Is Scully being dumped on?

Meta
Title:	Is Scully being dumped on?
Creator:	LoneThinker
Date(s):	late 1990s
Medium:	online
Fandom:	X-Files
Topic:
External Links:	The Cave's X-Files Commentary Archives: MSR: Is Scully being dumped on?, Archived version
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Is Scully being dumped on? is an essay by LoneThinker. It has the subtitle: "Some season 6 musings."

"Is she just babysitting an immature partner, or getting dragged along, bruised and injured, in the wake of his quest? Occasionally someone suggests that this is the case."

It is one of many essays at The Cave's X-Files Commentary Archives.

Excerpts

DEFINING MULDER: I don't buy into the self-loathing that some people seem to see in Mulder. Self-hate is emphatically destructive, and leads toward self-destruction. You would be more likely, I think, to find a genuine self-hater as an alcoholic or a drug addict than a person doing what Mulder does--as someone with no ambitions rather than as a man with grand (even if not realistic-seeming) ambitions. The goal of finding the truth or finding a sister or bringing to light a conspiracy hidden from the American people is not the ambition of a true self-hater. Yes, Mulder may find himself inadequate to his own ideals (unable to save his sister from abduction, unable to protect Scully from being drawn into the danger of his quest), but this is a whole different degree of things. I think self-hate would blind you to your own positive aspects, but Mulder does have positive traits--even ones that have been honed by his negative experiences, such as his compassion for victims--and he uses them in his work: an eagerness to engage the new and unexplained, compassion, tenacity, an analytical ability unfettered by conventional limitations, tenacity, tenacity... So many strengths.

IS ALL THIS FAIR TO SCULLY?: Are we upset not because Scully is along on this quest, but because she is being dragged along behind Mulder? Is it fair for her to be in this position? Does she deserve more say in the direction of the quest? Where is the justice in all this--a headlong, dangerous pursuit where she seems destined to be continually bruised and jostled, and all to what end? The answer, though we may not want to hear it, Scully spoke herself at the end of Paper Clip: "You were right, Mulder. There is no justice." The physical/human world as we know it is not a fair place. To quote a common truism: life isn't fair. Those of you who are younger may protest, Mulder-like, "But I refuse to believe that!" Just let me try to play interpreter here for a minute. Admittedly, 'life isn't fair" is a phrase often used by worn-out people who have succumbed to the blows of life, who want a justification not to struggle anymore. But it is also what you actually find through experience. Nothing you can probe or measure with scientific instruments contains even a scantly measurable quantity of things such as justice or fairness. These are philosophical constructs--ideals--born in the mental realm, but they have no relationship to the purely physical universe. (Notice I did not say they have no place or value, but simply that they are not a component of physical reality.) And the longer you hang around this planet, the more you bump up against this unfairness. It happens, so you may as well be warned. But the important question becomes (again), what are you going to do about it?