The Immortal Agent ScullyOne thing that won't happen in the X-Files finale.
By Josh DanielPosted Thursday, Jan. 31, 2002, at 3:05 PM ET
It's a good bet that the few of us who still follow The X-Files these days aren't making any social plans for Sunday nights in May. (Not that the dance card of your typical X-Files devotee is exactly overbooked anyway.) That's when Fox's long-running sci-fi series ends its run and series creator Chris Carter promises to tie up the show's many conspiratorial loose ends. Carter will try to ratchet up the mystery and the tension surrounding FBI agents Dana Scully, Fox Mulder, John Doggett, and Monica Reyes—but no matter how nerve-wracking the final episodes may be, fans can at least take comfort in this: Scully can't die.
I don't just mean it would be a downer for the series to end that way, or that her character will always live on in the memories of those who know her ("We'll always have Queequeg!"). I mean, literally, she can't die: Scully's immortal.
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Given the dozens of plots, subplots, and sub-subplots that have been introduced over the years, it would be easy enough to lose track of this one. But Internet fan sites have been documenting the hints about Gillian Anderson's character since the third season's terrific episode "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," in which Scully and Mulder hook up with a man who can foresee people's deaths. Though she seems to know better, Scully can't help asking the psychic how she dies. His reply: "You don't." But before she can find out what he means, he kills himself.
The next hint came in the sixth season's "Tithonus," in which Scully tracks down a photographer named Alfred Fellig, who has a habit of being around at the exact moment that people die. Fellig is no murderer, though. It turns out he's 149 years old; Death came looking for him years ago, but Fellig turned his eyes away at the last second and has been immortal ever since. In the end, both Scully and Fellig get shot, and Death comes for Scully—but Fellig persuades her to look away, and he dies instead.
(There have been other, tantalizing suggestions. Two seasons ago, for instance, Scully encountered a woman who, like her, had survived a bout with cancer and been cured miraculously—and was still sprightly at age 118. )
Give Carter credit: It takes guts to drop a hint and not pick it up for three years. That's just the sort of thing that earned the show its rabid fan base. But maybe Scully's immortality was just another sign that the series was doomed. After all, The X-Files thrives on putting its main characters in mortal peril week after week. Once one of them turned out to be immortal, the show didn't have long to live.
Josh Daniel is
Slate's West Coast editor.
Still by Timothy White/Fox.To the 500-plus Slate readers who entered "The Book Club" contest: We're reading as fast as we can. Results soon, we promise, and thanks for being patient.
Notes From The Fray Editor:
Console Jockey says X-Files was "continually dropping [in] new plot lines--black oil, the alien takeover, bees (remember the bees?), the weird farm with tons of clones of his sister--and then not doing anything with them," and the same may happen with immortality. Just as we were worrying about the black oil, Chad Schuermeyer helpfully told us this: "Mulder is immune to the black oil. I don't know about this new Superhero stuff, but the previous aliens can't touch him." Loran thinks the show has jumped the shark: read his post here, and the reply from Mfbenson, then turn to another "Culturebox" to find out more about this term. We were glad to welcome someone who has appeared on The X-Files: Daniel Kamin played Detective Hudak in a 1997 episode called Elegy.
Reader Comments From The Fray:
As a huge fan of The X-Files, and as someone who has guest starred on an episode, I can say that Chris Carter and the other writers/producers are collectively the Jules Verne of our generation. The X-Files however is out of gas. Why I don't know, but the truth is out there.
--Daniel Kamin
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
There's immortal, and there's immortal. In the last paragraph, the author opines that one of the characters never dying would doom the show, since all the dramatic peril would have been lost. That would depend on the nature of Ms. Scully's gift. Is she immune to physical trauma, or just the effects of aging and disease? If whatever mystical gift gave her eternal youth, but not protection from things like bullets or blows to the head, there's still plenty of dramatic peril to play with, perhaps even more. The ordinary person risking their life is risking the remainder of 80 years, most of it marked by deterioration, where Scully would be risking an eternity. That would put an added heroic quality on Scully.
--MarkD
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
My idea [for the final episode is] that a life-long schizophrenic patient named Muldur wakes out of his paranoid delusions thanks to a new experimental drug administered by his doctor Scully. Neither of them FBI agents.
--Howard Roark
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
The author of this piece is all-too-right when he says that the X-Files drew watchers in by putting their characters in mortal peril week after week.
In the early years of the show, Carter and his writers understood the first principle of great narrative television: give your protagonists goals to work towards and don't be afraid to be stingy with the payoff. Unfortunately, that was the only trick in Carter's bag. As other, later shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer in particular) have shown, you can keep people on pins and needles for an entire season--even several seasons--but the payoff has to come eventually, and it better be good.
Unequal to the challenge of mastering the second principle of great narrative television, Carter has been heightening the stakes steadily with little or no payoff, plus he's violated his audience's trust time and time again (Scully's surprise pregnancy, Scully appearing to cry over the dead Mulder, both of which had after the fact explanations that Buffy creator Joss Whedon would have set himself on fire before trying to foist on his viewers.)
--Kate Powers
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
(2/4)
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Notes From The Fray Editor:
Console Jockey says X-Files was "continually dropping [in] new plot lines--black oil, the alien takeover, bees (remember the bees?), the weird farm with tons of clones of his sister--and then not doing anything with them," and the same may happen with immortality. Just as we were worrying about the black oil, Chad Schuermeyer helpfully told us this: "Mulder is immune to the black oil. I don't know about this new Superhero stuff, but the previous aliens can't touch him." Loran thinks the show has jumped the shark: read his post here, and the reply from Mfbenson, then turn to another "Culturebox" to find out more about this term. We were glad to welcome someone who has appeared on The X-Files: Daniel Kamin played Detective Hudak in a 1997 episode called Elegy.
Reader Comments From The Fray:
As a huge fan of The X-Files, and as someone who has guest starred on an episode, I can say that Chris Carter and the other writers/producers are collectively the Jules Verne of our generation. The X-Files however is out of gas. Why I don't know, but the truth is out there.
--Daniel Kamin
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
There's immortal, and there's immortal. In the last paragraph, the author opines that one of the characters never dying would doom the show, since all the dramatic peril would have been lost. That would depend on the nature of Ms. Scully's gift. Is she immune to physical trauma, or just the effects of aging and disease? If whatever mystical gift gave her eternal youth, but not protection from things like bullets or blows to the head, there's still plenty of dramatic peril to play with, perhaps even more. The ordinary person risking their life is risking the remainder of 80 years, most of it marked by deterioration, where Scully would be risking an eternity. That would put an added heroic quality on Scully.
--MarkD
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
My idea [for the final episode is] that a life-long schizophrenic patient named Muldur wakes out of his paranoid delusions thanks to a new experimental drug administered by his doctor Scully. Neither of them FBI agents.
--Howard Roark
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
The author of this piece is all-too-right when he says that the X-Files drew watchers in by putting their characters in mortal peril week after week.
In the early years of the show, Carter and his writers understood the first principle of great narrative television: give your protagonists goals to work towards and don't be afraid to be stingy with the payoff. Unfortunately, that was the only trick in Carter's bag. As other, later shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer in particular) have shown, you can keep people on pins and needles for an entire season--even several seasons--but the payoff has to come eventually, and it better be good.
Unequal to the challenge of mastering the second principle of great narrative television, Carter has been heightening the stakes steadily with little or no payoff, plus he's violated his audience's trust time and time again (Scully's surprise pregnancy, Scully appearing to cry over the dead Mulder, both of which had after the fact explanations that Buffy creator Joss Whedon would have set himself on fire before trying to foist on his viewers.)
--Kate Powers
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
(2/4)