Every week there’s a new monster (MOTW) where all the evidence for outsiders disappears, or there’s the mythology where the government is covering it up.
I’m a huge skeptic in almost everything, but if I saw what she saw, I would clearly believe. That’s plenty of evidence for me, and I’m an actual scientist (well PhD engineer. I definitely did real science in school though)
The shit’s clearly real in their universe.
(Sorry, just been watching the first season of the x-files for the past few weeks)
The trouble is, we, the viewers, get a god’s eye view of the action. We see that the monsters are real, and experience every magical moment of proof. Scully is a scientist plucked from our world and placed in Mulder’s world of mystery. In our world, magic does not exist.
We experience weird and unexplained things all the time, and every single time there is a rational, scientific explanation for the evidence. UAPs actually are weather balloons and experimental aircraft. Mexican alien mummies are just plaster cast hoaxes. The guys who had a dead bigfoot in a cooler were lying for attention. Scully, in our world, would be correct every week, and we have a lot more Mulders than we care to think about.
Scully is a scientist. She does not dismiss that there are things we don’t know. She dismisses the fantastical explanations presented without evidence, and we see week after week that Mulder doesn’t have evidence. In the show, there are shadowy forces deliberately destroying evidence and disposing of bodies to keep secrets, always just outside Dana’s peripheral vision. From our seats in front of the TV, we can see them, but she doesn’t.
So when she sees something she cannot explain, she assumes that it is consistent with everything else she knows, everything we know in the real world. Fantastical experiences have natural, mundane explanations, even if we can’t see them. Coincidence, hallucination, imagination, pareidolia, smoke and mirrors, misdirection, and hoaxes. If you see a magician pulls a rabbit from a hat, you may never know how he did it, but you don’t assume martians created a wormhole in the hat and wear bunny costumes. That’s what Mulder sounds like to Scully at first. It just so happens, in this show, that Mulder is dead on balls accurate.
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Iirc it becomes progressively more obvious to her. Character development and audience relatability
It does not. She is stalwart in her skepticism.
I’ll grant your recollection a bit of leeway because when she’s part of the action, she does believe. That was true from the very beginning though.
She just writes it off at the end and continues to be skeptical about every new weird thing. After a few monsters, I would start believing whatever Mulder thought.
He’s not always right because he always jumps to aliens, but if she came to realize that monsters are real in her universe, she’d be a much better scientist.
Edit: I’m glad this got the support it needed. This response was pretty far down voted for a while. I know Internet forums can (and hopefully should) never be the arbiters of our understanding of truth, but positive communication is very important IMO.
By season 8 she’s so convinced she’s essentially Mulder. She has times where she’s more or less convinced until then, but it’s a trajectory towards believing until she does. It just takes her a really long time.
Then, the next episode, she doesn’t believe.
Every. Single. Time.
just been watching the first season of the x-files for the past few weeks
Oh boy do you have some fun coming up.
I see most of X-Files filmed from Mulder’s POV. There are some filmed from Scully’s POV and you understand why she doesn’t believe Mulders theories.
S3A:E12 is a good one from Scully’s POV
Maybe I should have said rewatch.
I watched this growing up (in the before times, when if you missed an episode, you never saw it), and have rewatched it twice since the streaming era.
Anyway, definitely a good show.
Just because you had aliens last week doesn’t mean that you can have Bigfoot this week. Blurry photos and poorly substantiated ravings don’t become good evidence of things until you get a lot more genre savvy.
And just because the thing you have matches Bigfoot on points one, five, and six doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be like Bigfoot on points two through four. Especially if there’s not a unifying theory of Bigfootness behind them and they’re just a list of aforesaid poorly substantiated ravings.
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I’m not angry. I’m trying to get inside Scully’s head.
Scully was legit abducted by aliens in her universe and met up with a whole room of people who had similar alien artifacts removed from them.
I think you are right : in this universe and since her character is described as rational, because of all the evidence she should come to believe.
Now of course, from a scenarist’s perspective, for the plot, it is necessary to have someone at the center which is forever skeptical and one who wants to believe.
Yeah. I suppose that goes along with the general theme as well. Just like the unresolved sexual tension and fabulous chemistry between Mulder and Scully.
Anyway. This is just a TV tropes kind of question. I wasn’t expecting any sort of complex analysis. I just wanted to post about the x-files on a Sunday afternoon now that I’m done with all that I needed to accomplish.
Vince Gilligan also met Bryan Cranston on this episode. It’s a good one btw.
They would later collaborate on a small time show.
Oh. And the stock radio chatter that is in every episode and sim city.
I’m showing my age.
Edit: found it 28 seconds in or so.
Edit 2: I’m watching the eve 6 one. They use it multiple times there.
Where are you watching these episodes at? I think I watched the first episode on some streaming service a long time ago, and never got around to watching the rest.
Currently on Hulu.
