Special Agent Dana Scully - A Biography
Childhood and Education
Agent Dana Katherine Scully was born on the 23rd of February 1964 to William and Margaret Scully. Scully and her family had moved all over America and overseas while she was growing up because of her father being in the Navy and being transferred from post to post. Scully was very close to her father being more of a tom boy than a girly girl like her sister Melissa. In fact, her two brothers, Bill Jnr. and Charles got her a B.B. gun for her birthday once, they took her out to the woods to practice with it. Scully also showed signs of wanting to be a healer, she shot and killed a garter snake with her new gun and felt terrible afterwards. She held the snake in her hands willing it to come back to life. Her nickname for her father was Ahab and his for her was Starbuck, these names were taken from Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick' a book her father read to her as a child.
Scully received a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Maryland in 1986. Her thesis was entitled "Einstein's Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation". While she was at college she also took German classes and appears to have a good level of spoken German. Following her undergraduate degree Scully qualified as a medical doctor and completed a residency in forensic pathology. Her father would have preferred her to have become a doctor but Scully decided she could make more of a difference as an FBI agent.
The X Files
Agent Scully was first assigned to The X Files to report on Mulder's work. It seemed it was hoped by the powers that be that she would report back to them that Mulder's work on The X Files was not legitimate. Of course this failed and Scully went on to become the Syndicates biggest problem and Mulder's strongest ally.
Given her background as a scientist Scully approached The X Files from this stand point. She always remained sceptical of Mulder's more "unconventional" theories. Mulder relied on her qualifications as a doctor to help solve cases, with Scully carrying out an autopsy on most cases.
Scully has appeared twice in The X Files herself. The first time was when Duane Barry kidnapped her and she was abducted from Skyland Mountain. She was missing for several months when she was returned without explanation to a hospital. She was unconscious and barely alive, Scully's mother was even considering pulling the plug on her but Mulder didn't want her to. Scully awoke from her coma eventually after her sister Melissa persuaded Mulder to really talk to Scully before it was too late.
Scully's sister Melissa was later killed by mistake when Luis Cardinal and Krycek were sent to kill Scully. She was dismayed to learn from AD Skinner a few months later that he sister's case was being dropped due to lack of evidence and new leads. However, she was successful in tracking down and apprehending Luis Cardinal. Cardinal is later killed in his cell, his death made to look like a suicide.
Scully appeared for the second time in The X Files when she went to Philadelphia to investigate an informant of Mulder's. While there she met a man named Ed Jerse, he had recently gotten a tattoo to commemorate his divorce and the ink used for the tattoo seemed to be making him hear his tattoo talk to him. Scully went on a date with him and got her own tattoo of a snake eating it's tail, the symbol for infinity. Ed killed his neighbour because he thought the tattoo voice was her teasing him. He also tried to kill Scully but overcame it and burned his arm in an attempt to make the voice stop talking to him instead.
Cancer
A short time after this encounter with Ed, Scully was diagnosed with cancer. She had an inoperable tumour on the wall between her sinus and her cerebrum. If this tumour were to push into her brain she would not survive.
After her diagnosis Scully was in hospital getting a check up when she met Penny Northern, who she had previously met a MUFON meeting and who claimed to have looked after Scully while she was abducted. While speaking to her Scully learned of a Dr. Scanlon who was treating Penny and also Betsy Higopian, another abductee. It turned out that Dr. Scanlon was working with the Sydicate and may have killed Betsy and Penny. Scully came away from Penny's death with more heart and was determined to survive her cancer.
Several months later Mulder was believed to be dead and Scully was called to testify as to the validity of Mulder's work over the four years previously. Mulder had in fact faked his death when he discovered a man spying on him from the apartment above. He shot the man in the face and Scully falsely identified Mulder as the dead man. During the hearing Scully's health took a down turn, her tumour was metastasising. While she is in the hospital Mulder used the ID of the dead man to gain access to Pentagon files and found a vial with one of the chips Scully had removed from her neck years before. It was never clear which method cured her but Scully recovered. It may have been the conventional treatment, the chip Mulder found or Scully's own faith.
Scully's faith had waned in previous months and years but during her illness she turned to her priest and the power of prayer to help her through her cancer.
Pregnancy
During her abduction Scully's ova were all removed and stored in a lab. This lab was controlled by alien clones who wished to protect their "mothers" by keeping their ova on ice and creating more clones. Mulder found this lab and he stole a test tube with her ova in it. He didn't tell Scully about it when he found them.
A few years later Scully discovered that she is infertile and is heart broken. But she learned later about Mulder finding her ova and has them taken to a different doctor, as the one Mulder consulted said they weren't viable.
It was never clear exactly how Scully became pregnant, but she did. She tried in vitro fertilization but it apparently did not take. She may have become pregnant because of it and it had given a false positive or she might have become pregnant from doing Mulder.
Either way approximately nine months later she give birth to a boy, whom she named William.
Family
Parents - William and Margaret Scully
Scully had been close to her father since she was little. When she was a child he used to read to her from Herman Melvilles' Moby Dick and they gave each other nicknames after his characters. Mr. Scully was Ahab, the misguided captain and Scully was Starbuck his first mate aboard the Pequod. Scully later named her dog Quequeg, after the Maori whaler Ishmael befriended.
Scully's father died of a heart attack during her first year on The X Files. 'Beyond the Sea' was the name of the song that was played at Scully's parents wedding. At the beginning of this episode Scully sees an apparition of her father just before she received the call from her mother to tell her he had passed away.
Shortly after he father's death Scully returned to work. While investigating the case of a serial murderer, a death row inmate who claimed to be able to channel the dead told Scully he has a message for from her father. This inmate, Luther Lee Boggs, had been to the electric chair once before and so he tried to use this as a bargaining tool but Scully didn't give into him, saying she knew what her father's message was because he was her father and she knew him well.
Later when Scully was abducted and was hanging between life and death her father came to her and told her her time wasn't now and to go back to the living. Scully also learned to be an accomplished sailor from her father.
Scully was also close to her mother but had a tendency to keep problems she was having from her. She didn't tell her mother about her cancer at first and only told her once she had to be hospitalised. Scully's mother was a devote Catholic and had given Scully and Melissa matching gold cross pendants for Christmas when they were about 15. She worried that Dana was losing her faith and asked Fr. McCue to speak to Dana at Thanksgiving dinner. Shortly after this Dana went into hospital because of her cancer and she eventually asked Fr. McCue to come and pray with her.
When Scully was affected by the subliminal signals being fed into people's televisions in Maryland she became very paranoid and didn't trust Mulder anymore. She had hallucinations in which she saw Mulder conferring with Cancer Man in his car. She went to hid at her mother's house as she was the only one she felt she could still trust. It was Mrs. Scully who persuaded Dana that she was okay and that Mulder was there to help her.
Mrs. Scully was a great source of strength for Dana during her pregnancy when she didn't have Mulder there to support her. She was one of the few people Dana trusted enough to tell about her pregnancy and have around her during it.
Siblings
Scully had three siblings altogether, two brothers and a sister, Dana was the third child. Her brother Bill Jnr. and sister Melissa were older and her brother Charles was younger. Bill Jnr. really didn't like Mulder, he felt he was asking too much of Scully and her family. That because of his quest for the truth they had lost Melissa and may lose Dana to cancer too. Bill was in the navy like their father and was married to Tara. It was while Dana and her mam were staying with Bill and Tara that she became involved with the case of Emily Sim and her mother's apparent suicide.
Bill and Mrs. Scully became increasing worried about Dana as she followed this case, especially when she told Bill about the phone call she had received telling her about the case. She told him the woman on the phone had sounded just like their sister Melissa.
It later turned out that the child Emily was not Melissa's daughter as Scully suspected but was in fact her child. A child that had been created using her stolen ova. Emily later died.
Her son - William
As mentioned previously Scully somehow became pregnant and gave birth to William. It was said by many that William was in fact part alien and this seemed to give him the ability to move his mobile with his mind. Scully still had pieces from the alien ship she had studied buried on the African coast of Sierra Leone. William seemed to be able to make these pieces fly through the air to his cot.
When William was a few months old a man who had been burned and disfigured came to Scully claiming that he had spoken to Mulder. He broke into The X Files office and was trying to find any files to do with alien tests and abductions to try and find evidence against the people who had subjected him to harrowing tests. When Scully had his DNA tested the results implied it was Mulder.
However, Scully wouldn't believe that it was Mulder. While they held the man in Scully's apartment he injected William with a solution of heavy metal. He claimed that this metal made William not be part alien any more. Scully was relieved at first to hear this as she believed this would make them leave William alone, but the man told her they would never leave him alone, they would never accept that William was no longer part alien.
The man turned out to be Jeffrey Spender, he had survived the gunshot wound to his face his father Cancer Man had given him. They experimented on him as a punishment for betraying his father. He and Mulder had the same DNA because they were brothers.
Scully decided that she could not guarantee her protection of William and so made the hard decision to give him up for adoption. She felt this gave him the best chance of not being found by the Syndicate.