#chris carter
There’s no X-Files without Gillian Anderson as Scully, but that doesn’t mean Chris Carter won’t do it anyway if given the chance. As the result of having anxiety, I’ve been tortured into envisioning what awful plot lines he might actually attempt. In doing so, I’ve also thrown canon away like William in the river and “the truth we both know”. May I be wrong about everything!
Scully dies:
1) In childbirth.
2) On the way to the hospital because some asshole runs a red light.
3) Or in some other way that’s recycled from how we’ve seen pregnant women die dramatically on TV 100x before.
4) Because the cancer returns and she doesn’t treat it because she’s pregnant and doesn’t want to harm the baby.
5) Or the cancer returns shortly after the baby is born and kills her just because.
6) Or the cancer returns because CSM’s death somehow triggers the chip in her neck to cause the cancer, therefore allowing him to continue to fuck with Scully’s body even from beyond the grave.
***The baby girl survives all of the above scenarios***
Scully gets abducted:
1) Because abductees everywhere are being taken again for a reason that’s unclear so why the fuck not.
2) Because the UFO on the bridge was not just a vision.
3) Because she decides after all that she is a mother to William and when she goes to him, his super soldier ass gets her swiped by the aliens.
When Mulder is left to parent alone:
1) He bumbles through single fatherhood in one episode that relies on sexist tropes about men not knowing what to do with babies.
2) He gives single fatherhood the one-episode shot, then he ends up hiring a woman to be his nanny. She’s not a professional nanny, just someone he encounters in public who gives him a tip on soothing a fussy baby. And she just so happens to need a job! He hires her even though she seems too nice to be true and/or is mysterious AF. Oh, and she’s pretty and 35 tops.
3) The nanny, who of course says she knows what it’s like to lose someone, gets him to open up over the pain of losing the mother of his child and comforts his broken heart. Also, Mulder does his signature ugly, open-mouthed cry, and ends up hugging her. This sets her up as a potential love interest and we want to gut ourselves with a fishing knife.
4) Mulder exchanges an onscreen kiss with the nanny in the cruelest twist of onscreen irony ever and even though we swore we would never watch The X-Files without Scully, we tune in on this particular occasion because we heard this was going to happen and we are compelled to suffer. When the nanny says she knows she could never take the place of Scully, we actually do gut ourselves with a fishing knife.
“Lonely” William returns:
1) Claiming he wants a relationship with Mulder, his not-dad, half-brother
2) But he kidnaps his baby sister instead.
3) Because his sister also has alien DNA and this makes him feel connected to her.
4) Or because he suddenly gives a shit about family and decides he’s the only one who could understand/protect a child with alien DNA.
5) Or because he decides she was the wanted child and feels jealous.
6) Or because now he’s completely evil, tired of being pursued by the bad guys, and thinks he can offer her up his sister in his place.
This is what is keeping me up at night.
David Duchovny as Fox Mulder in The X-Files created by Chris Carter (11 seasons …1993-2002, 2016, 2018).
The ghost empire announces itself. A QAnon-style video with QAnon’s enemies as the (anti)heroes. (Then again, where do you think QAnon came from?)
The goal is universal paranoia: to taint all information as misinformation and with this omni-skepticism to demobilize the public. Cordoning off information from misinformation isn’t going to be possible forever because there is no such boundary in experience, especially online experience; and not-too-bright Boomers who religiously watch The ViewandMorning Joe are a dwindling resource. So you break the whole society the way they broke the ‘60s militants: you don’t need entryists and informers if everybody thinks everybody else is an entryist or informer. And who’s to say what anybody’s motive is anyway? Just sit back and enjoy the ride.
The paranoids in the YouTube comments are already interpreting the scene where the witch unmasks the clown as a shot fired from military intelligence to CIA (i.e., “Clowns in America.”) Hermeneutics, baby! Or as we used to call it in my adjunct days in the English department, Textual Analysis.
A good day, maybe, to revisit my essay from that flaming summer of 2020 on Foucault’s Pendulum. Here are the ultra-paranoid opening paragraphs:
A strange series of coincidences, difficult to dismiss as chance, recently convinced me that I had to read Foucault’s Pendulum. First, the book itself appeared, “unbidden,” as the literary novelists always say. A few weeks ago, I found a hardcover in good condition inside a Little Free Library that usually boasts only children’s books and pop fiction. The LFL in question is, by the way, shaped like mailbox: was Someone sending me a message?
The mystery deepened only a week after I’d plucked the book from the box. I had been re-watching Chris Carter’s downbeat conspiracy-themed late-’90s TV series Millennium for the first time in many years, on the theory that the deliriously psychedelic conclusion to the controversial second season, in which an outbreak of the Marburg virus threatens to decimate America, might be newly relevant in “the age of coronavirus.” A few episodes before that apocalyptic finale, however, comes a tale that caught my paranoid eye. An episode titled “Anamnesis” is about gnosticism, matriarchal cults, and black madonnas; scripted by a female writing duo, it’s the only episode in all three seasons not to star the main male protagonist, featuring instead a team-up between his wife and his female sidekick; “Dancing Barefoot” plays, and “Thunder, Perfect Mind” is recited. Longtime readers of my work will know what I was thinking: that this episode, aired about a year after the novel’s publication, was inspired by Toni Morrison’s gnostic and female liberationist fantasia Paradise.
A bit of Internet sleuthing, though, demonstrated to me that no one had made the connection, and that the writers didn’t claim such an influence. On the other hand, I discovered that all the elements I’d associated with Morrison were there in Foucault’s Pendulum, precisely the novel I had found by chance just days before. Since Morrison has several times mentioned her admiration for Eco, it’s not out of the question that he influenced her or, perhaps more aptly, moved her to a counter-statement on some of the same themes. It’s also likely that this conspiracy-soaked occult novel affected the writers of Millennium, among many other late-20th-century gnostic revivalworks.
Finally, canvassing the Wikipedia entry on the novel before I read it, I found that among the endless occult paraphernalia Eco packed into the text was “[a]n obscure one-time reference to the fictional Cthulhu cult through a quote from The Satanic Rituals—‘I’a Cthulhu! I’a S’ha-t’n!’. The words closed a ritual composed by Michael Aquino.” Aquino was a high-ranking Satanist and a psychological warfare expert for the U.S. military; he co-wrote the notorious Pentagon position paper “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory”. Understandably, he recurs again and again in the annals of American conspiracy theory: the politically paranoid on the right abominate him for his Satanism, while those on the left loathe his anticommunist and militarist commitments. Through a vector I’m not at liberty to disclose, I am only two of the proverbial degrees of separation away from Aquino, though I have obviously never met him or had anything to do with him or even discussed him with anyone who has. I imagine conspiracy theorists will promulgate this curious fact widely on the Internet to discredit me whenever I finally become as famous as I deserve to be, considering that I am one of America’s great writers. (Megalomania and paranoia: like horse and carriage.) Two days after I made the Aquino-Eco-Millennium connection, it was announced on Twitter that Aquino had died. Yes, Someone was trying to tell me Something: I dutifully took up Foucault’s Pendulum and began to read.
I did answer the question posed in that last paragraph about my nonrelational connection to Aquino here, but you’re going to have to subscribe if you want to listen. Since DF sees the future in this bewildering epoch, I’d say it’s worth it.
Us: Can we have character development pleeeease?
Chris Carter: We have character development at home
The Character development at home: trauma
Chris & Cosey, 1981.
Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny and Chris Carter by Montalbetti+Campbell for Rolling Stone, 1996
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