Watching real tv is you scrape and claw for character backstory that they made cohesive on accident. Dana Scully!!!
She has this amazing internal drive and is an amazingly strong person, but also thinks that she has a desperate need to prove herself. She keeps her walls up, even when she doesn’t want to. She’s the third child in a family of six with a homemaker mother and a doting, perpetually absent father. She thinks she has daddy issues, and she does, but she never gives herself enough credit. “I want to be praised” girl it’s human to want to be recognized. She struggles with the feeling of cycles, of staying in place, of never really changing. She has this complex that I like to call the “Starbuck complex” (named for her childhood nickname, given to her by her navy captain dad, referring to the first mate in Moby Dick (she called him Ahab the captain from Moby Dick)) where she LOVES to play second fiddle and step up to the batting plate. Mulder forges ahead and she follows him, and she charts their course as they go. He drives, and she has the map in the passenger seat. She LOVES that— when it doesn’t grate at her to not be seen. If Mulder saw her, it would be okay. And he does see her, for who she is, but not always what she needs in their interpersonal relationship. They’ve got issues!!
One of Scully’s earliest memories is that of her hiding a rabbit kit in a metal lunch box after her older overbearing brother Bill says that he’d kill it. Of course, she leaves it in the lunch box, and comes back to find it dead. There’s this innate part of Scully here — the kindness, the protector. I think this is the instance that incited her desire to become a doctor. And there’s this other part of Scully, even while small, who keeps her walls up to protect herself and what she holds dear. She didn’t tell her family about the FBI until she was sure she was doing it. And they disapproved, and she had to go on knowing they did. She never explained her and Mulder’s relationship to her family, who always seem astounded when they display their characteristic normal levels of Mulder-Scully devotion. She keeps her cancer to herself, and learns that it’s okay to reach out to people, but she keeps her walls up because she’s afraid. She’s afraid to believe.
Like the previous example, Scully’s first encounter with morality and the question of who she wanted to be was when she caught and killed a snake in the backyard with her bb gun when she was six. She was playing with her brothers, and was caught up in it, but regretted it immediately after. It spurs her to realize the effects of her actions and consider who she wants to be (and also there’s Catholic guilt in here and Scully’s desire to protect and heal, which is very good). It’s a foundational experience for her.
Thirty years on, she’ll have a snake in the ouroboros tattooed on her lower back. “Everyone gets the tattoo they deserve.”
Dana Scully, physicist, doctor, agent, spends her life searching for the answers of the universe. She comes full circle to find the truth. She wants a normal life, but she doesn’t want your normal life. When considering the paths not taken, had she had a normal life, she says “what I would have missed.” She heads for adventure because she wants to. Reason and faith in harmony. And no matter her self doubt, she knows what she’s about. Reason, faith, justice, truth, love, the greater good, and the pursuit of knowledge in the face of the unknown.
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