scully is truly one of the characters most near and dear to my heart.
she's a navy brat. a middle child to a distant father. a genius. she rewrote einstein at age 23. she is a doctor and a scientist and she's wrestled with god, but never stopped wearing the cross necklace from her mother. she's jealous and territorial. she likes rules and still breaks them with regularity.
she will not discuss her emotions unless it's under 50 layers of metaphor, but she also cannot hide her feelings, so she sits there, visibly moody. she is a terrible liar. she falls asleep easily. she can and will kill someone, but she's such a good shot that she usually doesn't need to- she can put a bullet right in your collarbone and call an ambulance instead.
she spouts disconcerting facts about bugs and decomposition and genetics and saints without blinking. she once autopsied a guy and then ordered his last meal for dinner. she can cure alien viruses. she wants the real cream cheese on her bagel and something sweet to drink. how could you not love her.
Sexualizing Scully (in Never Again and the whole series)
I’ve been thinking about CC changing the original Never Again script because he was worried about sexualizing Scully, and I’ve been trying to get inside his head on this issue. Ready for a long essay no one asked for? Okay.
CC’s decision to eliminate the sex scene from Never Again reveals a pretty absolute mindset from him at the time — hanky panky for Scully takes her into a titillating area, which is not okay, because the show doesn’t sexualize Scully. According to ep co-writer Glen Morgan, CC said “every other woman on television was jumping into bed, and they had worked very hard to differentiate Scully from other female television characters.” So button up, Dana.
I admit that like many others (including possibly GA), I have always been frustrated by this particular kind of “we don’t want to sexualize Scully” logic from CC, because it really seems to be confusing sexually objectifying a female character with depicting her acting from sexual motivations which is really only confusing if you’re a straight cis man who is used to thinking any combination of women and sex as somehow being about men’s tastes. In other words, it doesn’t seem problematic to show Scully acting sexually if you’re thinking of a female character as a subject and not as an object.
CC is often credited as being a pioneer in his commitment not to sexualize Scully. Everyone (CC, 1013, media, fans) frequently claims the decision not to emphasize Scully’s sex appeal was rare for TV at the time. This is kind of true, if maybe a little overstated.
By the time Never Again aired, in 1997, primetime TV also had Captain Janeway, Buffy Summers, Murphy Brown, Elaine Benes, Anita Van Buren. These are not “de-sexualized” characters necessarily, but also not at all accurately described as oversexualized stereotypes. Some of those characters predated Scully. It was a less common choice to deemphasize a female character’s sex appeal on TV, but it’s also not really fair to say it was all Baywatch babe caricatures all the time. I think we can say this was something that was actively changing in the 1990s that would continue to evolve in the next decades. I do think it’s worth observing that some writers of the time had figured out how to write complicated female characters … who also sometimes had sex.
One quibble I have with the “1013 was special because they didn’t sexualize Scully” claim is that … they did sexualize Scully. All the time? No. But sometimes? Absolutely.
Some of this I just don’t really think is debatable. If this had been a series starring DD and Nicholas Lea, would Krycek nervously take off his clothes in the pilot to show Mulder his bug bites? Well, of course we would have written outstanding horny fic about it if he had, but come on: NO WAY. (Because 1993, heteronormativity, etc.) As it was, they knew they were sexualizing the female lead a little and exploiting both leads’ sexual chemistry as a tease to get audiences interested in their pilot. Come on. They knew. This isn’t rocket science. They had a little show on Fox, and they were trying to get people to watch.
(There was an interview years ago when GA said something to this effect, too. Something like: the bumps could have been anywhere on my body, but they had to be a place I had to take off my clothes.)
As many have pointed out over the years, Scully was also semi-regularly a focus of male sexual fantasy. Sometimes this was pathological and violent (see: Donnie Pfaster, twice). Other times, this was benign and played for gentle laughs (see: Frohike, Pendrell). Sometimes, the fantasy was quite vividly enacted on screen (see: Philip Padgett, Guy Mann). Please note that I’m not saying this should or shouldn’t have happened, only that it did.
That said, I think Carter did take pains to avoid sexualizing Scully as an overall principle, and I think this was effective. He emphasized her intellect and her professional motives. We love Scully for this. It’s part of what makes the character who she is. Credit where credit is due.
Unfortunately, he did seem to believe that Scully being seen as a serious character meant not having sex at all. I don’t want to erase asexuality, and I sometimes hear people saying they recognize that in Scully. If this works as representation for people, it’s positive. But for me, I just don’t see Scully written as ace. I think she was being written, by men, as embodying an old trope about women not having sex or being too overtly sexy to be seen as trustworthy or taken seriously (see: Madonna-whore complex).
Now mind you, Mulder’s sexuality was a problem for the show, too. For sure. As with Scully, they wanted him devoted to the quest / platonic partnership only, which means he couldn’t really have an outside romance as a competing motivation for him. I’d argue this did eventually paint the writers into a MSR corner, because both characters’ energy and emotions were really only focused towards one another as an extension of their quest. But they did let Mulder have porn, lots of suggestive talk, sexually aggressive exes (see: Phoebe, Diana), several ambiguous possible sexual encounters (see: Marita, Diana), and one unambiguous one night stand (see: Kristen).
Scully does eventually get an ex who directly comes on to her—and notice who gave him to her. She also gets a vibrator in canon—also a female writer—but that takes decades, people, decades. Mulder’s been carrying on with that porn forever by that point.
I think this relates to my cynical idea that Carter’s insistence on avoiding sexualizing Scully is really about his protection of Mulder as his hero / protagonist, not Scully herself. More on that later.
One of my least favorite pieces of “Chris Carter deemphasized Scully’s sexuality” evidence is Ye Olde Story About The Busty Baywatch Network Scully. If you look at any number of interviews with Carter dating back to, say, 1994-1998, he often tells the same story about the network wanting to hire a leggy busty actress to play Scully and him insisting on Plain Jane Gillian Anderson instead. Often Pamela Anderson, the lead actress of Baywatch, is specifically mentioned in the story, or sometimes it’s just a “Baywatch type” actress.
The repetition of this story is kind of gross, for two big reasons. Reason #1 is that it frames Carter as a hero for ... what? Rejecting the network’s toxic beauty standards to hire absolutely stunning GA, who, yes, is short, but isn’t exactly a radical rethinking of what’s attractive? I understand that Gillian Anderson isn’t “a Baywatch type,” but it’s not like she wasn’t a woman considered sexually appealing by MANY people. Including, incidentally, Chris Carter, who outright admitted Scully was his type.
It is absolutely good we got GA. No one questions that. But in my opinion Carter got way too many kudos for choosing this supposedly non-sexy actress for Scully. Because honestly. “non-sexy GA” can’t even be said with a straight face. Even DD eventually started saying in 1996 that this story was weird and overdone, although he said it in a kind of an awful way: “That’s overblown. You look at Gillian, and she’s a beautiful woman. And how often do you see Scully in a bathing suit? Gillian’s not 6 feet tall and doesn’t have what’s-her-face’s tits, but she’s got as nice a face as any of them.”
Reason #2 is that Carter’s story seems to remind GA at every turn in those early years that she wasn’t hot enough for success if it weren’t for him insisting on her. This has an especially icky residue given her struggles over body image and equitable salary. (If you don’t think it had the potential to have that effect, just take a gander at DD’s quote when he was probably sincerely trying to be supportive above, and try to get into the toxic 1990s mindset of how people talked about women’s bodies.)
Finally, one more complication regarding the sexualization of Scully: jealousy. I’d argue the jealousy trope was a kind of sexualization. The show has no issue with jealousy for vaguely sexual / romantic motives coming from Scully, even though the “hot women jealously bickering over the male hero” is a trope that seems pretty clearly derived from straight male sexual fantasies, too. Scully shows jealousy of female rivals for Mulder’s respect or trust early and often. Again, not saying this should or shouldn’t have happened: only that it did. (Actually, if you know me or my fanfic, you know I’m pretty down for some jealousy stories lol.)
In earlier seasons, Scully’s jealousy is played for laughs and is more ambiguously motivated, mixed up with professional jealousy. For example, she’s threatened by Bambi Berenbaum not only because she’s a hot woman who has Mulder’s attention, but also because she’s a competing scientist. By the Diana arc, Scully’s jealousy is tightly tied to plot and is angst-ridden. It’s also much harder to explain, at least in late season 5’s The End, without romantic jealousy as some sort of driving motive. We can say in One Son there is a professional explanation—she thinks Diana is dirty and Mulder is being disrespectful of his partner—but why on earth is Scully sitting heartbroken in that car in The End if not for personal reasons?
And then there’s this, some cut dialogue from Sixth Extinction that has Scully and Diana arguing over Mulder. Here both characters are written managing to reference one another’s physical appearance in a way that has absolutely no relevance to their ostensibly professional conversation.
There’s no universe in which you can convince me this is in character for Scully (or for Diana really), and it frankly shows objectification of both female characters. But this dialogue was cut, so maybe someone felt similarly at 1013.
Mulder is not shown as being jealous in the same obvious, overt way, and I don’t think Carter would have let that happen. This is where I start to suspect that the whole “Scully isn’t sexualized” claim of Carter’s is actually more about his protection of Mulder’s character than Scully’s.
Carter didn’t want to sexualize Scully because he didn’t want Mulder to be seen as the kind of male character who would seriously be distracted by lust for his co-worker and partner beyond easy, low-commitment jokes. He wanted Mulder to be seen as pure of heart (porn aside) and entirely devoted to his quest. He wanted him to have a partner he wouldn’t be thinking dirty thoughts about, especially because 1013’s writers often seem to have a worldview in which desire and respect can’t coexist. And he wanted Scully to be uncomplicatedly devoted to supporting him.
So Scully is jealous of female attention of Mulder because it’s consistent with her devotion to the work, and Mulder is equivalent to their work. But Mulder’s not going to be shown spinning too much about male attention to Scully because he’s gotta stay single-mindedly devoted to the quest. (Until it is a threat specifically to his work, as when it’s Doggett replacing him on multiple levels.)
Of course, by creating characters who only are interested in this mutual quest and in supporting one another— and then by casting constantly-handsy Duchovny and longing-eyed Anderson and presumably directing them to keep all that shit under control all the time — CC definitely created the perfect hothouse conditions for MSR. Apparently directors were telling them to dial back their performances of scenes all the time. And honestly, that feeling of constant restraint reads in the final cut. Even when they are just sitting there talking about a corpse they always look like they are holding back and buttoning in all these feelings. It’s constantly sexually charged. Desire and respect appear to be sharing space all the time. It’s a textbook case of getting the opposite of what you’re ostensibly trying to do.
I know I’ve touched on some hot button issues here. I welcome discussion if you’re so inclined.
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This 2015 essay re: CC strikes me as right. I always have had the impression that CC was imagining the audience watching his show as being basically like him: white guys about his age, for whom Watergate was a super important event, who would find Mulder’s mytharc struggles heroic.
The existence of all these rabid younger female fans always seemed to perplex him. I think he was suspicious they were focusing on the right parts of his Serious Sci Fi show. The questions about the ship annoyed him. Although it also didn’t take him long to begin to think of ways he could use teasing the ship to goose interest.
I also wish I could find the gender / age breakdown of the 90s Nielsen ratings, because I’d be curious. It was a popular show with everyone, but late 90s online fandom skewed female (although less dramatically than now.) It always felt like audience skewed younger, although I don’t know. I wonder who WAS mostly watching the show in, say, 1999. Maybe someone more clever than me knows how to find that.
the year is 2024. I am watching The X Files 1x08 with my blissfully offline boyfriend. We reach the scene where, in confinement, Mulder and Scully examine each other's backs for alien marks. My boyfriend, who has never seen the show before, makes an amused noise and utters a strong contender for understatement of the year:
I love reading fan fics but the only site i known are AO3, The nursery Files, i love the content but there’s another site where i can read fics?
I love ur fics 🤍 in AO3
Glad you're enjoying fic reading so much 😊
You should check out Gossamer because it has plenty of fic. It hasn't been updated in many years, but you'll find many classics and amazing stories there.
Gethsemane, Bill Scully Apologia, and Maggie the Emergency Contact
Dialogue and Play-By-Play Analysis:
Bill: "I picked up the phone when they called Mom. I thought you could use a change of clothes."
Scully: "Thank you... where's Mom?"
Believing her cancer is still a secret, Scully automatically places Bill's importance below her mother, wanting to talk freely with Maggie (without Bill.) Bill sees and understands this; and is hurt that she still won't open up to him despite being here, now, for her. As of yet, he doesn't act on that hurt.
Bill: "I didn't tell Mom what happened...."
Scully: "...But I'm okay. Luckily."
Bill: "You're not okay, Dana."
Scully: "I told Mom not to tell you."
Bill: "Why?"
Scully: "Because it's very personal. Because I don't want sympathy."
For all of the just criticism against Bill later in this arc, here he is holding back his anger (an expression of his hurt) and listening, really listening to his sister. He keeps quiet, giving Scully room to fully explain herself; and even sympathetically locks eyes, giving her his full attention.
Another thing of note: he is staring at Scully with the exact look of sympathy she wanted to avoid. Mulder and Maggie know her enough to acquiesce to her "I'm fine"s; but Bill is her life-long peer, and siblings can't hide truths from each other as effectively as they can their parents or partners.
"You think you can cure yourself."
Bill realizes that his sister never told her own family-- him-- about her cancer because she does, even now, believe she can cure herself. He's stunned, shocked, even appalled; and that leaks into his voice, coming across as judgmental.
Scully doesn't deny it, caught; and sighs, frustrated, that he divined and overly-simplified something she hadn't expressed to anyone and probably would not have been able to without a beautiful speech prepared ahead of time.
"Mom tells me that you've gotten worse. That your cancer's gone into your bloodstream."
This explains why Maggie told Bill in the first place: she cracked under the strain Dana's edict of secrecy put her under, watching her daughter slowly die without any apparent attempts to circumvent that death or even to bond over their shared tragedy. Bill became her only recourse... and Bill spilled the beans (as he does, again, in A Christmas Carol.)
Scully is shaken by his bluntness, unable to shy away from the truth spoken so baldly to her face.
"What are you doing at work getting knocked down? Beaten up? What are you trying to prove-- that you're going to go down fighting?"
Scully: "Now, c'mon Bill--"
Scully is deferring back to an old sibling dynamic: Bill misunderstanding, or only understanding enough to feel she's acting out of turn; and her attempting to draw him away from his preconceived notions. In this case, however, he's right; and she's avoiding the truth of that (subconsciously.)
Bill stops her by slapping down the clothes, getting her full attention.
"Y'know what Mom is going through? Why do you think I didn't tell her when they called?"
"What should be doing?"
Bill: "We have a responsibility-- not just to ourselves, but to the people in our lives."
And he's absolutely correct here: Scully has been so focused on work and its promise of a cure that she's forgotten to give space to those suffering alongside her.
"Just, just because I haven't bared my soul to you or to Father McCue or to God, it doesn't mean I'm not responsible to those important to me."
Here Scully reveals she thought emotional distance and soldiering on was her way of protecting her loved ones from her burdens, providing them strength in the face of her worsening health. In reality, it worsened their fears and burdens; and furthered their isolation... except for, ironically, Mulder, who wasn't ready to face the implications of her impending death, anyway.
"To who? This guy Mulder? But where is he, Dana? Where is he through all this?"
Bill is less right here: from his perspective, Dana has (once again) wrapped herself up with a man whose authority and work ethic supersedes Bill's love and concern for his sister-- another in the pattern of their late father and Daniel Waterston and Jack Willis. Bill isn't stupid: his above reproach also reveals he knows Mulder knows about Scully's cancer; and the fact that her partner did and still left her alone to deal with it to "pursue his career" while Bill hasn't been able to be there to support her at all eats away at him, makes him hate the man. (And still he's civil when he meets Mulder, even talks with him in terms he believes a workaholic will understand-- "Let's keep the work away from here"-- only getting rough when he misinterprets Mulder's blank face in response-- "Let her die with dignity.")
Despite being wrong here, Bill still hits the mark; because Mulder did wander off on a quest. But Scully can't argue for Mulder without betraying her own reticence, her own need to keep Mulder in the dark for Mulder's sake-- because that would betray her feelings in a way that she doesn't want to discuss with Bill, especially after Mulder has consistently dodged that serious conversation for years now. So, she picks up her clothes and ends the conversation.
In-Depth Analysis
Maggie Was Scully's Emergency Contact
The hospital called Maggie when Scully was rushed in, unconscious; and while this doesn't outright disprove the theory Mulder might also be an emergency contact, it certainly fits in with the pattern of him being called to the hospital and let into Scully's room by Maggie and not the other way around (i.e. One Breath and Wetwired.) Furthermore, Mulder isn't alerted (that I know of) to a missed call from the hospital after his return to civilization, meaning the hospital didn't notify him at all.
Bill the Bully?
Is Bill a despicable figure? Most definitely... in a deleted Memento Mori scene-- which is why I think they cut it. Though his words are brusque, even cruel in their blunt honesty, Bill, apart from that scene, doesn't seem to willfully inflict or weaponize guilt against his sister, wielding it only as a reminder of how much her family is left out of her life, how much they want to be there for her and don't understand why she won't let them in. It's a fundamental difference in how they approach life; and both are forceful about their insistence on doing things their own way.
Scully is used to being everyone's source of strength (Maggie places her on a pedestal even above her brothers in Memento Mori), which hinders her from opening up or betraying her weakness. Being "the strong one" for so long turned into a fear of failing others; but this reticence has the opposite effect, ostracizing and distancing her family (and Mulder) in her struggles to keep them unaffected. Their divide grows as the years go on (though it seems an equilibrium of sorts has been reached after Emily, since she mentions them fondly in How the Ghosts Stole Christmas and indirectly in Millennium.)
Bill Is Right (in This Instance)
On its face, Bill's speech is unrelenting and out of left field... but is it, really?
Bill is told about his sister's cancer only when it has become irredeemably terminal. He arrives on land, either before or after Maggie's revelation, and finds the rest of the family ignorant and his mother having to shoulder that burden, alone, because his sister refused to let her tell anyone else the news-- meaning, Maggie has been suffering in silence the entire cancer arc, trying to abide by her daughter's terms for space and silence on the topic. However, Scully's definitive terminal diagnosis broke her; and Maggie, having no one to turn to support because Dana still refused to talk about it, finally confessed to her priest and reached out to her son for strength. Bill sees how hard this has been on her and tries to alleviate that burden by adopting his sister's methods: keeping Maggie in the dark as much as possible. It honors what he knows to be his sister's wishes and his mother's fears.
In this scene Bill is absolutely in the right. He and his sister, while not incredibly close, have no ill will between them; and he finds out that not only has she been slowly dying for months and sworn their mother to secrecy but she also still refused to tell him, even when he dropped everything to bail her and Maggie out with this act of kindness. This is wrong-- it is-- and his speech rebuking his sister is as deserved as Scully's are to Mulder whenever he acts only in stubborn self-interest.
Bill is hurt, Bill is grieved; and Bill drives that home, peeling back his sister's denial by exposing her true intent: "You think you can cure yourself." The ludicrous nature of her expectations-- cure incurable cancer and never tell a soul so she won't have to 'suffer' the shame or embarrassment of their sympathy or pity-- galls him; and he's right. It's Scully's struggle and her burden; but it's not just her struggle or burden: her family and loved ones are losing her, too, and that pain is just as powerfully frightening. Bill wants more from her than an immovable pillar of strength-- and that's a good thing. Maggie needed her to be "the strong one", and Mulder needed her to keep fighting; but Bill just wanted his sister to tell him the truth and let him in.
A last note: Bill grew up with Dana-- he knows her propensity to get lost in father figures and demanding authorities. He probably sees Mulder as another Daniel Waterston or Jack Willis, an extension of her undisguised adoration for their late father. He's naturally protective (as we see in Redux II, though grossly misplaced) and thinks Scully is losing that stability in herself the more engrossed she becomes in her work (ex. Gethsemane-Redux II and A Christmas Carol.) These fears and concerns are expressed in overbearing finger-wagging and anger rather than communication, a (sadly) common affliction in a family growing a more distant with time and lives necessarily apart.
Scully Believed She Could Cure Herself
Since Memento Mori, Scully's modus operandi has been to avoid, avoid, avoid the topic of her cancer (and the death of her father, her abduction, etc.) The following cases rarely touched on her illness unless she had a concerning diagnosis or needed further treatment, i.e. Zero Sum and Elegy. Radiation was likely ruled out as ineffective since the skirmish with Dr. Scanlon (and was a drain of her valuable energy and health without any chance of helping, regardless); so, Scully probably opted for more obscure treatments, buying time while she and Mulder chipped away at their work.
In the back of her mind, she believed, truly, that she wouldn't die: that her cancer could be tucked away from her family and cured before Bill or the others ever found out. As we know, Maggie bore the brunt of her daughter's edict of silence alone, finally caving when the cancer reached Scully's bloodstream. When Bill waits for an explanation-- staring at his sister's defiance and stubbornness and pure conviction that she's fine and that the family shouldn't be worried about her at all-- he figures out her blind expectation and avoidance-bordering-on-denial and says, appalled: "You think you can cure yourself." Scully dips her head, exposed and embarrassed.
The beginning of Gethsemane proves Scully was still denial: "my dying wish" she professes on the one hand only to reject the priest and shake her head at Bill with the other. No, Scully did not expect to die alone without her family there. When Bill demands, "We have a responsibility-- not just to ourselves, but to the people in our lives", she parries, "Just because I don't bare my soul to you or to Father McCue or to God." Scully thought she was doing her duty by keeping her loved ones in her thoughts while carrying out her solitary battle. When Bill strips her of her further excuses-- "Who? To this guy Mulder?"-- it peels back her hyper-focused perspective, reminding Scully that it's not just her and Mulder fighting the world.
She did her family and Mulder and herself a disservice by pushing them all away to "protect them", as she realizes in Redux II: being "strong" stripped them of the ability to support each other and was damaging in the long run. In this, Bill is undeniably correct. However, where Bill is wrong is that he doesn't see that Scully believes in Mulder's ability to save her, that by following him she is doing what is best for herself.
Her partner's fervor and hope give her strength; and his inability to break under defeat keeps her fighting even in her darkest hours (and does end up saving her life.) Scully put such faith in Mulder and his abilities and his theories that she kept council only with herself (as much as possible) to keep him going, to keep the weight off his shoulders (and her mother's and her family's) so that they could move forward as a well-oiled machine, ready to snatch the cure whenever they got their hands on it. And Mulder did get his hands on it... and then it failed.
She's dying; but it's not until the cure fails that the dam breaks: everything Scully had been fearing comes rushing out of her. She gives in, crying to her mother about her crumbling lack of faith-- because the miracle cure didn't work, because her months of waiting and hoping in private were all for naught, because she's going to die and there's no possible way to escape. But it's also freeing: she can own her fear, hold onto her mother, clutch Mulder's hand, cry with the priest, finally lean into and start to heal from the weights she's been holding on her back, alone.
And she prays: death is near.
Scully Wanted to Please Bill, Too
As she told Ed Jerse in Never Again, "There are other fathers."
The ouroboros twirls on and on in her personal life, goading her to both make a stand for herself and to placate Bill's expected reactions. In this situation, she did deserve his anger; however, this dynamic continues to play out in Redux II and A Christmas Carol, separate circumstances that are outside Bill's scope of understanding or perspective. After each confrontation, her brother always backs off and begrudgingly acquiesces his sister's boundaries; but it's easy to see why he clings to his late father's behaviors-- viewing them as the only way his sister will confide in him-- and why Scully automatically responds to-- albeit with more guilt than openness-- and rejects his methods.
It's an aspect of their relationship that fell to the wayside as the series barreled onward; but there are hints of resignation on his part after the events of Emily unfolded the way they did (silent support in the courthouse and true remorse in the church.) Scully, however, is locked in grief and unwilling to open back up, yet. We're never shown on-screen what happens next; but he seems to have caused her no further problems in spite of her professional and personal scares in the future (including almost being burned alive, an unexpected trip to Antarctica, job demotion, and getting gut shot all within the span of a few months.) Perhaps he gave her up for loss, perhaps he stayed close but distant, perhaps he withdrew from the drama all together. We'll never know; and, ultimately, it's up to individual interpretation.
Conclusion
This scene sets up the hinge upon which the cancer arc (and any future Scully family drama) twists and turns.
I don't believe Bill is bad, or even malevolent: he, like any other person in a family strained with distance and death, doesn't seem to blame Scully entirely or for long; and only wishes to get through to her somehow. We saw him bully her as a child but we also saw him gift and teach her how to use a bb gun. Scully, meanwhile, balks at and softens over Bill's bluster and overstepping, always effectively putting him in his place after courteously listening to his opinion. We saw her yell and shove him as a child but we also saw her gleefully play alongside he and Charlie.
In conclusion: like all sibling relationships, there are headbutts and there are fights; but it seems, at least by their conversation here and succeeding ones in the future, that any hitch or bump in the road is smoothed over, ironed out, or fixed before it becomes permanent. Bill makes excellent points that Scully takes into consideration, changing her future dealings with Maggie and Bill and even Mulder (namely, her willingness to open up in Detour); and Bill, having said his peace, supports his sister in her decisions the rest of this arc and later in S5.
dana scully character of all time. she's five foot two. her two day jobs are cutting up dead people and professional ghostbuster. she's got daddy issues. she owns a fluffy little dog. she's held multiple different government officials hostage multiple times. she kissed her boss on the mouth. she accuses said boss of trying to kill her like once a year with literally no foundation. she's catholic but her favorite movie is the exorcist. she shot her best friend. she was abducted by aliens and still refuses to believe in them. she dresses like an underpaid arts teacher. she met god in a parking garage. out of the two times the man she's been blisteringly in love with for years confessed his feelings to her, the first time she got so overwhelmed she started crying and the second time she thought he was high on painkillers. she can't park a car. she once had an existential crisis, got a tattoo, and slept with a serial killer. she wears socks on the beach. she might be immortal
I feel like I want to explain to young tumblr users who weren't born yet that MulderxScully was a revolutionary ship. No, it was not queer but that is not the only way to be revolutionary.
In the 90s when The X Files was airing, media was like misogyny soup. Yes, there were exceptions. But casual sexism was so ubiquitous it was like we were all frogs simmering in it and if you dared to say, hey, uh, isn't this joke a little shitty to the wife? Or maybe this female character could do something other than pose and ask questions so the male lead can answer them? Then you were a hairy feminist outcast loser.
Scully was a lot of things but she was not that. All the "You're not going to believe this, Scully!" memes are based on the fact that Mulder, an attractive white dude, wanted nothing more in his entire life than to share his passions with this tiny redhead. Was he nuts? Yes. But on many other shows, he would have talked down to her, would've ignored her, would've mocked her. He didn't.
When you go back and watch The X Files, there's these moments where Mulder and Scully look at each other like, "wait did Jack Black really just say that" and the significance to fan history isn't just the sexual tension. It's that, yeah, and the origin of the word ship, and the 'will-they-won't-they'. But the most important thing about those looks is how they told the audience that Mulder was looking to Scully for something. A man was looking at a woman and asking with his eyes "what do you think about this?" Was he also saying "and do you want to bone about it?" Yeah, yeah he was. But the first thing was sexy as hell.
Respecting a woman's expertise and folding information she provided into his worldview was a revolutionary thing for a man to do on television at the time. Thank you for coming to my MSR ted talk.
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