Hi, it's the latelady. Is this necroposting? I like that word.
This and Fathoms Five are the only two EternalScully! stories I've read. No, I lie, I read "Age Cannot Wither" and didn't like it. But I don't think it's an accident that there are so few. It's really heavy stuff.
I tend to agree with wendelah and amyhit that Scully's reaction to immortality is so unconvincingly blissful. Scully is the designated Christian in canon, and I think it inevitable that religion drives a big bus into a scenario like this. The test-suicide (so eerily like the opening of FF) is almost jolly. But there's an interesting trajectory to her life as it follows. Scully revels in knowing that she won't have to waste time on paperwork or standing in lines forever; why is she wasting time on them now? If her options are open, why isn't she opening them? The answer is, I think, that she loves her partner and his investigative spirit too much to let go of her job, though that never seems to occur to her.
It is only after Mulder's shocking death that she admits--in a fleeting inner thought--that she loved him. He is gone. Never again. I believe that the truth of immortality reveals itself to her at the funeral. It means that you are alone. Community is impossible. All relationships will henceforth be contingent, superficial. How do you make a genuine friend and say, "incidentally, I'm going to live forever." How can you love someone who ages beyond your ability to share the experience? Penumbra's Scully, surrounded by a loving family, lives with this horror in her soul. Her only hope is that her son will find a way to allow her to die. That's dark, all the darker by being modulated in the context of pleasant, comfortable, sometimes humorous experience. But we don't know what Idella's Scully will do with her despair. She's just discovered it.
This is a wonderful, wonderful story. Idella is a terrific writer. And what makes her terrific here is that she knows better than to sugarcoat a tragedy.
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winterfish
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Date: 2012-11-19 12:51 pm (UTC)This and Fathoms Five are the only two EternalScully! stories I've read. No, I lie, I read "Age Cannot Wither" and didn't like it. But I don't think it's an accident that there are so few. It's really heavy stuff.
I tend to agree with wendelah and amyhit that Scully's reaction to immortality is so unconvincingly blissful. Scully is the designated Christian in canon, and I think it inevitable that religion drives a big bus into a scenario like this. The test-suicide (so eerily like the opening of FF) is almost jolly. But there's an interesting trajectory to her life as it follows. Scully revels in knowing that she won't have to waste time on paperwork or standing in lines forever; why is she wasting time on them now? If her options are open, why isn't she opening them? The answer is, I think, that she loves her partner and his investigative spirit too much to let go of her job, though that never seems to occur to her.
It is only after Mulder's shocking death that she admits--in a fleeting inner thought--that she loved him. He is gone. Never again. I believe that the truth of immortality reveals itself to her at the funeral. It means that you are alone. Community is impossible. All relationships will henceforth be contingent, superficial. How do you make a genuine friend and say, "incidentally, I'm going to live forever." How can you love someone who ages beyond your ability to share the experience? Penumbra's Scully, surrounded by a loving family, lives with this horror in her soul. Her only hope is that her son will find a way to allow her to die. That's dark, all the darker by being modulated in the context of pleasant, comfortable, sometimes humorous experience. But we don't know what Idella's Scully will do with her despair. She's just discovered it.
This is a wonderful, wonderful story. Idella is a terrific writer. And what makes her terrific here is that she knows better than to sugarcoat a tragedy.