X-Files S7E17: All things must pass

Sestra Amateur: 

All things ... considered? All things ... being equal? All things ... must end? Maybe we should ask Gillian Anderson, the writer/director for this one X-Files episode. And depending on how you look at it, the ep either strays from the formula or steamrolls forward with seven years’ worth of buildup. 

Scully is getting dressed in a bathroom while we listen to her voiceover about choices, which, unfortunately has the same effect on me as Mulder’s voiceovers. Plus, it also distracts from the fact that Dana’s quietly leaving the apartment while a presumably naked Fox is sleeping peacefully. Sixty-three hours earlier (well that’s oddly specific!), Mulder is gyrating to Moby music when Scully arrives at their office. He tries schooling Dana with a crop circles slide show, but she’s too engrossed in her salad to pay attention. They bicker because Scully wants an actual day off, so Fox heads alone to England for his next lead. 

Dana picks up an autopsy report at a local hospital, but gets medical records for Dr. Daniel Waterston instead. Turns out Dr. D is Scully's former teacher and lover. He’s in the hospital with cardiac issues and his daughter, Maggie, takes umbrage to Dana's visit. However, Daniel wants to see Scully, so Maggie begrudgingly passes along the message. When Dana arrives, she holds hands with Waterston at his bedside. Mulder keeps picking the wrong times to ask Scully for her help with his case, and Dana almost has a car accident when driving while distracted by his latest call. Luckily, a blonde pedestrian prevents that from happening.

Later that night, Scully goes to Fox's source, Colleen Azor, and realizes she saw the woman in the hospital before meeting with Waterston. Colleen reads Dana as a just-the-facts type and condescendingly reminds Scully, “There is a greater intelligence in all things. Accidents or near accidents often remind us that we need to keep our mind open to the lesson it gives.” And now we know the origin of the episode title. 

Clumsy Dana drops the papers and sees a correlation between Mulder’s crop circles and Dr. Waterston’s medical issues. She then gets summoned back to Daniel’s bedside to serve as a supporting medical opinion, which contradicts his attending doctor’s treatment plan. When they’re alone again, Dan and Dana have a heartfelt conversation about their choices in life. Waterston flatlines while Scully's resting her head on his chest. Clearly, he was ready to go but Dana's not ready to let him. Even without hospital privileges, she leads the code to bring him back.

The next morning, Scully returns to Colleen's house to apologize for her rudeness and to seek holistic advice on Daniel’s medical case. After hearing Colleen’s tale summed up with, “everything happens for a reason,” Dana returns to the hospital, but Maggie refuses to let her visit now-comatosed Daniel. Scully wanders through Chinatown and ends up following the blonde woman from her near-accident. Dana kneels before a Buddha statute, and taking Colleen’s advice, just stops for a moment. People from her past rush through her mind, along with the realization of how to treat Daniel. 

Scully, Colleen and a healer arrive at the hospital and Dana earns Maggie’s support. The healer determines there is nothing more he can do because Daniel has unfinished business. That doesn’t quite explain how Dr. D managed to “let go” earlier in the episode. Frankly, a simple DNR would resolve his pesky unable-to-move-on issue.

Later that night, Maggie calls for Scully to return to the hospital where Daniel is conscious again. He pooh-poohs her “voodoo” ritual, but Dana convinces him he needs to atone for the pain he caused his family. Scully also makes it clear that Daniel’s future is not with her. Outside the hospital, Dana chases down her blonde pedestrian who ends up being Mulder. His leads in England petered out, but I love his “Stonehenge rocks” ballcap. They talk about choices until Scully falls asleep on his couch. Based on that teaser scene, we know the choice they made. My choice right now is to go listen to some more Moby.


Sestra Professional: 

I never could decide whether "all things" was over my head or if it overshot the mark. Either way, it's cool to get Gillian Anderson's spin on things. Co-star David Duchovny has been getting story credits since Season 2. He wrote and directed "The Unnatural" (Season 6, Episode 19) around this time last year and his second effort is coming up in a couple of weeks. It was definitely Gillian's time and I was eager to see her take on a universe she's inhabited for seven years. 

Anderson doesn't waste any time either, starting off with the most incendiary scene possible. Naked Mulder, with Scully dressing nearby. It's what the shippers longed for for seven years, even when show creator Chris Carter maintained he didn't want to go there! Even as a non-shipper, seeing that does provide a bit of a jolt. 

So here's my stance. I'm generally a no-romo. This doesn't mean I don't want Fox and Dana together, what it means is that I don't need to see them smooching. At this point, it doesn't seem like anyone else would be good enough for either of them. They've been through so much together, there's just no way for someone to compete under the present guidelines. Now if he was to get abducted and go through rigorous probing -- by aliens, get your mind out of the gutter ... OK, mine was there too -- then there might be a change in the dynamic. But as currently constituted, yes, I recognize that the only person for Mulder is Scully and the only person for Scully is Mulder.

Why don't you ever just stay still? This episode offers up a scenario in which that might not be the case. And judging by what happens after the teaser, it's a wonder these two crazy kids get together at all. They're so far afield of each other. Fox and Dana are acting like the versions of themselves Scully describes in "Bad Blood" (S5E12). Mulder's off on a computer-generated crop circle kick that Dana rightly describes as not even close to the FBI's purview. He wants to race off to England, she would like to take a bath. Are we sure they're soulmates?

So Scully hangs back and goes to the hospital for autopsy results we know she doesn't need anymore. It's a little bit of a stretch that Dana would find an X-ray in her autopsy folder ... but if we're hanging our ep on the nature of coincidence and that everything happens for a reason, I suppose I have to let that go. (Speaking of that "everything happens for a reason" chestnut, I believed it a lot easier when Clark Kent was told that by his Earth dad in Superman: The Movie.)

But I do love the coat that Dana got to strut around in all episode. This was a far cry from her wardrobe in the early seasons, when she seemed to be garbed in men's wear that didn't come in her size. And she gets some silk pajamas too, Mulder should loooove them. 

You may be more open to things than you think: I don't think the scenes between dubious doc Dana and former physicist Colleen would have played out similarly under the show's male forces as we know them to this point. And that's not a judgment, just recognition that etching out that kind of space and time was something Anderson brought to the table. Conversely, Scully's taking a lot of things on the chin with everyone making snap judgments about her life, be it that she needs to slow down or she doesn't know as much as she thinks she does. In our other episodes, that usually comes out in more winky and jokey fashion.

I'm not quite certain about the woman with the blonde ponytail who leads Dana everywhere she needs to be -- just short of an accident, to the eerie image of the buddha looking down on her and ultimately to Fox. Did she really need any of these chance occurrences to make Scully realize she's not the same person as she was back then? So if the idea of Daniel Waterston's existence kept Dana from admitting certain truths when it comes to Fox -- and I kind of find that to be another huge stretch, although maybe it's just one of those "grass is greener" circumstances. We tend to remember the good times in the past as these untouchable moments that people in the present wouldn't understand. When she does come face to face with Daniel again, Scully realizes he's not the love of her life. 

Does it detract from "the" moment to have Scully rethinking her life choices all throughout this episode? In wondering if she wants the life she didn't choose, the one she did doesn't get too much air time. But an interesting take on sickness does come to the forefront. Her former love got sick because he was running from the truth for 10 years. That ends up clashing a bit with the concept of the comatose man being ready to move on but having unfinished business tying him to the plane, unless those chakras worked double-time. 

How many different lives would we be leading if we made different choices? Then Dana and Mulder sit down and talk about everything that occurred while he was gone. So much more tends to happen to her when Fox is on his own path -- witness "Never Again" (S4E13) and "Chinga" (S5E10), to name a couple. I found the idea of there being only one life we were meant to live with signs along the way to guide us both intriguing and aggravating, not necessarily in that order.

So Sestra Am posits that the Sculder match, in fact, finally did ignite, rather than seeing it as Scully woke up from where she was on the couch, went to the bathroom to fix herself up and then left. The two scenes that bookend "all things" will be mulled over much like "En Ami" (S7E15) from a couple of weeks ago, although not nearly in the same way. 

Guest star of the week: Nicolas Surovy may be best known as Susan Lucci's on-screen paramour, Mike Roy, on All My Children. The ability he undoubtedly cultivated on the soap made him well situated for the more melodramatic aspects of his part here.