William Scully, a captain in the U.S. Navy, proposed to Dana’s mother Margaret immediately after returning from the Bay of Pigs. A devoted couple, their song “Beyond the Sea” was played at their wedding. When death row prisoner Luther Lee Boggs begins to hum the tune soon after the unexpected death of her father, it is a powerful clue to Dana that he may in fact possess paranormal abilities.
Dana is the youngest of four children; her siblings include William Jr. (“Bill Junior”), Charles, and Melissa, a believer in miracles and reader of auras who is partial to new age paraphernalia. When Melissa is shot by Alex Krycek in a case of mistaken identity in “The Blessing Way,” a grief-stricken Dana laments, “She died for me.”
Don Davis, who plays Captain Scully, is one of five Twin Peaks alumni to have resurfaced on The X-Files, others include David Duchovny, Jan D’Arcy (“Tooms”), Michael Horse (“Shapes”), and Michael Anderson (the midget in “Humbug”). While formal and distant at times, Scully was an affectionate father. He called Dana “Starbuck,” after a character in Moby Dick, and she retorted by calling him “Ahab.” While he was proud of her professional accomplishments, Captain Scully never fully approved of Dana’s decision to join the F.B.I., a fact that continues to haunt her. But in “Beyond the Sea” and “One Breath,” she receives positive indications of his love, support, and enduring affection after his death.
A devout Catholic, Margaret Scully is a devoted wife and mother who may possess some psychic abilities (she reveals to Mulder her premonitory dream about Dana’s abduction by Duane Barry). Played by Sheila Larken, who is married to X-Files co-executive producer R.W. Goodwin, Margaret is portrayed as both traditional and supportive of Dana’s independent mind and spirit. Dana always wears the tiny cross her mother gave her when she was fifteen (and when Mulder finds it in the lair of Eugene Tooms, he knows she is the next intended victim).
The Family
Parents’ marriage: In “Beyond the Sea,” Mrs Scully reveals that her husband proposed to her when he stepped off his ship returning from the Cuban blockade, which is October 1962. The song, “Beyond the Sea,” was playing in the background.
The children: Melissa was born sometime in 1962, then Bill junior, then Dana (February 1964) then Charles. This is pretty tight, if they didn’t get engaged until October 1962! For one thing, Melissa being conceived out of wedlock to a naval Catholic couple in the early 60s is rather unlikely – well, perhaps not the conception, but Margaret meeting his ship in public view while at least 7 months pregant. Even ignoring that issue, this doesn’t leave a lot of time for Bill junior to be born between 1962 and February 1964. Maybe Bill and Melissa were twins.
Perhaps the problem can be solved if we believe the official web page. This puts the proposal as being on his return from the Bay of Pigs, which was April 1961. Mrs Scully clearly says it was after the Cuban blockade, but maybe we can ignore that!
Religion: The Scully family is Catholic. Scully first mentions this is “Miracle Man,” and it is explored in more detail in “Revelations.” Scully herself has drifted from the church in the last few years. It isn’t known how devout her family had remained, although devout enough for Mrs Scully to invite the family priest to dinner (“Gethsemene”).
The family’s priest, Father McCue, is based at St John’s Church, Alexandria, which seems quite a long way for the family, and for Scully, to travel.
Family rituals: Christmas at the Scullys always had its own rituals, such as the fact that Bill (senior) was always the one to place the Christmas angel on top of the tree. He also seems to have wanted the tree taken down soon after Christmas, as he teases Dana about keeping it up (“Beyond the Sea.”) In “how the Ghosts Stole Christmas,” Scully talks about having “6 a.m. roll call under the Christmas tree” with her family, which is… interesting.
Where they lived: At least some of Scully’s childhood was spent on the Miramar Naval Air Station, San Diego (“Piper Maru”) One of Scully’s school friends was Richard Johansen, son of Commander Johansen who experienced the oily alien in the submarine. The family home on the base was a little red-bricked house, as seen in “Piper Maru” – a house exactly like the one that Bill jnr and his wife are living in in “Christmas Carol.” In this house, young Dana and Melissa shared a room – just like the one Dana stays in in this episode.
[Kevin Anderson’s novel “Ground Zero” has Captain Scully stationed at Alameda Naval Air Station, at the time of Scully’s first year at University. After that, he was transferred to Maryland.]
Their assigments even took them abroad, apparently. In “Chirstmas Carol,” Scully looks at a picture of Melissa which was taken in 1966 at the Nagoya Farmer’s Market in Japan. Could have been a vacation, I suppose….
Red Hair: Mrs Scully is the only dark-haired one among them. Dana and Melissa are both redhaired, the two brothers seen in the flashback are red-haired, and what hair Captain Scully has left looks red too.
Irish? This is often seen in fanfic, due to the fact that they are red haired and Catholic. It’s no-where stated explicitly in the show, but then there’s nothing to the contrary in the show either. However, in “Rain King” Scully told Mulder, “Mulder, my Irish Aunt Olive has more Cherokee in her than Daryl Moots.” Is she talking literally, or figuratively? Make of it what you wish…
Margaret Scully
Seen in “Beyond the Sea,” “Ascension,” “One Breath,” “Blessing Way,” “Paper Clip,” “Wetwired,” “Memento Mori,” “Gethsemene,” “Redux II,” “Christmas Carol.”
Address: I have read that she lives in Baltimore, though I can’t find the episode this comes from. For a description of her house, see the X-Files Places section.
Psychic? In “Ascension,” Mrs Scully talks about having had a dream about Scully being taken away. She wanted to call Scully but thought she’d laugh at her. Coming round to check on her, she found Dana had been taken by Duane Barry. Later she tells Mulder she had the same dream again. “I can’t tell you how it scares me,” she says. “It’s probably scarier when you stop having it, don’t you think?” he says, and she nods, wonderingly.
After her husband’s death, she says, she used to see his face and hear his voice, but she says this was simply imagination. “When your father died, it was a long time before he left me. I saw him in my dreams. The phone would ring and…just for a moment, I was sure that it was his voice,” she says sadly, explaining that it was just because she didn’t want to let him go.
Melissa also talks about being psychic, and Scully herself has one or two moments in which she almost seems psychic herself.
Relationship with Dana: Dana runs to her mother when things go wrong (“Blessing Way,” “Wetwired”) This latter episode shows that, even when her mind is affected by subliminal messages telling her to act oddly, Dana will still always trust her mother. However, she doesn’t always tell her everything. She leaves it to Mulder to tell her mother she has cancer, for which she is roundly rebuked by the mother. However, she does seem to have told her about the implant. Although we saw her discussing this with Melissa, not her mother, in “Wetwired” Dana talks about the thing they put in her neck and her mother doesn’t look surprised at this.
In “Gethsemene” she seems to be trying to get her daughter back to the church, suggesting that she is still a practicing Catholic even if her children have lapsed. When close to death, in “Redux II,” it is to her mother that Dana confides her thoughts about her faith, and her possible (and vague) secret that she is reluctant to confide in anyone. DId she tell her mother? Hmm…. Probably. “I know you’re afraid to tell me, but you have to tell someone,” her mother says. Sowhat is it, Maggie? Do tell.
Dana tells her mother about her infertility several months after she learnt about it, so this is one thing she didn’t confide. Although, perhaps, she thought infertility wasn’t really important when she thought she was going to die any minute, so saw need to tell.
William Scully
Seen in “Beyond the Sea” and “One Breath.”
Date of death: Just after Christmas 1993 or New Year 1994. He died of a heart attack. His ashes were scattered at sea in a simple ceremony with just family present – Dana, her mother and two couples (presumably Dana’s two brothers and their partners), one of whom have two boys. “Beyond the Sea,” the song that was played as he proposed to his wife, was played in the background.
Rank: William Scully was a naval captain.
A stern father? We know very little about him, but there is much potential. While Dana clearly loved him very much, he seems to have expressed great disapproval about her joining the FBI rather than going into medicine. Even three years on, he seems to have not quite forgiven her for this. In “Never Again,” Scully talks about her life with one after another authority figures. Was he a stern father? Probably. Did this lead to some break with Melissa? Who can tell. Plenty of fanfic potential though.
Relationship with Dana: He used to read aloud from “Moby Dick.” From this, she called him Ahab and he called her Starbuck. They used to be very close, but he didn’t approve of her decision to join the FBI. In the pilot episode she smiles about this, saying her parents still think she rebelled by deciding not to practice medicine, but “Beyond the Sea” shows that she is still anxious about this. At the start of that episode, he has to prompted by his wife to hug Dana and ask about her work. After his death, her guilt about possibly letting him down by joining the FBI plays a major part in her reaction to Luther Lee Boggs. See the summary of “B eyond the Sea” for more on this. However, his speech to her in “One Breath” suggests he no longer feels any anger at her. “I never knew how much I loved my daughter until I could never tell her,” he says, talking about his own death. He says he would have traded everything for one more second with her
“Never Again” deals with Scully’s reaction to authority figures, which she dates back to the fact that she worshipped her father.
Oh, and she also inherited his legs. (“Dod Kalm”) This means his sea legs, by the way.
Melissa Scully
Date of birth: Birthday not known, but on her gravestone the date of birth is given as 1962.
Date of death: Shot round about 22nd April 1995 (give or take a day on either side.) The timeline gets a little confusing, but her death seems to be three or four days later – at a rough guess, 26th April. She is shot by “Hispanic Man,” aka Luis Cardinale, who is hiding in Scully’s apartment along with Alex Krycek. They intended to shoot Scully. The bullet wound was to the head, and the doctors induced a coma to try to save her. She was said to be improving, but died, despite the prayers of Albert Hosteen.
Her gravestone reads “Melissa Scully, beloved sister and daughter, 1962-1995”
Address: Not known, but close enough to call Scully to say she’s coming round, then to be there not much later.
New Age beliefs: She is first seen, in “One Breath,” holding a crystal over her sister’s hospital bed, claiming she is able to talk to her that way. She says Dana told her not to call Mulder Fox, communicating through the crystal. Later, the same crystal is seen always round her neck. These beliefs lead her to oppose keeping Dana alive on machines, saying it is unnatural to prolong human life this way. Later, it is Melissa who persuades Mulder not to turn to violence to avenge what happened to Scully. “I don’t have to be psychic to see you’re in a very dark place,” she says. “Much darker than where my sister is. Willingly walking deeper into darkness can not help her at all…. Why don’t you just drop your cynicism and your paranoia and your defeat. You know, just because it’s positive and good doesn’t make it silly, or trite. Why is it so much easier for you to run around trying to get even rather than just expressing to her how you feel? I expects more from you. Dana expects more. Even if it doesn’t bring her back, maybe she’ll know, and so will you.”
From the “I don’t have to be psychic” line, are we to assume she is psychic, or at least thinks herself to be so?
In “The Blessing Way,” Scully confides in her about the computer chip in her neck. Melissa urges her to get herself regressed. “What are you so afraid of, Dana?” Melissa asks. “Are you afraid that you might actually learn something about yourself? I mean, you are so shut off to the possibility there could be any other explanation apart from your rigid scientific view of the world. It’s like you’ve lost all touch with your own intuition. You’re carrying so much grief and fear that you can’t see – you’ve built up these walls around your true feelings and the memory of what really happened.”
Back in the early 90s, when Scully was about to join the FBI, Melissa talked to her about her belief in fate. “Life’s just a path,” she said. “You follow your heart and it’ll take you where you’re supposed to go.” Dana answered, not surprisingly, that she didn’t believe in fate.
Relationship with family: There was no sign of her at her father’s funeral, though we didn’t see anyone there. There was also no mention of her in “Roland,” where Scully told Mulder she has two brothers.
When she is at Dana’s bedside, their mother looks very surprised to see her there, and Melissa looks rather sheepish. From this, it looks as if she has been estranged from the family for a while – a fact confirmed in “Christmas Carol,” when Dana says how Melissa dropped out of sight in the latter half of 1994 and travelled up and down the West Coast for that time.
Did her New Age leanings lead to conflict with a father who even looked upon joining the FBI as an act of rebellion? Or did they clash with the family’s Catholicism? Who can tell? Maybe the seeds of this rift were being sown as early as the flashback scene in “Christmas Carol.” Melissa and Dana both received gold crosses from their mother, and Melissa seemed distinctly unimpressed, though she pretended well.
Bill Scully jnr
Date of birth: Not known, but is older than Dana.
Marriage: By 1997, he has a wife, Tara.
Children: Tara is heavily pregnant at Christmas-time of 1997, expecting their first child – a child they have been trying for years to conceive. She says she wants to have more children in the future. ( “You know what; I can’t believe I’m about to say this — as big and fat as I am right now. I can’t wait to have more. It’s our baby — our son. Kind of gives everything new meaning. I can’t help but think that life before now was somehow…less; just a prelude.”) The baby was due “two weeks ago,” and has been born by early January. It’s a boy, called Matthew.
Address: At the end of 1997, Bill and his wife are currently stationed in San Diego. As he is in the military, the couple will presumably be moving around quite a bit. The phone number of the San Diego house is 550-0380
In the navy: When we first see Bill in “Gethsemene,” he is in uniform, showing he following his father into the Navy, and the insignia on his sleeve show he’s a lieutenant-commander.
Childhood pranks: In “One Breath,” Mrs Scully describes how the boys liked to go out in the woods with guns, and that once they found a snake and shot at it (lovely children!). Dana, ever the tomboy, joined in, but wept when she realised she’d killed a living thing.
In “Christmas Carol,” in a flashback, young Bill teased Dana, threatening to kill her pet rabbit and put it in a stew and eat it. Dana’s attempt to save the rabbit by putting it in a lunchbox resulted in its rather gory and maggot-ridden death.
Typical big brother, then.
Attitude to Dana: From his first appearance, he is very much the over-protective big brother, trying to organise his sister’s life for her, and criticising Mulder. Needless to say, Dana resents his interference, as she seems to resent anyone who tells her what to do.
Attitude to Mulder: Bill meets Mulder for the first time in “Redux II,” and pulls no punches in his criticism of his sister’s partner. He thinks that Mulder should leave her alone, to “die with dignity,” and that Scully is defending Mulder because she seeks his approval and doesn’t want to let him down. He says Mulder’s quest is for “little green aliens,” and calls Mulder’s idea of Scully’s cure (implanting a chip) “science fiction.” Further, he accuses Mulder of causing the death of first Melissa and now Dana. “Has it been worth it? Have you found what you’ve been looking for?” he asks. Mulder softly answers that he hasn’t found it, and that he’s lost family himself to his quest. “You’re one sorry son-of-a-bitch,” Bill says, and walks.
In “Christmas Carol,” when Scully suggests that she has been receiving phone calls from their dead sister, Melissa, Bill scoffs and says it sounds like something Mulder would say.
Charles Scully
Er… Charles does exist, since a Christmas present is handed over in “Christmas Carol,” and said to be “from Charlie.” We have yet to see him, though, except in the flashback in “One Breath,” when Scully was seen with two brothers, one older, one younger.
By deduction, Charles must have children, since Bill hasn’t, yet. At the funeral of their father, we see two couples, one of whom has two boys, aged around 6 – 9 or so. These are presumably Dana’s brothers and their wives / girlfriends, plus her two nephews. They can’t have been Bill’s children, so much be Charles’. As Charles is the younger brother (younger than Dana’s 29 or so), this suggests that he started producing children rather young. (Though, of course, the episode writers have probably utterly forgotten this scene.)
In “Home” Scully says has a nephew who likes watching “Babe” over and over, suggesting a boy of 5 to 8, perhaps. Bearing in mind that this is 3 years after the funeral, the boys seen there would be 8 or 9 at the least, so this could suggest the existence of yet another nephew, maybe one considered too young to go to a funeral. They must live near enough for her to be asked to babysit at the weekend.
However, in the scene cut from Memento Mori, Bill Scully suggests that there are no Scully children yet. He says “Mom’s getting worried there’s going to be no one to carry on the Scully name. Guess the pressure’s on, huh?”
Um… Unless Charles isn’t married and he and his girlfriend have children, but they’ve taken their mother’s name. Yes, we’re clutching at straws here…
Emily
Date of birth: November 1994
Name: Emily Christine Sim, after her adoptive parents, Roberta and Marshall Sim (the middle name is seen on the database Scully searches for information.)
Appearance: Cute three year old blonde girl. (Hmm… I wonder why they didn’t make her a red-head, like they did with Kurt Crawford)
Parents: Genetically, she is Scully’s daughter. She is also half…. er…. alien? (though I don’t expect Scully believes this yet) with green corrosive blood. She was conceived by eggs taken from Scully in her abduction, fertilised in a test tube, and then (presumably) gestated in the womb of one Anna Fugazzi, who was about 67 or 68 at the time. She was then adopted by Roberta and Marshall Sim.
The Sims: When Roberta Sim wanted to withdraw Emily from the treatment she was receiving (of which more later) she was first bribed with lots of money, then killed, the death made to look like a suicide. Her husband was implicated, but killed in prison. This was round Christmastime 1997. Roberta was 40 at this time.
Her condition: Emily, allegedly, suffered from a severe and rare form of “autoimmune hemolytic anemia,” necessitating daily injections. She was being used in trials for a very new and experimental form of gene therapy, by Transgen Pharmaceuticals – or so the doctor says. When the treatment was withdrawn, by Scully, the girl became sick and developed a cyst on the back of her neck, which spread some sort of decay through her body. It is described as “anaerobic channels following the path of the central nervous system. They have the effect of killing the surrounding tissue depriving it of the oxygen it needs to survive.” When punctured, the cyst released the green corrosive fluid that the clones and morphs release, this showing her hybrid origin. It looks as if the “tests” were in fact keeping her alive, and stopping the green fluid from running throughout her body – but keeping her alive for what dark reason?
Death: She died in early January 1998. Scully, very upset both by the girls’s death and the fact that she can have no children of her own, consoles herself with the thought that the girl was not born to be loved, but that she did receive love right at the end.
The body, however, turns to nothing but sand.
Scully’s feelings about Emily are explored in A ll Souls, where she sees visions of her daughter