Scully's totally weepy, sitting there in the Please Counsel Me Chair. "You think that you find a way to deal with things," she begins, and then says some stuff about how doctors learn to distance themselves from death, and FBI agents learn to do the same, in between running laps around Quantico and visiting serial killers in jail. "You think you can look into the face of pure evil, and then you find yourself paralyzed by it," she continues. Kosseff wonders if Scully is aware that she's talking about herself in the third person. ["She's actually talking about herself in the second person, but this is therapy, not English class." -- Wing Chun] Scully shakes her head, as if to wake herself from a particularly potent daydream, like that one she indulges in during long car rides, in which she and Mulder investigate what he swears is some kind of demon possession, but which proves to be a simple case of medical something or other, which she correctly diagnoses right off the bat, and when she's proved entirely correct, she laughs and laughs and laughs at him, and then she buys him a beer and they make out. Then she hypothesizes that speaking in the third person is just another way for her to distance herself from the issue. Kosseff says that Scully has probably always felt that she can take care of any problem all by herself, but that now she feels vulnerable, and she doesn't know how to handle that feeling. Scully agrees but, she adds weepily, she can't explain why she feels that way. "Is it your partner?" Kosseff asks. "Is there a problem with the trust?" Scully almost smiles and shakes her head. "No," she says. "I trust him as much as anyone. I trust him with my life." Kosseff wonders whether Scully can talk to Mulder about the way she feels. Scully looks down at her lap. She doesn't want Mulder to know how much this is bothering her, she admits. "I don't want him to feel like he has to protect me," she says. Kosseff blinks sympathetically. "I know that the world is full of predators, just as it has always been," Scully says. "And I know that it is my job to protect people from them. And I have counted on that fact to give me faith in my ability to do what I do. I want that faith back. I need it back," she finishes. Gillian Anderson is quite good in this scene, but she's nowhere near as brilliant as she would have been with the same material three or four years down the road.