REVIEWED BY: Jennifer J. Chen ON: March 18, 1999
ORIGINAL AIR DATE: October 27, 1996
The best part about most, if not all, X-Files episodes
is that they have so many layers to them--it is much like
reading a dense novel, where every time you read it, you
find a new meaning, another level, something else that
provokes insight into the work. Unruhe is not an
episode that I have watched very many times. There are
those episodes that I have "episode mojo" with, and seem to catch
over and over again. I can't tell you how many times
I've seen Pusher, Memento Mori, Quagmire, and Soft Light (I love the first two so much that it's rather
convenient). Others I deliberately watch over and over
again, like Redux II, Never Again, Ice, and most of
the Season Six episodes. Then there are those that I
haven't taped yet, and can't seem to catch unless I
deliberately set out to catch them. Unruhe is one of
those episodes. Perhaps that is why I have never noticed
the things that I noticed during this most recent viewing.
They have always been there; I had just never been clear
as to where to look.
Nothing of extreme substance occurred; if you went through your entire X-Phile career and never watched it, you would be none for the worse plot-wise and character- wise. But for me, this episode rounded out a few rough edges here and there, it eased some of my "unruhe" regarding Scully's character and where some of the tension (not the good kind) came from between Scully and Mulder. The truly impressive part of all this is that it all comes from the actors. You would never get any of this from the script. Well, maybe a little bit--but it would seem that Scully is more disturbed by the case than by her position in their partnership, whereas watching the episode, watching Mulder and Scully rub each other the wrong way almost the whole way through, tells an entirely different story.
At times, I have wondered what it was that caused Scully to finally snap the way she did in Never Again (a critical episode in understanding that the stakes for Scully have changed in regard to the X-Files). I never doubted that her reasons were justified, and if she had never snapped I don't believe that she would have the same kind of loyalty to the X-Files that we see in Season Five and Season Six. But I hated to think that the writers just came up with it out of nowhere, with no prior snapping point, they just needed an excuse to create some major angst between Scully and Mulder. But Unruhe dismisses those fears. We sense Scully's growing impatience and resentment at being in a partnership that is not equal, a partnership that sees fit to prove her wrong in all theories and right in her partner's. She doesn't feel like a partner; she feels like a sidekick. Like Dr. Watson and Robin, she poses the theories that Mulder, like Sherlock Holmes and Batman, claims isn't right. Mulder loves Scully, and does not see it the same way that she does--but that doesn't mean he's not doing it. And at this point, he has not developed the kind of communication skills he has by the time Fight the Future comes around; he cannot say what she needs and deserves to hear, because the words aren't there.
Scully is a brilliant woman; to be placed in a situation
where she is almost never right cannot be easy. But
still, she stays. Because the bottom line is, she enjoys
being there. She loves being with Mulder--she loves
Mulder, period. But Scully is also a very proud woman--
she doesn't like feeling that she's not pulling her
weight, that the only thing she's good for is to pose
theories that are almost always proven wrong. Scully
cannot help but then feel resentful toward the one person
that she loves most--and it's almost because she does
love him most and is (ironically, I suppose) secure
in what she means to him that she feels safe to
lash out. At this point, she doesn't want to need Mulder;
needing him shows weakness, and weakness (at least, to
her way of thinking) shows that she is not as strong as
Mulder, that in a way, she is letting him down by not
pulling her own weight. Everything is about Mulder--he
may not know it (though I think he knows her well enough
and is also intuitive enough to suspect it), and she no
doubt denies it, but it's true.
In Unruhe, Scully is disturbed both by these feelings and by the case itself. We have seen her fall apart before, in Irresistible, and this episode reminds me a lot of that one. Mulder and Scully have a few tense confrontations. 
In one, she shows up at a crime scene and he gestures her over by crooking his finger (the look on her face clearly says that she is not happy at being gestured to like an underling). Mulder is completely involved in the case, and doesn't know how this has affronted her; he barely notices that she's rather upset, in general. In another, Scully has had it up to here with Mulder's bizarre theory about "thought-o-graphs," and thinks that he is being entirely too unreasonable and not thinking of the victims at all when he takes the time to fly back to Washington to have the photos examined. This actually goes really well with the next episode, The Field Where I Died, where again, Scully accuses Mulder of being self-absorbed and not thinking of the victims as much as he's thinking about himself. Scully manages not to look like a stubborn skeptic, and even though Mulder is ultimately right, I found myself taking Scully's side, that she was right to doubt him and his motives because any reasonable person would.
One of my favorite scenes is when Mulder calls Scully to warn her about what the killer may possibly be like ("he's either very tall, or not but wants to be"), and she looks at Schnauz and says, "Unruhe." I love Gillian Anderson's look, the way she says it, the way the entire scene was enacted. It chills me every time I watch it.
Their tension comes to a head when they find the second victim dead, and while this upsets and disappoints Scully, who had the interests of the victims in mind, Mulder is more fascinated by the motives of Gerald Schnauz, why he did it, what were the "howlers" he had spoken of, that perhaps the photos weren't Schnauz's fantasies, but his nightmares. Scully snaps, "What the hell does it matter?" And I can't help but agree with her. Mulder may be a brilliant profiler, but Scully's ultimate aim is humanity and not philosophy. She doesn't care why Schnauz did it; to her, he's a monster and needs to be stopped. That another victim resulted from his delusions is all she needs to know. She can't understand why Mulder wants to understand Schnauz. This apparent conflict of basic ideals adds more fuel to the fire where she's concerned; Mulder seems more and more distant, as if he is someone she doesn't know.
Mulder's brilliance and accuracy in reading the thought-o-graphs is amazing, to say the least, and if this weren't my favorite show I'd be rolling my eyes at the implausibility of it. But the photo of Scully, terrified, reaching out to someone...and no matter what has happened or been said, we know that it is ultimately Mulder that she needs, trusts, depends on. To see him sitting there with that photo, knowing that in his mind, Scully is reaching out to him for help, that she needs him, and to Mulder, nothing else matters. He doesn't know or doesn't understand what Scully has been struggling with, but for him, nothing has changed--he loves her as always, and will move heaven and earth to make sure that she is safe and unharmed.
Scully still has yet to understand that she has not lost herself in Mulder or that she is "giving in" to him while he remains the same.
Please feel free to 
The truth is that neither of them are the same--Mulder is now vulnerable in a way that he didn't used to be; Scully has changed and molded him as surely as he has changed and molded her. But this realization has yet to find its way into Scully's consciousness. She feels that she is losing herself, and resents Mulder for being the seeming cause of it. She doesn't feel like an equal partner, and she wants to believe that she is as strong on her own as when she is with Mulder. One of the most significant scenes occurs when Scully is trying to reason with Schnauz in German. She explicitly states, "I don't need to be saved." In the specific situation that she's speaking of, she's right, she doesn't have the "howlers" and doesn't need to be saved from any of the unrest that Schnauz thinks she needs saving from. But in a peripheral way, she does need to be saved. 
And Mulder is the only one who can do it, who she can depend on. Moments later, Mulder (the frantic, angst-ridden partner) crashes into the motorhome where Schnauz has been keeping Scully, saving her. Scully, shaken from the experience, leaves as quickly as possible. She refuses to allow herself to be comforted by Mulder, though it's obvious he wants to hold her the way he did in Irresistible, and though it's probably the one thing she needs in the whole world at that moment. However, she doesn't want to need it, to need him; she wants to be self-sufficent and strong. It saddened me because I could well understand that need, at the same time that I know that she and Mulder make each other strong--and that strength is more powerful than any individual effort.
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me at jenu1bruin@centropolis.org
1999 by Jennifer J. Chen