My review of Small Lives Awake by Jesemie's Evil Twin

[whitewriter]

located here via the wayback machine

The story is a domestic tale of S inviting M to a week away at her brother Charlies for Thanksgiving.

The story starts off with Mulder/ Scully friendship that turns softly into smoldering RST.

There's a small town old timey mini x-file included ; and deliciously painful conversations that sound so life like and true to character.

I especially like the one where Scully is reminiscing about past Thanksgivings at her mother's place and has a terse conversation with Bill.


Oh and the prose:

Plugging the nozzle into the tank hole gives her a
penetrating sense of visceral manliness. She's taken
to swaggering around the cramped for the holidays
Stop-n-Saves. The parking lots are always full of
sales-flyer-tumbleweed and rolling plastic supersize
soft drink cups.

Much love for this fic. Thanks wendelah1 for the rec!

I'm digging around JET's gossamer page. There's only one on there that's long-ish that I'm thinking to try next.

Comments

[wendelah1]

You asked about "Paper Hearts." There is a character limit for comments at LJ so I've put my reply here.

So. I wrote my own review of this episode back in 2007-ish, before the second movie, but I can't find it. My tags are a mess. So here is the review my husband wrote for my 201 days of x-files tumblr (before the reboot series I started rewatching the series and posted my reviews there). It covers the ground quite well.

To help me get caught up, my Resident Troll offered to do a review for me. He was going to do “El Mundo Giro,” which is pretty troll-worthy, but then we watched “Paper Hearts.”

“Let me tackle this one instead,” he soothed, after I burst into tears and started cursing at Vince Gilligan midway through the episode.

I hate “Paper Hearts.” So I took him up on it.

***

Despite what my wife might think, there are things I like about The X-Files. The interaction of the main characters is sometimes compelling and often charming. Gillian Anderson is a remarkable actress, and while David Duchovny can barely act at all, he is good at delivering sardonic one-liners. Darin Morgan brought the show two classic TV episodes, “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” and “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space,” and I am also fond of “Bad Blood.” As you might have guessed, I think the show is most successful in its “screwball comedy” episodes, where the implausibility that haunts the entire series really doesn’t matter.

Implausibility! That word can serve as my transition to the wretched turd called “Paper Hearts,” an episode that takes everything I hate about The X-Files to another level.

The episode suffers from one of the most preposterous plots imaginable, an unrelenting barrage of insults to the viewer’s intelligence. Mulder is turned into a character more insane than the serial killer he is obsessed with. One might argue that in the series as a whole, Mulder’s routinely excessive risk-taking makes sense in the face of the little gray men’s plot to annihilate humanity (no matter how absurd and self-contradictory that plot might be). But the absurd risks that Mulder takes in “Paper Hearts,” in order to investigate a cold case whose solution can accomplish nothing but to renew the pain of a few parents, are the work of a madman. Based on his personal need-to-know, Mulder releases John Lee Roche, a serial child killer, and, without any back-up, takes him to an empty house in the middle of nowhere. He then spends the night in a motel, again without another agent present, handcuffing the killer to the bed frame, relying on his ability to stay awake—even though he knows he has fallen asleep without warning a couple of times in the last few days. Mulder should not only lose his badge but should serve a long prison term for his reckless endangerment of the public. Of course, this is not just the normal “Spooky Mulder” of the average episode, but Stupidest-Agent-in-the-History-of-the-World Mulder. The character deserves better from the writer, the (at this point in his career, anyway) incompetent Vince Gilligan.

But for sheer lunacy, nothing matches the behavior of the judge who agrees to the murderer’s release. It’s impossible enough that a low-ranking agent could under any circumstances arrange for the release of a serial killer on his own, without his bosses signing off, by merely contacting a judge. But Scully tells us that Mulder convinced the judge that there was an emergency. What possible emergency could there be? Perhaps Mulder lied to the judge to get the prisoner released (another serious crime), but in any case the judge was himself a lunatic, willing to take Mulder’s word for everything and apparently unconcerned that his release of a serial killer could be bad for his career, let alone his country. But Gilligan is determined to throw credibility to the winds in order to put Mulder through hell and get the child-killer alone with another child.

This disaster of a plot is used to manipulate the emotions of the characters and audience. In fact, Vince Gilligan exhibits the same personality traits as the mass-murderer, manipulating the audience in ways precisely parallel to the ways that the mass-murderer manipulates Mulder. Gilligan’s cynicism is almost as astonishing as his incompetence.

And I don’t even have time to discuss the routine X-File-style absurdities, such as Mulder’s apparently psychic connection with the murderer, which assumes that they quite literally got inside each other’s heads.

The cast, director, and cinematographer do their best to salvage this disaster, and Tom Noonan is skillful at making Roche as hatable as possible. But not even one of Duchovny’s better performances can make up for the shameful falsity of this episode.

tldr; The script is a shameless, cynical manipulation of the audience's emotions, its implausibility an insult to the viewers' intelligence.

“Paper Hearts” is an impossible episode for me to watch. What Mulder does is so reckless, so selfish and unthinking, that it makes me want to run out of the room. His pain at never knowing who the final victim was, his fear that he would never be sure that it wasn’t his sister, is unbearable for me to witness.

[whitewriter]

Ah. I get it. You couldn't suspend reality for the episode.

I remember it well (having rewatched it last year) - and whilst I have liked a few cop procedurals in my time (X-files being my fave) - and also; least by the book, so to speak of any of them - I guess I manage to suspend my disbelief for most of it. He does act like an incompetent ass for the whole episode (which honestly: I never really noticed it in that way until I read your review)- Lazy writing: the authors placed all their focus on ensuring we all felt that emotional connection about M and his sister and that Le Roche could have been what happened to her
(etc.) more so than the whole hello Mulder: your an FBI agent, with responsibilities beyond your own personal life.

I feel like this (Mulder's reckless abandon, unreliability, single-minded focus) has come up in a (recently read) fanfic or two about why S had reservations about starting a relationship with M. -- but the authors (in my opinion)aren't usually very good at articulating it very well. They focus more on his addiction to work and the "cause" rather than specific personality traits. I suppose; in most times the focus is on the outcome (both on the show, and in fanfic).

Sure, he went to Antarctica - but he brought back Scully.
Sure, he killed the DOD guy - and pretended to be dead for a few days to smoke out the truth -- but he got the cure for Scully.
-- and going to the ?? some mountain in Canada- [had to look that up on wikipedia] -- to look at the frozen alien body - since when did the FBI have jurisdiction in Canada?

This is probably why the x-files was so good when I was 13.

I was verryyyyy naieve about anything. Rewatch it in my 30s... and I was yelling at the screen for all the hilarious things (all medical related though- The cop stuff washes over me) I never noticed. Like Mulder laying on a bed "on ecmo" (you can see his face he's not ventilated)- or this scene from, I think its Biogenesis https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ylfjui07t2cau8/Screen%20Shot%202020-09-07%20at%207.01.48%20am.png

I guess that's why X-files is so ripe for fanfiction. The show missed left so many things open whilst also simultaneously allowing an "anything goes" attitude.

S10 and 11 were ass though. I just couldn't get past how so unlike the original series it was - everything was just wrong, and therefore unenjoyable.