Why does Dana Scully not believe in aliens or any of the other weirdness in the x-files?
Why does Dana Scully not believe in aliens or any of the other weirdness in the x-files?
Every week there's a new monster (MOTW) where all the evidence for outsiders disappears, or there's the mythology where the government is covering it up.
I'm a huge skeptic in almost everything, but if I saw what she saw, I would clearly believe. That's plenty of evidence for me, and I'm an actual scientist (well PhD engineer. I definitely did real science in school though)
The shit's clearly real in their universe.
(Sorry, just been watching the first season of the x-files for the past few weeks)
The trouble is, we, the viewers, get a god's eye view of the action. We see that the monsters are real, and experience every magical moment of proof. Scully is a scientist plucked from our world and placed in Mulder's world of mystery. In our world, magic does not exist.
We experience weird and unexplained things all the time, and every single time there is a rational, scientific explanation for the evidence. UAPs actually are weather balloons and experimental aircraft. Mexican alien mummies are just plaster cast hoaxes. The guys who had a dead bigfoot in a cooler were lying for attention. Scully, in our world, would be correct every week, and we have a lot more Mulders than we care to think about.
Scully is a scientist. She does not dismiss that there are things we don't know. She dismisses the fantastical explanations presented without evidence, and we see week after week that Mulder doesn't have evidence. In the show, there are shadowy forces deliberately destroying evidence and disposing of bodies to keep secrets, always just outside Dana's peripheral vision. From our seats in front of the TV, we can see them, but she doesn't.
So when she sees something she cannot explain, she assumes that it is consistent with everything else she knows, everything we know in the real world. Fantastical experiences have natural, mundane explanations, even if we can't see them. Coincidence, hallucination, imagination, pareidolia, smoke and mirrors, misdirection, and hoaxes. If you see a magician pulls a rabbit from a hat, you may never know how he did it, but you don't assume martians created a wormhole in the hat and wear bunny costumes. That's what Mulder sounds like to Scully at first. It just so happens, in this show, that Mulder is dead on balls accurate.
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This is a whole bunch of word salad. (= "this is verbose nonsense")
It's just four paragraphs, and their content is rather clear. TL;DR:
- Scully works from the PoV of a RL scientist
- Scully has a fraction of the info that viewers do, and that fraction does not include things that would contradict a sceptic explanation
- As such there's no reason for Scully to change her worldview to accept aliens and other weirdness
Fair enough. Just know one thing. The unconscious mind seems to be not just incredibly powerful, but reality-defying to the point that myself and my dad have gotten information related to events we would not experience until years later in dreams, and in general lucid dreams are often stranger than fiction.
You don't have to believe anything, I'm just pointing out oneirology (study of dreams, and in an actual scientific manner rather than something shady like astrology) is both a real field of study and like trying to catalogue all the different ways lightning can be put in a jar; frustratingly resistant to the scientific method.
And that's just in anthopological and psychological fields, what about the bottom of the ocean or the depths of space? It's unlikely there's anything truly alien or magic on other worlds or in deep ocean water but so is the presence of life at all. In short, we might also be living in a world which isn't as realistic as we've been led to believe reality is.
The thing is, what we've dubbed "realistic" is things that are consistent with previous observation, and our best models of reality. We've so far never once, let alone frequently, seen incontrovertible proof of life from Extra Terrestrial origin, we never see real life vampires and when people die they tend to stay dead and eventually rot rather than becoming ghosts. Because of that, we consider phenomena that mostly follows this trend to be "realistic" or rather just, real.
Sometimes there's things that were simply not observed or not accounted for in our models before, but we'll experience them in a way that is frequent enough or resistant enough to being explained through existing models, that we have to update our understanding of reality. After that future experiences with phenomena that are explainable through the lens of our experiences and latest models of reality become the new "realistic". From that, we can't really live in an "unrealistic" universe because realistic is just whatever is "real" and when we find something provably new, it becomes the new "real". If vampires started popping up all over the place or even just one was discovered and provably had different biology from human beings that enabled the ability to live eternally or suck blood through specially adapted teeth, then ultimately that would just become normal. Until they do though, it's in general best to reckon using our collective experience and understanding of reality which mostly precludes vampires or premonitions as possibilities.
Iirc it becomes progressively more obvious to her. Character development and audience relatability
It does not. She is stalwart in her skepticism.
I'll grant your recollection a bit of leeway because when she's part of the action, she does believe. That was true from the very beginning though.
She just writes it off at the end and continues to be skeptical about every new weird thing. After a few monsters, I would start believing whatever Mulder thought.
He's not always right because he always jumps to aliens, but if she came to realize that monsters are real in her universe, she'd be a much better scientist.
Edit: I'm glad this got the support it needed. This response was pretty far down voted for a while. I know Internet forums can (and hopefully should) never be the arbiters of our understanding of truth, but positive communication is very important IMO.
literally sees a man go invisible and then gets choked by invisible man
"There's got to be a rational explanation!"
"Yeah, Scully, and I think the rational explanation is that he really can go fucking invisible!"
True. True. (90s reference).
I don't remember that episode of the x-files. It fits with the theme, but it's also the plot of the classic invisible man.
Any way, you've made some positive contributions to this discussion. I appreciate it.
There's something to be said about the whole "wanting to believe" thing for Mulder. While Scully may be rational and skeptical, there may also be a part of her that "doesn't want to believe" something outlandish.
If so, both Mulder's and Scully's gut instincts are technically irrational (because it doesn't make sense to "want to" believe something or not), but hers has a lifetime of reinforcement that is hard to break, even for an otherwise rational person.
I like the want to believe vs not want to believe interpretation. Extremely good point.
This is a way more interesting answer than I expected. Respect.
just been watching the first season of the x-files for the past few weeks
Oh boy do you have some fun coming up.
I see most of X-Files filmed from Mulder's POV. There are some filmed from Scully's POV and you understand why she doesn't believe Mulders theories.
S3A:E12 is a good one from Scully's POV
Maybe I should have said rewatch.
I watched this growing up (in the before times, when if you missed an episode, you never saw it), and have rewatched it twice since the streaming era.
Anyway, definitely a good show.
What about, like, the "COPS" parody episode where Scully, completely separated from Mulder, sees another doctor she is performing an autopsy with start manifesting symptoms a deadly disease mere moments after mentioning it and scaring her (the supernatural thing was making your fears come true)? He didn't see it, even though I would say that episode was clearly from Mulder's point of view (and IIRC, Duchovney was the director on that one, as he did with a lot of the more humorous episodes) if not from the POV of the cameraman following them around (again, cops parody; it was filmed like an episode of cops). Did he just make shit up?
I misread cameraman as Cartman and it was a funny visual! 🤣
There's a fan theory (that became my headcanon as soon as I heard it) that the episodes we see are the minority of their cases that are actually supernatural. Most of their cases have mundane explanations so Scully is always skeptical because she's usually right.
Just because you had aliens last week doesn't mean that you can have Bigfoot this week. Blurry photos and poorly substantiated ravings don't become good evidence of things until you get a lot more genre savvy.
And just because the thing you have matches Bigfoot on points one, five, and six doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be like Bigfoot on points two through four. Especially if there's not a unifying theory of Bigfootness behind them and they're just a list of aforesaid poorly substantiated ravings.
The easiest answer is that the plot and themes required it. The same way horror movie victims do stupid things like splitting up or checking on noises in a dark basement. It's necessary to advance the plot or maintain the status quo of the character relationships. Mulder needed a foil to his eagerness to embrace aliens and conspiracies as the explanation.
Right, but honestly, she's the star. Mulder is the foil. (I mean. I'm sure any literary scholar would agree with you, but I empathize with her more. I suppose that's why I asked this question)
In any case, the current top post suggests that a lot of people don't actually remember her character continuing to be skeptical at the beginning of every episode.
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I think you are right : in this universe and since her character is described as rational, because of all the evidence she should come to believe.
Now of course, from a scenarist's perspective, for the plot, it is necessary to have someone at the center which is forever skeptical and one who wants to believe.
Yeah. I suppose that goes along with the general theme as well. Just like the unresolved sexual tension and fabulous chemistry between Mulder and Scully.
Anyway. This is just a TV tropes kind of question. I wasn't expecting any sort of complex analysis. I just wanted to post about the x-files on a Sunday afternoon now that I'm done with all that I needed to accomplish.
Vince Gilligan also met Bryan Cranston on this episode. It's a good one btw.
They would later collaborate on a small time show.
Oh. And the stock radio chatter that is in every episode and sim city.
I'm showing my age.
Edit: found it 28 seconds in or so.
Edit 2: I'm watching the eve 6 one. They use it multiple times there.
Has the series aged well? I haven’t seen it yet, but wondered whether I would like it.
Same, always wanted to watch, not sure if it's worth it nowadays.
There's pretty good in-universe explanations that are probably more in line with what you wanted out of an answer but also, it's clear that it is because it is her role both literally within the FBI, but also for writing purposes, to be a foil to Fox Mulder.
It actually worked really well in the early episodes. A classic duality, characters of opposing extremes brought together. Dana continually see things that challenge her rationality and she has to grapple with that while maintaining what she sees as a duty to remain grounded and offer the possibility of the explainable amidst the seemingly inexplicable. The apparent erosion of this level-headed front in the face of the extraordinary and supernatural week after week was initially a point of interest and development in the show.
The problem is that this established the dynamic between Fox and Dana and it was that, that made the show great so they had to keep it up but as there seemed to be no over-arching multi season arc planned they had to keep this going long after it still made any sense. This is especially evident when you see that attempts were made to carry on whole season long arcs while at the same time keeping the Monster of the Week episodes in between story episodes, so Dana would, in one week acknowledge her own direct personal experience and go all-in on taking down the conspiracy and seeing them aliens, and in another week somehow be totally skeptical of Fox's latest crazy supernatural crime solving theory as if it were the first season all over again.