Mark with an X

Clearly, in the Pilot episode of The X Files, Dana Scully is little more than ‘the sidekick’. Her lack of experience in either investigative work generally and these types of cases specifically provides plenty of opportunity for the exposition the audience needs if we are to understand Mulder’s work.

According to the source that shall not be named, “it is typical for the character and sidekick to be of the same [sex] – otherwise the term ‘sidekick’ is replaced with ‘partner’ or ‘companion’”. Despite this, and despite it being rare for there to be no romantic or sexual relationship between the main character and sidekick if they be of opposite sexes, it isn’t inaccurate to describe Scully’s role as sidekick.

The first time we see Scully can only be described as an establishing shot; she is our introduction to the world we are about to enter, the counterpoint to all that just happened in the cold open. If the episode opens with mystery and death, Scully’s appearance brings order and rationality. It is the purpose of the FBI to provide the meanings and explanations, to impose their reading of the text. Scully is very much of this world.

We soon learn that Scully is a medical doctor, working out of Quantico. Recruited out of medical school, she sees the FBI as a place she can distinguish herself. And, certainly, she has succeeded; she of all possibilities has been selected for this new role, this “debunking” of the X Files.

Scully’s success to this point is that she has allowed herself to be subsumed by the text. If the FBI is the writer of this text, success is measured according to the extent that one fulfils the intentions of author. Scully has distinguished herself as someone who will “make the proper scientific analysis”, thereby precluding the construction of a personal text.

In climbing those steps, Scully enters a wholly different world to the one in which she has, up to now, secluded herself. At first, it appears normal. She signs in, thereby informing the audience just who she is, and proceeds through the building with confidence and purpose. She feels at home. There is a slight hesitation, look of concern, before she knocks on Section Chief Blevins’ door, but this is only natural before entering the office of a superior. On the whole, she is quite relaxed, feeling no undue stress or pressure. She has no sense that she is being called into the upper echelons of the Bureau to receive any kind of rebuke. She probably has some sense that her two years of dedicated work at Quantico has finally earned her an advancement of one kind or another.

In one sense, then, Scully is the perfect text, fully realising the role inscribed by the author. But we are about to find out that this is not an entirely accurate picture.

During her interview with Blevins, when he asks her how she came to the FBI, she offers a vital piece of personal information. To no one’s surprise, it is completely overlooked by the three men in the room. Her glance over at the man smoking in the corner is rebuffed; no one here has the slightest interest in her as a person, an individual who might have her own text. She is merely a tool, a literary element deployed to serve the progression of the author’s intention rather than for any real purpose of her own.

Whenever we look upon another as merely an object for our use, as a ‘thing’ rather than for what they are, a text in search of a story, we will always be disappointed at the outcome, for no one can really ever live up to the expectations, or intentions, of another, however hard they may try. And, certainly, Scully has tried. Her efforts are the very reason she has been chosen for this assignment.

It is in that glance and the words she utters that we are given a clue to her real self, a clue that goes completely unnoticed by Blevins and the Cigarette Smoking Man, a clue that would have told them – had they been capable of reading it – that they were setting themselves up for a great disappointment.

It is no wonder that these men are incapable of reading the text. They have, after all, selected her precisely because they thought they had read her. What, with her appearing properly attired and her physical size, she oozed conformity – the little lady awed by the power of the men with the pen.

She indicates, however, that they haven’t read the text anywhere near closely enough.

It is in that little sign of humanity, that little personal detail – “Um, my parents still think it was an act of rebellion…”. With these words, Scully sets up interesting possibilities. She is being sent to work with a man who has “developed a consuming devotion to an unassigned project outside the bureau mainstream”. Scully, as we have seen, is firmly within the bureau mainstream, so mainstream, in fact, that she is seen to be ideal for this most unusual assignment. Little do they know, these men who wield the pen, that Scully is a script waiting to be written, that she has very definite, if unexpressed, intentions for her own life story. Indeed, it is Scully’s character arc which, in many ways, makes her a far more interesting study than Mulder. Despite her beginnings, or because of them, her journey with the X Files is far more profound than her partner’s. He already inhabits this world and, yes, he has his ups and downs, moments of doubt and unbelief, but he never really changes as a person. His story is, in large measure, already written. Scully, on the other hand, really does change her script, struggles with imagining what is possible, and lives out her act of rebellion which isn’t rebellion so much as it is a coming to terms with who she is in herself rather than simply being what others expect or intend her to be.