Summary
The X-Filesis known for its iconic power couple of FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. They explore strange phenomenasurrounding UFOs, government conspiracies, and things that go bump in the night. Its influence still permeates popular culture today, with references appearing anywhere from the Cartoon Network to Nintendo video games.
A classic part of the show’s legacy is its iconic lines, from “The truth is out there” to “I want to believe.” Quite a few memorable lines come from Dana Scully, who is usually the calm rationalist who keeps Mulder’s head from going too far into orbit. Some of her quotes range from the profound to even the downright hilarious.
Updated August 26th, 2024, by Terrence Smith:As time marches on, The X-Files continues to age like the finest black oil. The line continues to blur between its fictionalized government conspiracies and recent revelations, including new allegations made by former government employees regarding the nature of UFOs. The legacy of the series comes not only from its conspiracy-centered mythos, but also the influence of FBI Agent Dana Scully. The character inspired numerous young girls to pursue STEM fields thanks to what is called “The Scully Effect.” Scully has had many iconic lines throughout the series, and this list has been updated to feature a few more of them.
S10 E3 Mulder and Scully Meet The Weremonster
Director
Darin Morgan
The X-Filesrevival in 2016 saw Mulder beginning to lose his sense of wonder, with several mysteries being explained thanks to modern technology. It takes an encounter with a man who claims to bea bipedal lizardto restore his faith. When Mulder concludes that a lizard man was behind recent murders in an Oregon town, he not only tells Scully his theory but also narrates the likely course of their predictable back-and-forth on such matters.
Scully cannot help but smile at Mulder’s raving. Sure, his ideas are not from planet Earth, but that’s her Mulder, the Mulder that she fell in love with in the first place. He wouldn’t be him otherwise.
Vince Gilligan
Scully, throughout her time with Mulder, has been proven wrong by him time and time again. Yet still, she refuses to believe Mulder’s theories. She can even be more biased than Mulder himself, refusing to acknowledge what is right in front of her eyes, or even what isn’t in front of them.
Scully finds herself in possession of the body ofa man turned invisibleby a genie. When Scully invites others to experience this revelation herself, she finds that the invisible body has vanished, causing Scully to believe that she was hallucinating. Mulder points out that “It is what is. You examined an invisible body, right?” All she does is shrug and say “I thought I did,” prompting Mulder to groan in disbelief. Scully just doesn’t want to believe.
Kim Manners
The X-Filesfollows a familiar pattern. Mulder believes a case is supernatural, Scully doesn’t believe him, and Mulder ends up right. The season 3 episode “Quagmire” usurps this expectation. When a string of attacks occur around a lake in Georgia, Mulder believes the culprit isthe lake’s legendary monster, Big Blue. Towards the end, he finds that the real killer is nothing more than an ordinary alligator, throwing him for a loop.
Even if Scully appears right for once, she doesn’t rub it in Mulder’s face. Instead, she comforts him. Scully may not believe all of Mulder’s theories, but she understands why he believes them. Pursuing the supernatural gives Mulder a sense of purpose and hope. Scully can also resonate with this as a woman of faith. While she pursues science, she is also a devout Catholic. Faith in God gives Scully the same kind of hope that chasing monsters and aliens gives Mulder. While they couldn’t be more different on the surface level, deep down they have much more in common than either may realize.
Steven Dean Moore
Agents Mulder and Scully have had their share of strange cases, but nothing would prepare them for their visit to the quirky town of Springfieldin an episode ofThe Simpsons.There, they investigate family man Homer Simpson’s claim that he encountered an extraterrestrial entity, as well as explore the oddities of the area’s residents.
Scully is a woman of science, putting every case to the standards of objective data. When Scully puts Homer on a treadmill and attaches electrodes to him, the only data she is concerned about is Homer’s body mass index. The man is known for enjoying beers and donuts a-plenty, so Scully’s analysis was likely for the best.
Rob Bowman
This quote has becomea meme in theX-Filescommunity. Scully says it when she and Mulder take a detour in Codigy, New Hampshire, where two teenage girls seem to have abilities granted to them by the Devil himself, which they use to kill fellow teenagers.
According to a local astrologist, this coincides with an alignment of three planets, impacting individuals’ behavior, including Scully’s and Mulder’s. Specifically, it causes Mulder and Scully to get testy with each other, such as when Mulder asks Scully to take some photos of a marking on a body that he believes appears Satanic. This prompts Scully to say this line. Her deadpan expression in the delivery is the icing on the cake. She repeats the line several times in the episode, with increasing levels of hilarity.
In “War of the Coprophages,” Mulder hunts for UFOs in a small forest town. There, he discovers that several of the townspeople have seemingly been devouredby cockroaches. When Mulder tells Scully of this over the phone, it prompts her to respond in this way.
At this point in the series, Scully and Mulder have been working together for a little over two years. Scully is used to hearing crazy theories and scenarios and expects him to get into bizarre situations. Chiding Mulder about it, completely at ease in her own home, and knowing Mulder can take it, shows just how close the two of them have become.
The X-Filestypically dealt with dark subjects, including murders, abductions, and government conspiracies. It has also had fun with its subject matter, as is the case with the episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space.” The author interviews Scully and witnesses about a case she and Mulder investigated, with increasingly ridiculous accounts of what happened.
In one case, an eyewitness tells of Scully and Mulder, whom he interpreted as “Men in Black,” arriving on the scene of an alien body. In this account, Scully maliciously threatens him. The stoic Scully is not known for using scare tactics such as this, and her over-the-top delivery, grabbing the witness by the shirt and shining a flashlight in his face, makes it even more preposterous.
William A. Graham
Scully was initially partnered with Mulder onThe X-Filesin order to keep tabs on his activity and to debunk the merits of his work. As time goes on, she becomes Mulder’s fiercest advocate, admiring his passion and dedication to his beliefs, even if his faith might blind him from facts at times.
When Mulder receives supposed photographic evidence of a UFO from his mysterious informantDeep Throat, Scully observes that it is a fake. She warns Mulder not to take Deep Throat’s so-called evidence at face value, not because she is against him, but because she wants his work to be based in reality. She knows that there are people who would want to take advantage of his desire to find hard evidence of extraterrestrial life, and that it could be used to manipulate him.
