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randomfoggytiger · 11 months

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Milagro In-Depth (Part II): Loneliness Is a Choice and Lamps Go Dark

We pick up where Part I left off (see post here)--

Scully stalks into the morgue, having left the church but not her unsettled feelings. Her expression mildly lifts seeing Mulder there waiting for her.

Mulder sidles up, subdued and gentle, obviously having mulled over her earlier reproof in the office. “Hey, you weren’t joking about being late. I was about to start slicing and dicing myself.”

He’s so caring that it melts Scully’s armor, bringing out her Starbuck guilt complex: “I’m sorry,” she offers. To her partner’s “Where were you?”, she responds “I was doing some research, and learning that I owe you an apology.”

Intrigued but cautious, Mulder straightens his posture and purses his lips. “For what?”

“The milagro charm,” Scully snips as she casts back on her experience, “you were right on its insignificance.”

Mulder states, “No, I think I was wrong. I think it is very significant. I think it may be a communication from the killer.”

She is initially frazzled that Mulder’s first response to her position-- especially in light of her “research”-- is a flat-out contradiction. Yet again, Mulder is sending the message-- accidentally-- that Scully’s ideas are always one step behind. But as he prattles on about his own research on psychic surgeons claiming to be “filled with the holy spirit” she is amused into complaisance.

Scully hands Mulder a metaphorical milagro charm of her own, giving weight to his ideas and debating them as intellectually and thoroughly as her tried and true science, expressing her repressed love in the only way he will accept.

Mulder only has Padgett half-right-- "...most credible practitioners of psychic surgery believe themselves to be imbued with the Holy Spirit, that their hands become the miracle tools of God"-- since Padgett doesn’t dabble in his sorcery to benefit others, only to try to "heal" his own diseased heart; and Scully also has Padgett half-right in her rebuttal.

“Mulder, this--” she says, taking and brandishing the charm as a statement, “is nothing more than a tool used by a lovelorn Romeo who just happens to be your next-door neighbor.”

Mulder’s pulled up short by this… and he’s not happy about the idea. “Who, the writer??”

“Yes,” Scully replies distinctly, hiding her stress behind a forced smile, “my secret admirer, who claims to know the mysteries of my heart.”

Mulder is completely blindsided but even more tender. “You’re kidding….”

Her tearful emotions briefly break to the surface as Scully recounts, “No, I wish I were. He cornered me today and told me my life’s story. He was kind of frightening, actually.” She looks down, unused to personal admissions still connected to unprocessed emotions.

Mulder flounders, flummoxed, shaking his head and stumbling for words. A Scully stripped from her defenses is a rare occurrence; and he is uncertain what to say. He retreats to safe ground: “Is… he… our killer?”

“No,” Scully clarifies, “‘Frightening’ as in ‘too much information and intimate detail’.” As Mulder is left with no ground left to hop on, his partner turns away to delicately sneer at the wall-- “What kills you is his audacity” before she takes a deep, stabilizing breath.

Dipping his head in solidarity, Mulder mulls over these new facts, toeing the line between empathizing with her shake-up and pretending not to notice how shaken Scully is. But he forms a resolution, raising his head with fire in his eyes and grim determination pulling at his mouth: “Did you get a name?”

His little rulekeeping rebel responds: “No, but that shouldn’t be too hard to find out, should it?” She walks off to do her work, letting Mulder read her face and draw his conclusions directly from her indirect response.

Scully knows her partner is on a vengeful hunt, giving him her unspoken blessing to do whatever he deems necessary.

Mulder now becomes an active part of the story rather than someone who wove in and around Scully or who Scully, the main focus of Padgett’s (and the narrative through his eyes), wove herself around.

He pulls out a lockpick set (proving everyone right on this poll about previous key or lockpick lore) and digs into his floor's mailbox. While swiping a letter, Mulder notices a pile of discarded newspapers, picking one up to pour over later for clues. In that hopelessly clueless way Mulder has, he's forced to snap out of his configurings by the harsh, cruel reality of his surroundings: needing to press an elevator button to make the door open. He makes a face, hits it, and waits.

Two thoughts:

#1. Gaze, focus, and attention continue to play heavily in this episode: Mulder having only eyes for his work (in this case, the newspaper) to the exclusion of the world around him (“life on this planet”) is given center stage as he fumbles around the normal world like someone who wants to run through it in pursuit of the next glorious chase.

#2. IMO, Mulder would love smart appliances and cool new innovations that cut down on minor daily decision-making (lacking the paranoia about technology and its advances as The Lone Gunmen do… or did); but they likely wouldn’t have liked him back since he’s already terrible with the conveniences he has in his “modern” world.

Padgett pops in, needing the elevator, too; and Mulder feels busted as he palms the man’s stolen letter and uncollected newspaper. He and Hoodie face-off on the ride up before Mulder turns away, evoking the polite, unspoken social norm of “stop staring.” His neighbor doesn’t follow those codes, eyeing the paper and Mulder’s increasingly annoyed expression.

“I’m sorry, I forgot your name,” Mulder fishes.

“Padgett.”

“Padgett,” he fake smoozes, Rob Petrie dripping in disdain and moral superiority.

“You’re a writer. Anything I’d know?”

Padgett is unfazed. “I don’t think so.” His story is not about Mulder-- an incidental second fiddle-- but about Scully, her motives and her heart.

The second act concludes this scene by a slight repetition of before: Padgett encountering a character on the elevator, staring into their soul, and following them down the hallway like a shadow. At this point, his role is not as a "person" so much as a conduit, becoming lost in the liminal spaces between both worlds. It’s not until the third act when Padgett becomes a flesh and blood human being, realizing the futility of Naciamento’s madness and tearing his heart out in sacrifice.

At his door, Padgett prods, “You’re an FBI agent. Working on anything interesting?”

Mulder calls his bluff, becoming as obtrusive in his study as his neighbor is, purposefully trading meaningful looks. “A murder case.”

His neighbor freezes, the rattle of his door loud in the silent hallway. To Mulder, he reveals that dichotomy of himself, the Naciamento side-- menace and meaning folded into one. “Anything I’d know?”

Mulder’s deceptively monotoned “Possibly” isn't intended to fool.

It’s very clear that Padgett views Mulder as a rival and a threat-- an intelligent suit who Scully buzzes around for attention while, in Padgett’s mind, bearing up, unrewarded, under neglect.

Mulder slips into his apartment first, the door serving as the last word to these hallway interludes. The writer-- the avatar, the conduit, the theme, the symbol-- is acutely aware of this, running into his own apartment as well, hoping to beat the FBI agent in like it’s a kindergarten foot race. Mulder is the clear winner this round, upper-handing the situation by unsettling Padgett and toying with his interest; and his unconcerned confidence gives him that detached edge that allows him to drop conversations or topics at the toss of a dime, leaving the other person shortchanged and aware a second too late.

This interaction sends Padgett into a jealous and desperate writing session that culminates with an explicit happy ending for himself and Scully, enviously hoping to rob his rival of the jewel that sits right under the other’s nose. He “directs” his FBI neighbor to listen through the vent system, deriding Mulder for his “Hegelian justification” with regards to breaking the Amendments, smug loathing pouring out of his eyes as he types out his own measure of control.

The episode plays with free will as well as gaze and focus quite a bit: does Padgett direct Mulder to break those rules and listen? Or does he pin Mulder down in the elevator and write a piece so thoroughly correct about the other’s character that he can “predict” rather than direct what his actions will be?

I believe Padgett is seeking control of his own life by controlling those around them; but this episode reveals that the only person he can fully control is Naciamento. Even further: his own creation reveals the truth to his creator: the writer was never in control-- the only truth his work created is something beyond himself, something that could not be bound by control; and that the unruly characters he tried so desperately to bind to a “greater” narrative whole were already free from his grip, and never wholly his to begin with (script here.)

Philip Padgett writes his words into Scully’s head, flavoring them with sexual interest but still detailing a grain of truth: “She was flattered. His words had presented a pretty picture of herself, quite unlike the practiced mask of uprightness that mirrored back to her from the medical examiners and investigators and all the lawmen who dared no such utterances.”

A key point is explored here: Scully pulls out the charm, a version of Padgett’s verbosity running through her own mind; but a colleague rushes by, and she drops it down out of focus in time with the writer’s “...she felt and involuntary blush; and rebuked herself for the girlish indulgence.”

Here, writer man believes his words have the power to sweep her off her feet and into his bed, two lonely souls finding love and wantonness in the company of only each other.

The camera pans back to Mulder from the on-high perspective of the vent, casting judgment and doom upon his rival (to no avail.)

He is unaware, but suspicious, of Padgett’s unspoken intentions, finally ripping open his mail (after hours of completely silent observation) and noting “Mr. Popularity”' has no records of calls placed or received. Mulder is a lonely man himself; but his loneliness is consumed by the quest and banished by Scully’s company, however he allows himself to receive it. Padgett has no one; and choses to write a better life into existence for himself, stealing from someone else’s work.

Collapsing back in exhaustion, Mulder contemplates his next move, this problem proving more sinister and desperate because of its subject’s stark isolationism. In his boredom, Mulder picks up the newspaper, opening it up and incidentally sending himself down a rabbit hole of clues.

Scully arrives on the 4th floor, flustered, bewildered, intrigued, confused; but this time she pauses, hearing the click click click of Padgett’s typewriter as clearly as if she were right next to it. Typewriter clacking this loudly is unnatural; and Scully is torn between fleeing it and figuring out what it means. She is a woman of science; but all of Scully’s pragmatism is a defense against her own unscientific inclinations, a tendency to give too much credence to supernatural signs or simple gut feelings. It saved Kevin Kryder in Revelations, it saved her daughter in Emily, it guarded the girls in All Souls, and it will warn her in Orison.

Her investigator instincts win over, and she pays a visit to Room 44, unaware of how dark Padgett's intentions are. She couches her visit as a gift-return; but Padgett, delighted twofold-- that his plan is working but also that Scully is here to unwind his mind-- plainly asks her “Why?”

Scully steels herself for his reaction-- and in reaction to his unabashed openness-- and replies, “Because I can’t return the gesture.”

Padgett lets the moment hang, playing on her kindness and natural sense of dutiful guilt; and it leaves her no choice but to further admit “I can’t.”

He, of course, misreads her denial as reluctance, not realizing that her heart has already been given; and that Mulder has known this since at least Memento Mori (her journal describing then “That you should know my heart, look into it; finding there the memory and experience that belong to you-- that are you….”)

At Philip Padgett’s “You’re curious about me”, Scully huffs, struck and shaken again by his relentless dissection of her mind. There is less animal fear now as she acknowledges the truth with a slight nod; but it curdles in her gut, tears threatening to pool after her study of his Spartan apartment. She is aware that a man who has this much of nothing will be unwilling to give up what he now thinks of as his something.

But there is also pity. As Padgett’s intense investigative skills reflect Mulder’s empty personal life, so too does his apartment the howling chasm of Scully’s internal isolation-- the empty desert she retreated into after Emily’s death was an expansive emptiness, making room for the width of her loss and the intelligence of her and heart and mind. Padgett has only a desk, a lamp on the floor, and a bed; and the littleness of this life strike a chord-- though not the one he wrote to strike-- of commiseration at the emptiness of his existence and the flagrancy of his honesty. It’s a fear Scully has never admitted to, let alone lived brazenly.

She asks about his books-- “Anything I’d know?”-- echoing Mulder’s own question.

“No. They’re all failures. Except the one I’m working on now,” Padgett triumphs.

Scully draws back from his intensity, though she continues to question. “Why now all of a sudden?”

Padgett unfurls his thinking, possibly even how he obtained his abilities: “Best not to question it.”

She understands this, living that motto daily with her partner; and looks down to cover her own vulnerability.

“See? You are curious about me.”

Denial kicks in: “Well, you lead a curious life.”

Padgett puts his foot in the metaphorical door: “It’s not so different from yours, I imagine.” And that is all he can do: imagine, and try to unite his life with someone else who, he thinks, will understand him better than he does himself, the description of a writer he gives Scully a scene later.

His point is accurate; and Scully allows it to sink deeper even as she quickly puts up her defensive, sarcastic guard. He breaks it back down it a pointed, “Lonely.”

Padgett’s words sear at her wound, twisting a knife into her heart; but she manages to answer a measured “Loneliness is a choice” by rapidly blinking back tears and swallowing down her pain.

At Padgett’s “So how about a cup of coffee?”, her eyes flash defensively; but she is drawn in by his prepossessing honesty and transparency, wanting it for herself. Perhaps if she had some for herself, perhaps if she were more forthright-- a litany of “perhapses" as maddening as Padgett’s elusive self-discovery.

What I find interesting is the idea that this is Padgett’s Never Again and Scully is his Ed Jerse. He is unable to understand his heart or motives, the truth behind his actions; and she is alluring and broken-hearted and fearing that love will never be returned to her equally. The unbalanced nature of The Quest is her divorce court and her assurance and self-reflection is his ouroboros.

Separated by a wall, the two agents do their own reading. Mulder has done his homework, doubling back for the rest of the neglected newspapers once he’d found a love dedication that Padgett had circled; and Scully takes a peek at Padgett's unfinished manuscript, pondering over the last sentence “How will it end?”

Clutching the coffee cup Padgett gave her, she bows before it in confession: “My life’s not so lonely…. It’s actually anything but.”

Padgett again hears (looks) but doesn't listen (see.)

Her questions become more pointed: “How is it you think you know so much about me?”; and to his “I’m writing about you”, she gets sick of the staring game, pointedly sticking her neck out.

“Since when?”

“Since I first noticed you. You live in my old neighborhood.”

“And you moved into this building by coincidence?”

“No.”

“You moved here because of me.”

“There wasn’t anything available at your building. And it’s not like you spent a lot of time at home.”

Scully is confused-- she is wired to be drawn to people that listen, truly listen, to what she has to say and notice her and her interests so closely; but she is continually reminded that Padgett is an obsessed, sick man. But the adage “physician, heal thyself” easily follows that thought; and it’s easier to run away than to dwell on them.

Padgett stumbles over her horror. “I, I should have said something; but I just couldn’t get it all down fast enough. To really write someone I have to be in their head, I have to know them more completely than they know themselves.”

What strikes Scully is how “Mulder” that is-- getting into someone’s head and crossing lines and boundaries, asking for forgiveness rather than permission. The difference, she knows, is that her partner uses those gifts in extreme circumstances and for the ultimate good whereas this man is completely self-serving and egotistical in his mixture of self-abasing hubris.

“This is all about me?”

“Well, you’re an important part.”

“May I read it?”

When her request is denied, Scully shrinks down, pulling her shoulders up. She knows what that means: there is something in his manuscript to hide, or something that might color her against him more than she already is. Her hand shakes slightly at his “Would you sit and stay a minute?”; but she rallies in caustic suspicion (“You don’t have anywhere to sit.”)

Padgett lures her to his room-- a completely different apartment setting than her experience had been with Ed Jerse or even Mulder this entire episode-- shutting down her warning and excuse (“I’m due next door”) with a page out of her own logical book (“You haven’t finished your coffee.”)

Scully, left with no subtlety, cuts through her own reticence. “I’m very uncomfortable with this.”

“Why? You’re armed, aren’t you?”

The light won’t turn on, something Padgett hadn’t written or anticipated. “Imagine that.” He opens the curtains further, pinning them up against the wall before pressing past (and up against) a dazed Scully who seems to be wavering, either under the spell of his words or her own dizzying indecision.

Again her pity chord is struck with Padgett’s view-- a brick wall, so different from the view one door down. Scully gives in, drawn to the powerful and unexplained (ex. Luther Lee Boggs and Clyde Bruckman and Alfred Fellig): “If you know me so well, then why am I standing here when my instincts tell me to go?”

“Motive is never easy. Sometimes it occurs to one only later.”

She chastises herself, disappointed with his answer and her own foolish question. At the repeated invitation, Scully almost leaves, but sits down anyway. When the light bulb burns out once again, she is startled, but Padgett is alarmed then resigned in awe (“Imagine that.”)

They sit, waiting; and Padgett turns, knowing the precipitous moment is arriving-- but when Scully still sits, seemingly unmoved, he leans forward, shocked and hoping a change in position will end any indecision.

It's then that Mulder busts through the apartment door.

He immediately puts up his gun at Scully’s “Mulder” but evades further questions after having confirmation she’s alright. He zips over to the typewriter and throws around the pages until he finds an incriminating one, delicately hands it to his partner and pushing Padgett against the wall to arrest him.

Scully, startled, doesn’t attempt to stop him; and stares, horrified, at the words "warm, beating heart" staring right back at her.

Part III coming sometime soon.

Thank you for reading~

Enjoy!

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