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deathsbestgirl · 1 month ago

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not really a character, but the dynamic between Scully and the MUFON ladies has always been of interest to me (sorry if this sent twice, my computer glitched and I can't tell)

i think something i love about scully is her fear & courage. the first time she meets the mufon women, she's blindsided. it's shortly after melissa was murdered, right after she learned about the chip in her neck. she has not remotely faced her abduction. possibly suppressing her own memories and couldn't handle doing the regression melissa urged her to do.

nisei + memento mori under the cut

at the beginning of nisei, scully's teasing mulder about aliens & autopsies. "that's not your usual brand of entertainment" with a little grin on her face. it goes from funny to spooky very quickly.

scully thinks it's a hoax, obviously. but then there's a japanese diplomat and skinner tells them to back off & head back to d.c. but as always, mulder plays one of his little tricks and held onto evidence, and they decidedly do not go back to d.c. instead, they split up and scully goes to betsy hagopian's house and meets penny northern & the other mufon women.

lottie holloway immediately recognizes her and scully simply tells her she's mistaken, and then penny northern comes out, agreeing with lottie. penny calls another woman to get the others to come over. scully tells them about the murder of steve zinnzser.

one of the things i love about this is that they've clearly talked about scully. because something new happened with her (as we'll learn from penny in memento mori) and they didn't see her again. i think not seeing her again was significant, as most of them have been taken multiple times, some from childhood through adulthood.

they're steadfast in knowing scully even though she insists she doesn't know them. they only give her a few details, unsurprised that scully doesn't remember. they talk about remembering, but it didn't make sense. mentioning the bright white room and then the men. scully has flashes of being there and of one of the tests done on her.

i think something they do wrong, not in a bad way just in the way that they don't know scully, is trying to connect with her through the fear they know she's feeling, that's understandable. but scully is here as an investigator, as a special agent of the fbi, not as a fellow abductee — something she doesn't believe in, and something she puts a lot of energy into compartmentalizing so she can continue doing her job (see irresistible). fear is still connected to vulnerability & weakness for her, and she's not about to openly express weakness with these women.

this is a trait, i think, inspired and reinforced by her mother & father. it's interesting because i think it's clearly implied how affectionate ahab always was with scully, and that she "lost" his favor when she joined the fbi. something that i don't think is really true, but just a failure of parents & children understanding each other. because scully is stubborn & passionate and she does what she believes is right. it may not be the path her parents wanted her to take, never wanting one of their daughters to take on an honorable but dangerous job. they wanted her to become a doctor, something typically more masculine but respectable, and something she would be good at (technically speaking). but i digress...

they talk about fear and scully takes a moment to look around the room, to look at all of these women. i think the scope of what happened to her going beyond just her is a different level of fear. scully went into the fbi believing in her country & government. she was aware of the evils in the world and she wanted to be part of protecting people from it. and here she is, in a room with a huge group of women, who have been failed, repeatedly. it's a new level of awareness to have these women in front of her and she's absorbing it.

it's hard to tell what scully thinks happened to her in that time. she doesn't think it was aliens, but i don't think she does have any idea what. she was kidnapped by an institutionalized former fbi agent. she is aware there's some kind of government conspiracy — there's no denying that with everything she's seen.

i kind of think this goes back to donnie pfaster, her particular horror at what he did. scavenging from & desecrating the dead, murdering in order to do so. something as a pathologist, scientist, fbi agent she cannot personally fathom. (i've talked about this before.) but this is bigger. this is possibly her government & the governments of other countries doing this to their own people. also completely unthinkable to her. it's against everything she stands for as a doctor, scientist and fbi agent.

and this is kind of an interesting thing with scully. she's a scientist and investigator, gathering evidence & putting the pieces together is what she does. but, this whole encounter is a piece of the puzzle she files away. until the next case when they need it, until her own cancer.

i admire scully because she so politely & clearly puts up boundaries, well tries to lol and i love the mufon women because they're understanding. they're persistent, but they're gentle. they aren't forceful. they've all been through this, they know what it's like, how scary & unsettling it is. but i don't think they understand scully's unique position compared to these women (as far as we know).

she doesn't want to face the things they have in common, kind of loses it when they present the hard evidence to her: all of them having having the scars on the back of their necks and the implant each & every one of them removed, like scully did earlier that year. again, she has to have some inkling this wasn't a typical abduction the world is more familiar with.

but continuing on with her purpose, they go to see betsy hagopian. where scully learns about the cancer and what's happening to all of these women. another layer to add to her fear, her denial & avoidance.

i think sometimes people forget how fragile scully is because she's saving mulder, ordering men around, and usually saves herself if she ever needs saving. at the least, she fights fiercely, barely wavering at what she has to do. she'll take another government agent hostage, face her friend kidnapping her with her chin lifted. she enters any ER and acts likes it's her own. she'll shoot her partner and she'll definitely shoot anyone else.

but this is so deeply personal and terrifying. and these women are trying so hard to help her. she can't accept it, but she doesn't forget it. these women are kind. she does know what they're talking about, but she doesn't have the memories they do. correct me if i'm wrong, but it's after this that she starts to recognize men they come across. she can't place them initially, but eventually she does — and she doesn't doubt it once she voices it. (i really don't know if this is a detail i'm remembering correctly lol but i think it's that episode where something's happening to the kids, there's a pedophile?? but they were being experimented on and she recognizes a man they pass while driving)

nisei is a really good precursor to memento mori. it's why mulder & scully know where to start with investigating her cancer. it's why she goes to mulder first, it's why she's able to tell skinner herself when they've already made a plan. she can approach it as investigator, not simply a sick woman or victim.

i think this is something pretty misunderstood about scully. work is her comfort zone. it gives her something to put her back up against, and she has mulder there with her. even after their recent difficulties, he's her touchstone. even if they don't say that until season seven lol

i've written about penny northern before (paragraph in this post, the rest i must have tweeted and i can't find it). scully so quickly bonds with her, even after trying to avoid speaking to her. but penny plays such an important role in scully's journey. not just with cancer, but in fighting the conspiracy. scully may not have always cared about capital H humanity on such a big scale, but she did care. she believed in what she could do as an fbi agent, and mulder really helped her find purpose. at this point, the x files are personal to her and penny northern becomes one of her personal crusades — along with the other mufon women (as cassandra does later).

the one tweet i did find was this:

penny is the one who helped scully decide to live & fight. penny & mulder give her hope that maybe there's a way. if there is one, they'll find it. but scully keeps that quiet, because she can't give mulder false hope either.

the mufon women made scully less alone. she couldn't accept that community (scully never really embraces community, she only trusts mulder). this part is actually very hard for me to put into words because she didn't really accept them in any way until memento mori, until it was only her & penny. penny was dying, so close to death, and scully (dana) just loved her. she accepted her care & guidance, confided in her. she still couldn't grasp the memories, face them (that still comes later, with emily & cassandra). scully tried to carry on for penny, and for her own reasons like she tells mulder. i think this is when scully really took personal ownership of the x files, a big step after never again (and another in patient x/the red and the black and two fathers/one son). scully begged mulder not to make her his next personal quest when she dies, but i do think she made penny & the others part of her own. something about the connection she feels to death. in a way similar to mulder conceptualizing love in loss.

#thescullyphile #dana scully #penny northern #the x files #nisei #memento mori #wrote this in parts so sorry if i repeated a couple things #only half on topic #also. there were some more pieces in 731 but this was already so long #it's mostly about scully's belief that it is men #and i think scully does best in the realm of human criminals #something she understands to a point and can rationalize #in a way she absolutely cannot rationalize aliens

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