Thread by @epballou

Okay, so.... I think we've been watching #TheXFiles "My Struggle" episodes wrong.

At least I have been.

The implications are leaving me both more and less frustrated, with MSIV especially. 1/

(This thread should be considered to contain major spoilers for seasons 10 & 11, if you haven't watched those all the way through yet.) 2/

So I started wondering about this when I was thinking particularly of MS2 and how the whole ep. was a hallucination, and almost nothing in it really happened, but what it revealed was what Scully feared and thought and felt (esp. about Einstein). 3/

And at first THAT was really frustrating, like, you're going to give each cornerstone character an ep. like that, and Scully's alone is a *total hallucination?* 4/

But then I wondered if the other MS episodes all fell into that pattern somehow--not that they're all hallucinations. They're not.

But whether all of them revealed some aspect of unreliable narration, or framing that is incredibly subjective to their title characters. 5/

Spoiler alert: Yes.

I think all of the MS episodes are suffused with the subjective viewpoints of their title characters, in ways that we're not really used to and that are pretty different from anything we saw in the original run. 6/

And that to watch any of those episodes in isolation, kind of just comes off as bad writing...

Like the dream logic of MS2 was a lot more apparent to me the 2nd time I watched it. The first time, I just went "You can't actually manufacture vaccines that fast, can you?" 7/

The 1st time I saw MS1, I was really frustrated w/ how the story was being presented yet again as "So is the alien conspiracy real or was the government lying to us all along?!" because like... it's both and I thought we'd more than amply established that! 8/

The aliens were real, AND the government was lying all over the place about everything, and I thought we'd spent like 9 years in the first place more than sufficiently establishing that. WHY are we still asking the question this way? 9/

But part of Mulder's whole obsession was the inability to let go of that incredibly dualistic, all-or-nothing framing of whether everything he believed was The Truth vs. lies.

So that's the thought distortion of Mulder's that pervades that episode. 10/

In MS3, aside from even the explicit discussions of Jackson's paternity (which I don't think are reliable narration, either), you get a whiff of it when Scully says of CSM, "he wouldn't do anything to harm me" or something, and like... What??? 11/

But that's CSM's subjectivity at play--that Scully doesn't think he's the devil or would have anything to do with the plan he's enacting.

All of the MS episodes are, in some sense, stories their title characters are telling themselves. 12/

(Though even when they first aired, I found almost all discussion of this plot line/outrage at the "retconning" really frustrating because, like, why were we considering CSM here? CSM is nothing if not self-serving in all things. It's not that he's always lying... 13/

...But he is ALWAYS framing things in self-serving ways.

And Skinner doesn't have the ability to assess the truth of what CSM's telling him, so why would Scully believe it from Skinner? No matter how much she trusts him? She wouldn't. He doesn't have the expertise. Anyway.) 14/

(I felt like I spent those weeks wanting to shake the whole fandom, going "CSM IS THE DEFINITION OF AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR.") 15/

Like many, many people, I had serious problems w/ the end of MS4. I could NOT believe that Scully would say the things she did about the son she'd spent 16 years looking for. I found Mulder's final line nonsensical and disconnected from his character's entire history... 16/

But the way I now think we are meant to view those episodes resolves or ameliorates a lot of that for me.

Because MS4 is Jackson's episode. All of it is suffused with the story HE is telling himself. And what Jackson has been through leading up to that point is...not great. 17/

Jackson is, to say the least, probably not real happy with himself leading up to/for most of MS4. He scares people. He seems to be a danger to everyone he cares about. He feels responsible for getting his adoptive parents killed over a stupid prank on his girlfriends. 18/

(Hitting pause; I'm going to have to come back to this after I pack up at work.)

Okay, we're back!

So MS4 is strongly infused with the story Jackson is telling himself. And he's not in a great frame of mind! He probably feels partly responsible for his parents' murders. He seems to get everyone he cares about hurt.... 19/

And the incredibly evil man who may or may not be his biological father wants to use him to end civilization as we know it. He wants no part of it. Not only does he not believe M&S can protect him (they can't), he doesn't want anything to happen to THEM because of him. 20/

HE wants M&S to let him go, as much or more for their sake as his own.

When Scully says "he's an experiment, he was never meant to be," I think that's Jackson's projection/narrative about himself at this point. Not Scully's. Who was *desperate* to find him... 21/

...and tell him she loved him, like, a scene ago.

It's also not new info to us or to M&S! It's a possibility Scully was openly grappling with in S9, but she hasn't loved or wanted William any less b/c of that for all these years! 22/

No, this is Jackson trying to make it easier in HIS head for M&S to let him go, and to have the child and the family they deserve, without him. This is HIS slant on the conversation M&S are having in this scene.

23/

I think he truly sees no way out but his own death. When he tells Sarah "I could die," I think he's being very sincere there, but I also think that's when his plot for the takedown of CSM really begins. I think he really knows what he's doing from that point onward. 24/

[SERIOUS S11 SPOILER. NOT KIDDING. TURN BACK.]

So, as CC asked in the final moments of this interview with the X-Files Preservation Collection @jthornton999, why was Jackson smiling when he rose from the water at the end of MS4?

https://twitter.com/jthornton999/status/1373273810837848064

25/

He saved the world. But maybe more than that, he saved his parents this time. He saved his younger sibling. And he WANTS to believe that they are going to be together, and happy, and safe. 26/

(The tagline of MS4 is "Salvator Mundi," which is Latin for "savior of the world," and I basically have to assume it's meant to refer to Jackson.) 27/

So implications that I think this has...

-I don't think we actually know that CSM is Jackson's biological father. I don't think this is info that has EVER been imparted in a trustworthy way. 28/

...Do I think Mulder is William's biological father? Yes.

Do I think CSM nevertheless played a role in "creating" William, as he says? Also yes.

Do I think Scully was sexually assaulted offscreen in "En Ami" and CSM is "really" William's father? No.

29/

Now, what I don't know is what Jackson actually knows, or believes, about who his father is, vs. what he's projecting himself to believe in his MS4 opening monologue, because he doesn't know how how much access to his mind CSM has... 30/

...And he is going to use that conviction on CSM's part to string CSM along to his own destruction.

I think there is a way in which MS3 & 4 can usefully be seen as a set of competing narratives not so much between CSM & Mulder, as between CSM and Jackson. 31/

(THAT said, I also think there's really something to what Keith Uhlich said in this @XFDPodcast interview about the theme of the spiritual vs. the biological father in the show, and that really made me think a little bit differently about MS4, too.)

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/082… 32/

I think it's entirely possible that CSM is Jackson's biological father, but it doesn't matter, because Mulder is his spiritual father.

But also, the Salvator Mundi, the painting from which this ep's tagline is taken, is of Christ... 33/

And the character most often, most strongly identified with Christ throughout this show, is Mulder. I don't think that's definitive, but it's a resonance. 34/

-I don't think we really know what was going on between Monica Reyes and CSM, or the terms under which she was supposedly working for him, or whether she did so voluntarily.

This is also info that was never imparted under trustworthy circumstances. 35/

BACKING UP A BIT.

A major theme of S10 & 11 was, once again, how M&S need, and are saved by, each other's beliefs. In "Babylon" we see them induct Miller & Einstein into this faith system of willingness to rely on belief you don't share... 36/

...and their partnership becomes a quadrangle of people who can operate this way, and *all* of their perspectives are required to come to a resolution of that case and ultimately save lives. 37/

And I think that ep. serves as a test case for what CC was trying to do with the MS episodes and beyond...that ultimately, four subjective, conflicting approaches to the narrative would be resolved back into a unified story line. 38/

I think CC was trying to do something truly next-level with the structure of the meta-narrative of these episodes.

And sadly...I don't think it worked as well as it needed to. 39/

Maybe it was too opaque. Maybe it was too different from how we were accustomed to watching the show. Maybe there just wasn't the time to make sure it truly worked.

But I don't think most viewers got it while it was happening. 40/

And while it makes me way more okay with the "My Struggle" episodes themselves, it makes me ache even more for the resolution of a season 12 we are most likely never going to see. 41/

~The End~

42/

An addendum to this thread, because I think it's significant.

But Jackson has definitely
definitely
definitely
seen "Donnie Darko."

And it matters to how he's framing his own story.