Archive of Our Own ^beta

Before forging further into Season 5, I’m gonna go back and hit a few things I wanted to write about in seasons 3 & 4. Having just done “The Postmodern Prometheus,” now seems like a good time to revisit “Small Potatoes.”

Seems like a long time ago now that I wrote up a thing on the Sherlock Series 3 ep “The Sign of Three” in which I talked about the fact that it was, essentially, fanfiction. “Small Potatoes” also had kind of a fanfic feel to me. It was written not by Chris Carter but by Vince Gilligan, an X-Files producer who is also given writing credit for a lot of series 5 episodes. So, like fanfic authors, he’s working with characters to whom he is very close, but which he didn’t create. “Small Potatoes” also comes pretty close to doing something that a lot of fanfic does, which is invent a crazy situation in order to Get the principals Together. The device used here—a shape-shifter who pretends to be Mulder—is the kind of thing you find in fanfic all the time, where it is an acknowledgement of the fact that in order for the two people in your OTP to Get It On, one of them at least will have to do something out of character. Of course, if this were a fanfic, it would go all the way, and Mulder and Scully would actually wind up getting together for real. Because it’s canon, though, “Small Potatoes” stops short of that; Mulder and Scully return to their ordinary relationship, though no doubt each of them is now thinking some kind of new and troubling thoughts about the other.

I remembered “Small Potatoes” fondly from the first time around, and on rewatch, I was enormously taken with it at first.  The basic situation is that in a smallish town which is nevertheless big enough to have a good-sized fertility clinic, a bunch of babies have been born with tails. It is later discovered that they have all been fathered by the same man, one Eddie Van Blundht, who in addition to having been born with a tail (Mulder figures him for the culprit when Van Blundht’s plumbers’ crack reveals the scar where it was surgically removed) has the ability to alter his face so that he can pass for other people. Apart from his longtime crush Amanda Nelligan, for whom he disguised himself as Luke Skywalker, the other women who have given birth to babies with tails believed that they were having sex with their own husbands, when in fact they were having sex with Eddie Van Blundht pretending to be their husbands. Inevitably, Van Blundht learns how to disguise himself as Mulder, locks the real Mulder into a cage down in the basement of the clinic, and travels back to DC with Scully. He drops by the apartment one night with a bottle of wine, and a couple hours later he is making his move when the real Mulder bursts in. The final scene shows Mulder visiting Van Blundht in prison, who taunts him for failing to capitalize on his natural assets:  Van Blundht was born a loser, he said, but Mulder became one by choice. As they leave, Scully reassures Mulder that he’s not a loser. “Yeah,” says Mulder, discouraged. “But I’m no Eddie Van Blundht, either.”

So here’s the thing. This episode starts out great. The humor is actually funny, the situation is ridiculous and yet compelling, and the Mulder/Scully banter is quality. My favorite moment perhaps comes when, after Van Blundht escapes from custody, Mulder tells Scully he’s got a theory. Scully says, is your theory that Van Blundht is able to alter his appearance and that he got out of here by impersonating the guard? Mulder just looks at her with this little smile and says, “Should we be picking out china patterns or what?” Much of the rest of the episode has that grotesque yet light-hearted quality that was perfected in “Humbug,” a Season 2 episode in which nearly all the supporting characters are literally circus freaks. Even the putatively ‘normal’ clients at the fertility clinic are heightened and flattened into caricatures of yuppie self-absorption. There’s a funny little bit where Scully is explaining to Mulder about what she’s found out from the autopsy on Van Blundht’s dead and quicklimed father, and Mulder gets a little antsy and knocks off part of the corpse’s foot. He spends the rest of the conversation trying to stick it back on without her noticing, and ends up just leaving it on the table and hoping she’ll think it fell off on its own.

This is the kind of stuff that makes us believe in the reality of the relationship, that shows you how close they are and how well they’ve gotten to know each other. Which is great…until the episode then asks us to believe that Scully could go back to DC with a fake Mulder and not notice, ever.

OK, we do typically assume that if it looks like a Mulder and talks like a Mulder then it’s a Mulder. But, as they point out earlier on, Scully has dealt with Mulder doppelgangers before, and she knows that Van Blundht is a shape-shifter who has doubled as Mulder a couple times already. Because Gilligan wants the audience to ‘get it,’ he has “Mulder” give himself away with about half a dozen obvious tells (not knowing what an “X-File” is, not knowing how to spell “Federal Bureau of Investigations,” generally not knowing how to conduct himself in Skinner’s office, etc.) which Scully somehow fails to pick up on. Then he comes by with a bottle of wine and she gets drunk with him. When he moves in to kiss her, she looks very puzzled; and from her total lack of reaction one might infer that she’s wondering what’s really going on here, but one might just as easily infer that she’s trying to figure out how to stave Mulder off without making it impossible for them to work together tomorrow. But it’s pretty clear that she’s very surprised to find out that the guy who’s trying to make her is not actually the real Mulder.

It bothered me then; it bothers me actually more now. Thinking about it now, I have come up with this hypothesis about why: The ‘bed trick’ is not just a plausibility problem. It is a patriarchy problem. 

This is perhaps partly because I read a piece written by a guy in the wake of the Isla Vista shootings about the intersection of nerd culture and rape culture. He cited the climactic event of the film Revenge of the Nerds, in which the protagonist uses a Darth Vader costume to have sex with his crush while pretending to be her jock boyfriend, as a prime example: it’s the film’s happy ending, but it’s also basically rape, since the girl was not able to give meaningful consent (since she didn’t know what she was consenting to). He went on to list other boy-nerd films that use similarly improbable fantasy devices to get their nerdy male heroes together with women usually presumed to be out of their league. He may be right that this is a particular thing with boy-nerd culture; but I did sort of want to tell him look, what you’re talking about goes way beyond nerd culture. The bed trick goes all the way up and all the way back, as do various other stratagems whereby men get women who don’t really want them. And the bed trick has always bothered me, no matter how young I was and no matter where I encountered it. I think I now finally understand why.

For one thing, in order for the bed trick to work, you have to believe that sex has nothing to do with intimacy. What kind of sex are these people having, I now ask myself, that the duped partner doesn’t figure out that the other person in the bed is not their husband/wife/lover/beloved? Don’t these people talk to each other? Don’t they make noise? Don’t they take off their clothes and touch each other’s bodies? Evidently not. Van Blundht has the ability to alter his face, his hair, and perhaps the layer of muscle just beneath his skin; but that wouldn’t explain how he could copy a guy who he hasn’t even seen naked so convincingly that his wife wouldn’t know the difference. The bed trick only functions if you assume that two people can have sex without really meeting each other in any way except genitally. Which, who knows, may be how the guys who write this stuff see it. I think most women see it differently.

For another, “Small Potatoes”—like, evidently, Revenge of the Nerds and not unlike, in fact, “The Postmodern Prometheus”—repackages a very old piece of patriarchal bullshit: the idea that rape is OK as long as the victim gets something out of it. Like the mad scientist’s wife in “Prometheus,” most of the women Van Blundht impregnates are desperately trying to get pregnant and having been able to. He tells himself that what he’s doing is OK because he’s giving them something they want: children. Amanda Nelligan definitely does not want children; but Van Blundht gives her something she does want, and which only he can provide: sex with Luke Skywalker. And the resolution comes as Van Blundht is on the verge of giving Scully what many of us have come to believe she wants, which is a Relationship with Mulder. So it doesn’t matter that none of these women were actually consenting to sex with him. They enjoyed the sex and they got pregnant, so where’s the harm? Of course, people other than Van Blundht are a little more critical; but the episode itself doesn’t treat what he’s doing as seriously as (you would hope) it would treat an unambiguous rape. 

But underneath all this, I think, we see a simpler fantasy: I am what women want, whether they know it or not, and if I can only get them to stop being shallow and focusing on physical appearance, they’ll realize that too. Course to do that I might have to get them drunk and lie to them about who I am, but that’s just a little speed bump in the road to mutual happiness. Van Blundht has developed a pickup routine that we see a sample of in that scene in Scully’s apartment; and that perhaps is the most chilling aspect of all this when I stop to think about it. He’s figured out that you can get women to have sex with you by pretending to care about them. Right before moving in on her, he is listening very intently to a long and rambling story Scully’s telling about something that happened to her on prom night—and not only apparently enjoying it, but demonstrating that he’s been paying close enough attention to recall the earlier details. Mulder has never paid this particular kind of attention to her—indeed, so far, whenever Scully’s life outside the X-Files comes up it seems to make him uncomfortable—and Scully tells “him” that she really likes this “new side” of him. And no doubt she does—especially since, as she’s dying, she is probably hungry for a closer relationship with him. But of course all this interest and empathy turns out to be something that Van Blundht is faking in order to get into her pants. And that’s what’s chilling. Any woman who dates men will run into at least one of these guys—the one who says all the right things and does all the right things and is really really really into you as long as he’s trying to get you to have sex with him, and doesn’t mean ANY of it. This is one of the reasons I like Frozen. That moment when Hans reveals his true self must really horrify all the little girls in the audience; but you know what, kids, it’s good you know how these guys operate, so that when you’re a grown-up you will be able to spot a Hans and dispose of him before he gets too close to you.

So that’s why I say this is a good fic spoiled: by representing Scully as capable of being fooled by Van Blundht to this extent, the episode turns her into just another credulous woman waiting to be taken in by a guy who tells her what she wants to hear. When in fact, she is more than that. I can think of ten better ways to end this story. How much better it would be, for instance, to have Scully figure the situation out as soon as Van Blundht makes one of those early mistakes, then play along with him until he gets himself into a compromising position, and then arrest him. If this were MY fic, she would get herself out of this situation. And if it were my fic, it wouldn’t end with Mulder—who, unlike the hero of nerd culture, is outwardly handsome and dashing but inwardly geeky and weird—wistfully envying Eddie Van Blundht’s way with women. 

Which is not to say that it isn’t still worth watching. I love the scene in which Van BLundht gets into Mulder’s apartment and starts acting in front of the mirror, perfecting the moves and the delivery for his new character. Acting about acting, how I always do love it.