The Blessing Way

Scene 16 — the whole of it

Scully arrives at her mother’s house in the middle of the night, having walked there, and breaks down. On the disc that scene ends where you would expect a scene to end:

In both drafts it does not end there. Scene 15 gives way to Scene 16, a long sequence in the living room afterwards: Scully with her legs up on the couch, her mother talking her down, and then Melissa coming through the front door. It runs from script page 11 to page 14 and it is the only extended conversation Scully has with her family in the episode.

Her mother’s answer to it is the thing the broadcast most conspicuously loses — a direct reply to “Dad would be so ashamed of me,” which on air is left standing:

Melissa, alive, arguing with her sister about Mulder

The back half of Scene 16 is a two-hander between Dana and Melissa, and it is the episode’s only real Mulder-and-Scully material — conducted, since he is nine hundred miles away in a hogan, entirely in the third person.

It escalates into a real fight. Scully gets off the sofa “angered by her sister’s loopy insensitivity”; Melissa tells her to get a second opinion; Scully tells her this is not a medical condition but a statement of fact, and that based on the empirical evidence — “which I happen to have gathered” — it looks like a pretty damn sure bet that “you’re whistling in the graveyard.” Melissa answers that if she could see through her guilt and anger she might look past her Western empiricism. And Scully ends it:

Both drafts hold it word for word; the Blue does not mark a single line of it. Whatever removed it happened after 12 July, on a stage or in an edit suite, and it took with it the only occasion in the episode on which anyone says out loud what Mulder is to her. Melissa is shot in Scully’s apartment at the end of “The Blessing Way”; her death follows in “Paper Clip.”

Scully’s bionic woman joke, and the laugh that outlived it

The implant is out of her neck and under a microscope. In the White, the doctor has the punchline:

The Blue replaces the joke with bafflement and the replacement aired verbatim. What makes it worth recording is the line underneath, which the Blue did not touch. Both drafts, before and after, close the scene with the same stage direction:

In the White she can’t find a laugh because there is a joke and she doesn’t want it. In the Blue the joke is gone and the direction stays where it was, describing a reaction to something no longer on the page.

Deep Throat’s speech, delivered slightly off the page

The monologue in Mulder’s vision is otherwise word-perfect across White, Blue and broadcast — the absence of time, the perpetual night, the dull clarity of the dead. Three small things move on the day. “There is truth here, old friend” becomes “There is truth, you know, old friend.” “Fight the monsters without and within ” is reversed to “ within and without.” And the last sentence in both drafts — “You have but precious time” — is not spoken; the scene goes straight from the monsters into the hissing and the clamour of the boxcar. These are performance-level differences rather than script changes, and are recorded as such.

Mulder and Scully share no scene in this episode

This is true of the drafts and true of the broadcast. Mulder spends the hour in the quarry, the boxcar and the hogan; Scully spends it in Washington. He has one line audible to anyone but himself — the dream voice at 31:49, “I have been on the bridge that spans two worlds” — and it is spoken to no one. There is no frame in the episode with both of them in it.

Which is why the loss of Scene 16 lands where it does. It was the compensating scene: the place where the script let someone else say the thing out loud, so that the separation would register as a separation. Without it the episode simply runs two stories in parallel, and the closest it comes to the subject is Scully telling a room full of her superiors that she did what she did for her partner — a line that is also in Scene 16, and also cut.

What she does say, on the record

The OPR hearing survives intact from White to broadcast. Told that the men who went after Mulder aren’t meant to be found, Scully answers her own Assistant Director in front of a table of senior agents: “With all due respect, sir… I think you overestimate your position in the chain of command.” She is at that moment suspended without pay. It is the same sentence in both drafts, unmarked.