Cheryl Duckworth
The Con-quest of Fear (Or just another excuse to gush about Scully)
May 1998
When Dana Katherine Scully walked into Fox Mulder's office nearly six years ago, two worlds collided. Her world view was instantly pitted against the beliefs of this strange, honest, bitter man whose intelligence seemed to contradict his outlandish, passionately held beliefs. Scully, almost by instinct, did not run or scare off. She stood her ground and stated her opinions with that clarity and intelligence and confidence her fans have come to cherish, resulting in that classic first meeting of the Dynamic Duo: "What I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the relm of sciene. The answers are there; you just have to know where to look." Yet behind that almost cold professional dememor, as so many had seen, was a woman of passion and compassion, a complex person who demands the best from herself and those around her daily. As she journey with Mulder, and revealed herself to him more and more, we too saw more of who she really is. Their journey is an inconceivably dangerous, frightening one in which she has seen things on a daily basis which defy the logic and order upon which she hangs her courage, trust and faith. If Scully is to prevail, she must not waver or weaken or show fear, lest she lose herself. At least, this is what she seems to believe. Because of this woman's courage, honor, grit and goodness, she refuses to quit until justice has prevailed. And for that to happen, she, again, must not lose control or her enemies will win. I therefore maintain that Scully's greatest fear is the loss of control, and that as she travels along her spiritual path, she begins accepting this fear and thereby begins overcoming it.
Countless episodes confirm this, as one of the show's staples is the intellectual, philisophical debate between Mulder and Scully. He, of course, works on instinct; she weighs the evidence and objectively calculates what must be the truth. Yet she is confronted again and again with "evidence" she has seen and heard herself yet which she cannot incorporate into her worldview. One of the first episodes to explore Scully's physche, "Beyond the Sea" states this clearly. Just after the death of her father, Scully refuses to quit working even temporarily, which in of itself testifies to her need for control of a situation.
A serial killer, Luther Boggs, requests to speak to Mulder, whose profile put him away. In a brutal attempt to win Scully's trust and be freed from the death penalty, Boggs (evidently) channels Scully's father to prove that he can help find the college couple Scully and Mulder are looking for. Throughout the episode, she wavers between belief and angry skepticism. In the touching final scene, Mulder asks her point blank why she cannot believe that Boggs had channeled her father after all she had witnessed. Her answer is wrenchingly honest and telling: "I'm afraid to believe." He, perhaps sensing the depth of this struggle in her, simply squeezes her shoulder in silent support.
The final scene in "Endgame" also gives us a wonderful mantra of what makes the engenmatic Dr. Scully tick. After having rescued Mulder (and having jumpstarted his heart*) she sits by his bed, waiting for him to awaken. He does and her *faith* in science, which is as much a faith as Mulder's belief in the paranormal, is rewarded. She says that, "ultimately, it was science that saved Agent Mulder's life." She further defines the determination that her cases with Mulder fire within her to "apply reason to those things which seem to defy it." The stranger, more frightening and more painful the journey gets, the more determined she seems to see it through. The more elusive the answers, the more she needs them.
But perhaps no other episode of the first several seasons gives us a glimpse into this fear of Scully's that is both a weakness and a strength than Chris Carter's masterpiece, "Irresistible." This entire episode, revered and dissected by Scullyists world-wide, is entirely devoted to exploring the theme of victimization, which is the ultimate loss of control, and its effect on Scully. From the beginning, she is deeply sickend by this case, an odd reaction for a forensic pathologist.
But her reaction is more than that; Mulder was sickened by what death fetishist Donnie Pfaster did to his victims as well, as he shows answering the question of the field agent with whom he and Scully were working. The agent asks if Mulder thinks is was a human who did this; he replies, "If you want to call it that...." Scully is clearly is clearly affected in a way Mulder was not (perhaps because he was not likely to become on of Pfaster's targets, being male). She is afraid.
She is so afraid that she is unable to do her job. And this sits well with her not at all. She will not be passive. Under the pretense of being more helpful, she flys back to Washington DC and visits the kindly therapist Karen Kossef (who quickly became on of my favorite minor characters). In this scene, she states perhaps more clearly than she ever will again that the need to feel strong and in control is essential to her: "I know that there are predators out there, just as there always have been. And I know it is my job to protect people from I depend on that faith to help me do what I do. I want that faith back;
I need it back." This faith that she is strong enough to defend those victims from the predators is what Pfaster has taken from her. As Scully says, "You think you can look into the face of pure evil and then you find yourself paralysed by it." And if she does not have this faith that protecting those who cannot protect themselves is what she is *meant* to do, how can she continue on this quest with Mulder? She can't and she knows this, which is why she returns to the Twin Cities slay her psychological dragon. One of the aspects of this episode that will always make me grateful is that Scully is given this chance. Using her wits and physical 5" 1' prowess, she is able to survive her violent kidnapping and nearly kills her attacker. Mulder, at that moment, bursts in and Pfaster is arrested.
Though this episode is clearly about Scully, Mulder's role in it reveals volumes about not only his relationship with this woman but about the woman herself. He sees her fear instantly and he asks her about it, assuring her she "doesn't have to hide anything from him" Naturally, she is, as always, "fine." She refuses to break down or reveal weakness, not, I believe, because of any coldness or arrogance but because she knows she must remain strong if she is to funtion on the path she has chosen for herself. She shuts him out, lest his gentle insistence and concern break her down. Eventually, that is exactly what happens after Pfaster is taken away. One touch of his hand to her quivering chin and she wraps herself up in his trenchcoat and sobs like "the conquest of fear lies in the moment of its acceptance." By admitting it to herself, and to her partner whom she "trusts with [her] life" she can begin to heal and grow even stronger. Scully's clear heroism in this episode lies in the fact that she turns her defeats into victories by refusing to do nothing. This is how she maintains control.
The next episode in which we meet Karen Kossef also reveals quite a bit about who Scully really is. Again, her challenge is to overcome her fear, as she has learned recently that she has cancer. In fact, those are the first words Kossef says to Scully: "We've spoken about your fears before." In a heartbreakingly human, poignant attempt to deal with it, she shuts it out and denies it. One gets the feeling that it is not Mulder she is trying to convice anymore when she insists she's "fine." She whispers it to herself as she walks off, alone, away from him. Her reaction when he challenges her unwillingness to tell him what is really wrong is similar; she tears up, that chin juts out and she whispers, "I'm going home," only to break down crying, alone, in her car. To have admitted her fear to him would have been to allow to lose control. The odds against her at that point felt overwhelming enough that that was not an option, not even with the man whose passion "has been the great source of strength I've drawn on."
And as if that were not enough, Scully is not only confronted with her seemingly eminent death; she is also confronted with accepting that she seen a "wraith", a foreteller of death, in the form of one of the murder victims of her and Mulder's case. She refuses to admit this to Mulder, but the effect of having seen this wraith, which her rational, challenging, frightened expression on her face when Kossef asked what message the wraith brought said it all. This is just not something she is prepared to accept now; she clings to her denial as her source of strength, needing control now more than ever. I think one of the reasons this episode is so wrenching for anyone who cares about Scully (other than Anderson's Emmy caliber performance) is that she never does reach that closure or healing in this episode. She is terribly afraid and to private, to stubborn, to unselfish and to strong to show this fear to anyone.
Yet as Scully continues on her journey, she begins to see clearly that pretending to be strong and feeling that strength within are two utterly different things. I believe she sees (whether or not she consistently acts on this knowledge) that she must accept and embrace this fear if she is to overcome it. As Mulder said, "the conquest of fear lies in one of the ways in which she is beginning to do so. Interestingly, Scully is shown kneeling, hands folded in prayer, for a few all to brief seconds (her expression was haunting) in "Elegy." Since "Revelations" we have seens that faith in a God who cares and is in some way involved with the world-- that "he is speaking but no one is listening." In "Revelations" Scully seemingly throws caution and science to the wind and acts on intuition, or rather, on faith, that she has been called to come to the rescue of a young boy. This might seem out of character; it was certainly a side of Scully we had not seen much of. But I believe her faith in God is a natural extension of her faith in science and vise versa. Her belief is in a God who has ordered and created the world to run by certain natural laws; her faith in the order world of science stems from this faith in a Creator. I believe her logic is that if there is a God, the world must be ordered and understandable (to an extent) and it must have some kind of goodness.
Naturally, nearly everything she witnesses on her search for the Truth with Mulder challenges this faith in an order, patterned universe run by a God who is involved. Again, if she is to prevail in this quest, holding onto that faith, which gives her the strength and control to do what she does and belief it is worth doing, is nearly survival.
While she did not seem to come to any sort of healing or knowledge or peace in "Elegy", in several episodes after that, some force seems to be pushing her forward on her journey, demanding she face her demons and follow the intuition it gives her. This begins in "Redux/Redux II."
Some argue it was Scully's return to faith. Some say it was the desperation of a dying woman. Some say she had never left her faith to begin with. Any of these could probably be supported if one went to the right episode. No matter-- either way, Scully by the episodes' end is praying the rosay, offering to pray for Mulder and challenging her doctor about why he does not believe in miricles. Three things could have saved her in this episode: Mulder's remission chip, the doctor's cutting edge cure or Scully's faith that God would not let her die. In the end, the viewer is left to choose, which is as it should be. I personally like to believe that it was her faith-- but then whose to say the Big Guy can't work through doctors or chips? Or, for that matter, Mulder? Again, any way the viewer chooses, she is clearly more active and vocal about her faith than she has been for a while and this growth seems to be from the fact that she has almost nearly died.
It might be easy to write this "return to faith" off if it were not for "A Christmas Carol" and its sequel "Emily." Right from the teaser in "Emily", Scully states clearly where she thinks her life is headed-- or rather, expresses that she doesn't know herself but she suspects Someone never held, on a course charted by an unseen hand...facing a truth I can no longer deny..." (Interesting, she also in her dream picks up that omnipresent cross of hers upon speaking the word, "Truth.") This theme is echoed and strengthed by the fact that the lesson that seems set before her is to discern what was "meant to be" instead of taking control of the situation for herself. She must learn to let her new daughter go nearly as soon as she found her. Mulder sees this, sees that Scully is torturing herself in an exercise in futility (wonder who she got that from?) and eventually she agrees, though she is less than thrilled about it. As Mother Teresa was quoted as saying, "I know God won't give me more than I can handle. I just wish he didn't trust me so much."
Scully's movement towards accepting her fear of losing control continues in "The Red and the Black." She faces something she cannot explain, like possible alien abduction. Instead of ignoring it, she chooses to face it head on, demanding to know what happened, demanding her memories back. She all but forces Mulder to help her if he wants her to continue on this quest with him (in an utterly heartrending scene, I might add.) He naturally agrees and she undergoes hypnotic regression; considering her views on this from past, that alone is significant. She is choosing to allow herself to lose control, however temporarily.
Yet perhaps no other episode reaveal as much of this journey or shows us so much of Scully's faith and soul as the most recent "All Souls." In this episode, Scully is seemingly chosen by God, with the help of a kindly priest, for the specific purpose of saving the lives of four hanicapped girls. Having stated that she has "taken it as [her] code and purpose...to save lives", she agrees. While on the case she witnesses a Satanic attack, an angelic rescue, and most painfully, visions of her late daughter (during an autopsy, no less). What is most interesting about this episode, however, is not that Scully is again the chosen protector (a role she plays requently) but that God seems to have chosen her for reasons personal to herself, and not simply to protect the girls whose souls Satan sought. During her wrenching confessional scenes, she expresses the beliefe that God intervned, planning her circumstances so that she would learn a specific lesson He had to teach her. As she states in the final scene, "You mean accepting my loss? Maybe that's what faith is." She also explains that she feels this message was meant only for her, "in a language only [she] could understand." The growth in her character and her progress on her journey toward the conquest of fear can also be seen in the fact that she is no longer denying what she has witnessed and experienced. Trusting her own intuition, against the opinion of Mulder and even her priest, she believes that what she saw was a vision, not a hallucination or a trick of her grief. She believes she was called and, without knowing how or why, she does her best to answer that call, facing her fear of possibly losing control in a world without clear answers. Indeed, she seems to give the control to the "unseen hand" guiding her journey.
On her search for the truths of life with Fox Mulder, Dana Scully has seen, felt, touched, heard (and even dissected) a myrid of things and events that cannot be explained via her logical, ordered view-- a view that gives her great comfort and strength to continue on her path. Being "afraid to believe" at times hindered her on her journey-- and at times it saved her. With each episode, as she witnesses and contemplates new ideas and views, she must face her fear that the world may not be the ordered place she believes it is. Seemingly being taught by God to that the only way to defeat this fear is to accept it, she has begun to do just that. And with each episode, Scully travels a bit closer on her journey towards the conquest of fear.