmen lower their eyes.

“Dad!” William says, hopping around. “The fear monster! That was so creepy and cool. Did you ever find it? Mom told you it wasn’t a werewolf and she was right but like, it was way scarier.”

“It wasn’t a werewolf,” Scully says, prim.

Mulder untucks his shirt, his tie having been abandoned during the drive. “Whatever it was, we never found it,” he says. “But it never showed up again, so you don’t have to worry.”

“I’m not worried. I wanna catch it!” His brow furrows. “Did Steve and Edy work it out?”

“Happily ever after.”

“Good,” William says. “They were nice.”

“God, those were the days,” Frohike says, nostalgically. Scorn is kneading his thigh. “Crazy stuff. Hacking for you two, breaking and entering, black ops.”

William perks up. “Tell me stuff,” he says. “Tell me more stuff you guys did.”

Langley, on the floor, glances at Scully. “Lots of computer stuff,” he says. “We were the original Geek Squad.”

Byers rises, brushing off his argyle vest. He holds out his hand to the boy. “Let’s go show mom and dad your bike, huh?”

The six of them head out to the deck, into the gloaming. Evergreen hedges and fences separate the houses, but on the deck it is possible to see the whole patchwork of the neighborhood. Early gardens, basketball nets, decorative ponds and swingsets. The new bike is a shiny cobalt color, with thick tires and sleek lines. Mulder tells himself it looks too big for William, for his little son.

“Wow,” Scully says, running a hand along it. “Will, it’s terrific.”

William hugs himself. “I knowwwww. We can take it on trails, it’s going to be amazing.”

Mulder palms the mohawk again. “You picked a winner. Now go upstairs and get ready for bed. We’ll be up in a few to tuck you in.”

Frohike punches Mulder in the shoulder. “Nice job on the miracle baby,” he says.

***

Scully’s in bed by the time he comes up, the stairs creaky under his feet. She has crime scene photos strewn across the comforter, and there is moisturizer on her forehead.

He loves the bones of her face, the fine architecture of her straight nose and long jaw. He loves her uneven top lip, and the tendons of her white neck. He loves the haughty grace of her eyebrows.

“God, you’re hot,” he says, sliding in next to her. The sheets are wonderfully cool and crisp.

“Har har.” She moves her papers out of his way.

“No, I mean it. Those glasses….I’m thinking about hanky panky at the Library of Congress.”

Scully rolls her eyes. “I was looking at the photos again, Mulder, and it occurs to me you never finished with your Hand of Glory thought.”

He looks at her, surprised. “Really? You want to hear that?”

She shrugs, her breasts shifting under the faded navy blue tank top. “Ideas go places.”

“Come here and I’ll tell you.” He props himself up against the bank of tastefully coordinated throw pillows.

She shifts so that she is leaning against him, her head on his chest. He strokes her freckled arm with his fingertips. “So I’m thinking her hand was cut off before he brought her in. If he used it as a Hand of Glory somehow, it would explain why nobody saw anything. It lets him put those cards in. It lets him put her in the tree, unseen, and leave, unseen.”

Scully plays with the end of her braid. “Let’s entertain this for a moment. The Hand of Glory is supposed to be from a murderer.”

“Well, she hasn’t been identified. Maybe she is.”

“Taken from the gibbet. Ignoring 1943 Bella, our Bella was most definitely not hanged.”

Mulder considers this. “True. But we don’t hang people anymore. Maybe it’s the intent with which the person was killed, you know? Maybe she did kill someone and her killer he…maybe he pronounced judgement over her before killing her. Going back to the idea of Norse Pagans-”

“They would throw a spear over their enemies to dedicate the deaths to Odin.” Scully mimes this.

Mulder kisses the top of her head. “Have I mentioned that you’re hot? Talk more pre-Christian mythology to me, baby.”

Scully laughs her wonderfully goofy laugh. “So let’s work with this. What do we know about the first Bella?”

Mulder closes his eyes to think. “There was some conjecture that she was a Nazi spy named Clara Bauerle.”

“Conjecture from whom?”

Mulder opens his eyes. “There was a woman named Anna who was dribbling information to the police in ‘53 about some cabaret singer, then a guy named Donald McCormick wrote a book in ‘68 called Murder by Witchcraft. Said the woman was a spy recruited by the Abwehr, that her name was Clarabella. Supports the graffiti, anyway.”

“Well, a German spy could certainly be construed as a murderer, especially at the time. But you said Clara Bauerle.”

“Yeah, so, declassified intelligence reveals that a Czech spy arrested by the British government in ‘41 was carrying a picture of this woman named Clara Bauerle. He said she was his girlfriend, an actress and cabaret singer who had been recruited by the Nazis and was supposed to parachute into England in ‘41.”

Scully looks thoughtful. “Interesting, but hardly proof. Though it explains why her dental records never matched up. Still, though…”

“Clara Bauerle to Clarabella to Bella is hardly a stretch. And there are no more public appearances or recordings of Clara after 1941, which is when this Czech guy said her mission was going to begin.”

“So let’s go another step. Let’s say it was this spy, this Clara Bauerle. It still doesn’t answer the graffiti, does it? It still doesn’t tell us who put Bella in the wych elm.”

“Anna, our friend from 1953, sheds some light on this. She says Bella was a Dutch woman who had illegally immigrated to England in about 1941, and that she was a dance hall girl who became involved in a spy ring involving a British officer, a local Dutch man, and another performer, an acrobat, who were giving information to the Luftwaffe. Clara somehow ran afoul of them, and they killed her.”

“Dutch,” muses Scully, former German student. “Deutsche.”

“Attagirl.” He thinks of her mind as an endless library, layering back on itself like a golden spiral.

“Were any of those mentioned ever identified?” she asks. “I mean the acrobat or anyone.”

“The officer was. He died in an insane asylum right around when the coroner estimates Bella was murdered.”

She picks up a picture of their current Bella’s hand. “The book from ‘68. You said it was called Murder by Witchcraft. The Nazis were obsessive occultists.”

“The Abwehr had an entire occult office.”

Scully presses her palms to her eyes. “This is hard for me.”

“I know,” he says softly.

Scully drops her hands to her lap. “When I found out I was pregnant with William, I didn’t ask too many questions. I was…I was afraid to have them answered, you know?”

“It’s okay, Scully, if you don’t want to talk about this.”

She shakes her head. “No, it’s fine. It’s good. He was born and he did these things. These miraculous things. And I couldn’t explain them, I didn’t have you there. I tried so hard to force it all to fit into my reality and I understood, eventually, that reality couldn’t be limited to what I was willing to accept. It had to include the facts of my experience.”

He knows the breathless shock of a sudden change in worldview. The truth of Samantha’s disappearance, the sudden swell of William in Scully’s taut belly when he awoke at the hospital.

She traces circles on his forearm. “I’m never going to be like you. I’m never going to look for the same things. But if we find the same things while we look, I can accept them. I can see them now.” She wraps her arms around him, burrowed close.

Mulder unbraids her hair, running his fingers through it until she falls asleep.

***

The alarm goes off at 5. He’d drifted off with Scully propped against him, her glasses now on her forehead.

“Pssst,” he says.

She grunts unhappily. “Turninoff.”

“Not until you’re up. You’ll be mad if I let you oversleep.”

Scully turns and stretches, limbering her arms and neck from their cramped posture. “Fine. I’m up.” She pats around for her glasses, sheepish when she finds them. “Sorry I crashed.”

“I liked it.”

They dress for their run in the quiet dark, William breathing evenly down the hall. Scorn mews for her breakfast, which Scully gives her.

They head outside into the stillness of the morning, their footsteps no louder than pebbles in a pond.

The streetlamps make halos on her hair.

***

They drop William off at 7:45. Scully groans inwardly when she sees Heather outside, directing carpool traffic in an orange safety vest. She turns around to William. “Got your lunch and your picture money?”

He holds up both items. “Scully, I appreciate it. You don’t want me looking foolish.”

“Nice kid you’re raising,” Mulder says from the driver’s seat.

“Not on a Monday, boys. William, Grandma might be picking you up from after-care today, okay? If we’re running late. If so, we’ll meet you at baseball practice with dinner.”

He nods. “I have another loose tooth.” He demonstrates this with his tongue as they pull up to the curb.

“Gross. Okay, have a great day!” She blows a kiss in his general direction as he hops out of the car, slamming the door behind him.

“Nail that vocab test!” Mulder calls through the open window. They’re about to pull away when Heather walks over. She raps on Scully’s doorframe.

“Hi, Dana! Hi, Fox,” she says brightly. “So I just have a quick question.”

Scully smiles and feels like her mouth has too many teeth in it. “Good morning Heather.”

“So as you knoooooow, I’m the class mom for William’s grade.”

No shit, Scully thinks. You’ve been class mom since kindergarten. And micromanaged every bake sale and school event since. “Yep,” she replies.

“And pictures are on Wednesday and William is the only one who hasn’t turned his money in. Sooooo, it would just be a shame if he couldn’t participate so I wanted to just give you a lil’ reminder.” She completes this with a huge grin, as though she isn’t a condescending pain in the ass.

“Great,” Scully says. “Thanks. He’s actually got the envelope with him now, so he’ll give it to the teacher.”

Heather beams. “So glad you’re on top of it! I know how hard it is for working parents, my gosh. I’ll make sure Mrs. Lewis gets it from him. Kids can be so forgetful, am I right?”

“How thoughtful of you,” she says, because it’s easy. These are not the politics that interest her.

Heather waves a dismissive hand, laughing. “I mean hello, that’s what I’m here for!”

“How blessed we are,” Mulder says, eyes wide with conviction, “to have you watching over our child when we can’t be there.”

Heather’s smile dims a few watts. “Well, you know, it takes a village, right?”

Scully waggles her fingers goodbye while she rolls up the window. “They’d never convict me,” she says, as Mulder pulls back onto the main road. “A jury of my peers would understand that a person can only take so many badly photoshopped newsletters before she snaps.”

“At least our village has an idiot,” he says brightly. “As all first rate villages do.”

“And those kids of hers,” Scully continues. “I don’t think they can wipe their own behinds. She wants to imply William’s going to forget to turn in his money, but I had to tie her little Alice’s shoes for her. The child is eleven. ELEVEN, Mulder.”

“Go on, make friends with her. Drink moscato and discuss the finer points of Fifty Shades.”

Scully narrows her eyes, unamused. “It’s different for you, you know. You can laugh it off, but I have to deal with this stupid shit differently. You’re the dad. If you remember your kid’s name people act like you’re a hero. Meanwhile I make a snack that’s not nut free, gluten free, vegan, locally sourced and the Heathers of the world gossip about me at pilates.”

Mulder blinks, surprised. “Do you care if they gossip about you at pilates?”

“That’s not the point,” she snaps. She doesn’t know what the point is, just that the whole thing annoys her. And her annoyance then becomes self-propagating, like bacteria on a dish.

“Did you have coffee today?” he asks, hoping for concern rather that patronization.

“No,” Scully snaps. “But that’s not the point either.”

***

They sit in front of Skinner in their familiar chairs. Mulder wonders how many hours they’ve logged in these seats compared to other agents. He suspects the scale may have to be expressed logarithmically.

Skinner eyebrows are riding high on his forehead. “Dry drowning, Scully?”

She tucks her hair behind her ear, runs her tongue over her top lip. “It accounts for only between 1-2% of all drowning deaths. It’s incredibly difficult to diagnose without prior knowledge of the victim having been submerged or otherwise exposed to water, but I believe the mucus plug in this case is more than sufficient evidence. I also found possible evidence of pulmonary edema, which is consistent with my diagnosis.”

“And that’s because….?”

“Sir, if you examine page 6 of our report, you’ll see I’ve included a diagram and explanations, which I’m happy to clarify.” She waits, alert, as Skinner shuffles pages.

“I sketched that,” Mulder chimes in. “I’m not trying to brag, but you know, I think it’s pretty good.”

“I’ll have it hung on the fridge, Mulder. Scully, you reference waterboarding in this report. The specific point of waterboarding, I might remind you, is its non-lethality.”

Scully shifts in her seat, her brow prickling. She was afraid of this. “Absolutely, and it was not my intent to make any commentary on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques in an official report. What I intended to indicate is that the fabric in her mouth could have been used in the same way washcloths are often used in the waterboarding technique.

“Mmm,” Skinner says. “So here’s what I’m getting. She was knocked unconscious, placed in the tree, her mouth and nose were covered with this fabric, water was dribbled onto the fabric while her head was tipped back. The water flowed up into her nasopharynx - am I saying that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. And this water triggered her larynx to spasm, cutting off airflow, which made a plug of mucus and blood in her trachea.” Skinner peers over his glasses.

“Please note that I shaded the mucus plug pink,” Mulder adds. “For verisimilitude.”

Skinner glowers. “Is there evidence of this on the fabric, Scully?”

Scully, still antsy about alluding to torture, nods. “At first I just thought the fabric was wet from being in her mouth, but when I checked the levels of amylase and other salivary enzymes, they were too low to account for that amount of moisture.”

Skinner nods slowly. “This is very impressive in such a short amount of time. Scully, remove the term waterboarding from your report, but I’m otherwise happy to sign off. Can we talk suspects? I’ve got pictures of Bella all over the news and Internet, hoping someone will recognize her. No dice yet.”

“My turn,” Mulder says.

“The piece de resistance, no doubt. Let’s hear it.”

“Based on the similarities to the 1943 case and Scully’s autopsy report, I’ve worked up a profile of a likely suspect.”

Skinner frowns. “If the case was never solved, how’d you do that?”

Mulder and Scully exchange a glance. “Based on what we’ve read about the case, it seems likely that the killer in this case bears many similarities to the other. One of the most likely suspects for the 1943 case was a British officer involved in a spy ring.”

“So you’ve solved two murders since yesterday morning? Shall I ring MI5?”

“It’s true, sir,” Scully says. “His name was given to the Home Office, and when those files were declassified, it’s found that he died in a mental institution in 1942, not long after the the woman in the tree is estimated to have died.”

“It’s possible killing Bella was the apotheosis of a mental breakdown that led to his being institutionalized.” Mulder, in fact, has far more conspiratorial thoughts about why the man might have ended up in an institution, but chooses not to share them with a government man.

“All right,” Skinner says. “ So you’re thinking a military guy?”

Mulder nods. “Specifically suffering from psychological trauma, likely PTSD with episodes of extreme paranoia. This will be a guy who has withdrawn from his family and friends, probably living in seclusion. I’m thinking white, mid thirties. He’ll be educated, and likely have a degree in history. The past will be very real to him, and he’ll be pleased with making a connection to a case as relatively obscure as 1943 Bella. My guess is a special ops guy, given Scully’s report. He’ll feel the woman has committed a crime.”

Skinner appears to be digesting this. “So I need an APB out for a mentally ill soldier using one of the most controversial interrogation techniques on innocent women at weddings. Do you know the level of shit this is going to bring down?”

Mulder winces. “It sounds pretty bad when you say it like that,” he admits. “Though as to her innocence, I did make a note on that.”

Scully cuts him a warning look.

Skinner flips a few pages. “Yeah, this Hand of Glory thing?”

“We found the symbolism significant,” Scully interjects hurriedly. “We thought that if we have someone with a high level of paranoia, it’s conceivable that he may be passing judgment on her. Cutting off the hands of criminals has a long-”

“Got it.” Skinner eyes her suspiciously. He closes the thick report and passes it to Scully. “I want you to continue to look into this, but keep it low profile. I don’t need the Pentagon up my ass.”

“It would be very uncomfortable,” Mulder says. “Pointy.”

Skinner, to everyone’s surprise, laughs. “Godspeed, agents. Keep him in line, Scully.”

They thank him and leave the office. Scully hits him with the rolled-up report on their way to the elevator.

***

They stopped at the taco place William likes on their way to the field. They have to park a block away from practice, and trudge over laden with camp chairs and fragrant paper bags.

“I really need to keep a change of casual clothes in the car,” Scully sighs. “My emergency trunk wardrobe needs expansion.” Her heels sink into the mud.

“Here, give me that chair.”

She passes it over, scanning the fields. “There, that’s his team. My mom’s on the bleachers.”

They pick their way over, Scully cursing the soft earth with every step. “Hi, Mom,” she says.

“Hello, dear,” Maggie says, getting to her feet. She kisses her daughter’s cheek as Mulder sets the chairs up.

“Hi, Maggie,” he says, bending down for a hug. “Sit in one of these, they’re better for your back.”

“Thank you,” Maggie says, patting his shoulder. She moves to one of the canvas chairs. “Oh, that’s much better.”

Scully unpacks dinner, distributing plastic wear and water bottles. She had different notions of herself when William was tiny, saw herself as a superwoman who made everything from scratch. The reality used to shame her, especially in front of her mother, but she’s well past it now. “Dig in,” she says, flopping into her seat. She chugs half a bottle of water.

“William got a nine out of ten on his vocabulary test,” Maggie says.

“What did he miss?” Mulder asks, loading his plate.

“Cooperation.”

Scully laughs, dribbling water onto her lap. “Figures you’d drop the ball there, coach.”

Maggie clears her throat. “He told me he watched that TV show you were on, Dana. Are you sure that was wise?”

Mulder stares at his tacos, but catches Scully’s face out of the corner of his eye. Her expression is about what it had been for the film crew.

“Mom,” Scully says, with testy politeness. “he’s shown an ability to handle material that would be too intense for most kids his age. He knows what we do, and he watched it in broad daylight with people who make him feel safe. This was not gratuitous violence.”

Maggie’s lips are pursed. “Well, it just seems very scary.”

Scully sips at her water, counting to ten. “I always appreciate your input, but it’s a decision we considered very carefully, then made together. And thus far, William has shown no ill effects or concern.”

Mulder is tempted to take the fall, but knows Scully won’t appreciate his undermining her show of authority. Her capacity for straight-faced lies is always somewhat disturbing.

“Hmmm,” Maggie replies.

“And may I remind you that you bought Matthew some shooting video games for Christmas at the same age,” Scully says, a certain smugness in her tone.

“Well, it was on the list Tara sent,” Maggie huffs.

Scully says nothing, but there’s a gleam in her eyes.

“Anyway,” Maggie says. “He told me all about his new bike. It was very good of the, er, Gunmen to take him.” She struggles at times with the non-Bill-ness of their lives.

“You’ll have to come by and see it,” Mulder says, feeling it safe to wade in now. “Things are a little crazy with the case we’re working on, but maybe this weekend?”

“You’re working on that awful case in Baltimore, aren’t you? With that poor woman in the tree? I hope you’ll catch whoever did it.” She blinks for a long beat, thinking of her own unavenged daughter.

Mulder squeezes her shoulder. “We’re doing our best, I promise.”

She pats his hand. “I know.”

William wanders over during a break, hurling himself into his father’s lap. He smells of sweat and dirt and grass stains. Mulder squeezes him as tight as he dares.

***

William, bathed and dressed for bed, lays with Scorn on his bedroom floor. He works carefully on a picture of a fire station being attacked by a monster octopus.

“Five minutes,” Scully says from the beanbag chair in the corner. “It’s already past your bedtime.” It was a bad idea to get so comfortable. She is bone tired, but still has hours of work ahead. Plus the laundry in the washer smelled musty and had to be restarted.

“Where’s Dad?”

“Um, I think he’s doing his weights in the basement. He’ll be up to tuck you in though.”

“Okay. Hey, Mom?”

“Yep?”

“Is it true you guys get to keep like the jewels and money and stuff from cases?”

Scully sits up. “What? No. Who on Earth told you that?”

“Carter on my team,” William says, nonchalantly drawing a Dalmatian. “He says that’s why we have a nice house even though you guys work for the government. He says you all divide it up.”

Scully grinds her teeth and doesn’t say that she thinks Carter is a little shit who has no business auditing her finances. “No, buddy. All that stuff is evidence. We don’t keep anything.”

“Is our house nice?

Scully sighs. It is, and, when they bought it, she’d disappeared into Williams Sonoma and Pier 1, scarcely coming up for air. They have napkin rings, for heaven’s sake. “It’s a nice house, William. When your dad’s parents died, they were able to be very generous.”

He rolls onto his side, cuddling Scorn. “Because my aunt Samantha is dead too.”

Scully crawls onto the floor next to him. “Yes.”

“And my aunt Melissa is dead. And your dad is dead. We have a lot of dead people in our family.”

She reaches out to stroke her son’s hair. “We do, kiddo.”

“That’s sad. Are you sad about it lot?”

She smiles at him, her round blue eyes peering out of his face. The same eyes that peered out of his own dead sister’s face. “I feel sad if I think about it a lot, I guess, but I have so many good things too, right?”

He flicks his loose tooth with his tongue. “Me?” he asks, grinning.

“Especially you.” He is her happy thought. He lets her fly.

William wriggles over and curls himself into her arms.

Mulder finds them sleeping on the floor when he comes upstairs.

***

“Sonofabitch,” Mulder says. “He gave me the wrong bag.” He unpacks their breakfast on the desk, two cream cheese bagels instead of the cheese and egg white sandwiches he’d ordered.

Scully considers the bagels. “I’ll eat that raisin one.”

“Ew, go for it. Poppy’s all mine, then. Hope there’s no random drug testing today.”

“You know that’s a common misconception. It’s an entirely different-”

“Shhh, I want the cool agents to think I’m hardcore.”

They chew in silence for a time, washing down the bagels with gulps of coffee. Scully examines the photos Mulder has strewn about, marked with circles and Post-It notes. His seeming chaos has always been well ordered. Mulder lives to fight entropy in his own peculiar way.

“Hey,” she says. “Got a call from Abdelnour while you were out.”

He looks puzzled. “Who?”

“OCME lady.”

“Oh, right. What’d she say?”

Scully wipes her mouth on a paper napkin. “She said someone from the military came by to see the body. But that he was vague when she asked what branch. Basically flashed some credentials and pulled rank.”

Mulder frowns. “That has not gone well for us, historically.”

“Not so much. Should we drive up?”

Mulder considers how big of a stir they should create in advance of having even a whiff of a suspect. “Did she say whether anything was missing?”

“No, said he just asked to see the body, took a few pictures, then left.”

“Sounds like someone doesn’t trust the OCME servers. Could’ve had that emailed.”

Scully props her chin on her hands, elbows on the desk. “Something’s up. I’m just glad I got my report done before things get….well. How things get for us.”

Mulder gets up, moving behind her so he can massage her shoulders. He brushes her hair out of the way, thumbs at her neck.

“Ohhhhhh,” she moans, head falling forward. “Yes please.”

“If this office is still wired for sound, someone’s real jealous right now.”

“Shut up and massage.”

Mulder pleases himself by listening to the noises she’s making, almost purring as the knots in her shoulders are worked loose.

Their phone rings and, regretfully, he stops touching her to answer it.

“Mulder.”

“Uh, hi. Agent Mulder? I, uh, I got your number from someone in Baltimore. It’s um, it’s about that case? The tree?” The voice is female, maybe thirty, and nervous.

Mulder presses a finger to his lips and switches to speaker.

Scully nods and begins recording.

“Yeah? I’m required to tell you there’s a tip hotline set up.”

“I want to talk to you. And Agent Scully. Is she there too?”

“She is. Go ahead.”

“I think I know the girl in the tree. I think she’s this girl my cousin was dating for a while. She was uh, Russian.” There’s a soft cough.

“Okay,” Mulder says. “Is that significant?”

There’s a sharp intake of breath. “I want to meet,” says the woman in a harsh whisper. “Can you meet me?”

“Absolutely. Where?”

“The zoo,” she says. “By the pandas. I’ll meet you in an hour.” The line goes dead.

Mulder puts the phone back in the cradle he gazes at his partner. “Well,” he says. That was something.”

Scully shakes her head, swiveling slowly in her chair. “Why’d she call us?”

He returns to her shoulders, kneading them as he thinks. “We’re tremendously popular on certain parts of the internet,” Mulder says.

“We?”

“Well, me mostly. You’re my beautiful, brilliant cross to bear.”

Scully narrows her eyes. “I’ve told you to stay off of Reddit and 4Chan, Mulder.”

He kisses the top of her head, her ear. “Come on, Scully. Let’s get to the panda before it eats shoots and leaves.”

***

They don’t look like anything but Feds, even in a setting as civilian as the zoo. Scully is alert to her own wary watchfulness, the way she is constantly assessing her surroundings. She’s afraid it will affect William.

They’re sitting on a bench, gazing as the pandas lumber about. The animals are gentle and clumsy, sweetly silly as they move around the enclosure.

“Pandas are good, aren’t they?” Scully asks. “It’s sort of nice to remember that the world has pandas in it.”

Mulder sheds his jacket, loosens his tie. “Yeah, it is. I like those red ones though. They call them firecats in Nepal.”

“The giant panda is the only member of the genus Ailuropoda,” Scully remarks, scanning the crowd. “It means cat-foot.” She spots an anxious looking woman in a green hoodie edging around the exhibit.

“That’s her,” Mulder says.

The woman spies them seconds later, ducking her head as she approaches. “Hi,” she says, sitting next to Scully. “I’m Fiona.”

“You okay?” Mulder asks.

“Nobody followed me.” Fiona wears khakis, her sharp knees pressing against the threadbare fabric.

“Has someone been following you?”

Fiona nods, her lank blonde hair sweeping her shoulders. “Off and on for about a day. Military guy, maybe. Maybe one of the Russians.” Her hands are shaking, and tears fall in dark splotches on her thighs.

“Fiona?” Scully says, her voice soft.

“I’m okay, I’m okay. I just, this is hard.”

“You’re doing the right thing,” Mulder says, gently coaxing her. “Take your time.”

A gulp. Then, “They were dealing arms, him and Tatiana.”

“Him?” Scully asks. “Your cousin?”

“Yeah. He’s real smart, went to West Point even. They put him in some elite unit he couldn’t tell us about, but my dad says he was interrogating guys at Gitmo.”

Mulder and Scully exchange a glance.

“And then what happened?”

Fiona sniffles, waves a thin hand. “They use these guys up, they break them and send the pieces home. He was so angry when he came back from his third tour, just a quiet, mean angry. We were so close as kids.”

Scully tamps down her own frustration on the subject. “I’m sorry that happened.”

“Yeah, well. Anyway, he said if he was gonna work for a bunch of fucking fascists, he wanted better pay. Got in with this guy Anatoly, they were running guns to the Russian mob and stuff.”

“How do you know this?” Mulder asks. “I can’t imagine that would go over well in the West Point Alumni newsletter.”

Fiona laughs a little. “No, like I said, we were close as kids. My husband had gotten laid off, he knew money was tight. Offered to cut us in.”

“And?” Scully asks.

Fiona looks offended. “Fuck no. So anyway, he meets Tatiana, she was here illegally for sure by the way. Didn’t work, hung out with the other Russians at the pool hall. But then my cousin, he started talking about Chechnya and stuff. He wanted to help those guys, and the Georgians. Do some good for the little guy.”

Scully wonders if this is meant to be redemptive in some way, to stir her compassion for a traitor and murderer. Disgust is sour on the back of her tongue, like blood.

Fiona squeezes her hands between her knees. “Shit got bad with him and Tatiana. He, uh, he hit her sometimes. They had a big fight around New Year’s about something. I heard Tatiana screaming that he was an anarchist and he said she was a killer. They threw some stuff.”

“Why’d he call her a killer?” Mulder asks.

Fiona favors him with a withering sideye. “I guess because she was selling guns to the fucking mob.”

“Nice to know he’s principled,” Scully says drily.

“Hey, I’m not defending him, okay? He’s into some dark shit, which is why I called you. Started getting into black magic type stuff, I don’t know what you call it.”

Mulder’s eyes light up. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, it’s how I got your names, actually. He was obsessed with some case you worked on in New Hampshire in the 90’s. Satanic PTA or whatever. Anyway, then I see your names in the paper for this case and it’s like, fucking kismet.”

“Fucking kismet,” Mulder repeats. “So why do you think he killed Tatiana?”

Fiona looks down at this, squirming. “I heard him on the phone last week. I was at his house and he was saying something like baby, you push people hard enough and they push back. Then they were arguing some more and he goes I’ll fucking kill you before I let you fuck this up!”

She begins to cry again.

Scully offers Fiona a tissue from her pocket, which is gratefully accepted. “Did you contact the police about this?”

“No. I should have, I know that. I’ve got kids though, so I just got the hell out and went home. But when I saw the picture on Facebook…”

“Kismet,” Scully murmurs.

“We need a name, “ Mulder says.

Silence, then muffled sobs.

“Fiona,” Scully says. “I know this is hard, but you’re doing the right thing.”

“We used to play together as kids,” she wails. “We were lifeguards together every summer.”

They let her sit, let her cry out her grief for the boy she knew. The pandas roll a large red ball back and forth.

“Drew,” she mumbles at last, sounding defeated. “Lieutenant Colonel Wesley Drew.”

***

Scully calls her mother from the parking lot. “Mom, hi, it’s Dana. Can, um, can you watch William overnight?”

She listens for a moment. “Yeah, no, it’s just that we have to-”

Mulder feels like he’s intruding somehow, even through the phone.

“Our house is good, sure,” Scully continues. “He can buy lunch tomorrow if you pre- oh. Okay, you can pack it, that’s fine. Yes, he likes peanut butter. Uh huh, we’ll be home to get him tomorrow after school, we just need to go to Baltimore and ask a few questions.”

She fumbles in her pockets for gum. “Okay, thanks Mom. Love you too.” Scully hangs up, then pops the gum into her mouth. She offers Mulder a piece which he takes.

“God bless Maggie,” he says, before blowing a bubble

Scully sighs. “They do seem pretty close,” she observes.

***

The fug of low-rent pool halls has been scrubbed from her pores, and even hotel toiletries beat stale smoke and beer. She thought of Fiona in the shower, of the sacrifices and betrayals entangled in love.

Scully emerges in a cloud of steam, wearing Mulder’s discarded dress shirt in the absence of a robe. She feels like one of those women in a 90’s music video.

“Hel-lo,” Mulder says, with voyeuristic joy. He has opted for boxers alone, hair still wet.

She tosses her head, striking a pose. “Dana wears a blue Oxford from the 2008 Joseph A. Bank collection,” she narrates in a husky voice. “And gray cotton briefs by Target.”

“Perfect for a romantic evening in a 2 star hotel,” Mulder adds, grabbing a handful of shirt fabric to tug her close.

She rises on her toes to kiss him. “Maybe so,” she says, pulling away. “But business first, I’m afraid.” She bends to her briefcase, gathering files. Today’s research needs color coded tabs and highlighters before it can be truly processed.

“Remember what a luxury this used to be?” Mulder asks, sprawling on his side of the bed. “A shared hotel room? So scandalous.”

Scully sits next to him, propped against the pillows with her knees up. “I remember the first time we shared a room,” she says, underlining an address. “I was so nervous.”

He rolls onto his side, rumpling her work. “Seriously? Scully, I’ve seen you stare down Congress and a Flukeman.”

She is strangely shy about this. “It’s funny, isn’t it? After all we’d been through, and I was anxious about sharing a room. We were in some little town in Iowa. Deborah, I think.”

“Decorah,” he supplies.

She smooths out the papers he’s crushed. “Mulder! If you remember, why am I telling you this?”

“Because I love listening to you talk,” he says, readjusting to rest his head on her belly. He nuzzles under the hem of her shirt.

“Okay. Well. We were in DeCORah, and there was some kind of Norwegian festival. Everything booked. We finally found a single room at this tiny inn.”

He remembers it well - the carpet like lumpy oatmeal, the bed not much better. The chaste thrill of Scully in the shower on the other side of the bathroom door

She strokes his hair. “It was while I had cancer, and I was still getting those nosebleeds. I was so afraid I’d get blood on the bed and you’d see and remember I was sick and, oh, I don’t know. ”

As though he ever forgot for even a second. “Oh, Scully…” He runs a hand over her kneecap, down her calf.

It was more than the nosebleeds, she recalls. It was lying with their backs to one another in the thick darkness, each with an acute awareness of the other’s heat. She remembers the wild, fleeting impulse she’d had, that she was dying and wouldn’t it be a shame…

“I don’t know that I’d owned up to wanting to jump you yet,” she says, interrupting her own thoughts.

“You wanted to jump me the first night. Your little mosquito bite ruse didn’t fool me. You thought I was a stud.” He licks her navel, the faint stretch marks like parentheses.

She strokes his nose with her fingertip. “Mulder, I admit that your pulchritude has never been in doubt. But I had recently disembarked from Jack Willis’s FBI Love Train and wasn’t looking for another ride just then. So to speak.”

“So when did you own up to it?”

“I don’t know. I mean, after Dallas I think I was ready to commit the great sin of sleeping with my partner. You were looking pretty good in the hallway that night.”

Mulder trails kisses up the inside of her thigh, tugging her underwear off. “You’ve said that before. But I find it hard to believe one single move on my part changed your mind entirely. Fess up.”

“I guess it might have been…..ohhhh.” His fingers slip inside of her and she squirms against his palm.

“You were saying?”

“That I should have nailed you that first night,” she replies, breathless. She unbuttons the shirt, which frames her lovely body against the bedding.

Mulder’s head, sleek as an otter, is between her legs in an instant.

His tongue travels the slick flats and ridges of the landscape between her thighs, an oscular playground he knows by heart.

Scully’s hands clutch at the grainy hotel sheets, her thighs radiating warmth against his flushed face. She smells of soap and salt and sex.

He glances up and her shoulders are rolled back, her head turned and cheek pressed against the pillows. Her hair is a mermaid tangle down to her breasts.

Mulder dips his head again, fingers curling and flexing in the wet heat of her body as he does. His tongue nudges at the hood of her clitoris, which he then licks with the steadiness of a metronome as she writhes and twists.

Scully is panting, her whole body a drumbeat in his ears. She isn’t vocal, his wife, but he can read her trembling and tremors like a seismologist. He quickens his pace, grazing her lightly with his teeth. His fingers beckon inside her, a come-hither motion to the little death.

Her back rises, pressing her body tighter against his mouth. Scully’s name, when he says it, is lost in the clench of her thighs. He rides it out with her, drinking her orgasm down as she shudders and sighs. She tastes of the sea, where he’d made his earliest memories of happiness.

Mulder slides his fingers out, rests his head on the saddle of her pelvis to catch his breath.

“Love you,” she mumbles, fingers twirling in his hair.

“I bet you do.”

“No, I really-”

“I know,” he says.

Later, deep in the liquid fire of her body, he remembers the way her back curved in Decorah. He’d thought about her like this that night, and had pressed his erection against the mattress until he finally was able to sleep.

***

Wednesday morning finds them back in Skinner’s office, stacks of neatly typed interviews in a binder.

“There’s still a lot more to do,” Scully says as she passes it to him, “but I think it’s enough for a warrant.”

Skinner scans her careful annotations. “Busy day yesterday.”

“Sir, when do you want to move on this?” Mulder asks.

Skinner sighs. “The sooner the better. Any indication of what he feared this Tatiana person was going to, if you’ll pardon me, fuck up?” he passes Mulder a dollar for the swear pig.

Mulder shakes his head. “No, though we kept the questions light, didn’t want to spook anybody. We tried to keep a vague missing person feel about it.”

“Good. Scully, any word on the guy at the morgue?”

She shakes her head.

“All right. I should be able to get the warrant by this afternoon. I want you to keep me posted on whatever comes up in Baltimore. Fiber confirmed the fabric in Bell- sorry. In Tatiana’s mouth was a match for the bridesmaid dresses. One of the women had ordered a matching wrap, and that went missing.”

Scully nods. “Prints?”

“We left the cards to Baltimore. They’re fuming them all, but it’s slow work and I don’t think we’ll find a damn thing. If this is the guy you think, he’ll have worn gloves.”

“Agreed,” Mulder said. “I’ve been calling around to printers to see if anyone had an order matching the cards, but nothing yet.”

“Let’s hope he went online,” Skinner says. “Credit card. Though I doubt he’s that dumb.”

“Everybody’s that dumb somewhere along the line,” Scully says, mustering a confidence she doesn’t quite feel. Lieutenant Corporal Drew’s treachery sickens her, violating her moral code at its very core. She looks forward to finding him.

“All right, agents. We’ll be in touch.”

“Thanks, sir,” Mulder says, as they rise.

Exiting into the waiting room, Scully freezes “Dammit!” she exclaims, startling both Kimberly and Mulder.

“Scully, you okay?”

“Yeah,” she sighs, rubbing her forehead. “But I forgot to get William’s hair cut for picture day.”

***

Back in the basement, Scully paces. Mulder throws darts at the board they’ve hung on the back of the door.

“Black magic,” he says. “I think that’s our only explanation for how Drew accomplished this unseen.”

“The only explanation? Mulder, look. I’m a lot more open minded than I was in my youth, but let’s not be dramatic.”

He stares. “The other night you accepted the Hand of Glory as the most plausible explanation! It drives me crazy when you do this.” He hurls the rest of his darts at the door.

She stops pacing, hands on her hips. “You’re as bad as William! Mulder, I said I was open to your ideas when all the pieces fit. It doesn’t mean I’m going to stop developing other hypotheses.”

Mulder rolls his eyes, gets up to retrieve his darts. “You caved as soon as soon as Skinner challenged you, had to play teacher’s pet as usual.”

She walks over to him, glaring up with her arms crossed. “Excuse me? Teacher’s pet? Is this middle school?”

He glares right back. “Look. I’m just saying that after all these years, even after William, it’s still like pulling teeth to get you to admit anything.”

“The existence of one phenomenon doesn’t necessitate that another be true! Why is it all or nothing with you?” He exasperates her with this, his seeming inability to give the mundane equal weight.

Mulder rubs his face, frustrated. “I thought we had talked this out. Clearly I misunderstood.”

Scully begins pacing again. “I’m open to the idea, okay? But we’re going to need something better for court.”

Their phone rings, and Scully answers. It’s Kimberly, summoning them back upstairs.

***

“Son of a bitch!” Scully exclaims. She slaps the papers down on Skinner’s desk.

“Scully!” Skinner says, shocked.

Mulder watches, intrigued.

Scully breathes through her nose. “I’m sorry, that was totally inappropriate. But they must have been waiting to pounce with that injunction as soon as the judge issued the warrant. It’s ridiculous!”

Skinner sighs, tapping his pen on the blotter. “It’s absolutely ridiculous, but this comes from above my pay grade from the guys at the DoD.”

“Well, we’re DoJ. Why do we have to answer to them?” Mulder asks.

“We aren’t answering to them. It’s a pissing match over the warrant and besides, it’s not technically our case. Murder’s not federal.”

“Arms dealing is, come back with that.”

“We can, on separate charges, but Maryland will get precedence for the murder in court, you know they will. Besides, you two haven’t been building a case for arms.”

“So the Pentagon is up our collective asses after all,” Scully sighs. She feels cheated. She wanted this one badly, even though the case was never really hers to begin with.

“They don’t like it when their honor students go bad,” Skinner says darkly. “Listen, Scully. As a Marine, I understand how you’re feeling about this. But they’re going to deal with him and it won’t be pretty, make no mistake.”

She feels like Veruca Salt, wants to stamp her foot and demand that Skinner get her body and her files and her suspect back now. “I understand, sir,” she says.

“Well,” Mulder says. “It’s been real.” They both shake his hand before leaving.

“Make sure I get a copy of William’s picture,” Skinner says.

***

They go out for ice cream after picking William up.

“Uh oh,” he says. “Did something bad happen?”

“So paranoid, just like your father,” Scully teases.

“Doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” William replies. “Can I get a banana split?”

“Sure, why not?”

Mulder opts for a hot fudge sundae, Scully a scoop of mint chocolate chip. They take their ice cream to one of the tables outside.

“So you really don’t have bad news?” William asks, whipped cream on his chin. “This is just for fun?”

Mulder wipes his son’s face with a napkin. “You really are paranoid. No, William. We’re not about to tell you that we sent Scorn to live on a farm where she can run free with other cats.”

“Scorn hates other cats.”

“It was just a rough day,” Scully confesses. “We wanted some down time with you, especially since we didn’t see you yesterday.”

“Yeah, Grandma said you got stuck in Baltimore. Did you go to the aquarium?”

“Work stuff,” Mulder says. “I wish it were the aquarium.”

“Did you catch the bad guy?” William asks around a mouthful of banana.

“We did,” Scully lies. It’s essentially true. Sort of.

“Cooool.”

“I thought our jobs were stupid,” Mulder says. “I thought you wanted your mom to be a baker or an accountant.”

“I did,” William says. “But I saw that COPS episode and honestly Dad, you need her out there.”

***

It’s nearly a week later, after a family bike ride, that Scully hears the news on TV.

“…killed in the explosions inside the Moscow Metro stations, believed to be the work of Chechen separatists,” the newscaster says.

“Mulder!” she yells. He runs over, helmet still on. “What? What is it?”

She points at the TV.

Mulder stares. “He knew,” he breathes. “That’s what Tatiana was talking about.”

“The question is,” Scully says, “whether the DoD bogarted him in an attempt to prevent it.”

“Or in an attempt to make sure we didn’t prevent it,” Mulder says.

The choices seem equally plausible to Scully at this point in her life. She says nothing, just stares at the television, at the rubble and destruction half a world away.

***

“Is he out?” Scully whispers.

Mulder nods. “All clear. I’ve got your back.”

Scully, being lighter of foot, picks her way across the floor to William’s bed. She slips her hand under his pillow, depositing the rumpled five dollar bill.

William stirs, and she freezes, wide-eyed.

When he doesn’t wake, she feels around for his tooth, then stealthily retreats to the hall.

“Mission complete,” she says, holding the tooth up for inspection.

“Nice work, Agent. What a weird ritual, though.”

“It is, isn’t it? Paying him for his skull fragments? I wouldn’t have minded a Hand of Glory though, I’ll tell you that. That was tense for a minute.”

“Yeah, well, it’s probably down in the bowels of the Pentagon with Oswald’s magic bullet,” Mulder says.

Scully hides the tooth at the bottom of the trash can. “Probably,” she agrees. “Big Indiana Jones warehouse.”

“Lost Ark or Temple of Doom?” Mulder asks her.

She looks surprised. “Lost Ark, is that even a question?”

“No, not really. I have to confess, Marion might tempt me away from you.”

Scully laughs. “She’d shoot you more than I have.”

He grins. “Yeah, maybe. But you know I love a girl who punches Nazis.”

Scully groans. “Are you going to tell me about the Queen Anne again?” She secretly hopes he will. She loves both the story and his telling of it.

“Yeah,” says Mulder, who knows her better than she thinks. “Yeah, I am.”

Scully follows him to the bedroom. “Just don’t leave out my surprise right hook,” she warns. “That’s my favorite part.”

Mulder pulls the bedding back, sighing happily as he lies down. “Get over here, Scully.” He holds an arm out to draw her close.

She curls up next to him, her head pillowed on his warm chest.

“Do you think he really believes in the Tooth Fairy?” Mulder asks.

She smiles. “Oh, he’s like you that way too, Mulder. He wants to believe.”

Scully closes her eyes in the dark, sliding softly into sleep. She dreams of Mulder’s ship, of a man and a woman who tried to save the world.

[cookiedoughmeagain]

Haven Season Two DVD Commentary: A Tale of Two Audreys

Sam Ernst and Jim Dunn, Co-Creators and Writers commenting.

[So, I *think* I have got used to the sounds of their voices and I think I can mostly tell who is speaking when, but it is possible that I have got them mixed up sometimes.]

Stuff they talk about includes:

How it seems so long ago that these scenes were being filmed. “And we’re watching the ‘Previously On’ for Season One, which I only kind of remember,” says Sam. “We were only vaguely conscious for most of that Season because we were writing so much,” agrees Jim.

How they are looking forward to seeing “all the stuff that we seeded in” in this episode and in Season One “that we paid on” in setting up Season Two. For instance bringing the Rev back.

The ‘previously on’ for when Nathan and Audrey meet another Audrey is not the original footage from Season One - they reshot it so that it would match the scenes from this episode [which follow directly on]. When we first see the new Audrey, it was August when that was filmed at the end of Season One, now filming the beginning of Season Two it’s April and so they reshot it for the continuity.

How because it’s only April it was really cold while they were filming “I’m wearing like nine layers, I’m in front of a heater and I’m cold” says Sam. It was 34 degrees, the water [in front of the Good Shepherd] was barely flowing, “poor Eric Balfour, I mean he never complained but I can’t believe you can’t see the breath coming out of his mouth.” There was sleet and snow later on the day this was filmed.

The sewer that the kid loses the paper boat in, isn’t real; it was completely fabricated for the shoot. “Everyone kept stepping on it because it looked like it had been there for 200 years,” says Sam.

The paper boat in the water as a homage to the first page of Stephen King’s IT.

As Duke is talking to the Rev, Jim says “Here we set up a lot of stuff that pays out across the Season, really getting into Duke’s story this year.” The details of it, with Duke’s father, as being a really slow burn and the pay off coming in episode 2.12 when we meet the ghost of Duke’s father. Sam agrees, saying “We always knew that would be an interesting story and we knew a lot of that story, but some of it of course we figured out as we went down the road.”

As we see Duke saying he’s calling the police, they comment “Look how cold he is!”, “He’s so cold.”

As we see Nathan show the new Audrey into the bronco, Sam says that one of the things he loves about this scene is “we don’t have everybody not believe everything right away.” In the sense that “of course” Audrey is going to think it’s a possibility that this new arrival is in some sense her. Jim agreeing that after the end of Season One “she’s got reasons to question who she thinks she is.” And he adds that it was a big challenge in writing this episode, working out how Audrey would react to this, what the natural reactions are to a situation like this. 

Sam talks about Nathan and how when Nathan says “I know you,” he’s not logically thinking the situation through. He’s being a loyal friend. Jim adds, “And that’s exactly what you want from your friends in that situation.” [and then jokes that this is a situation we all face all the time].

“These frogs by the way - many of them real. They’re actually frozen frogs.” says Sam. Jim adds that you can see some of them flying in from the left or right because they were being thrown by a production assistant.

As the credits roll, Sam talks about the tattoo symbol and how you could go back and watch Season One and there’s stuff that seeded forward for this season and also “now that we know we’ve got a Season Three”, it’s going to follow through into Season Three as well. Jim jokes, “It’s almost like we were thinking of that stuff. It’s almost like there’s a plan.”

As Nathan makes a brief attempt to suggest a tornado could be responsible for the frogs, Sam confirms that this is the part he likes about this scene. Because Nathan and Audrey don’t spend very long reaching for scientific explanations. “There’s no Scully moment.” And Jim adds, “We have the other Audrey Parker, we have Fraudrey in the truck who can take on that role.”

Sam; “By the way this is the amazing Kathleen Monroe, who was phenomenal … and when she was done, we were sorry to see her go.”

As we see the swarm of bugs fly over the bay, they both agree that was fun to write because they get to say what happens but “we don’t have to actually do it.” Sam adding, “They did a great job with the effects on that.”

The talk about researching the definition of the various biblical plagues - gnat being any sort of small pest. Sam says, “As a Jew myself, I do Passover every year, and now I will never forget the plagues. In order.” Jim adding, “They’re beaten in for good now right?”

As the Audreys are getting the injured man out of the truck, they joke that they had to cut away at that moment, because he’s big enough that even the two of them together wouldn’t actually be able to move him.

As Fraudrey starts singing to count the timings of her CPR, Sam says that Matt McGuinness came up with this idea. Jim adds that the actual song they [presumably the Campfire Girls] use is Staying Alive, but getting the rights to that for worldwide distribution was prohibitive. So they had to figure a public domain alternative.

As Audrey steps away to call Agent Howard, the Agent Howard side of that scene was filmed in the building in the background behind Audrey. They built the set in there so that they could film Agent Howard’s scene right after Audrey’s.

Sam says, “Agent Howard plays a very important role that we have not fully explored yet.” Jim corrects him, saying, “I would say ‘not fully revealed yet’.” And Sam agrees “that is more apt.”

Sam, apologising for how many times he will likely bring it up, says, “It was so cold this day. The two of them [Emily and Lucas], the fact that they’re not shivering while they’re acting is the most amazing feat of acting in itself.” Jim adds, “They had those instant heat packs stuffed in every pocket and wrapped around them. It’s crazy.”

Sam; “One thing I’m sorry about is this guy’s role” They then fail to remember the character’s name and I don’t think it’s ever used in the episode. This is the guy:

“He had a more fleshed out role in earlier drafts,” says Sam, but the problem when they shot it that way was that the episode “came in at about two hours” so they had to “trim it down and his role got minimised which was unfortunate.” He would have been an acolyte of the Rev. They “wanted to establish that the Rev. has acolytes and that he, like many leaders, have people who follow them blindly.” says Sam and he adds that this would have set up episode 12 “where the guy who is cursed is an acolyte of the Rev. And we wanted to set that up from the start.” Jim agrees that they’d tried to “establish the effect of the Rev. on the community. And the reaction by the community to the Troubles.” But you have to shoot for the timeslot you have, so they had to cut stuff to fit.

And then we see Evi. Sam says, “She would stand out in any crowd because she’s beautiful, but the fact that she’s in Maine, or in Nova Scotia, and she’s the only person of colour that we’ve seen … we’re always trying to flesh that out and get more people of colour into the show, but when you shoot in Nova Scotia it’s tricky.” Jim agrees, saying, “It is a pale environment.”

They talk about how what’s happening in the episode “has nothing to do with God” and wanting to make that clear.

Where the bugs start flying out of various things (a cannon, a car, a hydrant), Sam remembers having “a big argument” with Matt McGuiness about whether they could come out of the tailpipe. Matt’s argument was “well where would the flies be, in the car?” But Sam’s saying well, they’re inside the cannon and the hydrant, why shouldn’t they be in the car? And he says, “and those kinds of arguments, are why I love my job.” And gets lots of agreement from Jim.

As we see Nathan talking to the Rev in the church, Sam says this is his “absolute favourite Nathan scene in this episode”, and Jim adds it’s also the most creepy Rev. scene, “his eyes in this shot, with the way it’s lit - his eyes are doing that glowing maniacal crazy preacher thing.” Sam agrees; “Beautifully lit by Director of Photography Eric Cayla, but this is where we try to add colour to the Rev. and say, ‘Look; he doesn’t want to kill everyone, he just wants to do God’s work (what he thinks God’s work is)’” And he says this is the case for most men of God; they’re all trying to do God’s work, they just have different ideas of what that is. Jim adds, “And therein lies the tragedy.” 

Sam says they were careful not to look like they were bashing Christians, because “it has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with what Bible he’s referring to, because I don’t think any Bible says; ‘We have to go kill cursed people’ because they don’t really deal with it. But this is his own agenda. But believe me, skirting around the religious stuff was a huge consideration for us.” Jim comments that “It might fall into that ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ category.

They talk about how Season 2 will develop Vince and Dave’s characters more, and how at this point, they have known Audrey for “several decades”, but they’re not revealing it here and we will find it out later in the season. And they add that “We knew that, of course, and so we tried to have them colour their performances with that information.”

At Audrey’s “ A tricorder is just for readings” line, Jim comments “I love that line.” And Sam agrees he’s “happy that made it in” and adds, “It has nothing to do with anything, but what we like about it is, it’s the weird quirky stuff that we’re always trying to give Audrey, that a lot of times ends up by the wayside,” because there isn’t time to include everything.

As FBI Audrey is telling Audrey she should look at the events in the order they happened, Jim says, “I love seeing her argue with herself.” And they both agree that the actress did a really job to “make Fraudrey not into a bitch. Because; she’s not - she’s actually the rational person here,” says Sam. And Jim adds, “She’s assertive and confident the way Audrey is, but without the perspective of buying into all the supernatural hocus pocus.”

Sam adds, “Emily hit it out of the park with the last scene between them” at the end of the episode.

They note the “Ryan Atlantic II” that we see written on the side of the Rouge, and then we see Evi, and they note that she is Evidence Ryan, “which people connected and we did not.” “We can not take credit for that; unless we did it subconsiously.”

[Also, have a photo of Duke smiling. Just because:

Jim says that the original of the name Evidence Ryan comes from Charles Ardai (the publisher of The Colorado Kid novel) - he and his wife had a baby the year before when they were writing the early episodes and named her Evidence and “we were so taken by that name, that we immediately proposed that this character be named Evidence. And luckily they were willing to let us do that. It’s just a great name.”

They comment again on how cold the weather was when they were filming this. “Eric Balfour is always up for anything. If we wrote in there, he strips naked and jumps into the water, he would have done it.”

Where Audrey and Nathan knock on the door looking for the owner of the car, Sam comments that this is “the craziest house” - it’s two houses that got knocked into one, so it has an odd layout, with two staircases opposite each other. And that it has an oil-fuel stove, which Sam expresses great surprise at.

At Nathan’s “That’d be swell,” line, buth Sam and Jim laugh, and Sam says the video of the panel they did at the New York Comic Con shows how different Lucas is and how goofy he can be. 

The scene with Audrey and Nathan looking at the field of cows changed a lot - initially they were in a nursery and the animals on the wallpaper started dripping and bleeding down the walls. “We both loved that image,” says Jim and Sam adds, “Sadly we were alone.” It was felt to be too abstract, so they switched it to actual cows in a field.

Sam comments again how cold it was when they were filming, and how after every scene everyone would huddle around the heater, “Except for Eric, he somehow kept warm.”

And how it is a beautiful location there [at the Gull] outside of Hubbards [?]

Jim says that there at the Grey Gull there is a mark on the floor at the one spot you can make a cell phone call, because that is the only spot there with any signal.

Sam [I think] says that the name “TJ Smith” is his father-in-law.

“The one thing about writing this that was a two-edged sword was the plagues.” They liked it because it’s a simple affliction to understand and they needed something simple because they had so much character work to do for the first episode of the season. But the hiccup is that “there’s ten of them,” you have to commit to that timeline. And also “you know what’s coming up, so how do you make that interesting.”

Although Jim says he likes that because he didn’t want every episode to be always just about “what’s happening?” because sometimes it can be about “how do you cope with it?” And they agree that it worked well in the end.

As we see inside the Gull, Jim comments that it’s funny how “lush” the place got; “it definitely got an upgrade.”

The hail that we see was both real and digital and only some of it was flaming, because that was a difficult effect to do and especially at the beginning of the season with the crew still settling in.

When Duke meets Fraudrey, Sam comments that he really likes this scene, and Duke’s line of ‘Interesting’ in particular, because he likes Duke as someone “not being thrown by anything.” And Jim agrees, “He just rolls with it. He’s been here long enough, and been in enough different places long enough, that he just rolls with it.”

And they refer to Duke’s “Why does everyone always think I want to help?” line as a very important line for him, it “sums up his character very well,” says Jim - because of course, he then does go and help and that’s the real point of it.

They talk about the “shoe-leather” standard cop stuff as being “tricky to write because it can be kind of boring,” and Jim adds that’s where it helps to have the supernatural elements of the show because they’re the “bright shiny distraction” from focusing too much on the shoe leather. He says that can work well for shows that deliberately do that (like Law & Order), but for them they wanted to focus more on the character side and have fun with the supernatural stuff.

When they’re in the bronco, the car is getting towed along, so it’s real scenery outside the window. But they comment that what’s great about this scene is Eric’s acting when he learns that the Chief is dead.

When Audrey mentions the cooler, Jim says, “If you watch episode 2.12, that concept came back.” Sam says the cooler line was something Matt McGuiness wrote and that at first he thought it was the strangest line, but that with the call back in 2.12 it works.

They joke that they really skipped past the grasshopper plague because “we’ve already seen enough flying bugs”.

Sam comments that the dark effect worked really well - it was shot in the middle of the day and digitally darkened. And Jim agrees that “it felt right; it feels creepy and surreal.”

They talk about TW Peacock having directed this episode and how directing the first episode of a season is always difficult, with everyone still settling into the job and everything.

They started production this year at the very end of the hockey season, so their stages weren’t built yet [because they film in the ice rink during the off season]. Which was a bit of an issue because normally when the weather’s cold you try and put more of it in the standing stages (e.g. the station, Audrey’s apartment), but there were no sets ready, so they couldn’t. All of the police station scenes in this episode were filmed a few weeks later. 

As Audrey realises the first-born sons are dying, Sam says “this is classic Haven; everything’s going south,  people are going to die, and Audrey has to not kill the bad guy. Or jail him,” which is usually what happens in cop shows, but “they don’t mitigate the circumstance, which is what she needs to do.”

They had a discussion in the writer’s room about, what would happen if TJ shot himself; the Trouble he set loose when he read the Bible is out in the world now, so would it carry on if he died? The uncertainty of that being why it was important that Audrey talk him down.

Sam comments on the Velveteen Rabbit story, noting that they picked it because it’s public domain. Jim comments that the passages that are being read out, don’t really line up with what you would first come to when you open the book, but “that’s OK because it’s television.” And Sam says, “I don’t think people are reading along with the book while they’re watching. In fact they’re probably vacuuming and doing the dishes and putting the kids to sleep.”

Audrey’s “It’s over now,” line was Jim’s line added in post-production to give the closure/confirmation that the problem is resolved.

When we see the rabbit shadow on the wall, Sam says that he didn’t like it the first time because it was so different from what he had in his head. But now he’s gotten used to it he thinks it works.

They both agree it can be difficult with this kind of sci-fi show because the effects are never going to replicate exactly what they have in their heads; “seeing the internal become external is problematic” says Jim

“It’s interesting seeing the Rev. confront the two of them, because in so many ways Nathan and Duke are two sides of the same coin. They’re two sides of what it is to live in Haven,” says Jim, and Sam agrees and adds, “These two are brothers in a sense. I’m not saying they’re literally brothers, but … they are. They’re not Cain and Abel exactly but; they’re tied.” Jim agrees; “There are bonds between them that won’t be broken, regardless of how they feel about each other…. There’s something indissolvable between them.”

Jim says that one of the things he likes about this season is addressing the question of why Duke is in Haven. Like, why do people in general stay? And why Duke specifically? “He’s footloose, he’s fancy free. He’s got his boat, he’s got skills (however it is exactly that he’s making his money); he could go other places and do other things.”

Sam picks up on Evi’s line where she says to Duke he must have an angle for being in Haven, and says that she’s right, Duke does have an angle for why he’s in Haven, it’s just he doesn’t know yet what’s keeping him there. “And maybe that’s something we need to address in Season Three.”

“It’s funny,” says Jim, “Vince and Dave are sort of the secret town elders.” He talks about growing up in the kind of small town where the coffee shop would have a group of guys hanging out and talking, pulling strings and getting stuff done, and that Haven has that same thing, except there’s also “all the stuff that happens under the cover of secrecy, and Vince and Dave are smack in the heart of everything that’s going on that way.”

When we see Nathan on the hill burying his Dad, Sam talks about “this scene, which I absolutely love; it speaks about these two characters and what we were saying earlier about them being connected. The fact is that this is where we bring these two together. That they show up regardless of what they do. This is the most important moment… one of the most important scenes of the episode. It speaks to the core of these two.” He adds, “This is one of those scenes that changed so little” from the first draft. Jim agrees that this shows where these two characters are coming from. And they refer to the dramatic change in their relationship from this point to final scene of the season where their relationship has completely deteriorated.

Then we see the two Audrey’s, talking about the reason why they became a cop, and Sam says that “this scene never changed either.”

They say that someone questioned whether they should really have Audrey sticking scissors in the guy’s neck and they both strongly agree that, given the situation, they have “no problem with this at all”

Sam says that Emily in this scene is “amazing”, “phenomenal”.

Sam says he’s not sure whether it was clear that [at the moment where the FBI come through the door] Audrey is saying to Fraudrey “don’t worry, I’ll protect you, you’ll be fine.” Jim assures him it worked and it was clear.

And then “there’s the big reverse” because it’s Fraudrey who ends up doing the protecting.

Jim comments that this is “such a TV moment” because it stretches so much longer than it would in real life.

[lynchgirl90]

Who do we most need in reactionary times? #TwinPeaks Dale Cooper

Peter Ormerod

I’ve got good news: special agent Dale Cooper is soon to return to our screens, and through them, our lives. And he could not have picked a better time, because if there’s one person the world needs now, it’s him.

If you don’t already know Coop, that needs to change. He’s the hero of Twin Peaks, sent by the FBI to investigate the death of a high-school student named Laura Palmer. The first series of Twin Peaks, which started in 1990, is a landmark in television history. The second series of Twin Peaks, which aired the following year, is mostly no good but also includes some of the most startling and extraordinary material ever broadcast. The third series begins next month, after a gap of 26 years. And people are getting excited about it.

For some, the appeal will lie in nostalgia. For others, it will be in seeing how the cast have aged and how their characters have developed. There will be those desperate for the first mentions of damn fine cups of coffee or impressive slices of cherry pie. And yet it is the figure, the character, the very idea, of special agent Dale Cooper that is surely the most significant component, for he is the antidote to so much that’s poisoning the world.

If you fear that more and more aspects of our lives are being dictated by algorithms, Coop is your man. If, like Robert Newman, you’re worried that public discourse is being taken over by a bleak and reductive view of humanity, Coop is coming to save you. If you’re aghast at seeing beauty fall prey to greed, Coop is on your side, and in ways more profound than you may at first imagine.

When Cooper declares midway through the first series that “I know who killed Laura Palmer,” he’s responding not to some fresh evidence uncovered by the forensics team, or to a confession obtained during interrogation, but to a dreamhe just had involving a red-curtained room in which everything happens backwards and forwards at the same time. When he’s explaining his modus operandi to the local police, he does so by way of a lecture on Tibetan mysticism. When Laura’s killer is eventually caught, it’s after Cooper has a vision of a giant man intoning the fearful words: “It is happening again.”

To Cooper, instinct and insight are essential in understanding the world. He understands that truth is to be found not only in that which can be measured and counted, but also in the abstract and numinous, and that emotional intelligence is as important as factual knowledge and analytical capability. But he’s no new age woo merchant: to Coop, the truth still matters, and facts still matter, and right and wrong still matter.

Cooper appreciates that reality is broader than our perception of it. He teaches us that meaning can be found in nonsense; he encourages us to pay attention to our dreams. He accepts as evidence that which lesser mortals would dismiss: he takes seriously the words of a woman who claims to receive messages from a piece of wood. And his efforts are complemented all the while by the more earthly work of the local police team, without which he knows he could not do his job.

It is my conviction that we need more of this sort of thing. Progressive voices in recent years have mistakenly believed that all they need do is appeal to reason; all the while, reactionary voices have gained the ascendancy through appeals to emotion. Cooper understands that both are essential in the discernment of truth.

And if we really want to understand the world, we need to accept that quantitative approaches alone will be of limited use. Take as an example John Harris’s short film about Nuneaton, made just before the 2015 general election. It comprised only opinions, anecdotes and images, yet it gave a far clearer picture of the direction of events than was managed by any of the supposedly scientific opinion polls that informed much of the media’s coverage and ensured it missed the bigger story.

Cooper reminds us that feelings, when considered judiciously, are of great value in any meaningful search for truth. Yes, he’s a made-up character, born from the minds of David Lynch and Mark Frost; but works of fiction often abut with real life in meaningful ways. Our future depends on those whose minds are open, whose hearts are soft and whose devotion to justice is unswerving; in each respect, there is no better role model than special agent Dale Cooper. So welcome back, Coop. You deserve those doughnuts.

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