Jackie's Garden
Special Agent Dana Scully
I started re-re-re-watching The X-files yesterday during the blizzard that put fifteen inches of snow on the ground. It feels like I love this show more each time I come back to it after years of letting it ferment in my sub-conscious, the main reason being the characters. Fox Mulder is amazing, I love him so much - his optimism and belief in the unknown, his stupid jokes and nerd-jock fusion personality but, Dana Scully is who I really connect with.
Part of why I feel like I can appreciate this show and this character more and more as I age is that in the past few years I have decided to take my pursuit of academics and science seriously. I want to be a scientist so badly (some people try to tell me that I already am one but I don't believe them) and I am incredibly devoted to getting there. In this time, I have started to see and understand what science is really like, what the reality of 'doing science' means. When I watch X-files now, I see myself in Scully, or the self I want to be.
Scully is a scientist, THE scientist. She is often portrayed on the surface as 'the skeptic', which of course she is, but her real love is science. She takes each case at face value and starts to ask questions. Mulder is often (like 99% of time) right about what is happening in each creature-of-the-week episode and we, the audience, know that he is because we see what happens. When I was younger I would get annoyed at Dana Scully's unwillingness to accept the paranormal and her insistence on the facts but now I can see plainly that she IS right. Maybe not about the paranormal event of each episode, but she is right in the way that she is asking questions, avoiding biases, doing deep research, asking more questions, writing/recording/talking out her thoughts, checking on any related sources of information and re-assessing her opinions and subsequently her questions, on and on until the case is over. She observes, questions, and records everything. This is what is so inspiring to me about Dana Scully. Despite the overwhelming, mounting evidence that paranormal activities are common in her line of work, she never lets that fact get in the way of following the scientific method (much to Mulder's dismay).
When I grow up, I want to be like special agent Dana Scully.
