Trust Me, I'm the Creator: The "Roadrunners" Rant

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Title:	Trust Me, I'm the Creator: The "Roadrunners" Rant
Creator:	Fialka
Date(s):	November 2000
Medium:	online
Fandom:	The X-Files
Topic:
External Links:	Trust Me, I'm the Creator - Fialka, Archived version
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Trust Me, I'm the Creator: The "Roadrunners" Rant 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."

Author's note: "A slightly modified version of this essay first appeared on AXTA. Many thanks to those who shared their thoughts."

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

XF has always been about trust and it still is, but in a very different way. I was reminded of this as I hit stop on the recorder after Roswell last night. I adore that show, I'm as hooked on it as I ever was on XF, but I'm not bothered by any of the plot twists, even the ones I don't like. It's like Dawn suddenly appearing on Buffy, another show I really like. And I realised I don't worry about these weird, possibly annoying developments because I trust TPTB on those two shows. I trust that eventually I'll be given a proper, sensical explanation for anything that feels like a great, unnecessary hole in the plot. I trust that they know what they're doing when they jerk the audience around, that everything is planned and there for a purpose which will reveal itself in a way that makes us go "Whoa! Cool!" not "What the fuck?" I trust that characters that appear or disappear or change without explanation will come back later with a damn good reason (and in a damn cool context). I trust that it's worth thinking about and discussing and trying to figure out The Truth because IT WILL MATTER LATER to have paid attention to what came before. And I'm willing to be surprised, even if I'm not sure I'm going to like it. If Joss Whedon says 'Just trust us,' when it looks like he's rewriting the entire show's backstory, I can, because Joss Whedon has never lied to us. And in the end, Dawn turned out to have a very cool reason for appearing after all. I used to feel this way about the X-Files. No more.

Coming back to the objections I raised last week [see XF:TNG], however, I see the misogyny slowly escalating on the part of 1013. Has Scully been able to complete any autonomous act this season without getting slapped down by The Powers That Be? Tell me I'm wrong, please, but every time she tries to do something she fails and/or winds up in the hospital. Justify it as you wish when analysing her as if she's a real person, but in reality Scully is a character in a text written exclusively by men and the choices those men are making about this character are getting scary. [For a general discussion of fannish -vs- critical analysis see When The Shit Hits The Fan.] Scully-in-peril episodes fall into the guilty pleasure category for me. I love watching Gillian Anderson act them, but after a certain point, I'm going to get pissy about the sexism of continually tying up the female character and making her wait for her man to rescue her. If she cannot rescue *herself* (and of course she CAN, she can do anything the writers allow), then bless us, please, with some fortitude before I spit. Where is the Scully who fights back with whatever means she has to hand -- and succeeds within those limitations? From the first suspect-got-Scully ep, 'Lazarus', all the way to 'Unruhe' she fought with words when her hands were tied, buying the time Mulder needed to find her. While she does not wholly save herself in those eps, she is an active part of her own rescue. In 'Leonard Betts', on the ground, dazed and overpowered, she's clever enough to find the one weapon to hand that she can use. 'Never Again' sees her fight back hard, and though she loses the physical battle against a man nearly twice her size, she wins the psychological battle that convinces Jerse to hurt himself instead of hurting her. Even in 'Killswitch', in a sequence that takes place wholly in Mulder's addled mind, Scully descends, kicks mondo butt, and takes no prisoners. And last year's 'Orison', whatever else one may think of that ep, did at least show Scully defending herself without reservation, and finally putting an end to her torment with her own hands.

The thing is, if 1013 trusted Robert Patrick (and thereby Doggett) to grow on the audience by his own merits, they wouldn't have to try so hard to dictate what we're going to think about him. Girling Scully down to build Doggett up tells me that these boys don't trust themselves to have come up with a legitimate way to revive the dying entity that is The X-Files. Either that -- and more likely on CC's part considering his recent arrogance in an online chat -- they don't trust *us*. Well, if they don't trust us, why should I trust them? God knows they've jerked us around far too much in the past, and the level of missed opportunity for logical character and plot development (so what IS going on with the search for Mulder?) that I see in this season doesn't give me confidence that they've got some kind of plan, apart from taking every opportunity to erase Duchovny from the show as quickly and completely as possible. Do they really think the audience is as willing as they are to trade Mulder for Doggett, or that two male leading characters cannot co-exist on the same television programme, especially when one is only there in spirit? What on earth are they going to do when Mulder comes back? Have the two men growl at each other like pitbulls while Scully sits in a corner fondling her foam-rubber stomach? The worst thing of all is that Doggett is actually a decent creation and Patrick is doing well making us sympathetic toward a character we presently know almost nothing about. We could have accepted Doggett *and* kept the ghost of Mulder, but we were not trusted to be intelligent enough to do that. Just as the male 18-49 demographic has not been trusted to like the show if Scully is the definitive head of the X-Files, without having Doggett continually saving her ineffective little arse. I don't know, but if I were a male between 18 and 49, I might be a bit pissed off about being given so little credit. I'd like to believe that they are disempowering (I nearly wrote disembowelling, how's that for a Freudian slip?) Scully now so they have somewhere to go with her character, i.e. her finding her strength and certainty again, maybe even finding Mulder all by herself. I'd like to believe I'll win the lottery too, but there's not much more chance of that. Still, I'll invest the hour as I invest the dollar, and hope to be wrong about all of this come season's end. As it stands, I feel like I'm watching a good friend being beaten by a man she can't seem to leave. And that makes me very, very sad.