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ext_20969 ([identity profile] amyhit.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] xf_book_club2011-09-21 04:24 pm
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Story 181: "The Waterskiers" by Khyber

Well 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.

wendelah1: (Default)

March 9, 2009

[personal profile] wendelah1 2011-10-01 05:31 am (UTC)(link)
Dear Khyber,

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

wendelah1: (Default)

That was then, this is now

[personal profile] wendelah1 2011-10-01 06:31 am (UTC)(link)
Well, obviously he didn't finish the series this time around, although I do think he had intended to do so. It is perplexing to see how much the plan had changed.

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.

[identity profile] estella-c.livejournal.com 2011-10-05 10:18 pm (UTC)(link)
I am ashamed for not having posted before; just consider my excuses already given. I adore anything that Khyber writes/has written, simply because of his beautiful, incisive, witty tale-telling. I tend, as I've admitted, to admire the paragraphs and forget the plot--which is especially easy in the case of TWS, which is story-connective (minus connection) and wish-fulfilling, and KvsS7, which is unfinished. I doubt, though I hope, that it will be.

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.

ohai (1)

[identity profile] still-khyber.livejournal.com 2011-11-23 10:56 pm (UTC)(link)
Why hello there. It's Khyber...

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.

ohai (2)

[identity profile] still-khyber.livejournal.com 2011-11-23 10:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Regarding Scully

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.

ohai (3)

[identity profile] still-khyber.livejournal.com 2011-11-23 10:58 pm (UTC)(link)
The End

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.

ohai (4)

[identity profile] still-khyber.livejournal.com 2011-11-23 10:59 pm (UTC)(link)
In contrast Scully was going to have an experience which would confirm for her that some greater force works directly in the world with a purpose that is uncompromising and beyond easy comprehension, and that whether she chooses to accept it or not she is sometimes an instrument of that purpose. Though this is a pretty Catholic sentiment, I was fighting with the idea of whether not Scully would see this through a Christian frame or not.

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.)