Case 05, File 07: Emily

AKA: Has The Murmuring Sounds Of May

The X-Files is not a show that's set up to have the lead characters have children (and yes, I know about William, we'll get there when we get there). The characters work long hours, travel constantly and are in dangerous fields, and that's before we even get into how much danger they are of being abducted by aliens or killed by faceless bounty hunters. So even when I first saw this episode, I was under very little illusion that Emily was gonna stick around.

After a brief kinda weird opening in which Scully is walking in the desert, we pick up a little time after the previous episode, with Mulder coming to visit Scully and Emily. Mulder is there to help Scully adopt her, even if he thinks it's kind of a bad idea. He also tells the judge overseeing Scully's hearing that Emily was conceived using Scully's eggs that were stolen during her abduction, because even when he's trying to help Scully adopt a child, Mulder has to Mulder.

Anyway that night Mulder and Scully get a mysterious phone call and after tracing it, follow it back to the government center where Emily is, to find her with a massive fever and a cyst on the back of her neck. After messing around with some doctors, Mulder intuits (and they subsequently discover) that the cyst is alien related! Mulder has to Mulder. They discover it when a nurse pokes it with a needle and it hits her with the killing gas that alien blood hits people with. Sucks to be her I suppose.

Anyway, Emily is dying and Scully starts demanding Emily's medical records from the doctors who were putting her through experimental treatment, but they refuse as they want Emily to resume the treatment and also Scully technically has no legal right to make decisions for Emily? They bring this up a couple times throughout the episode, but nothing ever comes of it. Mulder goes and sees the possibly-villainous doctor from the previous episode, and when he refuses to help, Mulder violently assaults him. Mulder has to Mulde-actually that's not typical of Mulder but it sure was awesome.

"Look dude, I cut off my own leg at the end of Hannibal, this isn't anywhere close to the weirdest thing I've done."

After Mulder beats up the doctor he bolts home, because he's both scared and horny from it and is having trouble dealing. But his troubles are over because the two dudes from the previous episode show up and stab him in the back of the neck. He's an alien, and so are they. 80 percent of the characters in this show are aliens. The two dudes change into doubles of the doctor, one leading Mulder (who is following him, of course) and the other heading to the hospital to give Emily an injection.

Scully tries to stop the one who headed to the hospital but he changes faces and escapes, obviously, and the detective from the previous episode (remember him?) shows up to help track him down, She thinks that Mulder meanwhile follows the other fake-doctor to a retirement home where he finds the woman who gave birth to Emily (who he thought was fake) and a bunch of other elderly women who recently gave birth.

Home stretch: The doctor shows up and so does the detective and he arrests Mulder but stops when evil doctor shows up and shoots the doctor which...works out about as well as all other attempts to shoot aliens do, and the alien doc escapes. Emily dies, and the nursing home is cleaned out, leaving Emily as the only evidence, but during Emily's funeral they find only sandbags in the coffin, but Scully's cross necklace (she gave it to Emily last episode) and Scully takes it back and thus, the episode ends on kind of a down note.

"I was told Scully was the one who solved all her problems with a gun I WAS TOLD SCULLY WAS THE ONE WHO SOLVED ALL HER PROBLEMS WITH A GUN!"

Emily is, much like the previous episode, an episode that does a lot of stuff right and has some great standout moments, but has never fully clicked for me. I can't really honestly say it's a bad episode, and it Gillian Anderson is still doing some of her best Scully work in the entire series, but it's always left me out in the cold, staring in through the window like a street urchin when I should be inside partying with the...I think I've lost track of the metaphor there, the point is it doesn't grab me.

I think one of my sticking points is the character of Emily. She's pre-verbal and the actress isn't exactly doing Oscar material so we have very little sense of her as a character. Add in the fact that she shows up in one episode and dies in the very next and she feels less like a character and more like a plot device who exists entirely to die. Maybe spacing out Christmas Carol and Emily a bit, having Emily exist in the background for a little bit, might make her feel like a real person who exists as part of the show, rather than just some character development for Scully.

I suppose the other issue is that the episode doesn't pace out the story it's telling very well. The episode basically has two stories, one of Scully hanging out at the hospital watching Emily get worse and one of Mulder searching for answers, and they don't gel very well. Emily's story never seems to go anywhere, just sort of stay flat as Emily slowly declines, while Mulder is off punching doctors and finding elderly women who gave birth. I'm not saying that Scully should have to perform emergency surgery but...actually maybe I am saying that, it would spice up the proceedings. 

"...that's a fetus in a jar alright."

That might be the biggest issue of all really, that I don't really feel like Mulder and Scully alter the course of the story at all. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I know that Mulder and Scully can't fix everything (or really anything in the Myth arc episodes) but I do like it when I feel that they did something, helped in some way. But while Mulder gets to dick around and gather evidence, he ultimately loses and while they make a lot noise about Scully doing this or that medical procedure, it never seems to do anything. I don't have a strong feeling of the effects of their actions, is me point, and unlike previous episodes, Mulder doesn't jump on any trains.

But I feel like I'm being mean, there is a decent amount I like in this episode. Gillian Anderson is still playing it to the hilt and her effort is appreciate, but I was surprised how much David Duchovny got in on the action. His rage at the doctor's office feels a teeny bit unearned in the narrative (although I'll take it on behalf of Scully) but he plays it well. In fact, there's a lot of great understated work from Duchovny, from his first interaction with Emily (Mulder being good with kids is something from that always made sense to me) to his bouncing off Frohike on the phone. And it must be said, while I don't really connect to Emily as a character, her funeral scene is really well realized, and both Duchovny and Anderson act the shit out of it.

I wonder if this is one of those episodes I can't properly connect with due to my personal life experiences. I'm a big believer in trying to understand how and why you do or don't connect to this or that piece of media (that's basically the whole point of this blog) so I do wonder if I might get these episodes more years down the line, if and when I have kids. But that doesn't seem likely to be happening any time in the foreseeable future, so we're stuck with me staring in at these episodes from the outside, like a street urchin staring in the - no we're not going back into that metaphor.

Case Notes:

• Out of context, if you told me I was gonna watch an episode where Gillian Anderson walking through a metaphorical desert while monologuing, I'd assume I was gonna watch Hannibal.
• I get what they're going for with "Scully turns into sand and disintegrates" but the effect is uh...it's not great.
• Hey it's Mulder! I like how he just wanders in already into the plot.
• "Emily, I'd like you to meet a friend of mine. His name is Mulder and he's bugfuck crazy. But he's also gonna be the father of all my other children."
• Mulder, Scully has had Emily for like 20 minutes, can you maybe give her some time to adjust before you go straight to the conspiracy stuff.
• I do love how he just had Frohike hack into the California adoption records. A+ plus Mulder stuff there.
• Mulder is doing his best here and I do love his awkward attempts to protect Scully from getting hurt vis a vis Emily. Vince Gilligan is really good at writing Mulder's fumbling, emotionally stunted way of going at relationships.
• "Does FBI stand for Federal Bureau of Imagination?" What is San Diego, the lame joke capital of the world?
• There's a lot of good Mulder and Scully conversations in this episode.
• I am a sucker for any sequence in which someone mistakes Mulder and Scully for a couple. I am trash, sue me.
• Mulder randomly intuits that the weird thing on Emily's neck is alien blood but no one listens to him.
• Emily is super calm watching a nurse straight up die in front of her. Could they just not get the kid to react or is that intentional?
• I had honestly forgotten that they came up with a method to save someone from alien blood exposure. It only happens in the last two minutes of an episode 3 seasons ago, leave me alone.
• Mulder straight up assaults the doctor in his office, which is the sort of thing that in real life costs you your badge, but in a TV show is awesome.
• MRIs really do lend themselves to being scary when they need to, huh? House did this as well.
• I feel like, if they were just gonna replace him, the alien dudes didn't need to kill the doctor. Oh well, conspiracy gonna conspiracy.
• The episode uses like a full minute of dialogue to say "Emily's gonna die."
• The X-Files really loves the "Alien dude is escaping, gets caught and changes his face," move. They do it like 30 times.
• Okay, having two guys replace Calderon so that one can lead Mulder off and the other can go to Emily is pretty clever, points.
• I'd forgotten that the episode posits "Fugazzi" as a fake name and has her turn out to be real person. That's really solid.
• I am amused that the adoption lady is fighting Scully for control over Emily's medical decisions. It seems to me a little bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Or fighting over who gets to rearrange said deck chairs.
• The "Old Woman Gave Birth to Half Alien Baby's" bit in this bit is such a weird swerve but it's an interesting one.
• Mulder, to Frohike, at the old folks home: "Yeah I think you might have a shot here Frohike." Good stuff.
• The scene with Emily in the oxygen chamber feels a little extraneous?
• Mulder wandering around the old folks home finding fetuses (feti?) in jars is pretty great. Vintage X-Files.
• Mulder thinks he's about to get caught in the old folks home? STEAL EVERYTHING!
• The detective having never met Mulder is such a small detail but it ends up costing Mulder most of what he found.
• The ending funeral and the conversation between Scully and Mulder is very sad and very well put together but maybe a tad too long.
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Feel free to give it a look and maybe donate, so I can afford to blow off homework to finish my video essay.