DeadAlive: Off the Top of My Head (SPOILERS) (April 1, 2001) Caution: spoiler for next week's ep (based on the trailer) is in the "Etc." section. DEADALIVE (8ABX15): In a nutshell: Mulder's dead! No, he's alive! The story dragged for me, but the price of admission for this ep was MORE than worth it for those last two minutes. What I liked: - Mrs. Scully! And the Gunmen! So what if they didn't speak. :) - GA's performance throughout. Is this woman spectacular, or what? I was thrilled from her closed eyes in the teaser to her tears at the end. Her desperation when she first met Skinner at the hospital, before she saw Mulder, was a joy to view. Great, great, great job all around from her. - "Was... IS my partner." Whee! - Krycek! Being evil! Whee! - Scully's incredibly emotional "Hi!" when Mulder woke up. Just perfect. What I didn't like: - Is it just me, or was the word "truly" overused in the teaser? It was getting damn distracting. - Scully WAITED for Doggett to come out of Mulder's room when she first got to the hospital? She didn't just charge in there? Can someone explain this to me? It didn't look like she was in the middle of an argument with Skinner when Doggett walked out. I mean, even if Pregnant!Partner!Scully could be convinced to wait, surely Doctor!Scully could not. I wanted to see the "maybe they can deny me access as his partner, but not as his doctor" Scully from TSE/Amor Fati. - Mulder's "Who are you?" joke seemed out of place to me. Maybe it would have worked better if it had been followed with "had you big time." (How did Mulder know it was April Fools' Day? ) What's got me puzzled: - Timestamp, please? There's snow on the ground in Raleigh. Three months later the sun is rising at 6:41 a.m. in Washington DC (the 5:35 a.m. timestamp in the Doggett/Kersh scene, plus one hour and 6 minutes to sunrise, per Doggett's dialogue). Somebody help me out here? (And I won't get into the December timestamp from "Redrum." Not gonna do it. Nope. ) - Is it too much to hope that 1013 will explain how Mulder was buried with no autopsy and no embalming? Yup, I thought so. - Pregnancy complications? Are we going to here anything more about complications, or was that just a tease? Any chance of getting the results of any amnios? Will we find out if Scully ditched her doctor? Am I expecting too much? - How did Billy Miles rip himself away from all those wires and monitors without a bazillion alarms going off? Unless he took that shower in 5 seconds or less, somebody should have known he was missing long before he tried his naked escape trick. - So does Scully believe, or doesn't she? She charged after Doggett after they'd been talking to Billy Miles and he left the room, but when he asked it *she* believed his story, she balked. - How did Scully make the leap that Billy Miles had changed into a different person? Just because he shed his skin, and/or because of what appeared to be two heartbeats on the monitor when he was seizing? I don't get it. How did she know that Jeremiah hadn't shown up and healed him? - And on a related topic, did anyone ever question Teresa Hoese? Or is that another one of those things that's too much to hope for? And why hasn't anyone questioned Absalom further before now? Have any of the other abductees been returned in the last three months? - If Scully thought that Mulder's condition might be caused by a virus, not to mention that we all know that Krycek and his magic vaccine can't be trusted (did Skinner actually tell Scully that Krycek was in the picture?), why didn't Scully try the anti-virals sooner? I don't know much about medicine, but isn't there a way to tell if a virus is affecting a body -- and if so, why didn't Scully and the other doctors know that Mulder and Billy Miles were being affected by a virus before Krycek ever entered the picture? Etc.: - I guess we've determined -- as well as well as we possibly could -- that Mulder is NOT Jewish. - How come Scully's showing now but the rest of her body hasn't put on any weight? Was anybody else thinking about S2 GA when they first saw Obviously!Pregnant!Scully? - You know, if I were Scully I'd be pretty pissed that no one told me that Mulder's grave was being dug up. Maybe she was just so happy that Mulder was still alive that she let it go. But I just wish that people on this show would stop keeping information from her in order to protect her. She's a big girl, guys. She can take the truth. - In those last two wonderful minutes, Scully had a big ol' lock of hair hanging in front of her face. Was anyone besides me waiting for Mulder to reach up and push it behind her ear? - I'm delighted that Mulder is back, and I was thrilled with GA's performance, but except for the last two minutes I wasn't bowled over by this story. So... Krycek says the baby can't come to term. Why doesn't he just kill Scully and the Uber!Sculder himself? He had a vaccine. Maybe. But it's gone now. I wonder if Doggett mopped up any of that stuff to be analyzed? Skinner saved Mulder's life. By accident. Doggett was alternating between "this is crap" and "I need to find out more about this." I want to care, I really do, but... I just don't. Maybe I'll care more when I read other folks' posts. I'm hoping. :) - But Mulder's alive! He's back with Scully (where he belongs, dammit! )! And I am one happy camper for that. - Next week's ep: OK, call me evil, but I was woo-hoo'ing for Mulder giving Doggett a shove. It's about time *somebody* didn't trust the guy. Yeah, I know, we're supposed to like Doggett, but it still bugs me that everyone else on the show accepted him so quickly.