shipperx | XF: Yeah, what she said (Reply)

petzipellepingo sent this link to a Salon.com article, and I must admit that this article really sums up a great deal of my love for the show:

Scully I Have Loved

Dead on quotes:

"In this summer of Dark Knights and Hellboys and Iron Men, it's refreshing to be reminded -- as we will be this weekend, with the opening of "The-X-Files: I Want to Believe" -- that not so long ago, there was a science fiction series with a woman at its core, a heroine whose major goals were more about disproving the existence of extraterrestrial life than marrying Big, a chick who spent more time chasing fluke worms down toilets than trying on shoes. "

Not that shoes are bad, mind you. They just don't make an appropriate after-apocalypse diversion (yeah, I know the quote was about Carrie Bradshaw and not Buffy, but Carrie has enough problems being stuck with Big. Yech.)

"Sure, Mulder was hot, and made you want to heal and help him and go with him to the Andes in search of the yeti or whatever it was he planning to do with his three-day weekend. But the one I would have gone to the ends of the earth for was Scully. Patient, long-suffering, geeky forensic pathologist Scully, so short and tucked and tailored. Given such a tough role -- as the woman brought in by the FBI to be the minder and school marm, as Mulder correctly says in the first episode, to spy on him -- Scully was supposed to be able take away his toys and crush his dreams of ghouls and goblins. {...} But as the show matured, it was Scully -- the cerebral head of the X-Files, torn between her Catholic faith, her scientific impulse to explain away the inexplicable and her affection for her partner -- who was destined to become the (still cerebral) heart of the show. "

And

"Scully was a leading lady to fall for, a smart-girl icon who was (and would still be, alas) a rare television bird: professional, independent, unsentimental. She liked boys' things: Her favorite movie was "The Exorcist," her favorite book the phallic classic "Moby-Dick"; her nickname from her father was Starbuck; she wrote her thesis on Einstein's twin paradox. {...} Dana Scully was not standard television beautiful, but a diminutive pre-Raphaelite, pale of skin and red of hair, who could give equal amounts of soul to lines like "Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, just in contradiction to what we know of it" and "Well, seeing as how it's Friday, I was thinking I could get some work done on that monograph I'm writing for the penology review: 'Diminished Acetylcholine Production in Recidivist Offenders.'" A woman who, when asked by her pestering partner to examine a cadaver's head just one more time for a set of horns, can snap on her gloves and mutter "Whatever" like she really means it."

And finally:

"In an entertainment world where women are disappearing from multiplexes, where men bulk up as superheroes while women don't eat but sip pink drinks, we need to remember that there was once a very short heroine who hunted monsters and talked about Einstein, who kicked ass and questioned her faith, who went to work with a man she loved but didn't rip his shirt off over lunch, who didn't want to believe, but opened herself nonetheless to possibility."

The whole article is good. And, yes, Scully remains one of the very best.