Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – Scully’s Daughter

In season four of The X-Files, we found out that Scully’s abduction in season two left her without the ability to have children. The idea that she was unable to have a child made her realize that she did, in fact, want to have a child. It was only a matter of time before Chris Carter used this in Scully’s character development. I just wasn’t expecting that it would transpire the way that it did. I always feel this way when I rewatch the series even though I know it is coming, and that is what I’m discussing today – the two episode arc during which Scully realizes that her eggs were harvested and used to make a child she had no idea existed.

Christmas Carol and Emily are two of the more heartbreaking episodes of the show and give Gillian Anderson the opportunity to dig deeper into her character. It shows her depth as an actor as she struggles with the sudden knowledge of knowing she has a child only to have it taken away from her soon after.

This arc starts as Scully joins her family for Christmas. Her brother’s wife is pregnant, something Scully is happy about but also a bit heartbroken that she can never do the same. When Scully receives a phone call from who she believes is her sister, Melissa, (the sister died in season two) telling her someone needs help, Scully has the call traced to a nearby home. She is informed that the woman in residence could not have called her because she is dead. It’s that very night she admits to her mother that her abduction and cancer mean she can never have a child.

Scully has a flashback to her childhood when she hid a pet rabbit from her brother in a lunchbox so she could torment him with its disappearance. The rabbit suffocated and died before Scully released it. The imagery of the rabbit, deceased and covered in maggots, is certainly a memorable one for the unintentional death of the rabbit must feel like a metaphor for her inability to give life.

After another phone call from someone who sounds suspiciously like Melissa, Scully tries to get to the bottom of who is calling her. She believes that the woman from the house where the calls are coming from was murdered while the investigator on the case believes it was suicide. During an autopsy, she finds a needle puncture in Roberta’s foot leading Scully to believe the suicide was staged. The police search her house and find a hypodermic needle. The husband says it is for his daughter Emily’s anemia. Scully notices the Men in Black watching the house (these men are always lurking around during mythology episodes and work for the Syndicate).

When Scully sees the resemblance between Melissa and Emily, she finds a photograph of when Melissa was four. The girl was adopted and Scully has a DNA test run on her believing that Emily is Melissa’s daughter and that Melissa’s spirit reached out to her to save her from whatever her father is treating her for. Ultimately, the child ends up being Scully’s though she has no idea how at that point.

This episode is full of flashbacks to Scully’s childhood, including on of Melissa and Scully receiving gold cross necklaces from their mother as a gift. Scully ends up gifting hers to Emily at the end of Christmas Carol. The show of love and protection is Scully’s way of putting faith in whatever higher being she believes in to protect the little girl. Her faith in God and in her ability to care for Emily would be further tested in the next episode.

Mulder arrives at the medical center where Emily is receiving care and informs Scully that Emily’s surrogate mother’s last name was Fugazzi which is a slang word for fake. There are not actual records of how Emily came into the world.

Later when they discover a green cyst on the back of Emily’s neck, Mulder tries to keep the nurse from popping it but is locked out of the room. As with previous seasons when people with alien DNA have their green cysts popped, it releases gas into the room that is poisonous to humans. Since Emily is unaffected, Mulder believes she has the same body chemistry as the alien-human hybrids he has come across, including the bounty hunters that show up to pierce the back of necks of anyone in the Syndicate’s way.

The Men in Black run interference and end up killing Emily’s doctor, the one keeping her alive. As Emily deteriorates, Scully must come to terms with losing the daughter she only just found out she had. At the church after the funeral, Mulder informs her that all the evidence of what the doctor was doing to her was gone so the only evidence left is Emily’s body. Scully lifts the coffin just to look at her only to find she is gone since the hybrids turn to foamy liquid and dissipate when they die. All that is left is the cross Scully gifted Emily to protect her.

If it weren’t for Gillian Anderson’s performance, these two episodes would have not been memorable at all. The plot, as it often does when it goes full mythology, is convoluted at best and why Emily was created in the first place is never fully explained. At its best, this two parter latches on to how everyone is so up in arms over this little girl that we only just met and found out about. A lot of people have a spoon in the pot and there isn’t enough Emily to go around. At its worst, these episodes devolve into typical X-Files territory, reducing Emily’s story to that of a case file. The two things often are at odds with each other as the Men in Black ebb in and out of scenes with menacing expressions, but the viewer is often left wondering what their real motivations are. Why let Scully find out about Emily at all if they are just going to let her die anyway?

Perhaps what really needed to happen was that this start off as an actual X-File instead of it being something she happened into because of a bizarre phone call from her dead sister. Maybe the mother brought Emily to Mulder in order to save her and then she ends up dead at the hands of the husband. I think that would have been less at odds with Emily’s story. There are simply too many loose ends that never get tied up. I also wish Melissa had a closer connection to the whole thing instead of just leaving Scully a couple of cryptic phone calls.

That said, I find this are to be a memorable one largely because of Anderson’s performance and how this arc affects her family. It also comes into play later in the season as Scully deals with the grief of knowing she can’t have children and that she had her own daughter in her hands and lost her before she had a chance to really know her.

Until next week, the truth is out there.