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When The X-Files first appeared on television in 1993, Special Agent Dana Scully walked into a basement office at the FBI and changed television. Perhaps nobody knew it yet.
She was there, after all, for a very specific reason. Her superiors had assigned her to work with Fox Mulder because she was everything he was not supposed to be: rational, methodical, scientifically trained and sceptical. Mulder wanted to believe. Scully wanted evidence.
But Dana Scully soon became much more than Mulder's scientific counterweight. She became one of the most powerful female characters in television history.
Dana Katherine Scully was a medical doctor, a scientist and an FBI Special Agent. That combination mattered. Television had certainly shown intelligent women before her, but Scully occupied a space that women were still rarely allowed to inhabit in mainstream popular culture. She was not the assistant to the scientist. She was the scientist. She examined bodies. She performed autopsies. She studied tissue samples. She interpreted toxicology reports. She challenged hypotheses. She demanded evidence.
And when Fox Mulder presented an extraordinary explanation, Scully's response was rarely to ridicule him. She simply asked: Can we prove it? That distinction is essential to understanding the character. Scully's scepticism was not closed-mindedness. It was methodology.
Science does not say that something is impossible merely because it appears extraordinary. Science asks for evidence before accepting it as true. And that made Scully much more interesting than a simple sceptic.
One of the great achievements of The X-Files was that it never truly asked us to choose between its two protagonists. Mulder had intuition. Scully had method. Mulder looked at the impossible and asked, Why not? Scully looked at it and asked, How do we know? And somewhere between those two questions lay the truth. Their relationship worked because neither ultimately destroyed the other's worldview. Instead, over the years, they influenced one another. Scully learned that not everything could easily be explained. Mulder learned that believing something did not make it true. Faith needed reason. Reason sometimes needed imagination. The truth, perhaps, required both.
There was another quiet revolution taking place. Again and again, Scully entered an autopsy room. She put on her gloves, switched on her recorder and began examining the dead. The scene became one of the visual languages of The X-Files.
Today this hardly seems unusual. Television crime drama has made forensic laboratories, autopsy rooms, medical examiners and pathologists completely familiar to us. Think of CSI and its many descendants and spin-offs, Body of Proof, Forever, Bones, NCIS, Major Crimes and countless other procedural dramas. The forensic expert eventually became almost indispensable. But Scully had been there years earlier.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, for example, did not premiere until 2000, seven years after The X-Files. It would subsequently make forensic science the very centre of one of television's most successful franchises. It would be too much to claim that Dana Scully single-handedly created the television forensic boom. She did not. But she unquestionably helped prepare audiences for it. She made scientific investigation dramatic. She showed that an autopsy could move a story forward. And, perhaps most importantly, she demonstrated that the person holding the scalpel could be a woman.
This may be one of Scully's greatest achievements as a character. Her strength was never based on becoming masculine. She could carry a gun and perform an autopsy. She could confront killers and challenge FBI superiors. But she could also be vulnerable, frightened, compassionate and deeply emotional. She could be a scientist and a Catholic. She could question faith and still possess it. She could love. She could grieve. She could doubt herself. None of these things diminished her intelligence. None made her less capable. And this was enormously important. Scully did not demonstrate that women could succeed by behaving like men. She demonstrated that competence has no gender.
Her influence eventually escaped fiction altogether. It became known as the Scully Effect. Researchers studying the phenomenon found that women who had watched The X-Files regularly were significantly more likely to regard STEM positively, to consider working in a STEM field and to identify Scully as an inspiration.
A major study conducted by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media described Scully as one of the first multidimensional female STEM characters on popular television -and the first to occupy such a prominent leading role.
Gillian Anderson herself later discovered that women had become doctors, scientists and FBI agents partly because they had grown up watching Scully. Chris Carter has recalled hearing the same thing from viewers years later.
That is an extraordinary legacy for a fictional character. Because representation does something very simple and very powerful. Before someone can think, I can become that, sometimes they first need to see someone like themselves doing it.
Dana Scully was never designed as a superhero. She had no extraordinary powers. Quite the opposite. Her power was her mind. She observed. She studied. She questioned. She reasoned. And when the evidence contradicted her hypothesis, eventually she changed the hypothesis. There is something profoundly powerful about that.
Popular culture often celebrates certainty. Heroes know what they are doing. They know who the enemy is. They know what is right. Scientists cannot work that way. Science requires the courage to say: I don't know. And then to start looking. Scully made that search heroic.
More than three decades after Dana Scully first entered that basement office, television is full of female doctors, forensic scientists, detectives, pathologists and investigators. They are no longer unusual. And perhaps that is one of Scully's greatest victories. Characters such as her eventually made themselves less exceptional because they helped change what audiences considered normal. Dana Scully opened a door. Others walked through it. And behind the FBI badge, the red hair, the autopsy table and the wonderfully sceptical raised eyebrow, there remains something even more important.
A generation of girls watched a woman enter rooms traditionally occupied by men and behave as though she had every right to be there. Because she did.
Before she was a doctor, Scully was a physicist. Her senior thesis, Einstein's Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation, already tells us something essential about her character. Scully was never simply a woman who refused to believe. She was a woman trained to question, test and reinterpret. Long before she entered an autopsy room or joined the FBI, she had already been taught to look at the universe and ask whether the accepted explanation was enough.
Dana Scully taught us that scepticism is not the absence of imagination. That science is not the enemy of wonder. That asking questions is not a weakness. And that perhaps the most courageous response to the unknown is neither I believe nor I don't believe. It is: Show me the evidence.
More information: Geena Davis Institute
only in contradiction to what we know of it.
Dana Scully
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