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That’s Scully, waving goodbye to Phoebe Green, the brilliant and stark raving mad British…detective? you know they don’t have an FBI…who has flown all the way to DC just to fuck around with her ex-lover, Special Agent Fox Mulder. That little wave-plus-invisible-but-palpable-eyeroll sums up the very best thing about “Fire,” which is Scully’s response to being thrown into the middle of a super-awkward thing between her new partner and his crazy ex. The Scully/Phoebe/Mulder stuff in this episode is good; iit would be better if it had happened a couple seasons later on, when Duchovny’s acting was better and Scully’s character more clearly defined.
Everything else about “Fire” is basically terrible. The attempts to convince us that any of this episode is set in England are particularly laughable. I especially like it that they put the wife in Laura Ashley, and hope that’s gonna convince us that she’s really English. The fire special effects are also lamer than they will ever be again. Scully’s whole work wardrobe looks like they just bought it off the rack from the Jones New York section at Macy’s; nothing she wears in Season 1 ever really fits her. Mulder looks like a child in his huge trenchcoat. He tries to put out a fire by throwing curtains at it. It’s pretty funny.
But as this is an early Chris Carter-written episode, and since Phoebe is obviously an early prototype for the Diana Fowley character, I have come to the conclusion–now that I am less distracted by the terrible stuff–that “Fire” is actually a really important episode in terms of what it reveals about Carter’s original conception of Mulder, Scully, and the Mulder-Scully relationship.
First of all, let me say that no writer will ever handle the Mulder And The Other Woman plot better than “Fire” does. That’s because it’s Season One and we’re not supposed to be shipping Scully and Mulder yet. Carter has Scully reacting to Phoebe the way a friend and colleague would react, instead of the way a Jealous Woman would react–and it’s just so refreshing. Scully accurately determines, on their first meeting, that Phoebe is a hot mess: that gambit with the audiotape demonstrates that Phoebe a) has no boundaries b) has no real repsect for Mulder’s feelings c) likes to fuck with people and d) is a huge drama queen. This makes the discovery that Phoebe is an ex of Mulder’s highly amusing to her…until Mulder actually tells her about his experience of that relationship, during which he makes it clear that he was hurt by her, and that he still feels intimidated by and afraid of her. At that point Scully starts taking it seriously–not because Phoebe is poaching on her territory, but because she’s genuinely concerned about protecting Mulder from whatever it is that Phoebe wants to do with him. While they work the case together, Scully pursues her own line of investigation, which is what eventually identifies the killer.
Which is great. It’s a great episode for Scully and for Anderson, who gets to develop Scully’s snarky side but also gets a chance to demonstrate her loyalty to Mulder. But. Phoebe’s character, and the contrasts drawn in this episode between Phoebe and Scully, really foreshadow the problems Carter will have later on when the Ship finally sets sail.
Basically, Carter is concerned to show in this episode that Scully is better than Phoebe, which, you know, who’s going to argue with that? The problem is that the REASON this episode keeps telling us that Scully is better than Phoebe is that Scully’s interest in Mulder is not sexual, whereas Phoebe’s interest in him is basically nothing but sexual. In other words, it establishes a great gulf between Friendship, which is good, and Sex, which is basically evil.
Phoebe is highly sexualized; sexuality influences all of her interactions with Mulder, and in one of their confrontations she refers to them doing the deed on top of Arthur Conan Doyle’s tombstone back when he was at Oxford (there are all these Sherlock Holmes references, it’s kind of obnoxious in its lack of subtlety, you see she’s a BRITISH detective, that’s why). She’s later caught flirting with the guy they’re supposed to protect, and she goes after Mulder like a regular man-eater. Which means that the rest of Phoebe’s characterization tells you what Chris Carter thinks about sexual women: they’re manipulative, excessive, irresistible, and very bad for the men they play with.
Mulder, meanwhile, is unusually vulnerable and kind of incompetent in this episode, which we are to interpret as a result of his exposure to Phoebe, who’s supposed to be older, wilder, and smarter. When he tells Scully about the relationship he says that “I got in over my head;” and he appears to view Phoebe as a predator who took advantage of his youth and naivete once and has come back to do it again. She deliberately plays on his supposed childhood phobia of fire (which will never be referred to again), and sets him up to fail–which he does, in the Boston hotel scene, by failing to rescue the children and passing out in the hallway overcome by smoke.
Scully is the one who’s by (the shirtless) Mulder’s bedside with a glass of water as he’s recovering from smoke inhalation. She’s actually taking care of someone she cares about, whereas Phoebe obviously got bored and is off doing something else, probably involving flirting with some other guy. This is what makes Scully a good person: she sees Mulder as a human being and treats him with compassion and understanding, instead of running off to flirt with other people or judging him for failing to man up. But, and this is the Chilling Portent of Things To Come, all this is presented as possible precisely because Scully *isn’t* his romantic or sexual partner, and at the moment has no clear ambitions to become one. When this plot is redone in season 5 with Diana Fowley, Scully will have completely lost the ability to be chill about Mulder’s British ex-lovers.
So it shows you that Carter is doing that thing that so many men do, dividing women into Good and Bad and locating sex firmly on the Bad side. Which was going to come back to bite him when he started trying to put his Good Woman into a sexual relationship with Mulder.
It also shows you that Carter really sees Mulder as vulnerable and wounded and kind of pathetic–at the same time as he really identifies with him. It’s this weird ambivalence about Mulder that I think fucked up IWTB and (if the spoilers are to be believed) might also be haunting the revival: Carter WANTS Mulder to have the Good girl, but deep down he doesn’t really believe that Mulder deserves her. He seems really determined to keep him pathetically obsessive and borderline insane, despite the fact that the show continually validates Mulder’s beliefs. This is why he keeps writing scenarios in which Scully almost dumps him (Dreamland, Tithonus, Fight the Future): despite the fact that his ideas about what makes a woman Good require her to demonstrate unswerving loyalty to her partner, he somehow also feels as if it’s wrong for Scully to be throwing herself away on this loser. And I think this explains…but there lie spoilers and speculation.
Anyway. Phoebe gets on her bike and nobody’s happier to see her go than Mulder, at that point. Scully has proved that unlike Phoebe, she really does care about Mulder For Himself, not just for what’s in his pants. Not a bad setup for Beyond the Sea.