Shooting the Canon: How Episode Order Affects the Backstory in Season 4

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Title:	Shooting the Canon: How Episode Order Affects the Backstory in Season 4
Creator:	Fialka
Date(s):	1998, revamped 2001
Medium:	online
Fandom:	The X-Files
Topic:
External Links:	Shooting the Canon - Fialka, Archived version
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'Shooting the Canon: How Episode Order Affects the Backstory in Season 4 is by Fialka.

It was part of a series. The author comments that: "Many of these essays first appeared as discussions on OBSSE, Scullyfic and/or ATXA."

"While this essay was hanging around on my hard drive waiting for time to update it, a similar discussion appeared on the OBSSE ml. The following is adapted from that post, with some of the old stuff thrown in." The essay was first posted to The Annotated X-Files Study Guide and is at Fialka's Candybox.

Later, it was reposted:

Sadly, when the old NBCI server went the way of so many really cool, free things on the net, I never could find another free site with enough space to house the whole Study Guide, and it didn't get enough traffic to warrant paying for 250mb on a server somewhere. Not to mention, I no longer have as much time on my hands as I did back then, so like the UFOs...well, it is another UFO. Some of it still appears to be here, if you can wade your way through all the advertising on FortuneCity. I sure won't be insulted if you don't. These essays are from the original site, and appear here unchanged. Unlinked titles got abducted by aliens somewhere along the way. If you find them wandering dazed by the side of the road, could you be so kind as to send them home?

Excerpts

Something I've grown to notice lately: opinions about certain highly-debated eps seem to split along the lines of when the viewer originally saw the ep. For example, I, having seen Irresistible very late in the game, have never found it that impressive, whereas those who utterly adore it seem all to have seen it when it was first aired. Likewise, I often hear from those who started watching XF because of the movie that they don't like anything from Season 1 because "that's not my Scully". For the record, I started watching XF in the first UK season (1994), then didn't see it in any coherent fashion until mid S5. I worked my way back to the start via the full season boxed sets (the only pre-DVD advantage of being in Europe <g>), viewed backward as S5 finished in the UK and I was receiving tapes of the start of S6 from the States. While I'd made it all the way back to S1 within a month, I actually didn't get to see the first half of S5 until the boxed set came out in the summer of 1999.

I know The Powers That Be don't plan the season with any kind of <choke> continuity. But I do believe the actors ACT as if Mulder and Scully have a past that might inform their present actions, and this does play itself out as subtext from ep to ep. (Hell, that's what inspired this site to begin with!) And occasionally, that subtext can make all the difference in how an episode is understood by the viewing audience. For example, the highly controversial Never Again, which wound up being aired after Leonard Betts. Anderson was publicly upset about that -- stating in several interviews that if she'd known it would be aired in an order that made it seem as if cancer were the reason for Scully's behaviour, she would have layered that in there. As it was, she assumed it would go in the order they shot it, and her performance was very different.

I don't think the professional part of her crisis is about the value of their work, as much as the value of her contribution to it. She's had those doubts before and she'll have them again -- in the movie, in Field Trip, etc. This time it's coupled with the fear that life and love are passing her by as well. Her crisis seems to me to be about the value of *herself*, both as a federal agent and as a woman. It's much more complicated than a simple reaction to Mulder's hamfistedness -- that's just the last straw that makes her call Ed. I think even if Mulder had been paying her a more generous amount of attention at this point, it wouldn't have changed much, because he can't pay her the kind of attention she was needing at that moment, and it's one of the weaknesses of the script that M & W thought they had (or were forced) to make Mulder insufferable to justify her behaviour -- it's highly understandable just as a whirlpool of self-doubt and regret. No matter how confident we are, how happy with our choices, there are always times when we wonder what we might have missed, who we might have been if things were different. Duchovny tries very hard to mitigate the short shrift given to Mulder (that idiotic air guitar riff notwithstanding) and if one is very honest about it, Scully isn't giving him that much of a chance to help. And never has. Scully keeps her emotional cards so close to her chest it's no wonder that some days even she has no idea what she holds in her hand.