Work Text:
So, in the second half of Season Six, there’s a lot of crap. But there are two episodes that stand out to me like beautiful if slightly tarnished gems: “Monday” and “Arcadia.”
Let’s talk about “Monday.” If I start in on “Arcadia” it might get long.
So, Mulder’s having a bad day. Sometime in the night, his waterbed started leaking. It shorted out his alarm clock and his cell phone. He’s awakened when the morning paper hits his apartment door and discovers that he’s soaking wet, that the water is coming through downstairs, that his landlord is pissed at him, and that he’s going to be extremely late for work. Once he arrives, he realizes that he has to deposit his paycheck right away or the check he wrote to cover the damages will bounce, so he heads down the street to his bank. While he’s in the bank, a jittery guy with a beard named Bernard pulls out a gun and announces that he’s robbing it. Scully, meanwhile, is stuck in a meeting and wondering why Mulder isn’t showing up, so she goes to the bank to look for him. Her entrance takes Bernard’s attention off Mulder. Mulder pulls his gun; Bernard shoots him. Scully is desperately trying to do CPR on Mulder while convincing Bernard to let him go to get medical treatment when the assembled SWAT team storms the bank. Bernard flips the switch on a bomb he has strapped to his belt. The bank blows up, with Mulder and Scully in it.
At least that’s how it happens sometimes. Mulder and Scully are trapped in a repeating time loop, so they live through this day many times. The incidents vary slightly but the outcome is all the same: Mulder and Scully in bank, bank go boom. The only person who realizes what’s happening is Pam, Bernard’s girlfriend. She is just about to go mad, and she’s desperate to stop the loop. Every time the day repeats during the episode we see Pam trying a different stratagem to stop Bernard from blowing up the bank; but none of them work. Nothing works until Mulder, whose deja vu is more insistent than Scully’s, asks Scully to bring Pam into the bank. She begs Bernard not to do this. Mulder begs him not to do this. Bernard, who is extremely hyped up, shoots Pam. Pam dies; Bernard collapses and lets himself be handcuffed. Finally, when Mulder wakes up in the morning, it’s Tuesday. There’s an article in the paper about Pam dying in the bank robbery, and they have to make their report to Skinner about what happened. The End.
So many things I love about this episode. Well, let’s start with the waterbed.
When his landlord calls him up the first time (the first time we see it, anyway; obviously we don’t come in at the beginning of this loop because Pam is already about to lose her mind), Mulder says, “I know I’m not supposed to have a waterbed. I don’t know what to tell you. I think it was a gift.” When he’s telling his tale of woe to Scully, she stops him every time and asks him WTF he has a waterbed. Why does Mulder have a waterbed? Because Morris Fletcher bought one while he was in Mulder’s body back in “Dreamland.” Why doesn’t Mulder know how it got there, and why doesn’t Scully know about it at all? Because the timeline during which all that happened got erased and neither of them has any memory of 99% of what happens in “Dreamland.”
If you haven’t seen “Dreamland,” this just goes right over your head. If you have, then it reminds you that Mulder and Scully have some experience with time loops and alternative quantum realities—and that even though neither of them actually remembers "Dreamland," the fact that they experienced it still affects their lives. And this kind of opens up a really nifty thing about the relationships between experience, memory, and what Scully calls "character," and what someone else might have called the soul. "Monday" is actually the fourth Season Six episode in which a string of events that turns out not to have really happened nevertheless leaves behind important traces. At the end of "Triangle," after Scully has explained to Mulder that he never actually boarded the Queen Anne because she was only a ‘ghost ship,’ Mulder goes to lay his head on his pillow and starts up again, feeling his temple and smiling. He’s still got the bruise from where "Scully" punched him in the timeline that didn’t happen; and it makes him happy. At the end of "Dreamland," Scully finds the fused penny and dime that she brought back from Area 51 in the now-defunct timeline on her desk; Mulder is startled to discover that his whole apartment has been redone and that he has a completely new suite of bedroom furniture, including the damn waterbed. Neither of them knows what to make of any of it; but when Scully calls him at the end of the episode to let him know that Kirsch doesn’t seem to have noticed their unauthorized trip to Roswell, there seems to be some kind of emotional residue left from all the drama they went through during the alternative timeline. They feel as if they’ve just been through something major together, but they can’t explain to themselves why. In “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas,” Scully and Mulder come to believe that the whole encounter with the ghosts was all in their heads; but all the same, the experience changes how they relate to each other. This is how it actually is for most of us: we are affected by everything we experience but we don’t actually have conscious memories of most of it. We become who we are through the accumulation of a million tiny moments which we always remember in the short-term but which over time just become indistinguishable accretions which influence us without our knowing it.
And that’s one of the cool things about “Monday”: watching the accretions build up as Mulder and Scully keep experiencing the scenario. Mulder is more self-aware about this than Scully; when his déjà vu is triggered he pays attention to it whereas she dismisses it as a glitch of the brain. He also eventually learns to recognize Pam, who has one very intense conversation with him about what’s going on. The reason all of these scenarios end with a bang is that Mulder and Scully don’t know going into the scenario that Bernard has a bomb strapped to him. Now, why Pam couldn’t tell them this, or why Mulder doesn’t infer from Pam telling him that the bank always “blows up” that there’s a bomb involved, who can say; but on the penultimate Monday Mulder realizes, right before they all go up in smoke, that this is the key piece of information: Bernard doesn’t just have a gun, he has a bomb. So he repeats to himself, “He’s got a bomb, he’s got a bomb, he’s got a bomb, he’s got a bomb” as Bernard pulls the trigger. His brain doesn’t remember any of that the next time around; Pam, now so depressed she can’t even get out of the car, has given up on warning them. But when his body finds itself in the same situation, it does what it did last time: it repeats the phrase. That’s what finally changes the circumstances enough to change the outcome. In other words, Mulder exploits what he knows about somatic memory—the fact, for instance, that someone who’s been through a traumatic experience can have an involuntary physical response to some apparently innocuous stimulus that replicates some aspect of the original trauma—to bypass the daily memory wipe and retain the key piece of information by encoding it in his body. I think this is badass.
But we also see this happen with Scully in a somewhat more meta way. In the first iteration Pam tries warning Skinner. That works about as well as you could expect. In a later iteration she wangles her way down to Scully’s office—she signs up for an FBI tour and slips away—and warns her that if she and Mulder go into the bank today, they’ll die. Scully, of course, initially brushes it off. But when Mulder shows up and mentions that he’s off to the bank, she asks him what bank it is; and when it matches what Pam told her, she tells him the story. I love this moment, too, because it makes the whole history of their characters and their relationships so visible. Scully of season one wouldn’t have considered this encounter significant enough to remember. Scully of season two might have been weirded out by it but she wouldn’t have brought it up; she still wouldn’t have wanted to encourage Mulder’s crazycakity. Scully of season four would have worried over it but brought it up only after events had validated it. Scully of season six tells him the story, and they look at each other, and it’s like telepathy. Neither of them really wants to believe in it; but neither wants to dismiss it either. They know there’s shit going in in their world that they don’t understand; and they figure there’s more risk in scoffing at this warning than in taking it seriously. Mulder finally decides to use the ATM machine instead. Of course it’s out of service, so bank go boom anyway.
Which brings us to the fate vs. free will debate. It’s been had before. But what I like about it is that according to this episode, Scully is right. Mulder doesn’t believe in destiny—which is funny, cause he believed in it in “One Son,” but as we know, all bets are off now—because he thinks there are “too many variables” and that “with every choice, you change your fate.” Irritated without knowing why by Scully’s 500th query about when he got that waterbed, he says, “I might just as easily not have a waterbed…you might just as easily have stayed in medical school and we would never have met…” (I pause to note that this kind of fantasizing about what would have happened if chance hadn’t brought you together is a favorite game of people in long-term monogamous relationships…but I digress.) Scully says that she believes in personal agency—we choose to be who we are—and that “character” is what determines your fate. Well, on the evidence of “Monday,” fate has pretty clear ideas about what has to happen; and these variables Mulder speaks of are in fact variable—each iteration is a little different—but most of them don’t change the outcome. This is partly because—as Scully says—for them, character is fate. For instance, in all the scenarios they both wind up in that bank, because after the first one has been AWOL for a while the other one always goes to look for him/her—because that’s who they are. And, of course, that’s partly because their ‘reality’ is fictional, and they are in fact ‘characters’ in a TV show. There’s a range of things Scully can say in response to discovering that Mulder is late for a meeting; but it’s much smaller than the range of things Scully can’t say because they would be out of character. Ditto for Mulder’s response to discovering that he’s in a bank that’s being robbed. (I like it that in the last scenario, after Mulder remembers about the bomb, Mulder goes over and gives Bernard his gun—because it’s the only way to stop himself from pulling it out when the shit hits the fan.) These repetitions of the same scenario are analogous not only to script rewrites, which generate multiple slightly-different variations of the same scenario en route to the “right” one, but the filming process itself, where the actors do multiple versions of every scene, all of which are forgotten except for the “right” one.
Back when I was doing the Twilight Zone rewatch oh…seven years ago…I got kind of fed up with their time travel plots. Why, I thought to myself, does every time travel plot assume that there’s one “right” timeline which has to be restored before the conclusion? Even the “let’s kill Hitler” plots, where the traveler is deliberately attempting to change something unambiguously horrible about history, confirm the idea of the One True Timeline by refusing to allow the plot to succeed. It’s a very providential interpretation of history: history as what had to happen, as opposed to just what happened to happen. It supports our tendency to assume that the way things are now is the way they have to be; and it assumes the primacy of self-interest. What if there were a ‘better’ timeline—one that produces a more just world, with more equality and less suffering—that could have been, but which wouldn’t have produced us and all the things we’re used to? What if the timeline that produced us is—from an ethical point of view—actually not the right one?
“Monday” is not interested in this kind of speculation. Pam was fated to die that Monday; and by God, fate is going to make everyone on the planet suffer until that happens. Pam’s death is what, in Doctor Who terms, we would call a fixed point in time: it can’t be undone without the whole universe unraveling. And that really emphasizes just how unfair life is in a world where things are in fact predestined. Pam hasn’t done anything to deserve this. All we ever see her do is try to stop the robbery. Pam probably doesn’t want to be in that relationship with Bernard either; but she can’t get out of it any more than she can get out of dying. In a way, the real barrier to the resolution is her fear of dying. She isn’t ready to go into that bank until after she’s already concluded that her current existence is hell. And that too is a very Twilight Zone thing: you can refuse death, but that doesn’t mean you get life everlasting. It means you get a nightmare in-between existence that’s neither one thing nor the other, and eventually you decide that no matter what death is, it’s got to be better thanthis. She gets her release, in the end. But it’s a raw deal. It is a very raw deal.
Why doesn’t Pam’s character decide her fate? Why does she have to die, and why does Bernard get to live? Is it in some way a commentary on abusive relationships (their dynamic certainly suggests abuse, either emotional or physical) suggesting that after a certain point, the death of the victimized partner is the only possible outcome? Is Pam some kind of a scapegoat sacrificed to the scenario that’s so relentlessly foreshadowed for them in “How the Ghosts Stole CHristmas”—getting shot by her devoted but unstable boyfriend so that Scully doesn’t have to? Or is it just a gratuitous stab in the feels, for us and for Mulder?
At any rate, “Monday” really cashes in on all the good work that’s been done on this show so far, and it makes you wish that all the season 6 episodes could have been like this. And “Arcadia” sort of is; but that’s another story for another time.