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Before watching “Milagro,” I posted the review of it that I wrote up in April of 1999, when the episode originally aired. You will see from that review, if you have the patience to glance at it, that at the tender age of 30 I was able to have some fun with it. I recognized it as another Chris Carter meta episode (CC wrote the teleplay; Shiban and Spotnitz wrote the script, so we can’t blame any of this on ignorance or inexperience) about writing and the question of how much control writers have over their own process and their own characters. And since I had just discovered fanfiction, and still had hopes for my own original fiction, I was very interested in this Stuff About Writing And Being A Writer, and in the episode as an allegory about fanfiction (if we recognize what Padgett’s writing as RPF about Mulder and Scully). Sure, the plot drove me nuts. But it was interesting.

(The plot, incidentally, is basically this: A creepy writer named Padgett becomes fixated on Scully. He moves into the apartment next door to Mulder’s so he can stalk her. He starts writing a novel about her. At about the same time, bodies start turning up around DC with their hearts mysteriously ripped out but their bodies otherwise apparently intact. Scully and Mulder investigate. Padgett accosts Scully in a church and she inexplicably becomes interested enough in him to go into his apartment and have coffee with him. Mulder bursts in and arrests Padgett; he’s read the MS and it contains detailed descriptions of all the killings. They can’t figure out exactly how Padgett’s doing it, though; so Mulder lets him out so they can follow him to the next crime scene. While they’re surveilling him, Padgett has a confrontation with his novel’s male protagonist, The Stranger, who wants to know why he’s been ripping out hearts all over town. The Stranger talks him into changing the ending so that instead of having sex with the Stranger, Scully’s character winds up dead. Padgett finishes it, then goes down to the basement incinerator to burn the novel. While Mulder is down there waving a gun at him, the Stranger is ripping Scully’s heart out upstairs. She shoots at him; it doesn’t stop him, but Mulder runs upstairs to help, and Padgett burns the MS. The burning of the MS causes the Stranger to disappear, leaving Scully’s heart intact. She hangs onto Mulder, sobbing, while Padgett dies in hte basement, his heart beating in his outstretched hand.)

Re-viewing it again at 45, I have this to add: 

This episode makes me angry.

There are episodes that piss me off because they’re technically bad (*cough* “Alpha” *cough*) or because of the irresponsible Othering and monstrification of nonwhite people (*cough* “El Mundo Gira” *cough* “Teiko” *cough* “Trickster” *cough* ah fuck it basically any episode that features people of color *cough* plus that pick-up basketball game at the beginning of “One Son” *cough* seriously what the fuck was that *cough*), or because the characterization is off or the premise is ridiculous. 

This is different.

Because basically this episode is about how male writers relate to their female characters. And what it says about that is so sick and creepy that you really kind of wish you didn’t know it. Because with the way things are, most of the female characters that are out there in TV and film for us to identify with and want to be and love are created by male authors…and boys, when it comes to why you really made them and what in your heart of hearts you think they’re really for, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.

All right. So. Let me try and rhyme off the things about this episode that I wish I could unsee.

First of all, Padgett is a really bad writer. Let’s forget about plot and characterization and all that for the moment. His prose, itself, is terrible. It’s so engorged with its own self-importance that it’s just painful to listen to. The fact that he is a crap writer makes everything that happens in this episode a hundred times more insulting than it would otherwise be. Because Padgett is given quite a bit of power over Scully in this episode. Now that would be properly chilling if Padgett were actually a literary genius, and his control over her was something created by that strange magical ability that great writers have to make imaginary things become real. But because Padgett is a self-deluded hack, it is rage-honing, rather than frightening, to see Carter, Shiban and Spotnitz give him the kind of power over Scully that he has in this episode. Because it implies that ANY man who sits down at a typewriter–whether he’s good at it or not–has the power and the privilege of making whatever woman he’s obsessed with do what he wants her to do.

The episode validates Padgett’s delusions of power by making Scully behave in ways that are outrageously out of character. The first instance of this that prompted a howl of rage from me was the scene where he meets her in the church, and she just stands there listening to Padgett go off on a five-minute soliloquy which would send any woman with any sense running for the exit after the first sentence. But that’s nowhere near as rage-honing as the voiceover explaining that she was “flattered” by this maniac’s interest in her and starting to fantasize about having sex with him. And bad as that is, it’s even worse to see her fall for his creepy anonymous love-letter trick and come to his apartment to return the milagro, then go into it and have coffee with him, sitting on his bed even though she mentions that she’s really not comfortable with that. And then it also inflames my ventricles to see her defending him to Mulder when she must know damn well that not only these murders but her own behavior are mysteries to which his manipulation is the key.

So either Padgett really does have some kind of magical writerly power that allows him to control Scully, or the team that wrote this episode really does believe in the bullshit that Padgett slings about how this smart analytical scientist professional thing is a facade she puts on so she can be taken seriously by her male colleagues, and that what she REALLY wants but alas! will never have as long as she persists with this detached analytical persona thing, is to be fucked by a creepy stranger whose every interaction with her sets off WHOLE SCREAMING CHOIRS of alarm bells.

And at that point, one cannot avoid asking oneself the question: Is this what all the regular writers for this show–and so far, they are all men–really want? To be the creepy stranger who gets to fuck Scully? I mean for us, the women watching, this episode is definitely a nightmare. But one starts to get the creeping sense that for the writers, it’s a fantasy. 

And then one has to wonder: what does it mean that the only ways Padgett can imagine ending this novel are a) fucking Scully and b) killing her? Oh, and the Stranger loves ending #2. Killing Scully will make this novel “perfect." 

Seriously? Is this what you guys want from the women you write? Either let me fuck you or let me kill you? Because…because…that’s kind of evil. And yet, there is actually so much goddamn evidence of these desires in popular culture produced by men that I kind of don’t even want to stand her virtually talking you people right now.

But I have to, don’t I, because I love her. I love Scully too. But for me, you know, it’s different. I want different things for her. I want her to live, and grow, and become awesome, and if the thing with Mulder comes to incorporate sex then so be it as long as it doesn’t interfere with any of the rest of that, but if they stay friends, that’s OK with me. I don’t think Scully is "lonely.” Or let me rephrase: I don’t think she’s SO fucking lonely that she would be easy prey for the first asshole who makes a pass at her, or that she would use that asshole’s interest in her to make Mulder jealous. I don’t think she’s uncomfortable with who she is or that her life as a professional is empty because it prevents her from being goopy and dewy-eyed around her colleagues. I think respect is kind of rewarding in and of itself, and far more precious to many of us than the kind of sexual interest she gets from Padgett. 

You made this character that I love…and THIS is what you do with her. This. You fuckers.

And you know what the rage-honingest part of it is?

I’ve been talking about how Scully would never give this guy the time of day if she weren’t being mind-controlled. But in fact, I know, from my own experience and that of others close to me, that in fact women who are just as smart and self-driven as she is DO put up with creepy shit from men that makes them uncomfortable because they’re afraid to do anything confrontational, and DO get themselves into obviously inadvisable relationships because they feel some kind of pressure to have A Man. The kind of control Padgett exerts over her is exerted over ALL women in this culture, all the time; and it has far more power over us than it should. Just as the kind of craptastic woman-slicing serial killer novel that Padgett’s writing–the novel the episode’s writers think is so good that it actually endowed its protagonist with life–exerts far more power than it should over our own sense of self and society, far more power than (on the strength of its actual literary merit) it deserves.

In my own original fiction, I am realizing, there are actually a number of moments at which a female character winds up in conversation with the woman who created her. And what I notice, going back over these scenes in my mind, is that the women who create these other women do not treat them the way Padgett treats Scully, or the way Carter/Shiban/Spotnitz treats her in their writing of the episode. What they want for their female characters is happiness, success, true love if it’s out there for them, but above all growth and flourishing and going forth into the world to be their bad selves. Even in my fanfic I have a thing for getting female characters who are isolated in the canon universe into contact with each other so they can help each other out. Obviously I want something different from my characters than Padgett wants, or than Chris Carter at this moment appears to want. Maybe this is why so many male gatekeepers think so many women writers are Doing It Wrong.

Anyway. Christ almighty. Thank God THAT’S over. And yet I have a feeling I will never quite get the taste of that episode out of my mouth. 

So, “Milagro” is next in the rewatch. Before I see it again, here’s the review I wrote up the night it originally aired. Since the episode is really metafiction about writers and characters, I did it as a panel discussion including me and several characters I’d created for various kind of fiction that I was writing. Ophidia is a self-conscious Mary Sue introduced in some veeeeeery old fanfic. Altaria is Ophidia’s partner. Theamh and Lythril are from an origianl fantasy series that I once believed I would publish one day. You will also see that I had but newly discovered a thing called “fanfiction.” Enjoy.

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MILAGRO

Since this episode is all about metanarratives, I’m gonna do a meta review.

PLAIDDER: Good evening, and welcome to “Women On.” Today we’re going to be discussing last night’s metafictional X-Files episode. Here to give us her insights on the fanfiction angle is Ophidia Varegia…

OPHIDIA: Good evening.

PLAIDDER: And here to articulate Mrs. Plaidder’s viewpoint is Ophidia’s partner Altaria…Tarey, thank you for coming.

ALTARIA: I’m delighted to be here.

PLAIDDER: And please welcome to the program our special guest Theamh ni hUlnach, all the way from Women on Fire…(OPHIDIA and ALTARIA clap encouragingly; THEAMH looks around at the cameras and crew with some suspicion) Theamh, thanks for coming.

THEAMH: Who are these people, and what am I doing here?

PLAIDDER: I figure since you practice a religion based on the power of language to change reality, you should weigh in on this…

THEAMH: All right, that’s half the answer, now–

PLAIDDER: Ladies, let’s start with the premise. Good idea? Big mistake?

OPHIDIA: What is this, a rhetorical question? We all know how you love this meta stuff, don’t we, ladies? (Nods and murmurs from the other panelists) And especially since they have recently done a pretty good job with episodes that play around with narrative and the distinction between reality and fiction–

ALTARIA: Like the one on the boat, and the Smoking Man’s memoirs episode, and “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”–

OPHIDIA: –so I think the premise has big time potential, especially given the fact that these writers and producers *know* there are hundreds of viewers out there trying to do the exact same thing to Mulder and Scully that Paget was doing.

PLAIDDER: Well, not *exactly* the same thing.

OPHIDIA: No, but you can see the entire premise as a commentary on fanfiction. Here is this guy who’s trying to write a novel based on Scully and Mulder, and thinking that he can control both of them–especially, that he can manipulate Scully into having sex with who he wants her to have sex with, which in this case is the Stranger, a.k.a. Mary Sue. And on that level there are some nice touches. For instance, he invents a gruesome serial murderer, not because he’s really that interested in serial killing but because he wants to meet Scully–just as fanfiction writers invent these paranormal murder plots partly because they’re interested but mostly to get the chance to work with her. In fact, the apparent motivelessness of the murders aligns this plot with a lot of X-Files fanfiction, where the only point of the murder plot is to bring Scully and Mulder together.

THEAMH: Does she always talk this much?

OPHIDIA: Hey, I don’t want to hear it from you. I would kill to be a first-person narrator.

PLAIDDER: Returning to the topic–

OPHIDIA: And the other nice thing is the balance between the power of “real life” and the power of the story, as regards Scully’s character. He can’t write the end he wants because it involves what fanfiction writers call “character rape”–making Scully do things that she would never in a million years do.

ALTARIA: If I might get a word in–

OPHIDIA: Of course.

ALTARIA: This right there is my entire problem. I think the whole episode was about character rape from start to finish.

OPHIDIA: But you only watched the first ten minutes.

ALTARIA: That is because I cannot stand watching Scully get stalked, and that’s obviously all that this episode was about. The entire thing was nothing but an excuse to put her in danger and expose her to this sexualized and objectifying violence. That’s why it sucked.

OPHIDIA: Don’t you think “sucked” is going a little far? I mean, you gotta like the premise–

ALTARIA: Premise, schmemise. I’m sorry, but this isn’t a serious attempt to explore all those meta issues that Plaidder finds so interesting–it’s not about writing at all, it’s just about sexploitation.

PLAIDDER: Would you want to elaborate on that–

THEAMH: Well of course it’s not about writing.

PLAIDDER: Come again?

THEAMH: I can see why you expected me to like this episode, seeing as the thing is based on the central premise of shri–which is that if you can describe something in a way that tells the truth about it, you can make it happen. But you see in order to have this power you have to actually be a *good* writer, not just some creepy guy with no furniture. (Applause from the other side of the set)

OPHIDIA: You go, girl!

THEAMH: Thank you. I think that what–Altaria? (ALTARIA nods) is saying about it being sexploitation has to do with the quality of the writing. This man is not a dementedly intense genius–he’s a hack. “She brushed an errant strand of Titian hair behind her ear”?

OPHIDIA: (chiming in) Yeah, somewhere in L.A. there’s a drug store that’s all out of Harlequin romances.

PLAIDDER: Oh come on, Theamh, you brush your hair behind your ears all the time–

THEAMH: My hair gets in my face, what can I tell you. (As PLAIDDER is about to interrupt) Oh, I know it’s a convention to indicate that I’m pausing before answering or paying attention to something else–and frankly, if you could use it less often I don’t think anyone would complain–

OPHIDIA: But “Titian”?

THEAMH: What is that, some synonym for “dyed”?

OPHIDIA: No–Titian was an Italian painter who apparently liked paiting redheaded women.

THEAMH: So he’s seen too many of this guy’s paintings?

OPHIDIA: That or he’s read too many romance novels. “Titian” is one of those cliches–women in books like that have Titian hair like they have lithe, slim bodies or full, soft lips.

ALTARIA: It goes with all that bullshit about how Scully’s hard and cold on the outside but underneath she’s just a smoldering fire of passion and surrender waiting to be lit by the first guy who takes an interest. That’s what I mean about character rape. If a man comes up to you in a church and starts telling you he’s been obsessed with you for a way long time now, that’s *not* a turn-on. That does not say “at last, the man has come who can make me a complete woman,” it says, “I need to talk to someone about a temporary restraining order.”

PLAIDDER: OK, I’ll give you that–but wasn’t some of the point of this that this guy had limited power to alter reality? Not enough to get her to actually have sex with him, but enough to make her talk to him twice?

ALTARIA: It’s still character rape, and I still hate it.

OPHIDIA: And then Mulder–“a Hegelian act of self-justification”? Does this guy even know who Hegel is?

PLAIDDER: PRobably he’s remembering back to Philosophy 117–

OPHIDIA: “Expeditiously violating the fourth amendment”? This is one of those people who thinks that the way to be a good writer is to prove that your vocabulary is bigger than everyone else’s. He’s a self-important pain in the ass who thinks affectation is equivalent to talent.

THEAMH: Exactly.

PLAIDDER: What affectation?

OPHIDIA: Who composes on a typewriter any more?

PLAIDDER: Well, if he can’t afford furniture, probably he can’t afford a laptop.

OPHIDIA: That’s bullshit. If he’s that into writing he pays for that first–before he plunks down a deposit for that apartment, which has gotta be in one of the DC area’s pricier buildings. The typewriter is just there because it’s part of this lingering romantic idea of the Genius Writer Up in his Garret banging away on his portable typewriter and living on coffee and bourbon. He doesn’t think he can be a Real Writer unless he’s typing out a manuscript on real paper–it’s like Jack Kerouac and his friggin’ scrolls, or that asshole quoted in your “Writer’s Guide” about how he only uses rag paper and a fountain pen because he thinks it’s the only way–

PLAIDDER: It’s true, the episode perpetuates those myths about creativity, including the one that people who write have no real life, which frankly I get sick of seeing repeated–

ALTARIA: Especially that now instead of thinking of the Genius Writer Up in his Garret as merely self-destructive and suicidal, he’s outer-directed. We’ve now merged the whole Shelley/Keats/Poe/Hemingway myth of the brilliant, doomed writer with the “quiet loner” serial killer, and the result is this mess. A starving writer who’s homicidal as well as suicidal.

PLAIDDER: Yes, well, speaking of homicide, what about this Stranger guy?

OPHIDIA: Oh PLEASE.

PLAIDDER: You gotta admit, they did work on the symbolism with the whole ripping-out-the-heart thing, and bringing in all the Sacred Heart religious imagery–

LYTHRIL: Well, I’m not letting *that* go by.

THEAMH: Who let her in here?

PLAIDDER: Not me.

LYTHRIL: You call this gleachinai a villain? What is this moron *doing* with all of those hearts?

PLAIDDER: I don’t think that’s what the writers were really interested–

LYTHRIL: Motiveless malignancy is boring as hell. It gives us all a bad name. This guy rips out three young, strong, healthy hearts and just *throws them out?*

PLAIDDER: Well, see, I think the point is that this guy is more interested in the act of heart-ripping than in the actual hearts themselves–

LYTHRIL: See, this is why the Dark One won’t let men do magic. Murder is expensive. You don’t go around ripping people’s hearts out unless you plan to *do* something with them.

THEAMH: You don’t go around ripping people’s hearts out, period.

LYTHRIL: Says you.

PLAIDDER: But they do address that at the end, with that conversation between him and the Stranger–

LYTHRIL: Which is another sign that this man is nothing but a pathetic amateur.

PLAIDDER: The Stranger or Paget?

LYTHRIL: Both. He murders people without knowing why he does it? That’s weak. Power comes from knowing who you are and *choosing* what you do. Sure, I’m evil, but that’s because I know evil is going to get me what I want.

THEAMH: You’re evil because you were made that way, Lythril.

LYTHRIL: Tarbhfnaa. Characters choose their authors, isn’t that right?

PLAIDDER: No, that’s a crock of pseudo-Freudian bullshit.

LYTHRIL: Of course you’re going to say that. You wouldn’t like to think it’s me actually driving the story, would you?

OPHIDIA: (who has had her hand up for a long time) Hel-loooo…

PLAIDDER: All right, you’re next. Listen, Lythril, it’s true enough that there are elements of your character that go way back with me. And it’s also true that I probably don’t have a lot of control over that stuff or where it comes from. But it was my choice to make you, specifically, out of all that. Just like it was my choice to put you into a universe where there are a lot of women powerful enough to take you on.

THEAMH: Damn right.

OPHIDIA: Whereas this guy obviously is nothing *but* the Stranger. And that’s just creepy.

ALTARIA: It’s all just another male fantasy about taking a strong woman and turning her into a pile of mush, either by firing up her sexual boiler–

OPHIDIA: –figured oh so subtly by the basement incinerator, which as I remember made another appearance in the *other* episode where Scully is inexplicably attracted to a creepy stranger who’s clearly bad news–

ALTARIA:–or by reducing her to a murder victim. Which is what happens at the end of the episode. OK, Scully gets to not have sex with him, and to get off a few gunshots off at the Stranger. But she still ends up lying there bloody on the floor, and she still ends up crying hysterically into Mulder’s blazer at the end.

OPHIDIA: Yeah, I don’t like the message, really. Because what it says is, “OK, we need to get them together, but hte only way to do it is to make Scully realize that she really *is* vulnerable, and she really *is* womanly.” Bleeeeeeeeeeech.

THEAMH: But vulnerability *is* part of love.

LYTHRIL: Well, you would know about that, wouldn’t you.

THEAMH: Shut up, Lythril.

ALTARIA: I understand what you’re saying, Theamh, but you come out of a story written by a woman for women. This is a whole different deal.

PLAIDDER: Which brings me back to the character rape question. See, I think you may be being too hard on the writers here. Scully doesn’t often act like this, granted. But Scully isn’t like you guys. She’s a corporate character, created by a whole slew of writers, producers, and actors. You can’t expect her to be as coherent as you are.

ALTARIA: No, but I think we might reasonably expect that she would know a stalker when she sees one.

OPHIDIA: And not use him as an excuse to get to Mulder.

PLAIDDER: Well, folks, we’re out of time. Thanks to everyone for coming. Tune in next week, where our topic will be “David Duchovny, Writer/Director: Should He Keep The Day Job?”

[credits]

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I miss the WOF characters. It’s been so long. Don’t miss Ophidia so much; she was definitely very closely tied to my original discovery of fanfiction. Haven’t missed “Milagro” much either…but it’s always interesting to see what jumps out at you on rewatch. Either I will like it better…or I will hate it worse!