What I like best about this story is its structure. Though I didn't know for certain until the ending, this story isn't taking place during FTF at all. It's all taking place during an off-screen early season six case set sometime while Mulder and Scully were exiled from the X-Files, when they were on "fertilizer duty" for domestic terrorism. (In a post 9-11 world, that's no longer where FBI fuck-ups get posted. But anyway, that's where they are.)
Scully's telling him to get up now, but he's too warm and he's too tired. He'd rather think about the long trip home from Antarctica, despite the fear and the fatigue and the pain and the nightmares. There's something about that experience that he gravitates to when he's this unfiltered, when he has lost consciousness. Everything that happens in this story is being narrated to us by a man who is lying unconscious on a concrete floor after being cold-cocked by a faceless terrorist.
"Get up, Mulder" is the first line, almost the last line, and it's the Greek chorus of this play. As Nailbelle has pointed out, its repetition provides structure, by changing the scene; however, every time Scully says it, she's yelling to the unresponsive man lying on that concrete floor, whose concussed brain then spirals back to another memory of the trip home.
Just as M&S get away from the ship just in the nick of time, before it takes off and blows a huge hole in the Antarctic ice shelf, Mulder wakes up and gets up off the floor and out of the building just in time to escape being blown up by the bomb. (Just like they nearly got blown up in Dallas, back at the very beginning of FTF.) He saved her, she saves him. It's what they do. It's been a tough year and so I forgive Mulder's somewhat churlish reply, murmured under his breath as he's herded to the ambulance. It's his narrative so he gets the last word. "I'm up."
I didn't find one word of this story boring. I have some more thoughts but I need to get to sleep.
no subject
Scully's telling him to get up now, but he's too warm and he's too tired. He'd rather think about the long trip home from Antarctica, despite the fear and the fatigue and the pain and the nightmares. There's something about that experience that he gravitates to when he's this unfiltered, when he has lost consciousness. Everything that happens in this story is being narrated to us by a man who is lying unconscious on a concrete floor after being cold-cocked by a faceless terrorist.
"Get up, Mulder" is the first line, almost the last line, and it's the Greek chorus of this play. As Nailbelle has pointed out, its repetition provides structure, by changing the scene; however, every time Scully says it, she's yelling to the unresponsive man lying on that concrete floor, whose concussed brain then spirals back to another memory of the trip home.
Just as M&S get away from the ship just in the nick of time, before it takes off and blows a huge hole in the Antarctic ice shelf, Mulder wakes up and gets up off the floor and out of the building just in time to escape being blown up by the bomb. (Just like they nearly got blown up in Dallas, back at the very beginning of FTF.) He saved her, she saves him. It's what they do. It's been a tough year and so I forgive Mulder's somewhat churlish reply, murmured under his breath as he's herded to the ambulance. It's his narrative so he gets the last word. "I'm up."
I didn't find one word of this story boring. I have some more thoughts but I need to get to sleep.