Let’s talk about (former?) Agent Dana Katherine Scully, the “X-Files” character who by all rights should be considered the real protagonist of the “X-Files,” even though the series often seems to want to believe it is Fox Mulder. Scully is the skeptic who must learn over the course of years to reconcile scientific rigor with the unexplained; Mulder loves Elvis and conspiracies and eventually gets a waterbed.
Maybe that isn’t quite fair to Mulder. Based on the first episode of the new revival, the former FBI basement dweller is starting to contend with the possibility that his decades of work was almost entirely backward. Yet it is Scully, and not Mulder, who delivers the single best and truest moment in the episode that aired Sunday: a thorough, wonderful moment of unleashed exasperation.
[Review: Conspiracy theories are mainstream now. Can the new ‘X-Files’ stand out?]
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Hank Stuever wrote about that scene in his review of the six-episode return of the classic sci-fi series. Mild spoilers — the setup here is that Mulder has been drawn into a conspiracy theory spun by Joel McHale’s Glenn Beck-type character, Tad O’Malley:
“The new theory is catnip to Mulder, who can only feign so much disinterest before he’s looking into O’Malley’s leads and discovering fresh horrors. As Mulder and O’Malley fill in the blanks in the outlandish narrative, Scully, God bless her, must still carry the banner of common sense. Arms folded, she delivers a beautiful scolding to the two men. Her words drip with an exasperation that Anderson turns into sheer, topical poetry — vintage “X-Files” stuff — and, if you listen with a certain ear, she could easily be speaking to the unhinged farce of present-day politics.”
For years, there has been a persistent, adoring online documentation of Scully’s classic grumpiness, in glorious, perfect GIFs. You do not need any other GIFs. They are perfect for any occasion — for instance, when you are trying to express how you feel about Gillian Anderson saying in an interview that she was initially offered half of her co-star’s pay for the revival.
Below is a relatively comprehensive* collection of what the Internet has done to Scully’s eye rolls and sighs, ranked loosely from glorious to perfect.
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*A note: There are approximately a billion good Scully Annoyed Face GIFs from two “X-Files” episodes, “Bad Blood” and “Improbable,” so I have chosen a representative sample from those episodes in particular.
Share this articleShare[Disclosure: The writer’s husband draws the comic book continuation of “The X-Files” series for IDW.]
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