The X-Files and Consent, Conclusion: Scully's First Child (You Can Be Forgiven For Forgetting)

 

 

Dana Scully is one of the most dynamic TV characters ever created and one of the biggest parts of it was how much Chris Carter and his writers decided to deviate from the biggest norms of series television to that point and in a way to this day. She would never be defined by traditional gender roles.

There's a reason that even though Mulder is essentially the hero of The X-Files everyone considered Scully the more iconic character. It wasn't just that Gillian Anderson essentially nailed Scully from day one while it took David Duchovny practically until the second season to figure out how Mulder worked; it was that Scully was never going to be defined by the rules of society and television: she was never going to be defined by a man. Chris Carter made it very clear from day one of The X-Files that Scully and Mulder were never, ever going to hook up: that wasn't what the show was about. This truly irritated the internet as season after season Carter stood by that promise as stubbornly as Scully denied her belief in the paranormal. Even as the series entered its seventh season, which everyone expected to be the end of the road Carter absolutely refused to allow the inevitable happen, though every so often he would give a kiss here or there to indicate it was possible.

Dana Scully was an outlier in female characters that we wouldn't see on television until the 2000s when slowly cable and broadcast television would allow women to be more than just romantic attachments to male counterparts. She went toe to toe with Mulder and all the other men who looked down on her on the job, was able to autopsy a body on a moment's notice and was a better shot then her partner. Mulder had to rescue his partner from jeopardy quite a few times but Scully returned the favor just as often over the years – which in the 1990s was unheard of. In other words, Scully was a bad-ass.

Perhaps that's why I never leaned in as heavily to the idea that the series should end with Mulder and Scully finally hooking up. It mattered more to me that the mythology could end with a rational explanation than any romantic clinches between the two. Chris Carter would refer to it as a kind of courtly love absence romance and for what were the first seven seasons he held to that definition. I could never picture Scully enjoying domestic bliss as either a spouse or a mother.

And as anyone who endured the final two seasons knows all too well, we were right to want that. Much of the fanbase's trouble with the last two seasons in particular was that it took this strong independent woman and slowly but surely turned her into something close to a simpering female who forsook the basement for becoming a single mom and spent the rest of her time bemoaning the loss of Mulder. Of all the many, many flaws of the ninth season it was that Scully's character was sidelined only to show up whining after either the fate of Mulder (who was no longer a regular character) her baby and how she could now only see the fate of the world through the lens of those two things. What makes this even more frustrating from the perspective of continuity was that the show spent the two seasons dealing with Scully's mysterious pregnancy and child and completely ignored the fact that William Mulder wasn't the first Scully child.

One of the best episodes of Season 5 is 'A Christmas Carol'. Dana has gone to San Diego to spend the holidays with her mother, her brother Bill and her very pregnant sister-in-law. You'd think having only recently gotten over cancer Dana would have welcomed the occasion to relax and recuperate. It's a measure of just how much her life has changed after four years on The X-Files that she's no longer that kind of person. Nevertheless you spend the episode really wishing she could just be happier.

Not long after entering the house, the phone rings. There's a voice on the other end saying, "Dana she needs you." Scully traces the call to a home to find a domestic disturbance. A woman named Roberta Sim has committed suicide. When Bill asks Dana what this is about, Dana tells her brother that the voice on the other end was Melissa – their dead sister.

We don't get an answer as to how Melissa managed to reach out and touch her younger sibling but we do get an idea who needed her. The Sims had an adopted daughter, just over three years old. There are many pictures of her in the household, all of them with her alone and nobody else. Emily Sim is a child with special needs, and in this case it's a horrible medical condition. Scully can't let it go.

Later on Scully tells her family that because of the cancer she suffered from she is now unable to conceive a child. Her family is sympathetic but that starts to erode when Dana starts taking a very deep interest in the Sim household. First she thinks Roberta Sim was murdered rather than killed herself, then when her husband confesses to it she thinks that's a coverup -especially when the husband kills himself in his jail cell that same night. And she keeps feeling a connection with Emily.

She comes to believe that Emily is Melissa's daughter who she gave birth too not long before being killed at the start of Season 3. Her behavior first irritates, then begins to inflame her brother and her mother for reasons that should be obvious to the usually perceptive Dana – but humanize her by illustrating how, in the absence of Mulder, how much she's really changed.

It should be mentioned that the writers (Vince Gilligan, Frank Spotnitz and John Shiban) go out of their way to make it clear that Scully is unsuited for motherhood. They have an adoption worker refuse her request to become guardian for the purpose of making it clear to her – and the audience – why.

"You're a single woman, who's never been married or had a long term relationship. You're in a high-stress, time intensive and dangerous occupation. One that I sense you're committed to and one which would overnight become a secondary priority to the care and well-being of this child. I'm not sure that's a sacrifice you're prepared to make."

(It's not one a hit TV series would make of its lead character at this point, either."

Even when Scully makes an emotional plea, saying that she thinks she's been given a  second chance, the worker than points the other side of it. Emily has a medical condition that has required constant medical care since birth that is incurable. "The good news is you have first-hand experience of grave illness. The bad news is, you'd have to relive it through the eyes of a child."

The experience leaves Scully emotionally drained but the viewer has no reason to believe this alone would change anyone's minds. Scully is no doubt hoping the DNA tests will reveal the child is Melissa's and that will give her help. And that leads us to the revelation of the final minute.

Emily Sim is not Melissa's daughter. She's Dana's.

This episode is one of the masterpieces of the series for many reasons. Because Mulder is absent from the story (Duchovny was filming another movie, causing the story to be written in the first place) Gillian Anderson carries the show and we see it through a series of flashbacks of Scully's childhood and young adulthood through flashbacks, all of them set at this childhood house. Scully has to act as Mulder in this world but she does it more effectively, mainly because all she's trying to do is prove that there's a coverup not that aliens or the supernatural are involved. She is partnered with Detective Kresge, played by that skilled character actor John Pyper Ferguson, who for all intents and purposes takes on Scully's role and does it very well. (As has been pointed out, this could be seen as a dry run for the character John Doggett in Season Eight,)

Most of all, it hides the obvious answer as to who Emily's mother is in plain sight during the episode: the obvious answer is she's Dana's daughter but because Melissa makes the ghostly call, it seems more plausible (?) that she called her sister to protect her own child. That in her way she is being the big sister and trying to help her daughter from beyond the grave might be the clearer explanation – though that mystery is never resolved.

Unfortunately this episode is a two-parter, which means when Emily debuted the next week we are basically back in familiar territory. Mulder shows up, which means the conspiracy is involved, which means visits to medical facilities and a government operation. And what weakens all of this is the other overarching problem with Season 5. Mulder is going through a period where he thinks that aliens don't exist which makes the fact that so much of what involves Emily fitting exactly into the previous mythology all the more awkward because he won't make the connection.

There's also the fact that the moment Mulder shows up on scene he starts treating Emily not as what she means to Scully but what she might mean to the government. This is ham-handed given the circumstances. It doesn't help that Scully only called Mulder to be a witness for her at a hearing for Scully's adoption. Mulder makes it clear he would have refused under other circumstances.

It only when he testifies and tells Scully about how Emily could have come into the world – something he has withheld from her to this point – in front of a hearing that we realize two things. First, even when Mulder gives a more toned down version of the truth (he says that she was experimented on by the government not abducted by aliens) no one will ever believe a word he says. And two, he has the incredible ability for bad timing. He says he thought he was protecting her and that he never expected this. It doesn't change the fact that yet again he has withheld vital information from his partner.

The show is distracted by the fact Emily's condition is worsening, in large part because she clearly is an alien experiment. (Her blood is green and burns those who try to draw it.) The bigger problem is that now Emily Sim is being considered medical property of a Dr. Calderon who was treating her. Calderon works at Transgen Pharmaceuticals, clearly a front for the conspiracy.

Mulder goes to visit Calderon in order to try and persuade him to treat Emily. Calderon says he has to protect the company from litigation and financial research. Mulder takes this in and what follows is basically the high point of the episode – and makes very clear what has happened to Scully.

Mulder beats Calderon to a pulp and starts shouting at him:

"Why don't you tell me what your company is really in the business of? Huh? Abducting women and stealing their unborn children! Medical rapists, all you are. And now you're going to let that little girl die? She's just a lab rat to you!"

Then Mulder takes out his gun and puts it in Calderon's face. "Why don't you tell me whose life is worth saving – yours or hers?"

 This is a return to what happened to Scully and everyone who died at the hands of their experiments from MUFON over the years. And for a show that danced around the consequences of supernatural rape for comic purposes in so many storylines, it's almost completely made up for when Mulder essentially does call the conspirators rapists in all but name.

And it's very hard not to see a less-then-subtle commentary on the pro-life movement in how the conspiracy sees the test subjects in this context. We've already seen through Scully that they essentially have been hollowing out women and leaving them for dead when they're done with them, and by using Emily as a living, breathing example of that –  a child the conspiracy only sees value in based as a human guinea pig – they have rarely been as bold politically as they are here. (I'm almost astonished there weren't censorship questions at the time or now.)

It falls back to the more of the traditional mythology of course; Calderon is an alien and is dispatching with the stiletto by two shape-shifters who assume his form. But the show enters a gray area when it seems that Emily's parents were killed because they wanted to stop the tests on their daughter. Now they are coming to treat her because they seem to need her for those tests.

We get another sense of the perversity of this when Mulder goes to where Calderon led him and finds Anna Fugazzi. At the time Mulder thought she didn't exist and was a red herring – Fugazzi is Italian for fake. But she exists and she's 71. Mulder finds out that the conspiracy has been using a group of geriatric women as incubators for their tests. All of them have been giving estrogen and progesterone in huge amounts. They then go into hibernation where they find green cylinders, which contain human fetuses.

All of this, I should mention, is dropped as a storyline immediately after this point in favor of 'the alien rebels' in the next two mythology episodes that carry on until Season 6 when the Syndicate goes up in flames. Alien pregnancies do come up again in Season's 8 and 9 but by this point Carter has abandoned the whole-shapeshifter mythology in favor of super-soldiers and has forgotten all of this – as well as Scully's first child.

And by this time Scully has been going through her own anguish watching what is happening to Emily. And she's made the decision to let Emily die of the horrible disease that's been killing her. At the end of the episode Mulder and Scully attend Emily's funeral and while they are there Tara walks by with Matthew, her new nephew. (In keeping with so many two partners during the series, almost everything that was important to the first part of the episode is cast aside in part 2 for shiny, new stuff.) As always the conspiracy has cleaned up after itself and there's no proof of what those men did – not even Emily. The Syndicate has gotten to the funeral home and replaced Emily's body with sandbags. (Though for some reason they've left Scully's cross that she gave to Emily among the sand so she can put it back on her neck for the next episode. How thoughtful of them.)

Emily is never mentioned on The X-Files ever again in the context of the mythology and in regard to Scully only once more (during the Season 5 episode All Souls) When the show came to an end in 2002 and Emily wasn't even mentioned during The Truth when they were talking about everything involving the mytharc and connecting it, I found this very troublesome. More than twenty years later, it troubles me for reasons that are beyond even the show itself.

First there's the obvious laziness of the writing involved. Carter was always known for cherry-picking whatever elements of the mythology he wanted to try and fit them together in the always expanding house of cards it became season after season. That's not really forgivable when it involves black oil or bees, but when one of your main characters is pregnant and then has an infant and you never mention the other child she had and their importance to the conspiracy you're failing both as a writer and one of your actors. Not once in the final season or indeed in either revival season did Emily's name ever come up but they never missed an opportunity to mention William.

Second, there's what I mentioned in the course of mythology and the sea-change it meant going forward. The mytharc managed to keep going forward through the first four seasons far less because of trying to make sense of it but because we were drawn in by how it related to Mulder and Scully. How did Samantha relate to the conspiracy? Who killed Melissa and Scully's father? How did Scully get her cancer? We were willing to put up with the ever-expanding mytharc because Mulder and Scully were invested emotionally in it because of what they'd lost. You can see how Emily would fit into this as another brick in the wall: Scully is clearly emotionally devastated and Mulder enraged by what happened.

Instead, as I mentioned, the next step in the myth arc is to move towards the war between the resistance and the colonists and keep Mulder and Scully increasingly less central to it. That's clearly a mistake as big as the fraying plot lines. One could argue Scully's pregnancy and her son are an attempt to reboot the series in this direction but as I mentioned by this point Scully has essentially become more passive in her fate.

The third is something that I think is unforgivable from a cultural standpoint. By erasing Emily from the mythology – and critically, from Scully from this point forward – Carter and her writers are doing something that is uglier. Obviously there was no way Scully could have taken care of Emily from a plot standpoint so from that limited perspective I get why she had to die. But to then erase her entire character causally from the show as if she just another of those victims of the monsters of the week that we see has troubling implications. It's as if Emily only meant something based on what she meant to Scully and even as a cis white male, I find that horrifying. In Monster she is described as 'a cipher, a child more interesting for what she represents than who she is" and that's true.

(I don't agree with the comparison that the writer argues about so many children on Peak TV because all of them are already either adolescents or teenagers. There's a difference between Meadow Soprano or Dana Brody then a toddler.)

And strictly from a creative standpoint this storyline deals with powerful issues that go beyond the scope of The X-Files or science fiction. It was brave for a show to use lines like medical rapists but to discuss biological testing on three years old and a decision for a right to die in that context. I understand the desire of Carter and his writers to go back to more conventional storylines after this but to have no ramifications for what Scully went through emotionally going forward is appalling. (Hell, a month later she's on vacation in Maine worried about being interrupted by Mulder about an X-File. You sure got over that loss quick!) If you don't have the courage to follow through, then honestly, you shouldn't bother doing so at all.

Maybe that's why, when I learned that Scully gave up William for adoption in the final weeks of Season 9, I really couldn't find it in myself to moan about how in order to protect her son, she was giving him up to the strangers. Given what she did to her last child, that was practically kind-hearted. At least she didn't let him die horribly in a hospital. So…progress?