what she says: i’m fine
what she means: chris carter has even said that the x-files was really scully’s story, not mulder’s. the pilot episode opens with scully, a young fbi agent, being assigned to the x-files in order to debunk the work of fox mulder — we are to assume because of her background in “hard science”, and when we first meet her she’s a 29-year-old phd/md with a specialization in forensics, who has been through the fbi academy, and considering how much she’d achieved before the age of 30, you have to kind of wonder: why didn’t she get a better offer than debunking the x-files? why did the fbi pick her to work with mulder when the fbi could have really gotten their money’s worth by using her in a more serious capacity? was it because she was a woman? did they think mulder would be more likely to cave if he was partnered with a woman? did they think that she was too smart for her own good — or not smart enough? what did the fbi see — or fail to see — in scully that landed her in fox mulder’s basement office? if the fbi had really appreciated, or understood, just how brilliant and capable scully was, why would they have ever knowingly partnered her with mulder? it seems like they completely underestimated her, because she went on to become not just mulder’s greatest ally, but an enormous threat to those the fbi thought she would blindly protect. scully’s story began the way many a woman’s has: not being taken seriously by powerful men, while at the same time being expected to serve the goals and interests of those men. scully’s story, ultimately, is not about a young fbi agent who stumbles into a government conspiracy-laden basement and falls in love with her spaceship-chasing partner. it’s about a woman who spent her entire life trying to prove herself, and when she finally did, she was so powerful that it didn’t protect her — it endangered her. scully’s story is the story of all women who have to fight to prove that they are strong, and when they do, people just wait for them to be broken by their own strength. the threats against scully were often overt and specific, but not always. in so many ways the more subtle and pernicious attacks on scully’s sense of self, of her perception of truth, the shaking of her foundation of justice, were the real threats all along. the cat-and-mouse game between mulder & scully and the government was always this: they wanted to make sure mulder stopped asking questions and ensure that scully was always questioning. what they really wanted her to do, constantly, was question her own perceptions and undermine her own beliefs. from the beginning of the x-files to the most recent iteration, the only thing that ever really stood between scully and the truth was herself.