Story 181: "The Waterskiers" by Khyber
Sep. 21st, 2011 04:24 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
amyhit.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
xf_book_clubWell everyone (I'm not sure how numerous you are at the moment, but I'm going to be bold and say 'everyone'), we've reached the end of the road - the point where the narrative pavement turns to gravel turns to a beaten dirt path trailing off narrowly into the uncharted wilds of the great and sometimes terrible WIP territory.
By waybacking Khyber's website we get what seem to be conflicting accounts of what the future of KvsS7 was to be. In early 2008 there were five fics meant to follow "The Waterskiers," three of which were to be "full episodes" and two were to be vignettes (as seen here). This outline complies with Khyber's notes for "Amnesia" which he judged to be the "late beginning/early middle" of the story. Yet by late 2009 the titles of four of these five fics had vanished, and only the one titled "Parabola" remained. It was initially indicated to be planned as a vignette, but later seemed intended to have been a full episode.
In summary, the fate of the KvsS7 universe remains largely a mystery, and anyone participating in the comments thread should feel free to speculate on the future of the story, as well as share their thoughts about the fic itself.
TITLE: The Waterskiers (Mod note: You may have to c/p the URL, or find the fic on Gossamer.)
AUTHOR: Khyber
E-MAIL: khyber@khyberfic.net
DISTRIBUTION: Ephemeral, Gossamer, please ask for anywhere else.
RATING: R for mature content.
CATEGORIES: XR KEYWORDS: Withheld.
SPOILERS: Pbbblffft.
SUMMARY: Missing scenes... okay, a LOT of missing scenes... from "Hollywood AD."
Author's Notes: This story is part of "Khyber Versus Season Seven" and takes place during "Hollywood AD," specifically, following the end of the famous bathtub scene. The rest of the episode takes place a week or more after the end of this story.
Remember that the premiere of "The Lazarus Bowl," according to the episode, is "eighteen months later," sometime in late 2001.
Sadly the summer is over. That does, however, mean a return to something resembling a normal posting schedule at some point in the near future. Remember the old days (July) when a new week meant changing up the plot, style, and characterizations with an all new fic? Well those days are returning along with coats and scarves, so if you have any suggestions for fics you'd like to read this fall the recommendations page is always open.
By waybacking Khyber's website we get what seem to be conflicting accounts of what the future of KvsS7 was to be. In early 2008 there were five fics meant to follow "The Waterskiers," three of which were to be "full episodes" and two were to be vignettes (as seen here). This outline complies with Khyber's notes for "Amnesia" which he judged to be the "late beginning/early middle" of the story. Yet by late 2009 the titles of four of these five fics had vanished, and only the one titled "Parabola" remained. It was initially indicated to be planned as a vignette, but later seemed intended to have been a full episode.
In summary, the fate of the KvsS7 universe remains largely a mystery, and anyone participating in the comments thread should feel free to speculate on the future of the story, as well as share their thoughts about the fic itself.
TITLE: The Waterskiers (Mod note: You may have to c/p the URL, or find the fic on Gossamer.)
AUTHOR: Khyber
E-MAIL: khyber@khyberfic.net
DISTRIBUTION: Ephemeral, Gossamer, please ask for anywhere else.
RATING: R for mature content.
CATEGORIES: XR KEYWORDS: Withheld.
SPOILERS: Pbbblffft.
SUMMARY: Missing scenes... okay, a LOT of missing scenes... from "Hollywood AD."
Author's Notes: This story is part of "Khyber Versus Season Seven" and takes place during "Hollywood AD," specifically, following the end of the famous bathtub scene. The rest of the episode takes place a week or more after the end of this story.
Remember that the premiere of "The Lazarus Bowl," according to the episode, is "eighteen months later," sometime in late 2001.
Sadly the summer is over. That does, however, mean a return to something resembling a normal posting schedule at some point in the near future. Remember the old days (July) when a new week meant changing up the plot, style, and characterizations with an all new fic? Well those days are returning along with coats and scarves, so if you have any suggestions for fics you'd like to read this fall the recommendations page is always open.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
March 9, 2009
Date: 2011-10-01 05:31 am (UTC)You accomplished the near impossible when you posted "The Waterskiers." You made me re-watch "Hollywood A.D." I even kind of enjoyed it that time. There were many funny, even classic Mulder/Scully moments, although it kind of peters out at the end, doesn't it?
So, "The Waterskiers."
It was fun watching Mulder and Scully do the dinner party scene, acting like normal people, telling funny stories on each other, the way married people do. Scully is three sheets to the wind from drinking the "good wine," which she can no longer identify as anything more than "red," and unconsciously holding Mulder's hand at the dinner table. I liked Thomas and Katja, too. Your original characters always seem so real, and for a change, these two didn't have to die.
It'll probably seems strange for you to hear this, because well, I'm a noromo, and you are a dyed in the wool Mulder/Scully shipper. But your personal canon for these characters and mine have so much overlap. That's at least part of the reason why I love your stories. The other reason is the writing itself. I like your prose style. It's not fussy, or romantic, or overly concerned with the language, although it is clear you love words. You just have a gift for choosing the right words for the story you are trying to tell.
Mulder and Scully are adorable in this. I love the scene at the beginning where Scully entices Mulder into bed with her (smart woman). Presenting a guy with a naked woman underneath the covers is pretty much a sure thing, assuming the guy has any real interest in the girl.
The scene at the end, where they have "the talk" or as close to it as Scully is able to manage, is wonderfully truthful to what these characters are really like. Don't get me wrong, I love fluff as much as the next fan. Hell, I've written fluff. But I don't see how it could be easy for Scully to let her guard down, to get closer to Mulder, even if she wants him that way, even if she needs him, the way it is clear Mulder needs her, and has for a long, long time.
The scenes with Skinner are--disturbing--but given how he has been in Kv7 up to now, not unexpected. He just participated in another covert operation with the CSM, where American soldiers are shot and killed. How must he be feeling about that? I think Skinner still sees himself as one of the good guys, despite the part he's been forced to play in the drama so far, both yours and the series'. Spender is a snake, so I am a little worried about how this is going to play out, for M&S, and for Skinner, too. I am starting to get a feeling for where you are going with this, so it will be interesting to see if I'm right. Assuming you are going to finish it, this time.
I fervently hope you do.
All best,
wendelah1
That was then, this is now
Date: 2011-10-01 06:31 am (UTC)Frankly, I found this story a tough one to get my head around this time through. I'm having a hard time keeping the timeline straight, I don't even remember why they're suspended.
I still like the scenes with Thomas and Katja. I believe they're meant to remind us (and Mulder and Scully?) of the dream scenes of domestic life from "Home from the War" and WIEAYB. There is one false note. The awkward scene in the kitchen, where Scully is talking with Katja and finds out she's from Bosnia. Katja calls herself Thomas's "refugee camp Cinderella," and Scully never asks how they met. It seems like such an obvious question for one woman to ask another.
I don't know what to say about Skinner in this story. He bangs a Maxim Cover model who's snorting coke, and looks the other way because he'd "gotten the idea that laws ranging from possession of narcotics to gravity were different here, and he didn't really have jurisdiction. He'd waved off the Colombian and sipped at his whiskey again." He's put in for a transfer to Tactical Support (!?) He's working with the CSM. They're practically best buddies! Talk about a midlife crisis. The description of their trip to pick up the "immigrants" was creepy and heartrending.
I liked this bit of analysis:
"Yeah, I used to get out now and then." Skinner hadn't needed to
ask. The two dead men in Marjorie's back yard had been soldiers, he
could tell, probably Army from their youth and lousy shooting. He
remembered a counterintelligence briefing from fifteen years ago,
something about the Soviets. Iron triangle, they called it. That was
how the system worked in a totalitarian state. Party, armed forces,
KGB, the system remaining in equilibrium by the three sides
jockeying for advantage against one another. The KGB were always the
baddest bad guys. You never heard about the 'moderate' wing of the
KGB. "Bass, though, not water like this. Imagine this is probably a
good night for it," he said, nodding generally at the steady rain.
"That's generally the rule. Why did you stop?"
"Long drive to any good fishing from DC." He'd met the Party.
Senator Matheson, and the others who sat at the front of the House
committee rooms. Army was fairly self-explanatory. That only left
one side of the triangle for the smoking man.
The Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Camelot, Morning in
America-- these didn't figure into the equation at all. Survival,
then power. Always about power.
This story gives us a lot of information about who the players left on the field are. But it's now up to us to figure out where this was all leading.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 12:15 am (UTC)One major difficulty is that so much of The Waterskiers is about image, which works thematically with Hollywood AD, but is a bit of an imposition on Mulder and Scully, who I've always seen as being too purpose driven to be truly image conscious. Scully worries what TLG will think of she and Mulder going on vacation together, what Skinner will think, what her family will say, what Mulder's friends will think. And when she's not worried about that, she's worried about making kittenish noises during sex, about being too casual with Mulder, and - it would seem - about being to girly. To an extent I think this is true of her character, but I feel like Waterskiers focuses on that aspect of her too much. I see Scully as being less concerned about what people think than about what actually is. Which is why I think this passage is so important:
How do I honor this memory, how do I honor the trail of beloved and anonymous dead behind us? If everything happens for a reason, this can't all have happened so I can sip Chardonnay with Mulder's arm around me.
It's an issue that is only addressed directly in this one instance, but it's clearly something Scully has been struggling with through the KvsS7 stories, to one degree or another. Only now can she afford to truly confront this issue, though, because it's the first time in a long time she has gained equilibrium of her own. What she had no room for in TFOOS ("I have
no room left for Vicky or Patrick Crump or anything else") is a problem she is working on now.
I know what you would say. You'd tell me not to question, tell me that love is precious, tell me that you don't honor the dead by refusing to live.
This is all true, but personally I think that continuing to fight is the right course of action for she and Mulder to take, even if that means they must sacrifice the happy lives they would otherwise live. They're not fighting for vengeance or even justice - if they were, if that were all, then I would feel differently. But they're fighting so that humanity can have a future, just as CSM tells Skinner he is fighting for humanity's future. And, if that is true, there is a sad but lovely symmetry this fic brings clear: they truly are fighting for the same thing, the same end, but with very different ethical principles at heart.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 12:16 am (UTC)"I'd like snow," she said. "I'd like a snow day, two feet of snow."
"Maybe at Christmas."
They're back in DC. Their escape from everyday reality is over and it's back to work. Scully is wishing for a snow day - a reprieve, something to keep reality at bay. She doesn't want to go back. Is this a foretelling of their future? Does it mean that they can't keep on going this way, that soon they will no longer have the conviction necessary to go back? And does Mulder's response indicate that he doesn't understand what she's really wishing for? Or that he understands, but also understands that she's wishing for something she knows they can't have? I prefer to think it's the second, and that it isn't a foretelling of the future.
This thematic element of the story is very excellent, and very well incorporated into the fic, which is what makes me admire Waterskiers even though I don't always like it. We see Scully (and Mulder, though more by proxy) struggling to come to terms with their place in things, and how much she is willing to sacrifice for the cause. But this struggle is voiced more clearly by CSM, in what he says to Skinner:
"Waterskiing is such a strange pastime, don't you think. You caper and prance at the end of your line, as if somehow you have control over what's happening, as if the boat wasn't there pulling you along. But you don't. You're a puppet. All you really have control over is whether or not you keep going."
In this light, the title of this fic says it all in one word. It's a beautiful and chilling metaphor when you realize the scope of everything it encompasses. Not only does it apply to Mulder and Scully, but to Skinner and CSM, and also to Bill Mulder and all the rest of them. They're all waterskiers. None of them are in control of this thing or their place in it. It's hard to say if anyone is in charge anymore, or even if they ever really were.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-03 03:43 pm (UTC)Yes, that's it exactly. They don't even have control over that, unless they are the person driving the boat.
The interweaving of the two stories doesn't really work for me, but when I analyze what's making me uncomfortable, I think it's that anytime Mulder and Scully get closer on a romantic level, it feels to me as though they aren't as focused on the work. In "Home from the War," that was okay, because the war was over. But that was all an illusion, a dream world they each created independently, while under heavy sedation via hypnotic suggestion. By this time in the series, Mulder's found his dead sister, his mother's gone too, his father was murdered back in season two or three. I do see Mulder's commitment wavering in this series, and his focus shifting to his feelings for Scully. My sense is that as much as she loves Mulder (even noromo's get that they love each other), Scully isn't comfortable with it because her sense of justice won't let her be. More than her own abduction, I think it was the death of her sister, the deaths of the other Mufon women from cancer, and her daughter's death that gave purpose to her life, that cemented her commitment to the X-Files. Maybe CC and 1013 think she's there for Mulder but I don't. I think she is there because she has to live up to the fact that her life was spared, when Melissa's was not, when Penny's was not. Melissa died in her place. She'll never rest until the men who committed these crimes against humanity are brought to justice. She can't. And I think in large part that's what makes her (and me) so uneasy about her growing closeness with Mulder. In her mind, she hasn't earned it, she doesn't deserve it. It's not about the sex for her (and it really pisses me off that Mulder thinks it is for even a second), it's about their work and how important it is to the future of humanity.
This above all is what made me hate IWTB, even more than the ridiculous plot and inhumane medicine being practiced. There is no way on earth Scully would leave the fight, not unless she was forced out. And I never had a sense in that film that her leaving law enforcement for medicine was anything other than a retreat from reality. I also don't believe Mulder would sit around for years in a back room clipping newspaper articles, waiting for the FBI to give him an engraved invitation. Do you?
I think you can quote Khyber. He did like IWTB because he liked seeing them living their lives and being happy, which is why I think the ending to this saga would result in the same thing. I think if he does come back and finish it someday, M&S will end up being forced to flee for their lives, perhaps to Europe, perhaps even with the help of CSM and Skinner. The itinerary is planned, the tickets are bought; all they have to do is get on the plane and leave.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-04 03:28 am (UTC)In this metaphor, do you think that's no one, or the aliens? I suppose you could say it's the conspiracy itself. There's no one at the helm, and yet things continue. The conspiracy has become self-perpatuating, to an extent.
Yeah, I'm just going to agree with just about your entire comment. The thing about Scully being there for Mulder has always really bothered me. In fact, I think one of the only lines in the much beloved Parabiosis that I don't quite like is near the end when she says something along the lines of, "and I've stayed in this job because I'm in love with you." On one hand, I think it's true that if they didn't have each other, and love each other, they wouldn't have stayed. But I don't think for a seond that Mulder is why she does the work. At the risk of being overly simplistic, she does it because it's right.
It's not about the sex for her (and it really pisses me off that Mulder thinks it is for even a second)
Hmm. I think she can feel guilty about having sex with him, and that can encompass a lot. I don't think she's guilty about sex for itself, but then who ever is? Her sense of duty and professionalism, her sense of self-containment and control, these things are all bound up in her sexuality - especially when it comes to Mulder.
The fact that she's had sex with him leaves her open for reproach. I think that's how she views it. It makes her vulnerable, because it wasn't professional, and it wasn't about the cause, and she wasn't self-contained. Mulder thinks:
She avoided his eyes, mouth set in a straight line. It
pissed him off. Right, Scully, straight to the sex. That's
your greatest failure, the one you're most ashamed to admit,
opening your legs.
I do think it's pretty insensitive of him not to understand, after all this time, what "opening her legs" means to her. Everything else, all the terrible things that happened that she couldn't prevent, were things that were done to her. And she fought back, and was not defeated. But this was something she did by choice, out of desire and need, a kind of temporary but chronic surrender. I think it's a knee-jerk reaction for her to be ashamed for exposing herself the way she did. She has a lot of anxiety about a lot of things, and that anxiety gravitates to the areas of herself that she feels are weak or flawed. that's how I see it.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-16 03:52 pm (UTC)That kind of makes sense to me for Scully, although it also makes me sad. Because I don't think loving someone makes you weak or flawed. Getting to love and be loved in return is a wonderful thing under almost any circumstances. Getting to express that love in a physical way is something I can't ever get enough of or take for granted. I have a hard time understanding why after all of this time it wouldn't be a joy for her as it is clearly is for him. And why she feels like the power differential is still unequal. I feel like in these stories, Mulder keeps making himself vulnerable to her but she is still keeping a part of herself back. Or she keeps wishing she could? I thought "All Things" was supposed to represent a turning point for them, but it doesn't seem like it was in this series. It's almost like "All Things" never happened or it didn't mean the same thing if they'd been sleeping together on and off all along as in this series. They seem much happier in the real season seven than they do in Khyber's version. Do you think that was his intention?
Edit: Rereading the comments on "Poem" I ran into this one by Khyber: "My central concern for this s7 stuff is, "what would this really be like? What if everybody involved was a real person?" because I think they got very close to that in S7, and I just want to take it a little further."
I think that answers my question.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-05 10:18 pm (UTC)I think that both Wen and amyhit are taking this story, and many, a bit more serious than I do. I see Mulder and Scully having a marvelous honeymoon, despite their damn quest, and what honeymoon doesn't have its moments of painful ambivalence? Okay, lots. But there's the damn quest.
I think that Skinner, somewhat fixatd in his middle-ageness on the pretty redhead, is trying to find an active part in the story and vulnerable to sleeping with the enemy. CSM is an interesting enemy. WM Davis would die to play this part. I love the Hollywood epiphany, if that's the word for a night with a woman with glowing cleavage, and I love the brave twist on the characterization. Because, as you know or should, I love our characters behaving out-of-character.
I accused Khyber of wish-fulfillment, and I feel that he took a lot of pleasure in the manliness and sexiness of all concerned--except Scully, of course, and I'm sure she had a wonderful time too. She got over herself enough to grab the moment and I'm sure she'll forgive herself for her nonprofessionalism. Hey, it's not the government protocol, it's THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END, maybe. Focus.
I don't want to second-guess, but it might have been more satisfying to discuss Sokol, which has a beginning, middle, end, epilogues, and is sort of a crossover with HP Lovecraft (happy Halloween). KvsS7 consists of gorgeous fragments, but leaves us with frustrating nonresolution. I hate Khyber for that. But I love him for everything else.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-17 05:56 pm (UTC)Well, that is kind of the point here, taking the writing seriously. I enjoy it and I hope the other members do too. If it doesn't suit your mood at the moment, well that's okay.
Getting back to the story, I'm afraid I don't understand your "marvelous honeymoon" reference at all. It seems completely counter to Khyber's intent, i.e. to write an alternative Season Seven in which Mulder and Scully behave as though they were real people. I don't see how it can be read without acknowledging the darkness of the storyline. The impending darkness of what I suspect was the eventual ending for KvS7. For the record, while I loved "Sokol," I didn't like its resolution for Mulder and Scully or its ending for the series.
Edit: And it wasn't an either/or thing with KvS7 and "Sokol." We read this in lieu of going on hiatus, assuming that it would only interest the mods and possibly you.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-17 10:25 pm (UTC)The darkness is always there, of course, but honeymoons must be taken when possible. And screw Khyber's intent, as he hasn't shown up to fulfill it.
I love Sokol, and I don't quite understand why you assume no one else would. I think it's up there with Iolokus and Oyster and maybe Parabiosis. It's very long, but it isn't boring at all. And it has an ending, even if it isn't one you like.
You want a real challenge to reader patience: Oklahoma. It had its day, and it's where one goes for Muldertorture if one is still into it. And a lot of TS Eliot. Which I probably misspelled.
Okay then. (You realize no one else is paying attention.)
no subject
Date: 2011-10-17 11:01 pm (UTC)"Sokol" is very long, has an exciting but hard to follow plot AND, if memory serves, it's violent enough in places to require warnings. What people will or won't want to read here isn't the point. I agree it's one of the fandom's best. If you want to reread it, when we are done with the latest offering, go ahead and post it and moderate the discussion. You probably know it better than anyone except Khyber.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-17 11:44 pm (UTC)So we are all to be serious unless something is too hard to follow or violent enough for a warning. Then we don't go there. Okay.
I am NOT a moderator, as you know perfectly well. I can't even post icons. I don't remember Sokol any better than anyone else. We'll forget it until someone begs.
Sorry for the temper. Sickness at home. Let's adjourn to ATCAI.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-18 01:15 am (UTC)Yeah, me neither. Scully's family has disowned her, they're still puzzling out what happened to them in HFTW/WIEAYB, Scully's journaling to her dead sister. And that's just the relatively light "Mulder and Scully go on vacation" aspect of the fic. Ultimately, I find this fic about as dark as WIEAYB, except in this case the darkness emanates primarily from Skinner's half of the story.
I feel I've done a disservice to this fic by failing to discuss him more, but I haven't been able to quite get my thoughts together on his part of the story, important as it is.
Edit: And it wasn't an either/or thing with KvS7 and "Sokol." We read this in lieu of going on hiatus, assuming that it would only interest the mods and possibly you.
I had mentioned that it was a shame we couldn't read KvsS7 at the book club, because of the way it was structured. Then we got thinking that if we were just going to shut down the book club anyway, which we were already thinking about doing, then why not keep it open, but take that time to read a fic which would never have gotten the chance to be read at any other time. We really didn't mean to circumvent your rec, EC. I enjoyed and admired Sokol a great deal when I read it, and I definitely think we will read it here eventually.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-18 01:27 am (UTC)Me, too.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-18 03:54 pm (UTC)W knows better than to take ME seriously.
Incidentally, I think you're doing a super mod job. Don't go on hiatus.
ohai (1)
Date: 2011-11-23 10:56 pm (UTC)I don't have one of those google alerts but I do have someone who saw the discussion.
There's a certain degree of personal and professional drama involved that makes any type of continuing online 'secret life' implausible, but the main thing is that a hard drive sucked up a bunch of foreign dust and eroded away all the drafts of the rest of VS7. A coming-back scenario a la Sokol is pretty much inconceivable.
Okay, on to the comments about Kvs7:
Regarding tone in general, but especially with regard to "Amnesia" and "Vapor Trail"-- this is where you basically *have* to be on board for the central conceit that the other episodes (and the time implied in them) happens. "Amnesia" takes place probably a month after WIEAYB, "Vapor Trail" probably another two weeks at least after that. As well, I tried really hard to have the "tone" of the post-ep at least in the same ballpark as the episode, at least as I saw it. In retrospect don't think this lends itself well to sitting down and gobbling all the stories at once.
Poems / Coyote Luck
I wish I hadn't posted Poems at all-- the scenes in it were written as exercises, things that I needed to sort out how they happened but I didn't think anyone else needed to know. I'd consider it a relatively inessential B-side for the box set.
Amy re: timelines.
Air dates, especially in S3, make no sense whatsoever-- "Pusher" covers literally months within a single narrative. And do they only work seven months a year, late September through early May? Anasazi has no internal dates. I basically had to generate a timeline for S3 that doesn't exist, and when if you take the air dates as actual time the implied timelines of the episodes themselves are unrealistic. In "Coyote Luck" I just tried to project a few days forward from when they abandoned Scully's car. I took one liberty with the order of episodes-- moving the "undated" Grotesque after Pusher because Grotesque clearly takes place during winter (and also because Grotesque has resonance that most of late S3 doesn't, no one will care about an "Avatar" reference), while Pusher, more realistically, starts probably in late spring or early summer and winds up in autumn. If I had posted the explanation for how I tried to make S3's timeline make sense along *with* Poems, it would have been longer than the story and not actually satisfied anyone anyway.
HFTW/WIEAYB
The alwusray is Aulpay. Seriously, though, Amyhit was right, though I know nothing about quantum mechanics and it sounds suspiciously like poetry itself with its collapsing wave functions. That jewel-toned story that we see a flash of at the end has started and it's going to tell itself whether anyone is listening or not.
Re: ohai (1)
Date: 2011-11-24 02:59 am (UTC)Well, that is discouraging. I hope things get calmed down on your end. It saddens me that people still feel threatened because of their participating in fandom. Is that why you let your website go down and your email address went away? :(
... but the main thing is that a hard drive sucked up a bunch of foreign dust and eroded away all the drafts of the rest of VS7. A coming-back scenario a la Sokol is pretty much inconceivable.
That really sucks. Pardon me while I go back up my computer...
Regarding tone in general, but especially with regard to "Amnesia" and "Vapor Trail"-- this is where you basically *have* to be on board for the central conceit that the other episodes (and the time implied in them) happens. "Amnesia" takes place probably a month after WIEAYB, "Vapor Trail" probably another two weeks at least after that. As well, I tried really hard to have the "tone" of the post-ep at least in the same ballpark as the episode, at least as I saw it. In retrospect don't think this lends itself well to sitting down and gobbling all the stories at once.
To be fair, we didn't exactly gobble them down. We spent the better part of a month discussing this opus. I still think KvS7 works best if you watch the episodes as you go along. That's what I did the first couple of times I read these.
Seriously, though, Amyhit was right, though I know nothing about quantum mechanics and it sounds suspiciously like poetry itself with its collapsing wave functions. That jewel-toned story that we see a flash of at the end has started and it's going to tell itself whether anyone is listening or not.
Oh, okay. I had to go back and reread her comments to see what you were referring to. It's this: I actually don't think of the narrative's final return to the false reality as having actually been experienced by either Mulder or Scully. I see it as what could have been, purely a theoretical outcome - a branch off of a branch off of reality. This may be kind of pedantic of me, but I've always thought of it in quantum mechanical terms. The last bit of the 'dream' was obliterated when they chose to fight for the truth, and against their conditioning. On a deeper level, it's a reality that they lost (chose against) once before as well, in their actual reality, as we discover in Coyote Luck. So the possibility embodied by the last scene is like exploring the collapsed part of a wave function. (i.e., a result that could have been but was not.)
I guess I also like thinking of it in these terms because, in quantum mechanical terms, every possible reality can be thought of as a reality on a different plane. I'm not sure if I buy into the "many worlds" theory of physics, but it is a theory that's held by many, and I love the idea that the final scene can be real and completely non-existent at the same time.
That's a pretty startling conclusion. Finding out that she was right is pretty wonderful. <3
Re: ohai (1)
Date: 2011-11-24 04:19 pm (UTC)ohai (2)
Date: 2011-11-23 10:57 pm (UTC)Yes, Scully is being difficult about the ship and getting a rough ride of it. Scully's basically attempting to yank the only remaining chain she has in her life to assure herself that she still has some agency somewhere. When Scully's doorbell rings at the end of WIEAYB, we know that the doorbell is either Mulder, or something I invented, because Scully has no zany-but-wise gay neighbour coming to drop off his Yorkie for Scully to watch overnight, no friend from work coming over to watch a movie because the kids are with her ex this weekend. There is *no one*. She may as well be going home to a wall-mounted charger that she plugs into until it's time for something else in which Mulder is largely central.
Mulder's already been through this and come out the other side, I think-- he's kind of the "grownup" here in some ways. S7 Mulder is no longer tortured-- that, I think, is canon. Whatever his "life" consists of, and I have invented a bit of a life for him, he's pretty much good with it and to some extent he's intentionally trying to drag Scully out of her "comfort" zone (our comfort zones are often very uncomfortable, but they're what we're used to).
I would answer Wen by saying that Mulder is a lot less neurotic by S7 than he was in the past, and that he's come to terms with a lot of things that Scully still struggles with. Some of that's personality, some of it has to do with gender and expectations, and some of it has to do with Mulder having reached some symbolic resolution and closure on some of his "quests."
This is one thing I regret about not finishing the series because the very last story, a post-ep for "The Unnatural" called "Come and Go With Me", kinda teased this thread out of the episode. Mulder's got baseball. I don't mean baseball itself, but his appreciation of smelly balls and a nice piece of ash (as expressed in the ending of that episode) as a symbol of him having a sense that he's got a place in the universe that he's more or less good with. Scully doesn't have baseball. She doesn't have jack. A big part of KvS7 is about her finding that, and the last story was supposed to kind of close that circle (or open it, I guess, since it was the beginning.)
Waterskiers:
"Waterskiers" is basically a big sloppy love letter to "Hollywood AD", which is one of my favourite episodes-- XF goes goofily, insanely meta and does it with a tremendous amount of nuance, heart and humanity. I go off on my own meta-tangent as well, obviously, regarding whether it's still XF if you're writing about Mulder and Scully going on holiday. No, it's not, but that doesn't mean XF never existed.
And, yeah, it is dark, but not in a confronting-evil kind of way, just... life sucks sometimes.
Wen, remember M and S get suspended during the episode after their murder victim turns out to be not dead-- noli me tangere, baby.
Re: ohai (2)
Date: 2011-12-02 03:24 am (UTC)Yes, Scully is being difficult about the ship and getting a rough ride of it. Scully's basically attempting to yank the only remaining chain she has in her life to assure herself that she still has some agency somewhere. When Scully's doorbell rings at the end of WIEAYB, we know that the doorbell is either Mulder, or something I invented, because Scully has no zany-but-wise gay neighbour coming to drop off his Yorkie for Scully to watch overnight, no friend from work coming over to watch a movie because the kids are with her ex this weekend. There is *no one*. She may as well be going home to a wall-mounted charger that she plugs into until it's time for something else in which Mulder is largely central.
Her personal life in canon isn't great but you've made it much worse by having her family disown her. Why would you do that, by the way? From where I'm sitting it looks like it was to justify her pissy behavior toward Mulder, while you invent a life for him and let him be the adult for a change.
I would answer Wen by saying that Mulder is a lot less neurotic by S7 than he was in the past, and that he's come to terms with a lot of things that Scully still struggles with. Some of that's personality, some of it has to do with gender and expectations, and some of it has to do with Mulder having reached some symbolic resolution and closure on some of his "quests."
Is he really less neurotic? He wasn't acting any less neurotic to me. Is there any evidence of that in canon that you can offer? My position is that Mulder doesn't change from the pilot episode to the end of IWTB. Scully is the character who grows and changes.
In canon, Mulder does find out what happened to his sister. I think the plot for "Closure" is ridiculous and badly written but it's not merely a symbolic resolution. He gets closure, real, stupidly conceived closure. With the death of his mother, his family is gone, leaving only Scully. But in canon, Scully still has her mother and her brothers and sister-in-law and her nephew. Except you decided to take them away in this series for some reason. And Scully still has her work. Maybe Mulder's quest was only about finding the truth about his sister, but after her abduction and her sister's death and the deaths of the other Mufon women and the loss of Emily, I think Scully's quest was about justice. I'm unwilling to accept that that has changed for her, which is one reason why I dislike IWTB.
And, yeah, it is dark, but not in a confronting-evil kind of way, just... life sucks sometimes.
Look, I know this is your baby but that makes no sense in the context of this story. You have Skinner and the Smoking Man escorting refugees to "safety" who have been part of a Chinese program that experimented on human beings to what end? To create a viable human/alien hybrid? Fight the future? Find a vaccine for the black oil/virus/whatever? That sounds like a bigger problem to me than just "life sucks sometimes," even in XF terms. It's also a dropped plot thread, assuming you had no plans for it.
Wen, remember M and S get suspended during the episode after their murder victim turns out to be not dead-- noli me tangere, baby.
Right. Sorry, Hollywood AD was not one of my favs and I didn't get inspired to rewatch it this time.
ohai (3)
Date: 2011-11-23 10:58 pm (UTC)The only reason the VS7 "schedule" changed back in the day was that towards the end of the process I had outlines and anywhere from 3000 to 15000 words written on each of six full-length "episodes", but four of them were more or less standalone casefiles and there wasn't enough mytharc, CSM, Skinner, or Krycek in them to justify where I was going in the projected finale. I was having a hard time getting necessary narrative arc and character arc stuff to co-exist and didn't want to have episodes that existed purely as a crutch for a few scenes of character development (hi, Joss.) So I was going to try to figure out which two of those four would survive. All the stories couldn't make it because of the accelerating accumulation of nonessential internal canon; all of them would have been "too much."
Regarding the "quest" and the mythology. Amy, you are brilliant and read in tremendous depth, but have you, um, watched S7? There IS no quest anymore, that they or we know of-- it exits stage right towards the end of Amor Fati and doesn't come back until Requiem. We may be hoping that it comes back, but there's no evidence that it's going to. Mulder and Scully are not the heroes of a single narrative anymore, they are Scooby and Shaggy, or Kirk and Spock, bouncing from adventure to unrelated adventure.
And they don't care. Mulder goes through pretty complicated emotional gymnastics to dissociate Samantha's disappearance from his former quest in order to achieve some closure for himself. Scully may have uncovered the secret of alien biogenesis aaaaaand... nah, doesn't care, not once Mulder's head is safely bandaged up. Is this a flaw in the canon storytelling? Is this DD and GA running away with things as they apparently did in S7? Who knows. But it's there.
This leads to the massive internal contradiction of where I was going with the story arcs in that I had a really heavy meditation-cum-fable-cum-satire going about the nature and necessity of secrecy and conspiracy, morality versus utility versus good/evil dualism, the roles and interests of secret-keepers, and what constitutes virtue for them, as well as the runaway military/security/police-industrial complex that is more or less taking over the English-speaking world starting with the United States.
The thing was that the "heroes", or at least the protagonists, of that story are CSM and Skinner. The mytharc has not gone away, but in the absence of the Project, CSM is the only one left who actually knows the whole story about contact with atavistic aliens and their plans for colonization. Like it or not, *he's* the one who has to carry on the fight at this point in the story, and he will, because that's what he does. CSM long since walked away from any of the other distractions that would make him human. CSM is a terrible human being by any measure. But that doesn't mean he's not *right*. And this is why Skinner buys in. As we have seen in canon, he really is regretting his years of equivocating.
CSM wants Mulder and Scully to help him, simply because he's running out of options, but the question is, do they have any reason to? Why would they believe that he (and Skinner) are telling the truth, after all the lies he (and Skinner) have told? Especially when they have new investments in their lives?
The problem was that Mulder and Scully's journeys were not linking up with that story at all-- both of them, though in stories that may not have made the final cut, had pretty heavy personal spiritual experiences that did not necessarily lead them in the same place. Mulder was going to have a chat with Deep Throat, in the person of his six-year-old reincarnation. Deep Throat, I think in keeping with "Blessing Way", was actually rather ambiguous about the worth of missions and callings and such in the grand scheme of things, echoing Siduri and "Amor Fati" again.
Re: ohai (3)
Date: 2011-12-02 04:08 am (UTC)Really. I can see why that wasn't going to make the cut. There's a lot of very questionable metaphysics going on there, so good choice to jettison that one. It doesn't fit in with the bigger political picture at all, the one that relates to Skinner and the Smoking Man.
But what about what happened to them in your big two part episode? They were abducted and experimented on and, and— people died. What was the point of all of that? What was The Smoking Man trying to get them to do, by convincing them to fly to Amsterdam? Would Mulder and Scully just forget about what happened to them and say, oh well. Really? Because I still want to know what was going on there and I wasn't the one who was kidnapped and drugged and brain-washed. I think Mulder and Scully would want to know too.
What I wanted to see you do by the end of this saga is answer that question, tie it together with the Skinner-CSM plot and have them somehow end up together, their commitment to fighting the future assured. They can keep having sex if you want. I don't honestly care about their personal lives or lack thereof. They're the heroes. Not Skinner and Not the Smoking Man. Jeez. They need to act like heroes, or in this universe, human beings are toast.
ohai (4)
Date: 2011-11-23 10:59 pm (UTC)KvS7 was going to end with Skinner dead in Bellefleur, and CSM trying to convince M and S to help him and a few others re-establish a version of the Project and fight the future. And we, the readers, know that CSM is "right," but M and S don't. And to take this path that we know is "right" in terms of XF mythology would invalidate most everything and everywhere they have been through the rest of KvS7, reduce them again to suits and guns and test-tubes.
And I was going it leave it there, unresolved.
IWTB:
One of the things I liked about IWTB was that it actually worked as well or better after KvS7 than it did after the canonical series, except that Skinner was still alive. Their relationship in IWTB is pretty much exactly how I always imagined things turning out. I have been slightly misquoted regarding IWTB having a 'happy' ending that I liked; I think I said that it's an ending that feels true. I felt like it had been twelve years since Antarctica, and Antarctica's still there but so is a lot of other life. I can imagine how they got there and where it's going after and it feels like something real. I credit DD and GA for this, because their performances in IWTB are little gems of naturalism by great character actors (despite GA being saddled with one terrible montage scene.)
Re: ohai (4)
Date: 2011-12-02 01:59 am (UTC)Except to say that what you were planning to do to end the story sounds good to me. (Even though I'm pretty sure I'll never understand your POV on IWTB *g*) Lack of resolution is usually a good thing in my books.
Re: ohai (4)
Date: 2011-12-02 04:40 am (UTC)Are you saying that what happened to her in Africa has shaken her faith to the point that she no longer believes in a higher power?
What about "All Things"? Where does this fit in? This additional Scully metaphysical journey plan seems a little redundant to me, unless you were going to toss "All Things" out.
Why wouldn't Scully transform whatever happened to her into the framework that best fits her spiritual worldview, which is, her African adventure aside, still Catholicism? Just a guess, but I think this one probably wasn't going to make the cut either. I don't see how this was going to lead into your ending.
KvS7 was going to end with Skinner dead in Bellefleur, and CSM trying to convince M and S to help him and a few others re-establish a version of the Project and fight the future. And we, the readers, know that CSM is "right," but M and S don't. And to take this path that we know is "right" in terms of XF mythology would invalidate most everything and everywhere they have been through the rest of KvS7, reduce them again to suits and guns and test-tubes.
And I was going it leave it there, unresolved.
I've been thinking about this since you posted it and I still don't know to respond to this revelation. That's not an ending to the series or the season or anything, really. You wrote all of that in order to leave this unresolved.
I'm gobsmacked.
So.
Right now, I have nothing further to add, except to thank you again for for stopping by. At least now we know what the intended conclusion was, even if the specific details are a little shaky. I reserve the right to revisit this in the future if I think of a better response.
Khyber, in case you don't get back here again, I just want to tell you again how much I've enjoyed your writing. I hope you have a wonderful life and think of us as fondly as we think of you when we read your outstanding contributions to our fandom. You are/were one of the greats, and I feel fortunate to have shared the same fandom/cyberspace with you.
All best,
Wendy