Post: It seems we've finally gotten back to a 'real' X-File. The story was gripping, the science, as has already been noted, was a lot more plausible than it has been on occasion, and Mulder and Scully worked together in a way we've seen too seldom this season. I have to admit that I felt a palpable shift in things when it became apparent that the object of Rawls' search was not the robbery money or vengeance, but the very real--and very strong pull--of family ties. What had gone along as an interesting (and not overly implausible) story was suddenly vaulted into the realm of real life. Family, after all, is one of our most basic experiences as human beings. The yearning for connection and fulfillment always seems to be there. 

Mulder and Scully do, as Hobrock has pointed out, become almost the vehicles of discovery rather than large players in this drama, though not in the two-dimensional sense we see in an ep like *Sanguinarium. In addition to making the discoveries that keep the story moving, they become witnesses to a tragic drama cast in very distinctive shades of gray. Here is real life at it's most sticky and troublesome--people with motives we can understand and even sympathize with, but whose methods we cannot support. Even Mulder, for all the tragedy and coldness of his own childhood, is left nonplussed by a scenario of family incomprehensible from his own experience, for we have entered the realm of seat-of-your-pants culture, a real (and well-portrayed here) element of society that flourishes in places most of you probably haven't had to venture, and which stands our most cherished concepts about humanity on their heads. 

These are people with real feelings and real aspirations caught up in a sub-culture, who exist on the fringe of the law and on the fringe of subsistence where the first, instinctive rule is to do whatever is necessary for your survival, and then to try to get along, to keep your head above water. I know the fringe-of-subsistence part from experience; the fringe-of-the-law part I've seen in the lives of real people I've known. Most of them have been born into this culture, but some have fallen into it through various turns of (mis)fortune. They yearn to succeed (or, if they've been beaten down long enough, to merely survive.) They want the best for their kids, though this may devolve into sharing their drugs with their kids to help them escape the pain of harsh lives. These are people who shop at the convenience store every day, paying inflated prices because they never have enough money at one time to shop for more than today. These are people who frequent jails at visiting hours to see relatives or lovers, or who live in fear of relatives or lovers getting out of jail, or who sit in holding cells themselves, greeting every new arrival as if it were a class reunion because they all already know each other; they're all part of the same subculture, the only way of life they know, one that carries the price of getting caught and hauled in from time to time. 

Often the portrayals of fringe groups on TV is stereotypical, but the people in this episode--Rawls, June, Jackie--all came straight out of real life. Rawls the man who would follow another driver 62 miles to slam a fence board through his skull sincerely wants a chance to know his son. June, caught up in a self-confessed string of bad choices, wants a chance to live a normal life with chintz curtains and a man she doesn't live in fear of, though she buys her dream with stolen money and becomes 'Aunt June' to her son in order to do so. Jackie, struggling valiantly to provide a good home for her nephew, nonetheless lives in fear--not only from Rawls, but, judging from the quickness of her reactions when she first hears a noise in the house, from others in her life as well. 

We all picture life as something more than what these people experience; this fact in itself is what drives June to take the stolen money and use it to build a new, more secure life. It drives Rawls, for all his history of violence, to determinedly seek out the child he hopes (in his own childlike way) will accept him as a father. But harsh reality--and these characters' own harsh histories--intrude and turn the plans awry. Here, in all its horror, is the kind of human complexity we hope never to have to face. Certainly Robert, June's boyfriend, the symbol of conventional, middle-of-the-lane humanity, can't look away fast enough. "Also known as?" he echoes as soon as he realizes Scully is looking for the woman he *thought* he knew. He is left open-mouthed, feeling tricked. He hardly waits to hear June's side of the story. It is as if what he knew of her from personal experience no longer holds any weight; the only thing that matters now is her past, full of failings and mistakes. He only wants to leave this unwanted confrontation, to not be contaminated by it. To get away and forget it ever took place. 

June has made a new life for herself, but it has not disengaged her from her old one. She lives with the consequences of her choice to involve herself with Rawls. She lives in fear of him finding out about their son, Trevor. Though she has her chintz curtains and her tea pot and her nice house and a boyfriend who seems to appreciate her, she still carries with her the instincts she learned as a part of seat-of-the-pants (hereafter abbreviated SOTP) society. She knows that hiding is a part of daily life. She knows when Rawls is released that he will come looking for her. She knows--not just speculates but knows from her own past experience--that if he takes Trevor away, the boy will get hurt, so she does the only thing she knows will be effective: she runs Rawls over with her car. (You may object that she could have gotten a court order, that she could have fled to a shelter, that she--in essence--could have availed herself of the system. But people who live by SOTP know one thing if nothing else: that the system will not protect you, it's up to you to protect yourself. It's a society closely akin to a state of war, and battle tactics prove to be the ones that work.) 

Rawls himself is a study in contrasts. For almost every brutal thing he does, there is a normal--or gentle--counterpoint. He nails the other con's hand to the wall, and yet he seems to fall back on basic human rights in his plea not to be put into the box as punishment. He is harsh with June for hiding the boy ("my son" he says, as if Trevor is his property, like a car or a motorcycle), and yet he tries to be gentle to the boy. He speaks gently to Jackie, thanking her for the care she's taken with the boy, and yet when she attacks him he wastes no time in disabling her. As viewers--and as people--we want to be able to fit characters (as well as the people we meet) into either the 'good' box or the 'bad' box, or at least the 'potentially good' box, but Rawls, like many human beings, quite simply defies categorization. He is a tightly woven mix of contradictions. In the end he is, as are all the rest of the characters in this unsettling drama, highly human. Like them, he is fighting for his physical and emotional life. And as with many members of the SOTP culture, his methods doom him to a tragic end. 

There is no happy ending here. Jackie has been physically abused and traumatized. Rawls is dead. June will be incarcerated for what she has done and her son will have to live with having been a witness to the incident. The tragedy would be less unsettling if it didn't play itself out day after day in real society, but the fact is that we see this dynamic played out nearly every evening on the ten o'clock news. 

Mulder and Scully enable the story with their investigations. Scully--again--shows herself to be open to possibilities she never would have entertained in the past. "Say you were right..." has replaced "You can't possibly mean..." Mulder continues to demonstrate his unwillingness to argue with her this season; standing outside the car, in an obvious standoff of views regarding the evidence, he says, "Okay, we still agree on who he's looking for..." As Littljoe has pointed out, we may learn something significant about Scully here by her remark about "at the risk of further ridicule..." If this is her take on Mulder's attitude, it's not surprising that she doesn't open up more often (though I could only see Mulder's 'dear diary' remark as an in-joke spoofing shippy fanfic--in the same way we have the remarks in *Jose Chung's about the one agent being so 'completely expressionless' and the other's hair being 'too red' as a barb redirected at audience reaction.) 

In the end there is nothing our agents can do to stop the relentless sequence of events. Scully shelters Trevor as best she can and Mulder is left to turn off June's car after the damage is done. And the audience is left, with Mulder, open-mouthed in shock, wondering (as the Montagues and the Capulets might have) just what could have been done to stop this tragedy. This one has no easy answers. June voices the question, "What did he want?" and Mulder answers, "Maybe another chance." June herself had wanted another chance, and it had failed twice, first (passively) when her 'cover' was blown with Robert and again (actively) when she ran down Rawls. We can assume that any further chance Rawls might have had would have eventually ended in the kind of tragedy he had already instigated. 

The scenario we are left with, as the one we face in real life, is not a pretty one and seems not to have any easy solutions. But perhaps as audience members who have been touched by the questions raised here, we will think a little harder, or not turn away quite as quickly, when presented with the manifestations of the SOTP culture that lives all around us. The solution to every problem begins with the desire to *understand*. 

In closing I'm going to copy in a poem of sorts I wrote one time while sitting in the hallway of a probation department with a friend. The atmosphere is something you probably couldn't imagine if you haven't been there. 

INSTITUTIONAL STILL LIFE (still life...) 

They've seen it all, these walls, these floors,
these ceiling tiles with the little holes
like the upper atmosphere of the
schools of thirty years ago,
breathing in the heat and the sweat
and the tight frustration of
I-know-this-game-like-the-back-of-my-hand
and the stale smoke wafting upward
in the institutional draft.

The walls are bland and beige
and the people who lean against them wear
scruffy hair and poor grammar and the
bottoms of their pants are frayed,
or they're decked out in their best 
acid-washed jeans and attitudes
and their children behave themselves and play
restless-quietly, like in church,
while the parents fill out the 
white sheets and the yellow sheets and play
hurry-up-and-wait.

The people who work here stride by smiling and
peppy like recreation directors on some cruise ship, or
peer down on the hurry-up-and-waiters
as if through Aunt Martha's judgmental glasses
when she sees that little scamp Johnny-
who-everybody-knows-will-never-amount-to-
anything-but-trouble.
They've seen it all before, the workers and these walls;
they've seen all the people and they've 
heard every story and they're
all the same--always the same--and they know
they'll never amount to anything
but trouble.

The floor is beige under the high tops and
the work boots and the patent leather sandals
and the old worn nondescript shoes with
the little holes starting, streaked
in shades of tedium. Tiles like
the inlaid tiles of bureaucracy with the
wide mortar borders where everything of significance
slips through the cracks.
The benches are hard glossy wood, straight pieces
put together in a basic design,
no art, no curves, no accommodation, but hey,
they weren't built for comfort--
they were built to be benches.

And the plain and the scruffy and 
the painted and worn and different people
sit on the benches and fill out forms and
sit waiting and waiting and 
they talk quietly and respect the space
of the ones they don't know.
But the benches know it all.
They know the restless worry of every body that 
shifts on them in prolonged discomfort, every
story traded about friends in common who
spend time here, every cigarette
that tries to stave off the hidden edginess, 
every hard glare, every fuck-you, every
furious grip on the bench's edge
that are launched from their moorings
deadly and silent and almost undetectable.

The halls are cleaned at night, the benches
are cleaned and the floors are stripped
and waxed and polished and it never 
removes the buildup, it only grows and grows,
narrowing the hallway, making the passage more precarious,
until one day someone gets stuck solid
in the narrowness of it
and the people who never come here
look at it and marvel--that person 
jam-stuck in the middle of a big vacant hallway--

And they shake their heads in amazement
and wonder how it happened.

-LT

( poem copyright 1990)