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sigritandtheelves · 7 years ago

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Rating: Mature Timeline: post-Requiem, au Tags: angst, romance, aliens/mytharc, and (lord help me) fluff Words: 4.3 k

A/N: This is the fourth and final work in a series I’m calling Bearings that begins with “Drown,” “Surface,” and “Harbor,” following the reproduction arc from seasons 5-8. CW for all parts: mentions of some sensitive reproductive topics (IVF, loss, miscarriage, infertility, birth, etc.). Because I wanted to rework the season 8 mythology and timeline so it actually made sense, this is quite a bit more plot-heavy than the previous installments, but I hope it’s not too far off in tone from the others.

_+_

She comes home from the hospital to her empty apartment where there is nothing she wants to see, then to his empty apartment where she feeds his fish and draws circles with her left hand on her abdomen. We made you here, she thinks. On his couch, she watches the blank screen of his TV, dazed. His computer disappears. Her computer disappears. She vomits. She calls her mother. She meets the man that’s taken on the impossible task—so earnest, so by-the-book—so unequipped to find her partner.

A week after he’s taken, she stands among scrub grass and cacti, screaming his name into the dark. Beside her the boy Gibson touches her elbow. “It’s there,” he says and points.

“Where? Can you hear him?”

“Yes.”

But they are ripped away from the ship—by FBI helicopters and trucks, shot in the foot by their own people—before she can even think how to possibly reach him.

She comes, slowly, to trust this other man John, though he won’t believe her about Mulder’s abduction. She takes her prenatal vitamins with decaf coffee in the morning, grimacing at the taste. Her mother doesn’t understand, but brings her soup, crackers, ginger ale. She sits on the couch and watches her daughter cry, pats her knee with the empathy of a woman who has been pregnant and alone for long stretches, though never quite like this.

There is a sense of pressure in her belly, of fullness always, like she’s eaten too much, like there’s no more room. On a fuzzy monochrome screen she finds the shape of a peanut, hears the whoosh whoosh of a tiny heart and thinks Oh Mulder, it’s real. The doctor tells her that January 9 is her due date and she thanks her, takes the plasticky printout of the ultrasound paper to hang on her fridge. She touches the peanut shape in the mornings while she drinks her bad coffee alone.

A month goes by. Then two.

The air crackles hot in August and she burns with it—she has too much blood for this heat. Her suits are too tight, her skin is too tight. Her organs complain until one day she doubles over in pain as her strained abdominals split to make room for all her internal shifting. She thinks of those gestating monsters screeching to life in jelly-like bodies, of explosions of blood and claws in the Arizona heat.

“Agent Scully, you alright?” Doggett grips her arm and tries to straighten her, but the tearing sensation grows. She pulls the trashcan to her and vomits. He brings her water in a paper cup.

“You have some bad sushi or somethin’?” he asks.

She smiles at him sadly as she gets hold of herself. “Not quite.” She needs to tell him. The concerned look on his face pushes her over the edge. “I’m pregnant,” she says, and his concern turns to utter shock. When she tells him how far along, a new kind of understanding comes onto his face, but he doesn’t ask questions, for which she is very grateful. Eventually, he forgives her for not telling him sooner.

Two days after her confession, a crackling, distant voice comes through her phone. “Agent Scully,” it says: Gibson’s far-away voice. “Agent Scully, it’s coming back.”

She packs two bags and flies west.

_+_

Helena Montana, a drab motel room: Gibson, Scully, Doggett, Skinner.

“They’re bringing them back,” Gibson said, blunt as ever: “They’ve changed their brains.”

Doggett, pacing the small room, pinched his lips in frustration. “What are you talkin’ about?”

Behind his wire-framed glasses, the teenager narrowed his eyes. “They changed their brains so they can’t fight back. Mulder and the others. So they can’t fight back like I can.”

On the room’s small desk, a police radio squawked, and they all listened to hear if it were news. When it became clear that it wasn’t, Scully turned to Gibson.

“What you can do, that’s something that can be turned on, right? In some people or in everyone?”

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’s why they wanted me so badly before. It’s why they’re still after me now.”

Skinner heaved a sigh and stood from the desk chair, but with John’s pacing, there was nowhere to go. “Alright, so now what? They’re just turning off this god module or whatever it is and dropping everyone back off? That’s it? We just wait to collect their trash?” Scully bit her lip to keep from objecting to this. Realizing what he’d said, Skinner winced, then softened his features.

“I think what’s important here,” Scully said, “is that we find the people who were taken and make sure they’re okay, and that we protect Gibson and any others who might help us win whatever might lie ahead. That means Gibson should stay here when we go out, and someone needs to stay with him.”

Skinner and Doggett looked at each other for a moment, battling it out in steely gazes. “I’ll stay with him,” Doggett said eventually.

“No,” Gibson’s eyes were wide. “Agent Scully has to stay.”

“What? No, I’m not staying. If Mulder is out there, I need to get to him.”

For the first time, Gibson looked frightened. He reached out his hand and touched Scully’s arm. “I couldn’t tell before, which is good. That means they don’t know either.” Wide eyes peering up at her, an unusual nervousness to his speech. “Agent Scully, your baby is like me.”

---

There were tears, some arguing, but in the end, they trusted Gibson. Skinner and Doggett patrolled as much land as they could until the reports started coming through the staticky radio: strange lights, electrical disturbances, car crashes from distracted drivers. And then—people in a field. Dazed. Lost. Uncertain how they’d gotten there.

Scully had taken up the path of Doggett’s pacing, hand on her belly, ear to the radio always. People in a field. People, not bodies. She felt little flutters of movement from inside her, sparked by her agitation, her restlessness. She thought: Be calm. I’m sorry. It’s okay.

The movements slowed.

She looked at Gibson, who was reading on one of the double beds. She saw him now as he must have been: an infant, someone’s child, a toddler stacking blocks: loved. And what he’d become: quarry, fodder, a weapon in someone else’s war: hunted. How few times she’d bothered to see him as the former, she thought, ashamed.

“Gibson, where are your parents?” She asked.

He looked up at her suddenly, as if in surprise. A little smile turned up the corner of his mouth. “You know, no one has asked me that in a long time.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t think they’re dead, but I haven’t seen them since I first met you. I think those men who wanted me took them.”

“And you haven’t tried to find them?”

He shook his head. “Not safe.”

Scully looked at his socked feet stretched out and stacked on the bed, his too-big tshirt, his khakis with holes in the knee. “Do you miss them?” she asked.

The smile was gone now. “Yeah.”

She walked over and sat beside him, put her arm around the boy, who stiffened at first before relaxing. She wondered how long it had been since someone hugged him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If… when we figure all this out, we’ll find your parents. We’ll make sure you have a family to stay with. Even if it’s us.”

Before the silence could stretch into awkwardness, her cell phone rang: it was Skinner.

“We got him,” he said. “I’m bringing him to you.”

---

They’d thought the location random—chosen for its sparse population, its vast expanses of open land, perhaps. But they were wrong. A UFO cult, a cluster of abductees in the outskirts of Helena had been kept off the map. This trip was a dropoff and a pickup, another round of collecting and neutralizing potential human weapons. Scully found this out later. After.

Skinner brought him back whole, as he’d promised, only three months late. Scully was out the door and on the sidewalk before the engine of Skinner’s rental car cut off, and they were flying to each other across a motel parking lot, crashing into each other with arms and lips and legs while Skinner stood awkwardly and rubbed his bald head.

“You’re back, you’re back,” she was saying into his mouth and his hand was buried in her hair as he fell back against the car with the weight of her, his muscles weak from disuse. “Are you okay?” Genuine concern in her voice, but she was also nearly laughing with relief, with the unbelievable solid weight of him here in her arms. He was wearing the same clothes he’d disappeared in, as if no time at all had passed.

Mulder kissed her again, buried his face in her neck. “I’m fine,” he said. “Just a little weak. A little confused.”

She touched his chin to lift his head, to look at him, touched his hairline, searched for new scars: two small ones at either temple and her bottom lip was trembling. “Oh Mulder, your poor head.”

He was shaking it, though, his soft hair tickling against her palms. “Nah, it’s okay. I don’t think there’s much more they can knock loose. Maybe even straightened things up a bit in there.” He smiled sheepishly. The look on her face was everything at once: love and relief and gratitude and sorrow and lust and hope.

“I missed you,” she whispered.

He kissed her again. “If I could remember, I’d know I missed you too.”

She took his hands and pulled him toward the motel. “Come on. There’s a lot to talk about, and then you need to rest.”

---

When all five of them were in the room, they talked about everything but one—the one thing she was saving to tell him in private. They tossed around ideas about how to save the world, Mulder and Scully thigh-to-thigh on one of the beds, inseparable. Doggett kept glancing at them, glancing away, fascinated by the magnetic pull of their presence together in a room. Skinner was used to it and untroubled. Gibson, overhearing things the others could not, blushed occasionally and looked perhaps the most uncomfortable of all. But it grew late and they could not know all the answers in one night.

Mulder and Scully rented a third room for themselves where, in the dim illumination of a bedside lamp, she held out her hand to him and gestured for him to sit. When he did, she lowered herself beside him, not touching. She was suddenly terrified in the small room, which smelled like very old cigarettes and cheap air freshener. He was watching her with increasing concern; she was gnawing her lower lip, afraid he wouldn’t be as happy about this news as she, afraid he would see it somehow as a betrayal, a weakness, a call to give up—all the things she knew he’d feared at one time.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” she said finally, eyes locked firmly on their feet, on his boots, still scuffed with Oregon mud.

“What?” he asked.

“I… I’m not sure how,” she began, careful with each word, “but it seems that sometime last year, something changed for me. Physically.” She chanced a quick look at him, found only concern and question. He pulled her hand into both of his and squeezed her fingers, offering encouragement. “Whatever infertility I experienced after my abduction… Mulder, it’s gone. I am most certainly not infertile anymore.”

His eyes narrowed at her words, considering them carefully, and then widened as he realized their import—she could almost see his heart beating, could almost hear it over the rattling of the air conditioner. “Scully,” he said. He swallowed. “How do you know?”

She almost pulled her hand away, sure he would let go anyway when she spoke her next words. “Because I’m pregnant,” she said, and then watched him carefully: “With your baby.” And goddamnit, she couldn’t help it, there was a smile tugging at her lips, even through her fear, because she’d hoped for and imagined this moment so many times in the last months, and here he was, alive and whole. They hadn’t talked about children again, not since they’d been together, not since that terrible time between Emily and Antarctica, and she had no idea what he might be thinking now.

“With my…” he said, trailing off, his face utterly inscrutable.

“I’m sorry to tell you like this. Before you were taken, I didn’t know.” She watched his face, anxious for any sign. She began to pull her hand away, but he held it tight. He lifted his eyes to hers: hooded, lost, vulnerable, but also… hopeful.

“My baby, Scully?”

Another twitch of a smile, her own hope irrupting. “Yeah.”

He did let go of her hand then, but only to touch her further, to pull her arms away so he could gaze at her middle, to pluck at the buttons of her black blazer. “How… how far along?”

She helped him with the buttons, revealed the gentle slope of her abdomen, a softness he’d not seen in her since before she was abducted. “About eighteen weeks,” she said. His fingers spread out, itching to feel, and then, so so gingerly, he touched her middle. Scully’s eyes closed at the sheer enormity of it, the feel of his hands, the knowledge of his understanding, finally finally. One of his hands moved to her cheek and she opened her eyes to his: wet and hopeful, sure and steady in his love. She cupped his face as well, and they looked at each other with thumbs to cheeks and lips as they had in his doorway a year ago.

“Are you okay?” she asked, tentative.

“Okay?” His eyebrows lifted. “Scully, this…” he was shaking his head and then grinning, remembering the warmth of his vision of a boy on the beach, the enormous flood of love he’d felt for her then, that he felt for her now, that he felt for some hypothetical child he hadn’t even known was possible. “I am so very okay, Scully.” And he kissed her again, one hand still on her belly, whispering into her mouth how much he loved her and how fucking happy he was going to make her, and she reveled in it for as long as she could, for a moment longer, drunk on this brief moment of pure hope and possibility, before she pulled back and held his eyes again.

“There’s more,” she said, because it was them, and of course there was more, and there was always something to haunt their happiness, always some cloud holding a future storm. Two parents, each exposed to different strains of a virus, both exposed to a vaccine, both exposed to the markings of a miraculous ship: epigenetic conjury working itself along their every double helix, activating, switching on in the tiny cells that would later become their child (and yes, though they could not know it then, in time their children). It was science and mysticism and love-magic, combining like a perfect syzygy. It was the history of them, their lives, their suffering, their work, their love, emerging of some dark alchemy into a perfect future person, housed now beneath his palm. “The baby will be like Gibson,” she said: a weapon and a target and a key.

“But it’s ours,” he whispered—it was a question and a statement.

“Yes,” she said. “Only ours. Of that I’m sure.” And therefore so much more than merely weapon, target, key.

She hauled him onto the bed with her and they stripped each other bare. His mouth found all the newish parts of her changing body and poured its devotions onto each in turn. Her skin was on fire, her body aflame with reunion and relief and the hot glow of life in her every heartbeat. Her toes curled against the hair of his calves. Her back stretched in an arc, pressing ever toward him. She could feel her pulse between her legs. She begged him to cut his worship short and to just please fuck her now because she was dying without him and she’d been dying this whole time, even though her insides said otherwise, and she needed him everywhere but mostly inside her now. He did not need convincing. He gave and she took and she gave and he took and they came together in sweetness, then collapsed in a tangle of arms and legs, his fingers on her belly. He rubbed small circles, wishing he could feel the same little movements she could. They slept and slept until the sun was high and Skinner was banging on their door.

They answered, barely dressed and blinking against the too-bright August sunshine. There was more to do. Always more: paperwork and planes to catch and the news of more abductions. The syndicate may have been ash in the wind, but the war raged on, indefinite.

_+_

This is the truth that they learn: that there are no happy endings, no tragic endings, no endings at all really—only the infinite struggle, the work, the dark seeping in at the edges, and their love to push it back. There are moments, stringing out into the future. He fingers the monochrome peanut shape on the ultrasound tacked to her fridge, and a faraway smile booms on his lips. She presses the tips of his fingers to her belly where she swears there’s a foot, but he shakes his head. She tells him soon. He drinks her bad coffee in the morning (“It’s decaf, sorry”) while they plot a new resistance against the end times, elbow to elbow at her kitchen table.

Without much fuss, they request transfers to Quantico for consulting work, where they can stay below the radar. They let his apartment lease run out, and his things crowd into her space for a time. Doggett suggests a new partner for the X-Files, a woman with the right kind of background, and then they are six against the world including Gibson, nine with the Gunmen.

“Do you want to know?” The doctor asks.

They look at each other. There’s such giddiness in his eyes: he is bouncing on his toes and she bites her lip to stop from laughing. The gel on her abdomen has warmed to match the temperature of her skin. She nods, unable to deny his excitement. “Okay.”

A new image joins the peanut: a bigger peanut but with vaguely humanoid features, a tiny hand in the air (“He’s waving!”).

He finds some land, a farmhouse: isolated, but not too far. He buys it. They will let her lease run out as well. They move, which takes too long because he won’t let her carry anything heavier than a lamp. She doesn’t mind. She feels overflowing and overfull: ready already, though she has a month to go yet. On the creaky floorboards of their new (old) porch, he tells her to close her eyes.

“Oh no,” she says. “What have you done?”

“Just close your eyes!”

She does, and he leads her through the door, aligns her body where he wants it, fiddles with something, and then says, “Okay, open.”

It’s a Christmas tree: a pathetic little thing, exactly what her Charlie Brown would pick, but he’s done the lights up and they shine so pretty. There’s only one ornament, a little white bassinette. She can’t help it: she cries.

The heater clanks and the water pressure isn’t perfect, but the place is. The house is so utterly them, with her heirloom bookshelves, her modest antiques, his ridiculous kitsch and clutter (an alien bobblehead on the mantle joins her carefully chosen candles). His Navajo blanket finally meets her plush couch and clashes terribly, wonderfully. Her boxes, marked in color-coded labels, come open beside the ones marked “Mulder stuff” in hasty sharpie. Their things forge a strange and heady intimacy of contradiction that parallels their own story.

On their first real night in the house, they grin stupidly at each other across the pillows in the light of a waxing moon. It feels impossible. They grasp the moment and hold it anyway. His arm breaches the space between them, hand cupping her belly. “What is that, a knee? Feels too big.”

She finds where his fingers are and laughs. “That’s his butt. Look, see, he’s still sort of sideways. But his head is moving down.”

“That’s good, right?”

Another goofy smile. “Yeah.”

He brushes her cheek with his knuckles, so in love with her he can’t stand it. “Three weeks,” he whispers, and she nods. But after a moment, the smile fades. The house settles and creaks around them. The bed sheets rustle as she rolls to her back.

“I’m worried,” she says.

“About the birth?”

A frown as she thinks. “In a way, but not how you think. I’ve been thinking of how embedded the syndicate was in the medical establishment, how vulnerable spaces like hospitals are when our enemies can look like anyone.”

He’s frowning now too. “Do you think someone will try to take him?”

A pause, a bit too long. “I don’t know.” She rolls to face him again, the weight on her back too much. “Probably not.”

“That’s not good enough. What can we do?” he asks.

“I may have an idea,” she says.

---

On New Year’s Day it snows, a fine white coating at dusk. They stand on the porch to watch, he wrapped in his well-worn blanket, she in his arms. The sound of the snow is like leaves rustling, but steady, persistent, soft. “They’ll be here,” he says; his voice rumbles against her back, chin moving against the top of her hair.

“Even in the snow?”

He kisses her head and wraps the blanket more tightly around them. “Yeah.”

The Lone Gunmen come bearing gadgets and Gibson, who has been staying with them. Frohike wears a red stocking cap and holds up a bottle of whiskey. “Happy Holidays!”

“We saw you for Christmas a week ago, Melvin.” Mulder is laughing as he lets them all in.

“The holiday is not over until the clock strikes midnight on January 2, and you can quote me on that.” He slaps the bottle of whiskey against Mulder’s chest on his way past.

Around the table, they eat and are merry, some faces growing redder from high spirits of all kinds, others from the fire. They have brought Gibson to be their guard, their alarm should the wrong person come near, but also as their friend. He will stay until the baby is born, and after if he likes. It’s been so long since he’s known family.

On the twelfth, she feels the first real contraction and by evening, she is breathing hard through them. Arms linked around his neck, she hangs and sways, moving her hips.

“Should I make the call?” He asks, and she nods. “I’ll make the call.”

The midwife arrives at nine, certified, but illegal in the state of Virginia. She is a spunky woman of sixty, well vetted by both the Gunmen and Gibson, who lets her in and smiles at whatever he hears in her mind. He stays by the door when the excitement moves upstairs.

Maggie appears next, and her daughter cries when she sees her. “Oh, mom,” she says, teary, sweating, gripping Mulder’s arms in only a tank-top and underwear. “How did you do this four times?” And then she is racked again by another contraction, burying her face in Mulder’s chest. He rubs her back and murmurs encouragement for a full two minutes of quiet groans.

By two a.m. she is on her knees on the stripped bed, gripping the footboard and leaning back, pushing hard as Mulder holds her gaze and whispers words of love. He is born at 2:36 a.m. on January 13: William Scully Mulder, red and roaring, caught by his father and lifted straight into his mother’s arms with tears all around, save the midwife, who smiles and checks and makes notes and says, “Oh Dana, you did so well.”

By the time the first light of dawn breaks through the bedroom windows, the midwife has gone home and the little family sits propped on pillows, in warm blankets and soft pajamas on the remade bed. William has been wiped clean and nursed, weighed and measured, swaddled and kissed. He sleeps the dreamless and hard-earned sleep of the newly born. His parents’ eyes move between each other and the child, not sure what else to do under the weight of what this night has brought.

Maggie tiptoes in with two mugs of tea, which she sets on the bedside table. “Do you want me to take him? You two should sleep. I don’t mind.”

Scully nods and gratefully passes William to his grandmother, who says goodnight and slips into the nursery.

In the quiet of their bedroom, they are alone again, dazed by the enormity of the wide, unimaginable future. Mulder cups her face, kisses her nose, her lips. “You’re incredible,” he says.

“I’m a mess,” she says, and laughs.

“Let’s do it again,” he says, and the look she gives him could shatter glass. But she is smiling, too.

“Things might be okay,” she reasons, posing it as both a question and a statement.

“Yeah. I think they might.” He bumps her shoulder, nips at her ear, pulls her down into the blankets and pillows to rest.

There are still worlds to save, still many battles in this endless war. But there are other kinds of moments waiting, too. Here is where they will hold their ground: in this house and in each other.

- end -

This was probably the hardest thing I’ve written because the pacing and reconstructing a new plot for s8 didn’t seem to fit with the way I’d told the other installments. I was a grumbly mess for a long time in writing it, and I’m still not totally happy. But thanks so much for reading. Tagging @peacenik0 who listened to me complain, and @kateyes224 who offered a quick second pair of eyes and some reassurance. Thank you, friends!

#a thing i wrote #xf fanfic #s8 sort of #au #angst #mytharc corrections #baby stuff #kinda fluffy by the end #sry

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amplifyme · 2 years ago

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If the aliens were going to colonize the planet and consume their hosts via gestation, I never fully understood why would they would allow the hybrids. I thought the Syndicate created them in secret with alien rebels to fight colonization with immunity from the black oil/virus. Did you understand the purpose of the clones?

I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Fight the Future was when we (and the Syndicate) were first made aware of the gestating aliens. Up until that point, the project was to create alien-human hybrids that would be immune to the black oil/virus and serve as an sort of army under the Syndicate's control. The faceless alien rebels were introduced in Patient X and The Red and the Black and were just as much a surprise to the Syndicate as to the fans. Long story semi-short: the colonizing aliens lied to the members of the Syndicate and planned on taking back the planet not only through the black oil but also through gestation, with humans serving as hosts. That's why they were warehousing them in the ship buried in Antarctica.

I can't tell you what the purpose of the clones was, except maybe as a means of creating a work force immune to the black oil/virus (as we saw in Herrenvolk) in order to facilitate (or possibly fight back against) the takeover. They also came in handy when the Syndicate needed to manipulate certain people (looking at you, Mulder) into believing that what they saw with their own eyes was indeed a long lost sister, etc.

Truth be told, nothing that came after Two Father/One Son made much sense to me, or to many other Philes. That's where the mytharc started to fall apart. Don't even get me started on the super soldiers, because by that point I'd given up and stopped watching.

I don't know if this helps or not, but I gave it my best shot.

#ask and answer #xfiles #the mytharc

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enigmaticxbee · 4 years ago

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✖️✖️✖️ 8x21 Existence

The one where... Scully gives birth to William in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of aliens watching - but we get a happy ending kiss ❤️ Part 2 of 2.

Best: That lovely season ending kiss over their son. After everything they’ve been through it’s simple, and heartfelt, and the truth we both know, the truth that really matters, is that they love each other. I can’t resist continuing to watch or pretend that season 9 or the revival didn’t happen but I don’t blame those that do - this is a lovely, hopeful ending point for the show.

Worst: All the on the nose religious symbolism gets a GIANT eye roll from me - the three wise Gunmen, Mulder following a light to find them, Scully in Virgin Mary blue robes 🙄. I signed on to this show for two people who team up for the sisyphean task of going up against shadowy forces in the government to uncover the Truth and fall in love along the way. As the show goes on it tries to turn Mulder and Scully into the key, central figures around which these conspiracies revolve (Mulder’s mysterious brain activity and brain surgery, Scully’s mysterious pregnancy). The shift in scope from individuals using their badges and wits to search for the Truth and bring it to light, to (the implication of) divine intervention against unstoppable alien forces just doesn’t work for me and I think it betrays what made the mytharc work in the early seasons.

✔️ Flashlights

❌ Woods/Desert

❌ Slideshow

❌ Autopsy

❌ Evidence Disappears

❌ Scully Misses It

❌ Mulder Ditch

❌ Sunflower Seeds

❌ Voiceover

❌ Catch Phrase

✔️ Scully is a (Medical) Doctor

❌ Mulder is Spooky

✔️ Scuuullllaaaaayy!

❌ Fox/Dana

✔️ Inappropriate Touching (that I am here for)

✔️ Casual Scully

✔️ Casual Mulder

✔️ Trench Coats

❌ Bad Tie Watch

❌ Glasses Watch

✔️ Taking! It! Personally!: Mulder & Scully

50 States: Georgia x2 & DC x85 (44/50)

Investigate: Apart

Solve Rate: 62%

✔️ Bechdel Test

MSR: 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝

Goriness: 👽👽👽

Creepiness: 👽👽

Humor: 👽👽

Rewatch Thoughts:

Doggett check-in: Mulder says don’t tell anyone where Scully is, not even me, then turns around and asks where Scully is, and Doggett just rolls with it because he knows enough not to keep them apart 😆

Pregnancy check-in: It’s The Miracle of Birth, The Episode. Once again I say, poor Scully.

Theory 1 from last episode: Miracle baby, super human, proof of God

Theory 2 from this episode: The chip made her pregnant with the first organic version of a super soldier

Theory 3 from this episode: Miracle baby, but human, not what they thought he would be

For a long time I thought the answer was some combo of Theory 1 and 3 - miracle baby, special (but with all the shit Mulder and Scully have been through you would expect him to be). The revival posits Theory 2 was actually correct I guess, but that’s just depressing and if I think about it too much it’ll upset me all over again so lalalala William is Mulder and Scully’s baby and he has a few alien super powers but it’s fine.

Reyes is definitely a goof, but I like her - making the best of a terrible situation and doing her best up to make Scully comfortable... doing whale calls as birth music... Scully opening up to her (a little) about Melissa 🥰😆🥺

As much as I enjoy the stuff with Reyes, Mulder should have been there - only CC would think that splitting them up on Mulder’s last original run episode (except for the “series” finale) was a good idea... It wouldn’t have changed anything plot-wise! Skinner and Doggett could have still run around the bureau looking for answers. Mulder could have witnessed the creepy-ass crowd of aliens witnessing the birth of their child. It wouldn’t have changed anything plot-wise, but the two of them on the run together, resourceless, helpless against these super soldiers, could have actually laid some emotional groundwork for why Scully and William don’t go on the run with Mulder next season.

I don’t like how Krycek’s death was handled. (Except for how Mulder’s like please just kill me and skip the villain monologue where you explain why you did it 😆) I get that it was a big moment after all this time, but it felt drawn out and melodramatic. Skinner doing it was fitting but I wish it had more of a Don Draper I don’t think of you at all you little rat bastard vibe. Just a personal preference though.

Scully: William, after your father. I... 🤯 My guess is they wanted to make it clear that we’re done with the who’s the daddy guessing game (for now 😡) but the fix is so, so simple! Just say she’s naming him William, after both our fathers!!!

#xf rewatch #xf fanart #msr #txf #xf #the x files #the xfiles #thexfiles #xf mytharc #i want to believe #truth is out there #xf review #8x21 #existence

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theseerasures · 3 years ago

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Conspicuous Media Consumption, 2021

looking back i realize that declaring “it’s that time of year again!” on the SECOND year i did this was ill-advised, because now i don’t have any other way introduce this shindig that doesn’t end up repeating myself. might have been premature, too! because this is the year i came closest to not actually meeting the goals i set due to exam fuckery eating up the entirety of my November--but hey! that’s what catch-up weeks are for.*

*not actually what catch-up weeks are for, since catch-up weeks are for catching up to media instead of forgoing media altogether so i can cram more theory i don’t understand into my head

ANYWAY. explanation for what this is here, for the...actually not-few of you who started following me this year, but the tl;dr is that i consume a different content every week for 48 weeks and share my thoughts at the end.

(”but Helen!!!” one may point out, “aren’t you already obnoxiously long-winded when you limit yourself to talking about one thing? how much longer will it take for you to talk about 48 at once???”

and...yeah. buckle up.)

Bitter Root (comic, 1 trade finished 1/1/2021): distinctly remember last year saying something to the tune of “don’t think i read enough to form lasting impressions” and wow!!!! i love being right and correct as usual. there was a literal moment when i was reading the trade this year when i whispered “holy shit” to myself, because holy shit!!! the action and characterization picked up and were top notch.

The Baby-Sitters Club (TV, 1 season finished 1/6/2021): after demon tiddy apocalypse in 2019 and Eastern European depression in 2020 i was like “fuck this!!! i’m gonna pick a CHEERFUL thing and that too will foreshadow how this year goes” and guess what! this year was terrible anyway!! but i did enjoy BSC immensely, because it was an updated adaptation with some actual thought put into it, and all the middle schoolers LOOK like middle schoolers. and are adorable, even if their middle school shenanigans gave me so much secondhand embarrassment i had to watch “Boy-Crazy Stacey” in 30 second spurts and now THAT is Leah’s entire impression of the show as opposed to the gazillion times i have protested that it is actually good

House of X/Powers of X (comic, 12 issues finished 1/7/2021): obviously i’d already read them, but X of Swords made me nostalgic all over again so i went back. still care nothing for the conspiracy mytharc nonsense, but damn does Hickman know how to characterize. Emma Frost overlooking Krakoa before sighing and declaring “one more time, then. for the children” is just *chef’s kiss*, even if i’m not too fond of RB Silva’s weirdly leonine character art.

The Prophets (book, finished 1/11/2021): what a fucking DEBUT NOVEL that instantly made it into my field exam list. “queerness among slaves in antebellum South” is breathtaking in concept alone, but the next level lyricism really made the book shine.

Immortal Hulk (comic, 2 trades finished 1/13/2021): was also more taken with this than i had been in previous years! “Hulk does social justice” feels like a hackneyed concept but Ewing’s virtuosity really makes it work.

The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata (book, finished 1/16/2021): am i lit snob?? rhetorical question don’t answer obvie but i’ve found that it’s usually books that leave me thinking “meh could be better” when i’d be more forgiving otherwise. i’d heard about Gina Apostol and both subject and style seemed like my thing so i really wanted to like it, but it didn’t end up doing a lot for me.

Evermore (album, finished 1/17/2021): is better than folklore??? as usual i am not prepared to die on this hill due to reasons of “i don’t actually care THAT much about Taylor Swift” but more songs stood out here imo

WandaVision (TV, 2 episodes finished 1/20/2021): wow, the first two episodes of this show were great, right??? i’m so glad i immediately stopped watching after the premiere so my opinion could remain unsullied, it was definitely on purpose

The Idler Wheeler is Wiser Than Wow Look at That I Made Slightly More Than a Token Effort to Write the Entire Title Down (album, finished 1/21/2021): i listened to this when it first came out, but i don’t think i was old enough to appreciate it until...basically now, almost a decade later. there’s something very disconcerting about Fiona Apple’s music, but damn does it get stuck in you anyway.

Remote Control (book, finished 1/26/2021): can you believe Nnedi Okorafor wrote TWO BOOKS this year?? it’s been a while since i read Binti, but i think i might prefer Remote Control, which is less sci fi and more...magitech realism? is that a thing? anyway, it was good. quality meditation on death, which is all anyone could want.

Lazarus (comic, 2 issues finished 1/27/2021): should i be calling it Lazarus Risen now? is that the official title? didn’t stand out as much this year, but maybe that’s because the other comics i read were so astonishingly good. i...think Johanna is planning something Devious that would upend the status quo, so i’m excited to catch up, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

We Could Be Heroes (book, finished 2/2/2021): see above: i’m a lit snob. it’s a cute book and an interesting concept, but given how much speculative fic has flexed its creative and thematic muscles in recent years it comes off as...well, as definitely a first book, which i’m not gonna fault Mike Chen for, but here we are.

Rainbow (album, finished 2/3/2021): see above: Fiona Apple nostalgia. the difference here i think is that i was already affected by this album the first time i listened to it, but revisiting it after High Road altered my experience, i think? the rage and heartbreak felt like it had more there-there, even as just a spectator.

Milk Blood Heat (book, finished 2/5/2021): absolute fabulous short story collection and probably my book of the year—and again, a DEBUT WORK. Moniz’s style is just. concentrated viscera cloaked in a matter-of-factness which both mutes and amplifies??? it’s magic??

The Old Republic (game, finished 2/7/2021): the past year’s worth of content was apparently so cursory i finished it in two days and have no memory of anything that happened. i think Lana flirted with that one buff Twi’lek sniper lady? was that this year? one of my husbands came back, the one i married less accidentally? it’s all a blur.

The Absolute Book (book, finished 2/13/2021): i don’t usually go for full-on fantasy in my novel reading these days, but i’m VERY glad i picked this up. probably the longest book i’ve read this year, and suitably epic with juuuuust the right amount of metatextual chin stroking. it was a little weird to read this and then That Ted Chiang Short Story About Angels almost immediately after for my exams, but i’m not ever gonna be UNPLEASANTLY surprised by more meditations on the divine than i anticipated.

Picture This (comic, finished 2/16/2021): don’t think i’m as taken with this than i had been with What It Is, but it’s. y’know. it’s Lynda Barry, so i loved it.

The Next Batman (comic, 4 issues finished 2/17/2021): proooobably should have read Death Metal BEFORE this instead of after, but if the point of Future State was to intrigue newcomers with accessible stories it…did succeed? i don’t know much about the Fox side of the Extended Batfam, but Ridley made them all interesting people with depth, so.

Hyperbole and a Half (comic, finished 2/19/2021): after not liking Solutions and Other Problems as much as this last year i thought i’d go back to this just to be sure i wasn’t remembering it with rose colored classes, and—nope, it’s still my preferred of the two, even though there are moments in Solutions that stand out more individually.

It’s A Sin (TV, 1 season finished 2/22/2021): as soon as i started watching i was like “this is gonna be my favorite thing of the year isn’t it” and…yeah. even if the rest of the year had not been a weirdly underwhelming trickle, this still would have clenched it. i HAVE critiques (obviously), but it’s Rusty and i love Rusty, and it feels like a Rusty who had more creative control, which…also explains some of the flaws, but i’m very happy it exists nonetheless. has the distinction of being the only show Leah and i successfully finished watching together this year

Legend of Zelda (game, Breath of the Wild finished 4/12/2021): BotW is still topical, right? the sequel released a trailer this year? anyway. i liked it! the story was decidedly on the Fine side of things, mostly because of Open World Pacing Syndrome, but Zelda was a BITCH and i love her. gameplay remains my favorite iteration of any Zelda, and i very much enjoyed watching Leah turn purple over the fact that i refused to get the Master Sword until right before the end. didn’t end up fighting a single Lynel, and i wasn’t even trying to avoid them? oh well.

Fearless (Taylor’s Version) (album, finished 4/13/2021): kind of waffled over whether i should count this since i have a strict “no re-release” policy wrt this project, but in the end i decided there was enough new content (and special context) to warrant including it. and it’s…impossible for me to gauge the quality of this, actually? a lot of songs from OG Fearless were popular during the only time in my life i listened to the radio, and hearing them again just hurled me back to the Bad High School Times, which was not fun. and it made me miss Marlena.

Way of X (comic, 1 issue finished 5/18/2021): Si Spurrier writes good comics! i feel like in recent years i’ve heard a lot of hype for his stuff, and even though i barely dipped a toe in here there was enough to get me interested. sidebar: i really do love the tight collaborative networks during Hickman’s X-Men—it feels like one writer can drop something that another WILL pick up, even if it might not be right away.

Fire Emblem (2 games: Fates and Three Houses, finished 6/12/2021): i think i’ve said all i’ve needed to on Fates and its truly GLARING misogyny here, so i’ll let that lie. Three Houses was good! i don’t think it was some kind of UTTER revolution in storytelling or whatever but it is certainly the most thoughtfully written Fire Emblem i’ve played. Edelgard is a small dumb baby and i cherish every moment i bully her. i have now played all four routes multiple times and am currently working on Crimson Flower Maddening, because i truly cannot overestimate how much Fire Emblem’s gameplay makes my brain go brrrrr, and…how the routes stack up against each other probably merits its own post, doesn’t it? so suffice to say i have complicated thoughts on it.

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (manga, 5 volumes finished 8/8/2021): logistical note since i know the manga has been packaged a bazillion different ways since original publication: i was going by original tankobon, which in retrospect was not a smart thing to do because it meant that i finished Phantom Blood and then read a teeeeensy bit of *Googles furtively* Battle Tendency. the wholehearted campy hilarity was enough for me to finish the first arc, but the amateurish art and (again!) rampant misogyny put me off enough that i didn’t really have any interest in continuing. yes i KNOW the anime is better i have seen some episodes yes i knoooowwwwww the stories become more sophisticated but i don’t have the patience sorry

The Tangleroot Palace (book, finished 8/14/2021): i put Monstress on my fields list and then didn’t adore it and felt like a bad Asian, so i picked this up too, and i liked it a lot!!! Marjorie Liu’s prose writing roots are impressive, and it had queer shit AND fairy tale subversion, so if i crossed my eyes a little—actually never mind

Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth (book, finished 8/19/2021): here’s something no one here knows about me but will probably make everyone go “yeah that tracks”: for the (very very short) time i toyed with the idea of writing professionally, i mostly trained as a poet. i don’t think i’ve read Komunyakaa since those days and was kind of worried i’d stopped having Those Feelings (what feelings??? i unno the poetry ones), but it was great! the thing about poetry collections is that all you really need is a couple that stand out and you’re golden, and this definitely had that.

Pressure Machine (album, finished 8/14/2021): i think this came out like two weeks after i finally caught up on the Killers albums i’d missed since Battle Born. it’s a nice change of pace! especially since i feel like their sound has become increasingly homogenized since probably Day & Age. appreciated the pretentiousness, obviously, but also kudos for being somewhat oblique as far as “art influenced by COVID” goes

Inside (special, finished 9/10/2021): speaking of not being oblique! i largely missed the Bo Burnham train when he was hitting his stride, so i’m not as big a fan, but this was still just a...gutwrenching watch. uncomfortable and ugly in a lot of places (not the least of which is the way he literally embodies discomfort and ugliness throughout), but still made me laugh in way that i think i did need.

Ms. Marvel: Stretched Thin (comic, finished 9/25/2021): i’ve grown increasingly wary of how Kamala is used as a diversity shorthand by Marvel in recent years, so i was p skeptical going in. boy did it blow my expectations out of the water tho! stylish art and a well-told story really made me remember the original charm of the character.

Star Wars (2 movies: Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, finished 10/1/2021): how long can one person procrastinate watching a terrible movie she’s already seen? almost a whole year, as it turns out. they are Bad, but v fun to watch when the only expectations going in are that you and your fiance come up with some great zingers. and we did! we’re hilarious and never out of fresh material

Playlist for the Apocalypse (book, finished 10/3/2021): i swear i didn’t set out to read any poetry this year but then a whole bunch of poets i liked published their stuff. i’ve read Rita Dove more recently than i’ve read Komunyakaa, which...means it hasn’t been that recent at all, but here we are. it’s good! there’s a sense of humor to her work that i appreciate in this medium in particular, where everyone is in constant risk of disappearing up their own ass.

Wayne Family Adventures (webcomic, 7...episodes?? finished 10/8/2021): i kept reading after that, obviously. my freak out upon discovering its existence is already well documented, but yes: it’s the Platonic ideal of a Batfam comic for me, made even better by the fact that it doesn’t bother with overt retcons and just assumes everyone gets to hang.

Lost (TV, 1 season finished 10/22/2021): it’s been a while since i’ve rewatched the entire series and the first time i’ve watched it with Leah (who has never seen), and...wow!! parts of this show have really not aged well. i take some solace in the fact that my opinion remains much the same despite television as a medium changing so drastically in the intervening years, and my opinion is that season 1 is overrated, srynotsry

Harlem Shuffle (book, finished 10/27/2021): well, i guess after two consecutive years of giving Colson Whitehead lavish praise i was due for being underwhelmed. i respect his desire to experiment with genre, but in this case i think he leaned so hard into crime thriller that what i love most about his books (ie. lyricism, compassionate empathy) didn’t feel like a priority.

The Underground Railroad (TV, finished 10/28/2021): what’s this??? being disappointed by a Colson Whitehead thing twice in a row??? nowadays i tend to get very defensive when critiques of adaptation basically boil down to “how faithful is it to the source material” because it is SUCH low hanging (and often irrelevant) fruit, but i can’t help but feel like the ways THIS deviated from the source material resulted from compromises with whoever is in charge of programing at Amazon Prime. not everything added was bad, but some (the Ridgeway focus. i’m talking about the Ridgeway focus) feel like things neither Whitehead nor Barry Jenkins would have come up with. cool to see that Owen Lars was apparently so bitter his dad married a former slave he became a slave catcher tho

Red (Taylor’s Version) (album, finished 12/4/2021): toyed with listening to it when it first came out, but that was during exam month and i was Not Emotionally Ready. Red is my favorite Taylor album and the only i know by heart, so i was very glad that this was such a creative success. interesting that this release feels like it toned DOWN the production from the original, but i suppose that mirrors her shift from slick pop to a more indie vibe. i’ve never...particularly loved All Too Well? glad y’all were happy with it tho

30 (album, finished 12/10/2021): is it just me, or has Adele really started to phone it in with the song titles? her lyrics are still Adele-standard, but i miss the days when they had more oblique or metaphorical names like Chasing Pavements. then again, the album overall seems disinterested in metaphor--makes sense given the rawness of her emotional arc during it, i suppose, but i don’t think it resonated with me as much as her past work has because of that.

Bojack Horseman (TV, 4 seasons finished 12/22/2021): well, i’ve done it! i finally got caught up to...*checks notes* the last time i was caught up with Bojack Horseman. in all honesty, i’m pretty glad that i waited until after i was therapied and medicated before coming back to this, because it’s still. a lot. something about the writing of this show just gets stuck in my head and watching the first half of any season always makes me INCREDIBLY anxious, because the inevitable fuckups are just over the horizon, but i always end up feeling...a sense of fulfillment, i guess? whenever i watch it.

Winter Recipes from the Collective (book, finished 12/23/2021): so like yes my blog name is a Louise Gluck quote yes her poetry is good yes she literally has a Nobel now yes this collection has some very good stuff that is trademark Louise but also THIS POETRY COLLECTION WAS LESS THAN FIFTY PAGES AND COST THIRTEEN DOLLARS? WHAT THE FUCK LOUISE???

Disgaea (game, unfinished): haha! nope. i picked it up because i was jonesing for more turn based strategy and had heard it described as “Fire Emblem but more tongue in cheek,” which feels like my jam, but it very much was not. turns out the utterly woeful storytelling needs wholehearted serious commitment, because when it ditches that in favor of “haha! i also think this is absurd!!” it just becomes...embarrassing for everyone. will probably never finish it, to be honest.

last year i remember feeling exhausted from keeping up with all the franchises, so i went out of my way to pick less oversaturated stuff. results are...mixed? there weren’t a lot of bad things, but there were quite a few things that were mediocre, or less good that i’d hoped. the indie stuff certainly didn’t make me MISS franchises, though, because even though i wasn’t consuming them everywhere i turned another thing was getting remastered or spinoffed or released or what have you, so...am i out of touch? no. it is the children who are wrong

#conspicuous media consumption

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prairiedust · 5 years ago

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More Last Holiday Musings...

I want to poke at that interdimensional geoscope a little more, because upon reading it over again, I think I splashed it up a little fast and there are a couple of points I’d like to be clearer about. I meant to queue this up to post last night but also want it to be up before Gimme Shelter so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is more blue curtains lit crit with a dash of folklore and an honorable mention for post-structuralism. And we’re talking about Supernatural after all, so this is sort of... well, it’s about endings.

Last Holiday was not a typical “filler” or even a typical MOTW episode. It felt extremely insular, possibly more so than any other episode I can think at any other point in the series. As opposed to the usual crowd of “locals,” a spate of victims, and a couple of red herring suspects, the only other people in this ep besides the Winchesters (including Jack) and Mrs. Butters were the two vampires and Cuthbert Sinclair. There was no “case” as in a usual MOTW-- there was no Chuck Struggle, either, and the lack of mytharc was strange against the lack of “filler” schema. That lack of “MOTW investigation” marked this episode also as being about “curiosity”-- the Winchesters all-too-quickly took Mrs. Butters for granted-- Dean even dismissed her as a “Magic Roomba” and that seemed to settle the matter. Furthermore, the moment that Dean spotted Mrs. B in his room, the stage was set for Antics ™ when she held up his goofy Scooby boxers, and indeed a zaniness, an almost manic energy drove the action forward at a breakneck pace. [Spoiler alert, we do get “investigation” in the next episode, 15x15 Gimme Shelter, as stills and the preview show that Castiel and Jack will be teaming up together, in yet another shake-up of the usual “MOTW” template, almost like we can expect the other side of a coin when Sam and Dean switch places with Cas...] These features set Last Holiday apart as not so much “filler” as “between,” as in there was struggle before, and there will be struggle after, but for a while there was cake. (Contrast this to the usual “peril of the threshold” that usually shrouds liminality if you’d like.)

At the end of Last Holiday, however, we finally get to find out what that old blue telescope really is, and with that name we get confirmation that there are no more alternate universes-- Chuck has burned them all. Viewers are left to come to the conclusion that in retrospect the telescope-thing could have changed the course of season 13 completely. The reveal is played off as darkly funny, but it’s also kind of a gut-wrenching moment, too. All the heartbreak of the last two and a half years, reviewed now through the lens of “if only.” If only they’d known about Mrs. Butters from the time they found the bunker, “none of this would have happened”… they’d have had monster radar, they’d have had the geoscope, they would have had supernatural help of a completely different level.

The temptation to read Last Holiday as a Chuck-free episode is strong, but fraught-- the threat of Chuck’s involvement has been established by a pattern this season (well the pattern is woven throughout the whole series really but Dabb has deliberately structured these last three seasons with an exponentially increasing frequency.) I feel like we’ve been conditioned this season in particular to hold ourselves in a perpetual flinch, to be afraid of what we’ll learn “in retrospect.” That geoscope was really_good_subtext, and it is entirely possible, even encouraged, at this point in the plot to take information we’ve learned from the naming of the object, examine our own conditioned response to this episode, and apply both things to the structure of the season so far and make a prediction as to what might happen in the main plot. That’s what I mean about subtext getting loud. We’ve been given the green-light to make a prediction about The Struggle and march forward with it, and see if we will be correct by extrapolating the pattern, or if that expectation will be subverted (the twist is set up to run either way, so either outcome is satisfying.) It is Melville-esque architecture of the highest degree;I could write another thousand words just about that. So I have a prediction that I’m hanging on to, because of what we’ve learned from the geoscope, and what kinds of clues were hung up in Last Holiday, and I’m super excited to either have my hunch confirmed or be frightfully and delightedly surprised. I mean, where the fuck did Jeremy Adams even come from? He’s like our own Mrs. Butters, showing up in the last quarter to run a couple game-changing balls into the end zone, it’s bonkers. I mean, I know writing mysteries is hard and requires still AND cunning, but damn, son.

But anyway, back to the geoscope…

I’m perplexed, from a very “lit crit” perspective, but this is where I’m at and why I referenced blue curtains-- if you shine too bright a light on subtext, does it evaporate-- like looking through an interdimensional geoscope and not seeing anything-- or is “subtext” sometimes not some ephemeral fever-dream that we as viewers conjure up through our experiential interlocution with the text but something a writer has steeped into the narrative as part of their craft? Or when you’re talking about an evolving iteration of writers, is it possible that one picks up a thread that another wove in for something else, repurposing or amplifying it? And, when perhaps is something deliberately instilled in the text in order to become “text” at just the right time? In Moby Dick, [spoiler alert lol] Quequeg’s coffin-- formerly one of many symbolic vehicles used to foreshadow the doom of the Pequod-- is repurposed as a life buoy and becomes the actual object that saves Ishmael’s life, transforming it from a portent of disaster to a symbol of salvation and then to one of Ishmael’s guilt for surviving Ahab’s madness-- the guilt that had been made text by the very opening line of the book, “Call me Ishmael.” In retrospect, the connotations of wandering, exile and salvation behind the name that the narrator gives himself become crystal clear. The problem that the post-structuralist model of “reading” as simultaneously “creating the text” has manufactured is that the idea that “subtext” can often be discounted as something dreamed up wholecloth by the reader, and thus inferior, imaginary, even delusional (and I use that last word knowing what a loaded term that is in the spn fandom, but this is not about a ship, even) where once it was considered to be a valid and measurable part of the text itself, like that dang coffin. It was the basement, the underpinnings, the catacombs below the opera house sure, but it helped to hold up the structure. And for some reason, putting subtext into a piece of media has become passe, or cringe? Anyway, not to be bitter on main but it didn’t used to be this way, at least not in the heady early days of postmodernism. So that green light? Critical hit against blue curtains. And while yes, some readings are going to be better supported than others, and the wild variety of checklists in this fandom mean that some conclusions have been drawn which can’t pan out, if you’re paying attention to the structure, the subtexts, the alchemical/psychoanalytical/postmodern themata, the ending will be very satisfying.

So. What was once speculated to be a symbol for emotional lows or turning points (among other things) in the bunker was textually hit with a bright green light, then Dean got curious about it in text, and we were told-- in text-- that oh it’s just a fancy spyglass, and now that the other worlds are gone, it has no purpose…. that’s what I mean about the geoscope now being “pure”-- it wasn’t clear whether the telescope ever had any function, subtetxtual or not, and now that it’s certain what it’s “function” was, it’s now freed up as a “symbol”-- unless like in Moby Dick it’s new “purpose” is revealed later, but right now it’s caught in this liminal place of not-quite-clue and not-quite-metaphor...

However, and I didn’t put this in my first post because I was trying to be fast and not a wet blanket, but I felt like finally naming the geoscope was an ending.

This is literally Singer, Dabb, and Co tidying up the house before locking it behind them.

I think when Dean said he didn’t see anything through the “telescope thing,” that we’re to understand that maybe this was the last hurrah of the cute, zany, campy “subtext” or even “metatext” if you’d rather that so many of us have been parsing and which has gotten so weird and bright since season 12/13. I think I said in one of the folklore posts that writing about some of the things I write about feels like making daisy chains in the endzone during the big game. Which is fun, that’s how I personally got through having to be in AYSO soccer for four years, by looking for four leafed clovers and eating orange quarters. And we got a wood nymph in this episode, textually even, so I could easily check the “folklore” box on this one. But the sheer euphoria of Last Holiday and all the sparkles it brought into the story aren’t meant to last. When you look back on fifteen years of text, a lot of it is bleak, miserable stuff. That’s not to say that episodes like Yellow Fever and Hunteri Heroici and Fan Fiction et al shouldn’t be celebrated. But I think from here on out, things are going to be less “golly gee, three birthdays!” and more “There she blows! --there she blows! A hump like a snowhill!”

This episode was a gift in many ways, not just for the sense of glee it transmitted-- it also did so much work and there are things I want to yell about in the way language was hit, the red versus green lighting, the way the backwards holidays worked, the projector as a metaphor for Mrs. B projecting her regrets and fears onto Jack, the amount of food that was created and consumed, how that smoothie was also an echo of “fairy food” or an underworld pact if you squint-- but the stakes are so high now. We haven’t been shown the next valley-- there was no final scene of Chuck rubbing his hands together like the villain from a melodrama, for example-- but the last image we got was Jack blowing out a candle. After the candle is blown out, the cake is dismantled and consumed. Once the story is over, all the themes that are so hard to grapple in a text like a television show can be gathered up and analyzed. (IS that all, though? After all, Dean made his own cake later, which, like, echoes of the “oh two cakes” comic lol...)

Since I really never want to leave anything I toss out on this blog on a last note of doom and gloom, however, I do want to say that I too understand what that last image meant. It meant, as Sam said, make a wish. Think of the future, think of free will, and hope for something wonderful to happen. (or do like me and wonder what the hell Jack wished for with dread and anticipation ha ha ha.)

#the poststructuralism of supernatural #the folklore of supernatural #no more tags right now #tag later

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mittensmorgul · 6 years ago

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Aah, one of the Great Unresolved Plot Arcs of s10, burned and abandoned by the roadside when Carver had to slam on the brakes and detour into a random blind alley to walk back most of what he set up in s10′s mytharc.

S10 has so many beautiful episodes, even AFTER the mytharc slash and burn at midseason, they just don’t work as one cohesive whole. And I will eternally despise this whole season because of it.

The most HILARIOUS bit about it is now, with the big reveal of Chuck’s overarching supervillainy in 14.20, we can look back at s10-- and the fallout from all of Metatron’s s8 and s9 machinations from the fracture of heaven and the angel fall event, bringing Abaddon back into the story after she’d already been defeated in 8.12, from the smashing of the angel tablet to Dean having taken the mark of cain in the first place, to demon Dean, to slaughtering of Cain first and then Death, and the unlocking of the Mark of Cain and freeing the Darkness... ALL of it can be chalked up as Chuck’s narrative failures. And Metatron was foil, the fall guy, this time around in Chuck’s Plot-Go-Round. He was Chuck’s scapegoat.

As a demon, Dean behaved exactly the way Chuck expected s15 Dean to behave. Chuck threw the pretty blonde victim in his path and expected Dean to play knight in shining armor and give in to the woman’s seduction. Maybe if Dean had been a demon, he wouldn’t have cared and would’ve taken advantage of a victim nearly half his age, like he did with Ann Marie in 10.01, but that is not who Dean is, no matter how much Chuck might want him to be that guy for the purposes of his story.

There’s so much in 10.01 about the intended development of Cas’s arc that never came to pass in s10, and it looks so horrifyingly similar thematically to Cas’s final confrontation with himself, his motives, his guilt, and his understanding of himself, humanity, and free will.

In 10.01:

HANNAH: And you, Castiel? You're feeling well? CASTIEL: Oh, yes. Like a million dollars. HANNAH: That's not true. CASTIEL: It's my truth. HANNAH: When you left heaven, your borrowed Grace was failing. By the looks of you, you've only gotten worse. CASTIEL: I'm fine. HANNAH: You're dying, Castiel. You need more Grace. CASTIEL: And we have a mission in front of us that supersedes my needs -- all of our needs. Don't you agree? You're a good soldier, Hannah... And one of the best. Metatron certainly could not have been brought to heel without your bravery. HANNAH: Or yours. You must take care of yourself, Castiel. CASTIEL [lashing out]: And another angel should die so that I can be saved?! Is this really that hard to understand?

For comparison’s sake, we saw Lucifer-- aka the villain-- do this with impunity in s13, not caring about what he destroyed in his quest for personal restoration to his former glory. But Cas had to be force-fed grace by Crowley in 10.03 to keep the plot from folding in on itself, to keep Cas from “burning out.” Because Cas wouldn’t sacrifice anyone else in his place. Everything else in his life was structured around “the mission,” and his duty to fix what he blames himself from having broken. Early s10 shows his completely divided loyalty-- between saving Heaven and the Angels as penance from having played a role in the devastation that’s brought it to this point, and his duty to the Winchesters and his mission to save Dean at all costs. First, the angels:

HANNAH: Perhaps it is you who has failed to get the message? All of us serve at heaven's command. DANIEL: I suppose. But that was before the fall, wasn't it? HANNAH: You are an angel, once and forever. DANIEL: Dropped unwillingly...Unknowingly...Into a strange land, a land that, as it turns out, celebrates the free, the individual. For the first time in thousands of years, I have choices. And with each choice... I begin to discover who I really am. HANNAH: This is nonsense. DANIEL: Because they don't teach you this in heaven? Perhaps they should. Then you would understand why it's worth fighting for.

Cas is... torn. He’s both sides of this conversation. He wishes he could just abandon heaven the way Daniel and Adina tried, but that sense of duty bound him to “do the right thing,” and “follow orders” and do what he could to remedy his own past mistakes. He willingly sacrifices his own happiness and choices thinking that in doing so at least he can correct some of his mistakes and restore a measure of peace to the Winchesters. And... the system was always rigged against him.

In s15, this fundamental lack of understanding (which we will gain in s13 during Dean’s period of grief over Cas’s death) of his importance to Dean’s ongoing peace and happiness, viewing himself as a disposable tool for achieving what he believes is his “mission,” his reason he was resurrected from the Empty, becomes explicit in 15.02. It plays out in his mission to save Dean in 10.03, and then immediately returning to his Heaven Mission with Hannah the moment he believes Dean doesn’t need him anymore. It leaves Dean feeling like he’s nothing but a burden to Cas, a distraction from his “more important” duties, like Dean has no right to put a further emotional burden on Cas by asking him to just STAY, by forcing his apparently unrequited feelings on Cas. This is now the sole issue standing between them. It’s a complicated tangle of years of failures to communicate their actual wants and needs outside of their respective cosmically-enforced duties.

SAM [walking down a rural road]: You need to get to Beulah, North Dakota -- now. CASTIEL: I do? SAM: Yes. Crowley and Dean were there. We got to pick up their trail. CASTIEL: Good. Great. SAM: Yeah, um...not so much. Cas...Dean's a demon. CASTIEL: Dean's a demon? How? SAM: The Mark --I-I guess it --it just messed him up. I don't know. CASTIEL: That is a vast understatement. SAM: Right. Now, Cas, listen. I know you're not feeling so hot, but this is kind of an “all hands on deck” situation here, so... CASTIEL: So... I'll meet you there.

The horror of it all, Cas is needed to help save Dean, and yet he’s practically human-- sleeping, weak and unable to even heal himself, and back then he had Hannah bargaining with Metatron to restore his grace. And in 15.02, Dean just wanted Cas to side with HIM for once. But:

CASTIEL: You're angry. DEAN: Yes, I am angry. At everything. All of it. CASTIEL: All of it? DEAN: This mess... all the messes. It turns out that we're just hamsters running in a wheel our whole lives. What do we have to show for it, huh? Tell me you don't feel conned. God's been lying to you, Cas, forever. You bought into the biggest scam in history. CASTIEL: You don't think I'm angry? After what Chuck did? After what he took from me? He killed Jack. But that doesn't mean it was all a lie. DEAN: Really? Chuck is all-knowing. He knew the truth, he... he just kept it to himself. Well, now that his cover's blown, everything that we've done is for what? Nothing?

to Dean, it appears as if Cas’s anger is entirely and only about Chuck having taken Jack from him. Dean doesn’t understand what Jack symbolized to Cas. This is EXACTLY what Zerbe was saying the other day in this post:

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/189063380030/wait-dead-lover-as-in-either-cas-or-dean-is

lol just go read that instead so I can spare myself having to type anymore today.

#spn s15 spoilers #spn 15.05 #spn 15.02 #spn 10.01 #spn 10.02 #spn 10.03 #spiders georg of the tnt loop #s15 meta rewatch #it's spirals all the way down #dabb vs cars #destiel #the scheherazade of supernatural #at this point i should just stop bothering with meta tags because *waves hand at everything in a significant fashion*

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leiascully · 6 years ago

Text

Fic: Baseball Metaphors (15/15)

Thanks for sticking with me to the end of what, like Visitor, began as a one-shot and ended up a thirty thousand word journey. It’s possible that this is the epilogue of Deathly Hallows of epilogues, and if that’s true for you, please feel free to ignore it and live forever with Mulder and Scully in the throes of some truly epic afterglow. But I wanted to follow the thread a little further, and explore what their future might have been if this had been their present sometime in the middle of Season 3 (honestly, a terrible time to set it, given how many killer episodes and how much mytharc I ended up having to write out of their moderately peaceful life together). I’m sorry to say that it’s safe for work, PG at most.

Jenny won't take elopement for an answer, so Scully relents and lets her help plan the reception. Despite her dull taste in paint colors, Jenny turns out to have exquisite taste when it comes to planning weddings, and she and Scully talk flowers and place settings and the details of the reception dress for hours. She coaxes out all of the details Scully never thought she cared about as Mulder watches, fascinated. In another life Jenny would have made a great interrogator. Maybe even in this one.

They go to the wedding, of course. The minister is boring and the vows are boilerplate. Mulder slides his thumb smugly under the hem of Scully's dress. She smiles like an angel and pulls him into the garden during the reception so that he can keep the promise his thumb made. But they both cry, just a little. It's not because of Ethan and Jenny, they swear to each other. It's just the idea of weddings, of course. It's the idea that they, one day soon, will be standing up in front of each other and saying their various versions of same old words that somehow still mean something every time.

Eventually, the baby is born, and their time with Ethan and Jenny peters out, except for Scully's occasional wedding planning dates. She dandles the baby on her knee and discusses the merits of a veil versus a fascinator for the reception (the fascinator wins) while Jenny changes out the cabbage leaves in her nursing bra.

They get married in her mother's living room. Maggie isn't happy about the lack of a Catholic wedding necessarily, but she gives them her blessing as they join hands and promise themselves to each other, forever and ever. At least the priest makes house calls, Mulder thinks. They all sign the document afterwards and Scully's mother serves up cake and coffee. It's all very civilized. Scully glows in a dress she got from the department store. Mulder touches the white rose pinned to the lapel of his new bespoke suit. When everyone's plates are just crumbs and the cups are dregs, they hug Maggie and take their leave. She presses a horseshoe and a bell into Mulder's hands.

"Melissa would have wanted you to have it," she says. Scully cries.

That night in bed, they explore each other slowly, their hunger tempered now by months of indulgence. He spends so long after his first orgasm coaxing gentle climaxes out of her that she reaches down and finds him firm again, and she slides her leg over his hip and takes him in. They make love gazing into each other's eyes, as if each touch is part of a ritual that will keep them safe and whole and happy.

Only afterwards do they realize they forgot the condom.

The train from DC to Portland, Maine takes twelve hours, give or take. They spend most of it holding hands. Scully pages through the issues of JAMA she's never managed to catch up on. Mulder reads a treatise on alien behavior that someone sent him anonymously, sharing the most entertaining portions aloud with Scully.

The B&B may or may not be haunted, but it's picturesque as hell. They rent a car and drive into the woods and there it is, white clapboard and black gables spattered with wet leaves that the wind has pasted there. The bed is deep and soft and they spend the weekend hiking, eating, drinking wine by the fireplace, and making love with no barriers between them, holding their hope cupped in their palms like a candle flame in a breeze.

Scully doesn't get pregnant. It's just as well. They keep going out on cases. They dip in and out of the darkness of their own minds. Krycek reappears, the bad penny forever turning up. That's after the black oil, after the airport in Hong Kong.

"I should have made him my best man," Mulder muses, when everything's over, because there's nothing to do but whistle in the dark.

"Frohike would have been a better choice," Scully demurs.

At the reception, Byers gives a lovely toast and Frohike demands to dance with the bride. Langly tries to DJ. No one dances. It's a small party, but Teena Mulder comes down. She kisses Scully's cheek and presses a glass of wine into her hand. "I said the seven blessings," she says. "I always knew it would be you. Fox will know what to do."

He ducks his head. "Thank you, Mom."

She reaches up and strokes his cheek. "You're a good son, Fox. I think you'll make a good husband."

"He is," Scully says fiercely.

Teena's eyes soften. She nods. They drink the wine and Mulder steps on the glass. "Mazel tov," Teena says, and makes her excuses.

They don't tell anyone about the marriage, not even Skinner. Scully wears her ring on the chain around her neck, next to her cross. It seems safer that way. They do move in together, quietly, submitting separate change of address forms weeks apart. There's some kind of solace in coming to work in separate cars and opening the door of their new apartment to find the other one already waiting in a place that isn't filled with their own ghosts. Mulder keeps his old place too; it's a convenient place to meet up with his informants.

They fake his death there one day, when Scully is dying of cancer and Mulder is at the end of his rope. He comes back from the land of the lost with a chip for the back of her neck. Bill steps in front of him, a snarl on his face, but Maggie lays a hand on her son's arm.

"That's her husband," she says calmly, and weathers the hurricane of Bill's fury and confusion while Mulder coaxes Scully to sit up, kissing her dry cheek and whispering to her about miracles. She has the little bottle in one hand and her rosary in the other.

"You can't let go," he says. "I know I said 'til death do us part, but Scully, that can't be now." He kneels at her bedside and sobs against her thigh while she strokes his hair.

"I'll do it," she says, and he can hear that there isn't really hope in her voice, but she wants to spare him the agony of never having tried.

She gets better. They go to the doctor to discuss the ova from the facility Mulder found. The specialist thinks there's hope. It takes a few months, but eventually the test comes back positive. "Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Scully," the specialist says, and neither of them correct her. The conspiracy they've been unraveling may be so much lint and chaff, but this is real. They put their hands together on her belly.

When they find Emily, the adoption agency is only too happy to let them fill out the paperwork. A nice young married couple, steady jobs, maybe a little on the dangerous side, but at least they've got good insurance and a government pension, right? And it can't be so risky, if Agent Scully is pregnant and still going in to the office. They have to tell Skinner after that. He doesn't look particularly surprised. They fly their daughter across the country and settle, dazed and dazzled, into some kind of routine.

At least their new place has a bedroom for her, and one for the baby on the way. They burn through a lot of their sick days, but Emily begins to grow and thrive and Scully's belly rounds. Mulder helps her with her reading at night; Scully coaxes her through math. It works. They're a family. When they bring home little William, Emily is delighted.

Cassandra Spender disappears from a bridge in Pennsylvania. Her son batters down the door to the basement, but they don't know much more than he does. Scully was home with Emily when the itching began, not in her neck but in her brain, but it was bathtime for Emily, and there were stories to be read, and then Mulder to hold her in the dark, and she never left DC.

Diana Fowley strides back into their lives, bearing news of a psychic child. She studies the ring on Scully's hand (no point in secrets anymore) and their family photos on the desk. "Congratulations," she says in a deliberately even voice. The door closes behind her with a click. She doesn't come back.

They go to Texas while Maggie watches the kids. Somehow they end up in Antarctica, but somehow they get back with all their fingers and toes and a few more insights into the vast global conspiracy that used to be the lodestar of their lives. They lose the X-Files for a little while, but they have other things that are important, like where Emily's other shoe is and whether there are any clean bottles to store breastmilk in and why Mulder's mother sends such expensive presents.

(Scully never goes to Africa. Mulder never goes to Oregon. Despite it all, they have their health and strength.)

They're happy. They still argue. One Christmas Eve, Mulder convinces Scully to leave the kids at her mother's and takes her ghosthunting for old time's sake. One strange day through a series of strange coincidences, Scully meets her ex at a hospital.

"All the choices we've made," she says later, blurry after a glass of wine, "they've all led to this moment."

"I'd make the same ones," he says.

"Me too," she says, taking his hand. "You know, the kids are in bed."

"Are you propositioning me, Agent Scully?" he asks, mocking outrage.

"It's my turn," she says, and leads him into their bedroom, and he thinks they just might live happily ever after after all.

#the x-files fic #xfiles au fic #canon divergent au #msr #mulder x scully #my fic #fic: baseball metaphors

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callmearcturus · 5 years ago

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ARC I listen to reddit readings right?? I found this series of posts that has intense TMA Vibes. Like it's got at least 7 episodes and it's basically one long statement. It's called "previous tenant left a survival guide" on youtube. Let me know if you check it out. (No explict gore from what I've seen. Some violence in a few places, but if you've listened to TMA you should be fine.)

Correction. Someone burns alive to near death in one of the episodes. I think 3 or 4? It's not described very detailed but just a heads up.

I don’t know what reddit readings are? Anything with “reddit” in the name makes me incredibly gunshy. XD For getting me into new media, I have to know

1. Is it queer2. Does it have a mytharc

shruh

#reddit in of itself is such a massive red flag for me lol #kineticdiice

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elizabethrobertajones · 7 years ago

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Comparing Season 6 and Season 10 - which one do you think makes more sense as a whole, which one better pulls of seeming like what happened/was revealed at the end of the season is what was supposed to happen/was planned all along?

I may be biased, but for me, season 6 by miles. And almost all of that is Edlund desperately cramming everything that had happened so far into something that either made sense or handwaved why it didn’t make sense in an effectively emotional enough episode that by the end of TMWWBK you sort of feel like you’ve actually got your answers and Cas has been completely honest and open with YOU at least, making it that much easier to handle what was going on.

I think for me season 10 was poorly handled in ways that weren’t particularly well addressed and the only offered explanation ever was “oh it was Amara after all” which in the context of season 11 gives us some more characterisation to begin to pull things together, though without addressing everything. Still if we’re dealing with things as a whole, season 10 doesn’t have an episode that scrapes everything together in the post-Edlund era and what we get only within the confines of season 10 is extremely unsatisfactory, even if later canon eases it a little bit, along with just… not being actively in SPN season 10 as it airs :P

Going off my memories of being in the fandom at the time, we had a lot of issues with things like

Dean’s incomplete demon reversal (so far as in 10x02, written by Dabb who invented the cure repeating the correct steps, then in 10x03 Buckleming not following through with them)

“the river ends at the source” “never mind I was screwing with you”

Did Cain still have the Mark after 9x11? lasting drama until 10x14, and still debated afterwards especially by people who had thought he didn’t have the Mark and had passed it entirely to Dean now being very confused

What the fuck was this about Lucifer having the Mark and how did that last minute addition affect everything?

the Colette parallel being wildly mis-applied by fandom but also issues with the show’s fear to explore it leading to “we are all the colette” episodes with lasting drama until 10x22, where Charlie, Sam and Cas all variously and persistently seemed to be suggested to be capable of being a team effort to pull Dean out of the darkness. 10x22 also wasn’t enough to stop Dean, and the final confrontation was with Sam, I think a general consensus was - especially again with season 11′s help - that the memory of Mary drew him back/unleashed Amara metaphorically who unleashed Mary literally - it wasn’t a great note to end on without season 11 context (as a whole, so, like, a whole YEAR later) that Sam had “won” the battle to bring Dean back from himself where Cas had failed, and the subtext and show and fandom most of all had made SUCH a huge deal out of Colette, after 9x11 over-told her story instead of retelling Cain & Abel, that it was set up with the expectation that saving Dean was a romantic quest, not a brotherly one. 10x14 sort of helped set things to rights with the list, but the fighting about what it all meant at the time was AWFUL, and though I think I was right and the show bore that out and these days I type it all with confidence, I’m pretty sure there’s a ton of buried wank about it that could be dragged out if we want >.>

the fact there wasn’t really an overarcing Mark of Cain plot except “Dean is suffering” with the only 3 actual plot points they could do with it being demon!Dean, kill Cain, and remove Mark. Because of that, everything else is literally set-dressing to fill the time and add drama in between, but these were played with poorly and there wasn’t any subterfuge we weren’t in on (i.e. sam stealing the book) vs Cas betraying both the Winchesters and US. The only retcon offered in the end was Death’s exposition about the Darkness.

people literally forgetting which order episodes came out in and being very confused about why Amara wasn’t released when Dean was 14 in 10x12 even though he didn’t kill Cain for 2 more episodes (like, within weeks of 10x14 airing, I swear)

the understandable disappearance of Cole but bizarre application of that hunter called Rudy who popped up in his place and featured in 10x23 along with Cas for Dean’s guilt trip. Even if Cole and TAW sucked ass, it’s much easier to understand the emotional impact of what happened to Rudy if you assume he has the exact same backstory as Cole and the same nonsense happened to Dean twice in the same year :P

Pre-season hype about Rowena made a huge deal out of the Grand Coven, and for a brief moment it seemed like there might be a witch plotline, including new lore dumps about different types of witches in 10x07, characters like Olivette the Hamster, etc, but they squandered her first season and 10x19 was as close as we got to any pay off to her actual storyline

Then Oskaar happened and that was like ??? Okay just introduce him in the second to last episode and throw us into that emotional situation

the entire cure coming out of nowhere as a random last minute macguffin instead of having been anything they put together over the season - even though the book of the damned thing showed up in 10x11 it changed substantially from the clue Charlie left with (a less than 100 year old book with a library reference number found on an antique rare book website, based on a real book, which we all picked over and were left wondering if the plot was to be about some sort of occultism thing as a result) to a much different lore. Then there were a few episodes dealing with it and the codex, the actual spell had no real struggle, and Crowley delivered all the pieces while Cas stood around scowling and Rowena stood around in chains eye-rolling. Compare season 13′s pacing with Sam and Dean cobbling together what they needed from halfway through the season, and being on the mission to get to the AU from episode 9, with relatively little of the endless sitting around googling and being frustrated of past seasons but ESPECIALLY season 10 where Sam was futilely trawling the results of googling “mark of cain” from mid-late season 9 through to like, 10x18 when an actual brief plot appeared around it directly.

I think all of it points to a problem of working forwards from where they were instead of backwards to tidy up what was left. In season 6 Edlund took as many loose plot threads, from how Sam lost his soul, what was up with Crowley and Cas, the angel war, explanations for Sam and Samuel working together, why eve happened, everything, and put it all together to explain the elements of the season so far in a new light. Despite how disastrous that season was, PRETENDING you knew like you meant to do it all along glosses over inconsistencies in Samuel’s story or Cas and Crowley’s 6x10 interactions, and makes them relatively inconsequential when most of the details add up.

The same thing works with the Lucifer as Sam’s vessel storyline, in the sense that while Azazel’s plan is fucking ridiculous in its over-complex bizarre attempt to find a worthy true vessel that Heaven had fated, comparing season 1-2 to season 5 head on is bad, each season explains itself from the last in enough of a way and with enough knowledge of what already happened that really despite vast inconsistencies in the lore, by 5x22 we are pretty much all on board to accept the way it all played out because they use what was previously written to build up Sam’s arc, and little details thrown in towards the end like Brady and then Lucifer revealing ALL of Sam’s closer rando peeps had been demons, tidy up more and more loose ends and there’s left with plausible deniability about a lot of the issues.

In season 10 they kept on introducing elements instead of working with what they had already established, and also discarded what seemed like major plot hooks for Rowena and Cole, one annoyingly, one completely metatextually understandably and fuck TAW, I’m glad the show never brought Cole back as soon as rumours of him groping fans appeared, and it makes me genuinely trust that the SPN set is a safe place. But yeah.

Things they set up and could have worked with, were the Cas’s grace arc, which was resolved to a small personal satisfaction to Cas without any major plot impact except we could stop worrying about when Cas would get sick and die from bad grace, or steal more.

The demon!Dean issue was bad writing from Buckleming re: was he still a demon or not, but given Dean was supposed to be struggling with succumbing to darkness the season actually kept him almost completely level without any significant relapses, even after killing Cain. The sense of needing a functional Dean Winchester to keep hunting monsters and prop up the show as both the carrier of the mytharc, the emotional core, and the go-between between Sam and Cas even when the show was trying to figure out if Sam and Cas could function without Dean, it was all still so much about Dean that in 10x21 when they’re doing the cringeworthy “for Dean” thing and Rowena rolls her eyes like “I barely know the man”, I was actually applauding Buckleming snark thinking they maybe briefly had a handle on how ridiculous Dean’s position in the narrative was. (Listen, this was the last 10 minutes of my innocence about how awful Buckleming could be, leave past!me alone. She’s sweet and precious and not bitter :P) In any case, a more effective season would have utilised him more to slip and slide between light and dark and explore it in much deeper detail, but balancing that with a procedural formula doesn’t work as well and they were lacking enough philosophers on staff. I think the Dabb era writing team could handle it, because Yockey, Perez, and Glynn especially, who seems to have a psychology background based on her writing, all have a sharp attention to the exact things in emotional arcs that would have made it work better, even just as it was. Since this was a weaker writing team where Robbie, Bobo and Dabb episodes were little islands of excellence and the motw were fun but more shallow even with strong foreshadowing themes, it just didn’t pay off.

I think the biggest waste of time was “the river ends at the source” which was either Buckleming trying to introduce a concept and hoping someone else dealt with it, or an agreed plot hook which never materialised, or Metatron literally spoke the truth, that the line had only ever been written to mess with us. However 10x23 could have actually included more of a “river ends at the source” sort of slant and had Death confirm it in so many words because Amara really did sort of seem to be the answer to the question. In 10x10 it seemed like they knew where the season was going, but by 10x17 it was obvious they DIDN’T, and it was during 10x18 that the plot actually got hashed out and Robbie was handed heavy revisions to make to change the Stynes to end of season villains and the Book of the Damned was going to be used how it was. I think this is really weak plotting, as someone who always puts in fun lines and then attempts like crazy to pay off on them. My first novel has the line “you can’t talk to me yet” and I play through that the whole book until they CAN talk and make it a major motif, goal and in the end try to explain it as best I can about how it’s all plot relevant and why using that for tension to put off the explanations and such was a valid thing to throw at my main character, and then the springboard to more adventure when she was ready for it. I literally do not understand putting a portentous line into your story, and not becoming desperately eager to answer it or twist something into revealing how it all fits at the end, if not basing your entire story off of it. Sam and Dean seemed wildly uncurious about how to apply that or what it means.

In season 6 one of the more frustrating things is the “it’s all about the souls” line because Dean fails to investigate until someone or other rolls their eyes and makes it all clear to him. But we get a few more reminders in Cas’s presence, until we find out his plan, and Crowley repeats that line in 6x20 when making his sales pitch to Cas, if I’m remembering rightly (I hope so :/) and so despite Dean’s infuriating lack of investigation (not that he had a great deal of leads, but still - you could build a plot around it by GIVING him a lead, he’s the fictional character and you’re the writer :P) at the very least they repeat the motif in at least 6x17 and 6x20 to my memory, before the souls thing becomes a lot more obvious about Cas taking the purgatory souls and we’re allowed to actually discuss what he’s up to instead of the vague hints Atropos and Rachel give that they know his plans. 6x07 also hints early on that Purgatory is full of monster souls if you add it all up - the writers knew they were doing SOMETHING with this even if it took to the end of the season for it to all come together. (And that’s something that’s clearly and overarcing plot that Gamble oversaw because she wrote 6x11 and the line then appears in multiple episodes around the place, so that’s not just something Edlund tidied up but an actual effort to write the season well.)

Throwing aside the “river ends at the source” line is wildly frustrating because it wouldn’t have been too hard to apply it thematically and even keep Metatron being a douche while giving the viewer a pay off anyway for our own satisfaction, by showing it had been a theme all along anyway. You CAN squint at season 10 and analyse it through that lens but it’s exhausting when the show doesn’t give us the themes on a platter. It also shows that the plotting is careless and they’re experimenting, and rather than working with what they have, this is in a path of episodes where they’re discarding some plotlines, and we’re beginning to have end of season plotlines hastily pasted onto the end of the season, but they make very little of any of the work already done to build up the season as we’d seen it so far.

Add onto that Charlie being murdered for manpain to motivate some things into action and all the random elements being used, and the sense that Crowley, Cas and Rowena all abruptly ran out of a plotline that had been intended to utilise them and put on a side character duty away from Sam and Dean, the season is extremely messily and carelessly written, and without any real attention to detail to its own themes and characters and plotlines. Even if they’d gone into the season not particularly expecting where to go, they brought a lot to the table early on but then quickly wiped a lot of it off, and brought a lot more stuff to the table instead, which makes season 10 a really wonky, unfinished feeling product as a thing on its own, and the overall story is scrappy and carelessly plotted.

And that is speaking just about the easy plot stuff without getting into the absolute mess of speculation from the Destiel side of fandom wondering wtf was going on with the seeming build up to crypt scenes, colette, the grace cure, etc, that made up the bulk of the speculation but makes actually analysing expectations vs presented product completely impossible to evaluate on that side of things because as always Destiel speculation really overshoots what is expected and was really running wild at that point. I mean, not being judgemental because that was the year I was right in the thick of it. 3 years clear of it now, some of it seems really silly, but those 3 things all seemed clearly built up to our eyes, and we got the reverse crypt scene we’d been expecting since before the season started, and we got the Colette reference which slotted Cas firmly into place as a reminder of how Cain’s peeps lined up against Dean’s, as well as Cas asking Dean to stop, which satisfied the terms and conditions of Dean resisting walking in Cain’s footsteps with the overall set up of the scene. With the way Cas got his grace back and then some other rando cure popped up where Rowena of all people made the sacrifice, I really can’t help feeling like the conspiracy theorist who knows they were right but with the way it all shook out, only people who knew the conspiracy would understand how it didn’t happen and it’s very hard for me to look at that and say that some non-Cas-related cure was coming all along, given the conspicuous dropping of one plotline sort of day of picking up the next >.> But I’ll cede that from my position I might be a bit compromised on that one.

Anyways. To me season 10 is a disaster that only season 11 really justifies, while season 6 has some truly low points but in the end the actual writing skill hauls it through so that it creates the illusion that there was consistency, if you ignore everything outside of the text suggesting it may have been as poorly planned as season 10. Planning isn’t everything - it’s what you do when confronted with the unplanned wire tangle in front of you that really marks how well they were written, and just shoving it under the table and putting a new wire tangle down vs actually unpicking it and making them as neat as possible? Gamble slam dunks Carver :P

#Asks #season 10 #we don't talk about season 6

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sigritandtheelves · 6 years ago

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You told me you don't believe in canon, can I ask why? I am really curious, and I don't mind a long detailed answer ( lol). Also what are your thoughts on the difference between canon divergent and AU?

Crisis on Infinite Truths, or, Why I Don’t Believe in Canon (And Neither Should You)

Thanks for this ask, friend. I’ve thought about this quite a bit, especially when I see occasional comments about what or when events “really” happened, or people saying that they don’t like AU (by which they often mean any canon divergence). So here’s my little manifesto on why I think adherence to canon is pointless (and painful).

The world of the X-Files contradicts itself. Constantly.

Mulder and Scully met in March, 1992 (Pilot). But in December, 1993, they’d known each other only a few months. Scully was missing for four weeks. No wait, Duane Barry clearly takes place in August, and she was returned in November so that’s three months! Samantha’s middle name is Teena—no, Anne! Margaret Scully gave Dana her cross necklace for her birthday… or was it for Christmas?

Anyone who’s ever tried to piece together a coherent timeline for this show knows that there are constant, frustrating contradictions, and numerous impossibilities—but not the good kind that Mulder likes to investigate. We pick and choose these minor points to accept or deny all the time without worrying about betraying canon. Why, then, do some remain committed to the idea of a “true” storyline (canon), even after major contradictions in story, not to mention the betrayals and cruelties of our Clueless Creator? It’s a matter of personal preference and one’s own relationship to the show, but here’s why I don’t believe in canon.

The smaller discrepancies listed above (just a tiny sampling) appear early in what I think of as the main timeline of seasons 1-7, but the contradictions that began to appear afterward were truly egregious: major changes in the mythology and characterization that were incompatible with earlier seasons, and which were sometimes later retconned by the show itself (Supersoldiers? Never happened. Colonization in 2012, “The date is set!”? Nup.). The plot became desperate (for ratings and to intensify its drama), cruel (to both Mulder and Scully in its violences and unjustified, poorly handled traumas), dictated by real-world constraints (Duchovny’s absence), and utterly nonsensical (the Smoking Man appears to be an otherworldly demon? He dies how many times?). I mostly hang with canon in the first seven seasons, but after that, I feel absolutely no obligation to this nonsense. Season ten was so painful and so offensive in so many ways—I won’t ever go near most of that season. I don’t think any fan should feel obligated to believe in one “true” timeline, especially when it seems written into the show that there are multiple possibilities and versions of truth.

My orientation toward canon, and I think that of many fanfic writers, is based on this multiplicity: we pick narrative elements that are grounded in what’s given or represented in the show itself. We reframe and retell. We offer something new. I’m going to draw, just briefly, on the work that I do academically, and talk about hermeneutics. Writing fanfiction is a transformative act of interpretation. By necessity, all of it is canon-divergent to some extent, because canon (like any primary text) contains no “true” interpretation. There is no single and correct reading, no singular meaning beyond what we, as readers and viewers, bring to it. A text is worth what we make of it and nothing more. Isn’t that incredibly liberating?

Why are some people so committed to the idea of canon?

When I first returned to writing fanfic, I had an epic goal in mind—I wanted to trace the relationship development between Mulder and Scully through all of the years of the show. I failed very early on because the project quickly felt both impossible and unnecessary. Most fic that is “canon compliant” emphasizes a particular piece of the timeline in order to parse out the distinct emotional and psychological nuances of a single arc. We zero in on one place to make sense of it (hermeneutics) and then tell our stories that offer more than the original. Already, we diverge from canon.

Rather than an account of the whole series, my idea became an effort to understand and reframe the reproduction arc, beginning in season five. It became the “Bearings” series of four stories, which attempted to be faithful to canonical events as much as possible. But even then, it diverged after the beginning of season eight because the things that happen in that season do not make sense in the arc of the rest of the show. I could find absolutely no justification for Mulder’s “death” based on what we know of the alien plot. Supersoldiers? They get written out of the show after season nine! They don’t make sense in relation to anything else we know about the aliens, and they never appear again. Screw supersoldiers, and screw the nonsensical mytharc of seasons eight and nine. I rewrote it in the final part.

People focus on the canonical because they want there to be coherence and consistency—they want a true truth that is grounded in the show’s representation. I say: let go of that. It is impossible both because the writing contradicts itself, literally, over and over again, and because many of the events that do become consistent (Scully gave up William? Really, we’re sticking with that one because no one in Hollywood knows how to write children?) are so fundamentally wrong in relation to what we know of the characters.

There is no dogma, there is no truth, there is no single and correct canon. We have pieces. Let’s make beautiful things with them.

Through all of a narrative’s divergent possibilities, we choose our elements.

We know that the arc of this overall story was not planned. There’s no show bible, no “truth” that was ever out there, in the end. What we have instead are truths (plural) and infinite possibilities: factoids, events, feelings, characters. Personally, I have a few things that I hold as true across most versions of the stories that I like to tell, and some of that borrows from post-season-seven events, even as I tend to rewrite canon after that point: Mulder and Scully tried IVF, but it didn’t work. Afterward, they had two children together (at a reasonable human age for conceiving children). They find their way (in all ‘verses) to the unremarkable house. They keep fighting the good fight and are as tough as nails—but they always love the absolute hell out of each other and their kids. These are the elements that I often choose to keep, and the rest I can play around with. Others do great things with other bits and pieces, and I like to experiment with angsty vignettes, too. I dig a good break-up fic, for example. Even an on-the-run fic: I love those, too. There are interesting, nuanced, painful, and beautiful things that can be done with what 1013 gave us—but not with everything it gave us and nothing else.

What’s the difference between AU and Canon Divergence?

This is a difference that gets conflated all the time, and I’m just as guilty of this mix-up as anyone else, because of the way the term AU gets used these days. It’s not a huge deal; I’m not really into taxonomizing and hair-splitting. But I do think story metadata is useful for finding what you’re looking for, so maybe we should clarify what these things mean. AU stands for Alternate Universe, and initially, that’s what this term was used to designate: a fundamental difference in worlds. Let’s put Mulder and Scully in the Wild West, or the 1950s, or in space, and see how their story changes or stays the same. I love these stories, as many do, because they maintain essential elements from the world of the show (characterization, certain plot points, family relations, approximations of life-defining events), but allow readers and writers to speculate about how things might have played out, were the world not as it is.

Canon divergence is different, and also is pretty self explanatory. This is the world of the X-Files, but here’s how things would play out if just this one thing (or these five) happened differently: Melissa didn’t die in Paper Clip; Scully and Mulder kept and raised William; Mulder finds Samantha alive at the end of Closure; etc. These stories are great because they allow for imaginative speculation, but keep us in a world we’re familiar with. But again, all fanfiction involves creative speculation. All of it diverges from what we actually saw. These just diverge a little more widely. They speculate a little bit harder, maybe.

The difference between canon divergence and AU gets fuzzy in spaces like pre-XF, because it’s kind of an AU—a world that takes place before the timeline of the show, and therefore makes major changes before there’s such thing as “canon” (see—we using scare quotes now). It seems like hair-splitting to argue for one or the other, but AU probably makes the most sense, unless you’re going to incorporate major elements of the canonical storyline too.

So that’s pretty much all I have to say. Sorry for the long-windedness, but I’d love to chat more about it.

#xf meta #my rant on canon #and why it's bullshit

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italwayshadtobeyou · 2 years ago

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No, you're cool. The whole thing is weirder for Lutherans than it would've been for Baptists or Pentecostals or non-denominational charismatic believers.

That said, I don't think that Gideon is promoting Rapture theology. He obviously expects that his flock is going to have to live, and fight, through at least some of the Tribulations. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think fake!Leah talks about the Chosen being whisked away to Heaven, only about the not-Chosen being sent to Hell before Earth becomes a paradise. That doesn't sound like the Rapture.

Anyway, the episode's head-scratching mythology shouldn't come as much of a surprise, considering that it was written by Julie Siege. Her other greatest hits include "It's the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester" (with Celtic holiday Samhain being anthropomorphized by an Abrahamic demon summoned in Latin), "Fallen Idols" (with a leshii that eats people), and "Swap Meat" (a mess WRT souls, bodies, and angelic consent). She wrote some good scenes, but I maintain that she should've only been assigned episodes that dealt with well-established phenomena (like ghosts) and didn't require additional research or mytharc knowledge.

The Winchesters' preacher friends

In "Salvation," when Meg goes scorched-earth on the Winchesters' friends, 2 of her first victims are preachers. At first glance, this seems odd, on two counts: First, most preachers would dismiss spells and ghosts as idolatry and heresy; and, second, John doesn't show any signs of religious devotion.

However, I think it does make sense when you think about how John would've been filtering his acquaintances. He knew lots of hunters, he just didn't make real friends with most of them, and he definitely didn't introduce several important ones (like Gordon and anyone at the Roadhouse) to Sam and Dean. As it turns out, many of the hunters we see are untrustworthy and physically attack Sam when they learn more about him: Gordon and Kubrick, Tim and Reggie, Walt and Roy.

John had his suspicions about Sam, and maybe had ever since Sam was six months old. (Did he see the blood on Sam's mouth? No one knows.) By "In My Time of Dying," he considers it a possibility that Sam would become dangerous enough to warrant killing.

Disturbing as that is, he clearly doesn't want Sam dead. From a practical standpoint, he could have killed Sam at pretty much any point. While living at Palo Alto, Sam's idea of self-defense was a wooden baseball bat. Even after he gets back on the road and reunites with John, Sam isn't prepared for an assassination attempt by his own father. He lets his guard down on multiple occasions, for example, while pacing back and forth in "Dead Man's Blood."

Yes, John thinks he might have to kill Sam-- a burden that he passes on to Dean in "In My Time of Dying"-- but it isn't plan A. He specifically tells Dean to kill Sam if he can't save him.

And who would be the likeliest allies in a salvation attempt? Preachers, probably. It isn't just a concept that they apply to hunting; it's their day job. Further, if they've attended seminaries, then they've probably read more ancient prophecies than John has himself. Preachers would probably among the first people to recognize prophecies becoming manifest, and among the last people to categorize Sam as beyond salvation.

So I don't think it's a coincidence that two of the hunters that the brothers knew growing up were preachers. I think that John was establishing as much of a safety net as he felt he could, while keeping shoot-now types from getting too close to Sam.

#spn writers #john winchester #sam winchester #dean winchester #meta #mine #not-mine #long post

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enigmaticxbee · 5 years ago

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✖️✖️✖️ 3x10 731

The one where... Mulder’s trapped on a train with a bomb. Part 2 of 2.

Tagline: Apology is Policy

Best: The face Scully makes after she tells Mulder she’s sure about the last PIN number (she’s not sure).

Worst: They end up with nothing again - no proof, and telling the truth from the lies is getting fuzzier and more frustrating as the mytharc goes on.

✔️ Flashlights

✔️ Woods

❌ Slideshow

❌ Autopsy

✔️ Evidence Disappears

✔️ Scully Misses It

✔️ Mulder Ditch

❌ Sunflower Seeds

❌ Voiceover

❌ Catch Phrase

❌ Scully is a Medical Doctor

❌ Mulder is Spooky

✔️ Muullllderrrr!

❌ Fox/Dana

❌ Inappropriate Touching (that I am here for)

❌ Casual Scully

✔️ Casual Mulder

✔️ Trench Coats

❌ Bad Tie Watch

❌ Glasses Watch

✔️ Taking! It! Personally!: Mulder

50 States: D.C. x16, West Virginia x3, Ohio x3 & Iowa x2 (28/50)

Investigate: Apart

Solve Rate: 63%

❌ Bechdel Test: Scully doesn’t speak to another woman.

MSR: 🐝🐝

Goriness: 👽👽👽

Creepiness: 👽👽👽

Humor: 👽

Rewatch Thoughts:

1. I think that Scully is correct about what happened to her. She was abducted by and experimented on by men. I’m less sure about all the rest of it. Were those alien-human hybrids? Were they victims of radiation and disease experimentation? Both? Who/what was on the train and where were they taking it? Was Dr. Shiro Zama working for the Syndicate and if so why were they stopping his experiments and cleaning up the evidence now? Who was the NSA guy? So many questions, so few answers (ever).

2. The links to WWII and the horrible real history of human experimentation/torture is interesting (and horrifying) and ties in with the show’s themes of distrust of government and abuse of science and of power. There’s a powerful moment in the previous episode of all the MUFON women coming together and showing Scully their implants - proof of what was done to them. But the show never really follows up on that, they’re just victims and they never get to regain any agency. I’m not sure exactly what my point is, just that the mytharc can be so frustrating, with the scale of atrocities so vast, and we never get the catharsis of changing the narrative - the Syndicate just kind of fails/screws themselves over, and others take their place (? I don’t know/care about the mytharc by the late seasons). The bad guys always win, the best we can hope for is that Mulder and Scully survive, together.

3. I can understand why Mulder doesn’t want to do what the Syndicate’s telling Scully to tell him to do. But pretending his cell was losing service was a pretty shitty thing to do to Scully.

#xf rewatch #xf fanart #the x files #the xfiles #thexfiles #xf #txf #xf mytharc #i want to believe #truth is out there #xf review #msr #3x10 #731 #can you tell i’m starting to get fed up with the mytharc?#and it’s only season 3...

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punchdrunkdoc · 8 years ago

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Arrow’s storytelling problems

I was originally going to tack this onto a response to an excellent piece by @eilowyn1 but it became SUPER long and I didn’t want to hijack her post. (But you should definitely read her thoughts, as my post is still in direct response to it. It’s also just a great read from the perspective of an aspiring screen writer).

Now, I’ve never had ambitions to be a screenwriter but the process of constructing a story fascinates me, and I’ve had a lot of thoughts about Arrow’s narrative issues for a while now. I guess today was the day to let them out.

Point 1:

This concerns the serialised vs semi-serialised TV structures @eilowyn1 mentioned:

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer, like The X-Files and Supernatural, is semi-serialized, and this is why I think it’s more successful: there is an ongoing, season-long arc (the “mythology” episodes on The X-Files), but there are also character-driven one-shots that deal with a monster-of-the-week that usually helps reveal things about the characters you wouldn’t get to explore if you were going for non-stop plot.”

I was a BIG X-Phile back in the day and, I believe (correct me if I’m wrong), it was the first show to adopt this type of structure. It revolutionised long form TV storytelling structure - a structure which I think Arrow tries to emulate in a way, with their ‘Big Bads’.

They were somewhat successful in S1 and S2 - the two seasons in which the storytelling felt tight, organic and relatively well-plotted.

Season 1

It slowly became clear that there was an underlying conspiracy linking certain people and events to a mysterious ‘Undertaking’. Solving the mystery of this undertaking then became a parallel goal running alongside the ‘monster of the week (MOTW)’ takedowns and it all came to a head towards the end of the season.

This was the closest Arrow has ever come to the X-Files mytharc, and it actually has quite a few parallels; the conspiracy tangentially involved Oliver via his own tragedy (being on the island and losing his father vs Mulder’s sister being abducted) and his parent’s collusion (also similar to Mulder). But the undertaking (like the Alien mytharc) wasn’t happening as a direct consequence of the main protagonist - it was a decades-long plot that he stumbled upon, and decided to stop. This, I think, was crucial to its success. It’s why you can realistically go several episodes focusing on MOTW without directly dealing with the conspiracy; the architects of the conspiracy aren’t spending all their time plotting against the hero, they’re too caught up in their own machinations.

Season 2

There was a similar underlying conspiracy linking certain events and people, but this time it was orchestrated by Slade as a revenge-plot DIRECTLY against Oliver. Even though this goes against what I said above, it was still somewhat successful, because the reveal happened quite late in the show, and we were fully invested in this plot because the show had taken the time to introduce the character and build his relationship with Oliver. Also (and this is just from memory, so may be wrong), it felt like once the Slade reveal happened, the rest of the season was pretty much dedicated to stopping him.

In season 4 and 5, the writers tried to recreate these two formulas, but without the same success. (I’m going to ignore Season 3 because that was just a giant mess in terms of the season long mytharc/big bad).

Season 4: They tried the season 1 formula; you had a Machiavellian BigBad intent on his years-long plot of villainy, which Oliver tried to stop. Oliver was not the direct target, but was tangentially involved because of his links to LOA.

But, the reason season 4 failed was because they introduced Damien Darhk as the (super powerful) BigBad FAR TOO EARLY. The writers then had to twist themselves into narrative knots to explain A) how Oliver and the team could waste time on MOTW storylines that had nothing to do with DD and his plot for world domination and B) why DD didn’t just kill Oliver in episode 4x01. Remember DD’s magnanimous ‘time out’? And how the team destroyed the totem halfway through the season, then had to rebuild it for plot purposes?

EPIC FAIL!

Season 5: This is recapitulating season 2′s formula; a BigBad from Oliver’s past who is intent on revenge. But, again, they introduced him and his motivations far too early and (unlike Slade) they haven’t given us a reason to care - we don’t know Prometheus or the father that (supposedly) sparked off this crusade. Now, the writers may bait and switch later in the season (there seems to be a reason he hasn’t been unmasked) but at present, his back story is supremely uninteresting. Another reason this season is failing in terms of plot and pacing, is that the writers aren’t even TRYING to come up with a reason why the team can ignore Prometheus (and he can ignore the team) from week-to-week while they deal with MOTWs. He’s conveniently leaving them alone while Oliver hunts for birds and fights aliens.

I know there are still 9 episodes left, but this season long arc already feels like an EPIC FAIL!

The writers are PROFESSIONALS! They are being paid to create this! And yet, I’ve read better plotted fanfic. It’s so frustrating!!

Point 2:

Based on this quote: “Arrow doesn’t have one-off episodes to focus on character building. It doesn’t have wacky meta episodes like Supernatural, it doesn’t have concept episodes like The X-Files and it doesn’t have madcap absurdist comedy episodes like Buffy.All of this, I think, is to Arrow’s detriment.”

THIS!!

This is an incredibly wasted opportunity on a COMIC BOOK SHOW! The X-files managed to do it, and that was a MUCH more grounded, serious show. Arrow is about frickin’ superheroes! Characters run around in masks and leather and fight crime with magic rags and super-powered screams! There were even aliens this year. ALIENS!!

So why is the storytelling so god-damn conventional? I know the show started as gritty and dark and ‘realistic’ but we’re a long way from that now (no matter how ‘back-to-basics’ they pretend to be - need I mention ‘Aliens’ again?)

Why can’t they embrace their ridiculousness a bit more and have fun with their structure?

Give me a bottle-episode, where OTA are trapped in an abandoned, bomb-ridden building for the entire 43 minutes and must use their combined talents to escape.

Give me an amnesia episode where they all wake up in the lair with no memory of each other, and have to work out their connections and purpose

Give me a ‘Bad Blood’ episode, where Oliver and Felicity tell conflicting stories to Digg about a botched mission.

Give me an episode entirely from the point of view of a BigBad’s henchman as he tries to do his job while that annoying Green Arrow guy keeps getting in the way

Or from the point of view of Green Arrow’s biggest fangirl or unofficial biographer while he tries to rescue them

Give me a proper ‘Small Potatoes’-style Human Target farce

Give me a ‘Cops’-style episode where all the episode footage is shot by Star City residents on their cellphones

Hell, embrace Flashpoint for real and give me Earth2 Digg and Felicity interacting with the team

The X-files was a serious show, with death and cancer and abductions, but they still had episodes which were pure comedic relief. And it worked!

Why can’t it work in a universe that has time travel and magic? Does a comic book show need to be so conventional?

So those were my thoughts - criticisms really. And it’s not just because I’m in a negative space with the show in general. These are thoughts I’ve had since well before season 5, and it comes from a place of frustration more than bitterness. Because I’ve always felt Arrow had the potential to be SO MUCH MORE than what it has turned out to be.

And that’s a shame.

P.s. Feel free to add on your wacky episode wishlist - I’d love to hear them!

#Arrow #arrow criticism #X-files #x

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