Never Again

[HighPlainsDrifter]

Anyone seen this epi. from Season 4......what a great episode with Scully as a main character. My questions are how come her tattoo didnt effect her like Eds. Looks like she keeps the tattoo also. Does the tattoo appear in any other episodes?

[Raven Wolf]

This was a really....Extreamly cool episode! I wondered why she didn't seem as effected by the toxin, too. Maybe there wasn't as much of it on her tattoo.

[The Old Man]

Scully should have gone to the same place as our Blondton! Her's is way better!

[ethsnafu]

Rumour mill abounds a bit, but:

Never Again was the departing episode for Morgan and Wong as they went to take over the reigns of MM. It was acknowledged at the time, by Philes at least, that Morgan and Wong had become disallusioned by the restrictions of writing for the X-Files, that the mythology of the show had begun to constrain the writers and that the characters, and the show, had become a pastiche of themselves and itself. Dana opts to have a tattoo of the ouroborus as 'she has always gone round in a circle': thought to be a comment regarding the seeming inability to move the story and the characters forward due to the increasing plot strands of the conspiracy episodes. Morgan and Wong penned this, their final episode before their hiatus, making it a commentary on the lack of change and growth in the X-Files and its characters, deliberately writing an 'out of character' episode for Scully, depicting their shift to another creative venture by nature of including its trademark and slapping the title 'Never Again' all over the show they were leaving.

Oddly enough only a handful of episodes earlier Morgan and Wong employed a similar tactic when they briefly returned to writing chores of X-Files by naming the episode Home.

Of course all this could be apocryphal but it's certainly 'out there' as truth......

Till then,

ethsnafu

I must admit I do umm and ahhh about having an ouroborus tattoo and agree that blondton's looks absolutely fantastic. There's always that danger that it go a bit Scully though: if only I could be sure............

[ethsnafu]

Ooops, I forgot to add a bit.........typical of me really.

*

Raven Wolf is spot on! The reason that Scully isn't affected by the toxin is exactly because there isn't enough of it in the tattoo. Both Scully and Jerse are exposed to a psychoactive drug that the tattooist uses in his red dye however Mulder explains that there wasn't enough of it present to induce the psychotic hallucinations that Jerse had. The real puzzle is not why Scully isn't halucinating but why Jerse is....

*

mmmmmmm...the truth, as always, is up to you.

ethsnafu