Scully have I loved

Fox Mulder was brilliant and sexy in "The X-Files" -- but it's Dana Scully who has my heart.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Science Fiction, Movies, The X-Files, David Duchovny, Arts & Entertainment, Rebecca Traister

Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment

Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully in "The X-Files."

July 24, 2008 | In this summer of Dark Knights and Hellboys and Iron Men, it's refreshing to be reminded -- as we will be this weekend, with the opening of "The-X-Files: I Want to Believe" -- that not so long ago, there was a science fiction series with a woman at its core, a heroine whose major goals were more about disproving the existence of extraterrestrial life than marrying Big, a chick who spent more time chasing fluke worms down toilets than trying on shoes.

I was crazy about "The X-Files," Fox's pre-9/11 ode to trusting no one. I taped every episode. I watched many of them repeatedly. I borrowed friends' tapes and purchased some of my favorite episodes when they became available. I saw the confounding first "X-Files" feature, "Fight the Future," in the theaters. Twice. I still think of 10:13 as a lucky number, on a clock or calendar, and I still occasionally address e-mails to friends who knew me at the time with "Mulder, it's me." Perhaps the biggest sign of my devotion was that I forced myself, balefully, to keep watching the show to the bitter end, after David Duchovny took off and pallid young Mulder and Scully imitators were hired to generate new heat.

No, I never wrote fanfic or had an online alter ego named after Scully's dog, "Queequeg"; I didn't name my cat Skinner, though let me tell you, it crossed my mind. Eight years out, I can't imaginatively conjure up the face of the Well-Manicured Man, or tell you what the deal was with the alien black oil.

But I was never in it for the conspiracy, the Syndicate, Deep Throat, the Cigarette Smoking Man or the array of bat boys, robotic cockroaches, Satanic cheerleaders or Mexican goat suckers that waltzed menacingly across my screen every week.

I was there because I knew, eventually, my heroes would get it on. And because I was totally enraptured by special agent Dana Scully.

It probably wasn't supposed to be that way. Duchovny's Fox Mulder was, after all, the centerpiece of the narrative: the brilliant, wounded, lonely man, who spends his life trying to sort through the trauma of his sister's disappearance and prove that he isn't crazy for believing in aliens, ghosts and El Chupacabra (the Mexican goat sucker). And it didn't hurt that Duchovny was basically a walking pheromone, all languid eyes and long-necked eroticism.

Sure, Mulder was hot, and made you want to heal and help him and go with him to the Andes in search of the yeti or whatever it was he planning to do with his three-day weekend.

But the one I would have gone to the ends of the earth for was Scully. Patient, long-suffering, geeky forensic pathologist Scully, so short and tucked and tailored. Given such a tough role -- as the woman brought in by the FBI to be the minder and school marm, as Mulder correctly says in the first episode, to spy on him -- Scully was supposed to be able take away his toys and crush his dreams of ghouls and goblins.

Who wants to be the skeptic, the killjoy, the buzzkill? Gillian Anderson, plucked from obscurity in her early 20s to play Scully, should have initially petitioned for a special Emmy category that rewards excellence in the field of lip biting, sideways casting of the eyes and exasperated bowing of the head.

But as the show matured, it was Scully -- the cerebral head of the X-Files, torn between her Catholic faith, her scientific impulse to explain away the inexplicable and her affection for her partner -- who was destined to become the (still cerebral) heart of the show.

The very fact that her character was such a hard sell made her repeated brushes with the supernatural all the more powerful. Mulder's desire to believe was so expansive, his credulity so flexible, that it's not as though he was ever going to have either shaken from him. But Scully's surety was solid, stable, rigid; every time she saw something she thought she'd never see, we saw it crack, sparks fly from it. She was forced to question herself, grow, change. In short, she got the better arc, and her journeys were always, by dint of the setup, more intricate and moving.

There's a beautiful scene at the end of an episode from Season 3, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," about a man who can foresee when and how everyone will meet his or her end. In it, Scully, who of course initially doubts him, watches as one of Bruckman's unlikelier predictions -- that she will wind up in bed with him, holding his hand tenderly as tears stream down his face -- comes true. Anderson's pale young face opens wide with grief and realization: grief for the man she'd taken for a kook, realization that he had been for real, and also that the other prediction he'd made about her was that she would never die.

Scully, we are to believe, is immortal; the series hinted at it at various other points, especially in a stunning sixth-season episode in which she looks away from death as it approaches her. It's a testament to the strength of the character that as the other unwieldy mythologies of "The X-Files" -- aliens and government conspiracies and black oil! -- inevitably crumbled under the weight of their own convoluted expectations, the mystery and mythos surrounding Scully grew steadily stronger.

Early episodes of the show look so dated now -- check out their toaster-size phones and Scully's ill-advised jewel-toned pantsuits -- but "The X-Files" was innovative television when it debuted, dealing as it did with issues of science, faith and distrust in government that in a post-9/11 world would probably have landed Fox Mulder deep in Guantánamo.

Next page: Not just another alien-loving nerd and his bombshell lady scientist partner