Sunday Mornings With Mulder and Scully – Scully’s Disappearance

There was a four episode stretch in season two when Gillian Anderson filmed limited scenes so it looked like she was on set, but in reality, she was on maternity leave. She had gotten pregnant at the end of season one and Chris Carter chose not to have it written into the show. Instead, he chose to have her abducted and later returned, leaving Mulder to deal with both the FBI and Alex Krycek alone. She was mostly filmed from the chest up earlier in the season so you could not tell she was about to give birth.

Today, I’ll be discussing four episodes; Duane Barry, Ascension, 3, and One Breath. The main arc starts when Mulder is called to a hostage situation where a man named Duane Barry says he is an alien abductee and wants to take someone to be abducted in his stead. When Mulder realizes that Scully is the person he kidnapped, he gives chase up a mountain with Agent Krycek in tow. Mulder uses a aerial tram to make faster progress up the mountain, but Krycek sabatoges the mission and Mulder is too late. Scully is abducted by the aliens. Skinner finds out that Mulder’s research has been suppressed and with Scully’s disappearance, he has decided to reopen the X-Files at the end of Ascension which takes place right after Duane Barry.

In the middle of this arc is 3, an episode where Mulder investigates a case alone with his mind still on Scully who remains missing.  The episode centers around a three person cult who believe they are vampires. Mulder gets involved with Kristen Kilar who he initially believes in the killer, but later learns that she is on the run from the actual killer. She takes her own life and that of the other remaining cult member by lighting them on fire. The dynamic between Mulder and Kristen Kilar reminds me of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation when Gil Grissom had a brief non-romantic relationship with Lady Heather, a fetish club owner. Initially, Lady Heather was a suspect, but later it turned out she was innocent. The same dynamic is in this episode of The X-Files.   

In One Breath, Scully randomly shows up at a hospital in a coma. No one knows how she arrived there, only that she is there. Mulder meets Scully’s sister and spends time with her mother, but cannot understand why she is so ill. Just when they are about to give up hope, Scully awakens.

Wisely, they used Gillian Anderson’s real-life pregnancy during this arc to show her with whoever had abducted her – aliens are implied – had Gillian Anderson’s pregnant belly hooked to medical equipment even though Scully wasn’t pregnant. Obviously, they were experimenting on her and it negatively affected her health leaving her with what her doctor calls junk DNA. This will have lasting ramifications on Scully’s life and the future of the show. It was genius, though, for Chris Carter to completely ignore Anderson’s real life pregnancy while also using her swelling belly in a scene. Great plotting.

I remember being so concerned that Scully would not survive but those concerns were unfounded. The show’s popularity at the time would not have allowed for her to die off so soon, or at all since she is still alive in the context of eleven seasons and two movies. Funny how network television held us so tightly to the chest back then. Nowadays, that is the type of thing you expect from an HBO series, and they would have actually killed of the characters without a second thought. There were two times during The Walking Dead’s run where I considered giving up on the show because they killed off Beth and later Glenn, but I stuck it out to the bitter end. I probably would have given up on The X-Files had the killed off Scully so early. Fox and Chris Carter, though, knew what they had in Mulder and Scully and losing one of them in season two would have been an insurmountable obstacle to overcome. It did make for great television though.

Until next week, trust no one.