Story 199: "Dance Card" by Sab (Sabine)
After reading "Five Things That Never Happened to Dana Scully" last week, it seems appropriate that this week's offering is also about a "road not taken." Since three members separately expressed some interest in reading it, and because Sabine is an accomplished and entertaining writer, "Dance Card" is now on our dance card.
( Author's Note )
( Author's Note )
I liked the second story a whole lot better. As a stand alone it worked very well. I liked it for all the reasons Estella mentions above. The magic of New York, which is on my list of "Places To See Before I Die." The way Sabine describes the cold and the frost crunching under their feet. And I loved the no-talking lovemaking too. This made a whole lot of sense and I can completely buy this.
I guess what bugged me about the first one is that I didn't really buy this college Scully. Plus American College means nothing to me, so I don't even have the luxury of experiencing nostalgia. Until this week, I had no idea what "chalking was".
And Scully refering to her friends as "hyperintellectuals" made me roll my eyes. They're college kids writing silly witticisms with a chalk, how hyperintellectual can they be, seriously?
The Scully we see in the early seasons strikes me as terribly conservative and 'goody two shoes'. A far cry from this "rebel" college Scully who hangs out with wannabe poets, drinking vodka out of a paper bag.
As for canon Scully being described as a child rebel, sneaking the odd cigarette from her parents does not a rebel makes. And unlike you Estella I just can't mix Scully and Gillian.
More later but I gotta go to work....*sigh*
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The Scully we see in the early seasons strikes me as terribly conservative and 'goody two shoes'.
Srsly. Plus, a very prim, young Scully rolling her eyes and saying her parents considered it an act of rebellion when she joined law enforcement does not make her a "rebel", although that idea has somehow become fanon. It was an unconventional career choice for her gender at that time, but becoming a doctor and a federal agent does not actually mean one used drugs freely in college or smoked endless cigarettes or lived the full Bohemian lifestyle in open rebellion against one's oh-so-repressive Catholic roots. You see this kind of thing all the time with Scully-fic, and it just makes me laugh. Did anyone notice how she treated Melissa in the few scenes we had of them together? It's still fun to try and piece the different parts of Scully's character together, don't get me wrong, but there's no real evidence in canon for Scully being some enfant terrible or even being particularly free-spirited or resentful about her background (although I do think her explanation of herself in Never Again is a good characterization ultimately, if not very CC -- but his characterizations were cardboard, let's admit.) Mulder and the basement office were the biggest rebellions she'd ever encountered, IMO.
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Her comment is here.
Srsly. Plus, a very prim, young Scully rolling her eyes and saying her parents considered it an act of rebellion when she joined law enforcement does not make her a "rebel", although that idea has somehow become fanon. It was an unconventional career choice for her gender at that time, but becoming a doctor and a federal agent does not actually mean one used drugs freely in college or smoked endless cigarettes or lived the full Bohemian lifestyle in open rebellion against one's oh-so-repressive Catholic roots. You see this kind of thing all the time with Scully-fic, and it just makes me laugh. Did anyone notice how she treated Melissa in the few scenes we had of them together? It's still fun to try and piece the different parts of Scully's character together, don't get me wrong, but there's no real evidence in canon for Scully being some enfant terrible or even being particularly free-spirited or resentful about her background (although I do think her explanation of herself in Never Again is a good characterization ultimately, if not very CC -- but his characterizations were cardboard, let's admit.) Mulder and the basement office were the biggest rebellions she'd ever encountered, IMO.
I don't think she used drugs routinely. She might have passed a joint around at a party, if that was commonplace in her circle of friends. Or she might have just said no. I think you could write her either way. She might have smoked cigarettes. A lot of otherwise smart people still did back then.
Maybe it's more open to interpretation than I think, but she seems too worried about what her father thought about her career choice to be seen as a rebellious daughter to me. And yes, Mulder and his basement was her first real foray into non-conformity. But she didn't choose to go there, she was assigned by Blevins, and she's often seen trying to get Mulder to use more conventional investigative methods. I guess she chose to stay with Mulder rather than be assigned to Salt Lake City during FTF. And she chose to stay with him afterward, too, but it still feels sometimes like events forced her hand, you know? She's a unique individual and theirs is a unique relationship. I guess that's why we're still here, discussing the fic and the series.
I'm interested in your take on her relationship with Melissa. Maybe I need to go back and rewatch all of the Melissa episodes since there aren't many of them.
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Plus, a very prim, young Scully rolling her eyes and saying her parents considered it an act of rebellion when she joined law enforcement does not make her a "rebel", although that idea has somehow become fanon.
I've always thought of Scully's rebellion, when it occurs, as quite an inward thing. It's about Scully getting to the point where internally she says, "No, they're wrong, this is wrong. No, I won't do this or that. No, I don't agree. No, regardless of who they are and what authority they have or claim to have, they're lying or they're being hypocritical or they're just mistaken." And of course there's the inverse as well, "Yes, this is right. He's right, we're right, I'm right. Yes, I will do this, despite their opposition."
Even the bit about her smoking her mother's cigarettes as a kid wasn't outwardly rebellious. She did it in secret and as far as we're told she never got caught, which tells us she didn't want to get caught, which suggests that the defience was the point in and of itself - doing something her parents had undoubtedly told her was bad, something that it would be very wrong of her to do (and yet they did it anyway).
What does seem in-character for Scully at least in Dance Card is how much she follows people around, but in a way that makes her seem really distant. Hard to explain.
I think of this as being an aspect of that same inward rebellion, like a division of the self. In the case of DC's Dana, it's like she needs to be amenable and to be approved of, but she also doesn't want to give herself, especially to anyone who thinks she should. She wants Paul and lets herself be lead and projects flexibility, yet she never really cedes anything to him, and the more he sits there expectantly with his sexual subtext and his bossiness, expecting her to say, "yes paul, take me now," the more she refuses to be there, in the moment, with him.
With canon Scully I think it's more a case of her wanting to be the "good little soldier" (to always do a good job, and the right thing) and yet her superiors are not trustworthy, so she constantly has to fight to figure out what the right thing is for herself, even when it means disobeying direct orders, which her "good little soldier" mentality tells her is a very bad thing to do. In both cases there's a similar division of self, though. Her impulses are divided between capitulation and negation, which gives the character a feeling of reserve, or as you put it, distance.
Incidentally, when I first read Dance Card five years ago I connected really strongly with that distance in her character. In fact, I think it was why the fic originally made such an impression on me, though I no longer feel much connection with the Dana character now.
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I agree. I think her rebellion against authority begins very early on in the series, when she shows us she is willing to face down the US military to get Mulder back. Yes, he's her partner and that's what partners do, but more than that, she knew on some level that what they were doing was wrong. For her, there is always a higher moral authority, the individual conscience, that guides her actions.
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