Why I Loved Scully

The X-Files’ Dana Scully was everything women in entertainment today are not: intellectual, nuanced, tortured, Rebecca Traister writes in Salon. So as the sci-fi classic hits the big screen once again this weekend, we need Scully, “the cerebral head of the X-Files, torn between her Catholic faith, her scientific impulse to explain away the inexplicable, and her affection for her partner,” more than ever.

The geeky alien hunter Fox Mulder, played by press darling David Duchovny, was always supposed to be the star of The X-Files. But Gillian Anderson stole the show as the skeptical Scully, whose “surety was solid, stable, rigid; every time she saw something she thought she'd never see, we saw it crack, sparks fly from it.” (More The X-Files stories.)