X-Files Wiki
Don't have an account?
Register
Advertisement
Register
in: Events

Dana Scully's abduction

Revision as of 21:07, 4 December 2009 by Mulder (Message Wall | contribs) (→‎Investigation of Abduction)
 Edit

In 1994, FBI Special Agent Dana Scully was kidnapped by Duane Barry, taken by him to Skyland Mountain and abducted from there before being returned later that year. (TXF: "Duane Barry" — "One Breath", et al.)

Prelude

Syndicate meeting (1994)

A Syndicate meeting at which Agent Krycek reported that Scully was a problem.

After the X-files were closed in 1994, Scully and her FBI partner, Fox Mulder, were reassigned to other sections and Mulder was partnered with Agent Alex Krycek. (TXF: "The Erlenmeyer Flask", "Sleepless") However, Krycek was secretly working for the Cigarette Smoking Man, and in a Syndicate meeting primarily involving Krycek and his superior shortly after he had investigated his first case with Mulder, Krycek reported that Scully was a much larger problem than the CSM had described. The CSM mysteriously replied that "every problem has a solution" and sinisterly stubbed out a cigarette he had been smoking. (TXF: "Sleepless")

Soon thereafter, Mulder became involved in a hostage situation in which he was taken captive by Duane Barry, a crazed self-professed alien abductee who was insistent on not being taken again and hoped that – by taking someone else to the site from where he had first been abducted – he might save himself from such an outcome, as he believed that his companion would be abducted instead of him. Barry had difficulty with remembering where that site was, but believed that a group would tell him the location's whereabouts. The person who Barry originally intended to take with him was his original hostage, Doctor Del Hakkie, but due to Mulder intentionally giving Barry some misleading advice, Barry was shot, freeing Mulder and Dr. Hakkie from his captivity. However, Barry subsequently managed to escape from a hospital where he had been taken. (TXF: "Duane Barry")

At one point prior to Scully's kidnapping, her mother, Margaret, had a dream about her being taken away. Mrs. Scully intended to call Dana with news of the dream but feared that, by doing so, she might only scare her daughter. (TXF: "Ascension")

Abduction

Kidnapping by Duane Barry

Shortly after his escape, Duane Barry kidnapped Scully from her home, bursting through her window while she was recording a phone message for Mulder about a metallic implant that had been recently removed from Duane Barry's body. (TXF: "Duane Barry", "Ascension")

A scene of "Ascension" implies that Krycek provided Duane Barry with Scully's address.

Scully's message to Mulder alerted him to her situation (when he listened to the recording later that night) and he rushed to the crime scene, where he met with Margaret Scully, who was shocked to find that her daughter was missing and told Mulder about the dream she had experienced.

Scully had been gagged, bound and forced into the trunk of Barry's car by 11:23 the next morning, at which time Barry was driving along Route 229 in Rixeyville, Virginia with her in the vehicle's boot. Moments later, the vehicle was pulled over by a Patrolman who grew suspicious of Barry, as the Patrolman noticed blood evidence on Barry and he seemed desperate to keep traveling to the destination that he allegedly did not know. The Patrolman heard Scully cause a commotion inside the boot and this distraction allowed Barry an opportunity to shoot the other man. Barry took the opportunity and opened the boot to look at Scully. He was unaware that, meanwhile, a camera inside the Patrolman's car – parked just behind Barry's vehicle – was recording the scene.

At 3:11 p.m., Mulder – who had not slept and had been ordered to go home – nevertheless analyzed footage from the Patrolman's camera, at the Video Production Unit of FBI Headquarters; the footage established, for the FBI, that Scully was still alive. Mulder then determined, while in the company of Agent Krycek, that Barry intended to take Scully to Skyland Mountain and Mulder decided to head after her. Krycek secretly called the CSM with this news, vowing to hold Mulder off until Scully was located by a group that Krycek did not name. Mulder did not inform his FBI superior, Assistant Director Walter Skinner, that he knew where Barry was going, as Mulder feared that – if Skinner sent an FBI task force after Barry – the crazed, alleged abductee might do something that was even more manic.

Meanwhile, Barry and Scully arrived near the base of Skyland Mountain where Barry spoke to a Tram Operator who did not notice Scully but instructed Barry to take a side road to the mountain's summit, a journey that would take a little more than an hour. A little more than forty-five minutes after this encounter, Mulder dangerously raced toward the top of the mountain in the tram while its operator and Krycek remained at the bottom of the incline but, when Mulder was almost at the summit, his progress was delayed by Krycek, who killed the tram operator and stopped the tram before calling his superior to report that he was stalling Mulder until advised to do otherwise. Barry reached the summit just as Mulder began to realize that he might have to climb the rest of the way. As he clambered onto the tram's roof, however, Krycek restarted the tram.

By the time Mulder finally arrived at the summit, Barry had abandoned his car, with its radio left on, and had taken Scully out of the trunk, leaving her necklace inside it. Mulder found this deserted scene, upon his arrival, and was witness to an immensely bright light beaming from an airborne craft that sped away. Apparently, Scully had been abducted from the mountain top. (TXF: "Ascension")

Investigation of Abduction

Moments after the bright light in the sky rushed away, an ecstatic Duane Barry exclaimed to Mulder that Scully had been taken by a group that Barry did not name but implied that they were the same group whom he had referred to, upon warning Mulder that they would take someone else. When he saw another bright light in the sky, Barry fearfully thought that the group had returned for him, but the light was merely from a Search and Rescue helicopter and the two men were transported to safety by 8:46 p.m.. Five teams were dispatched to search the mountain for the missing FBI agent.

Undergoing questioning by Mulder, Barry repeated his claim that Scully – rather than him – had been taken by a group, swearing that he had not killed her. He also alleged that he had obtained injuries from the craft that had sped away, which he referred to as a "ship" even though Mulder maintained that the first bright light he had seen in the sky had been a helicopter. Barry insisted that the military knew where Scully was. Mulder was initially highly suspicious that Barry himself had hurt Scully, despite Barry denying such a possibility. An apologetic Duane Barry told Mulder that the group had had to take her and that he hoped they were not hurting her too much with their tests.

Krycek thereafter encountered considerable trouble with learning what had happened to Scully. After noticing that he had been talking with Barry, Mulder privately queried Krycek on whether he had asked Barry about Scully; Krycek confirmed that he had, adding that Barry had responded by whistling "Stairway to Heaven", but Barry died soon thereafter. When asked by Krycek about Scully, the CSM revealed that his group had taken care of that issue but refused to divulge any further information to Krycek.

In a hearing with AD Skinner and members of the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility, Mulder recounted that he had questioned Barry about Scully. He also claimed that the military knew where Scully was but were, because of this, covering up the actual cause of Barry's death, but this line of thinking was thought to be "paranoid" by one of the FBI members at the meeting.

When Mulder went to see Senator Richard Matheson to find out if he could help, Mulder was confronted by his informer, X, who told Mulder that Senator Matheson could not lend his assistance. Mulder suspected X of knowing what had happened to Scully, demanding that X confirm or deny whether he did, but X was typically unforthcoming with any clear answers.

Nonetheless, Mulder then discovered Krycek's involvement with the CSM and began to suspect his involvement in Scully's abduction. While meeting alone with Skinner to report his own suspicions regarding Krycek, Mulder testified that, when he had reached the top of Skyland Mountain, he had seen an unmarked helicopter working in the area and that he now believed Krycek had given away the whereabouts of Scully and Barry to an agency that Krycek was working with and the CSM was working for. Mulder argued that the reason Scully had been abducted was either because she had gotten too close to whatever it was the agency was trying to deny, had obtained hard and damning evidence – the metallic implant in her possession – or because her termination would prevent further involvement with Mulder and his work. Influenced by Mulder making such a statement, Skinner wondered if he thought Scully was dead, but Mulder admitted to being unsure as to whether she was.

When Mulder subsequently met with Mrs. Scully, she was immediately curious to know if he had any news that her daughter, Dana, was okay. Despite Mulder admitting that the FBI had no further information about Agent Scully, Mrs. Scully remarked that she knew Mulder and/or the other investigators of her daughter's disappearance were doing all they could. Mrs. Scully confessed that she had experienced the same dream about Dana being taken away and commented that she was extremely scared by the dream but Mulder thought it would be scarier for someone in Mrs. Scully's position if they stopped having the recurring dream. He showed her the necklace he had found and they both commented on the item; even though Mulder intended to deliver it to Mrs. Scully, she told Mulder to give it to Agent Scully when he found her. Mulder agreed and returned to Skyland Mountain in lonesome remembrance of his missing FBI partner. (TXF: "Ascension")

Shortly after Skinner reopened the X-files, Mulder carried a folder containing Scully's belongings upon his return to his X-files office. (TXF: "Ascension", "3") From the folder, he put a relatively new X-file pertaining to Scully (labeled 73317) into storage, inside a file cabinet in the room, as well as her badge and glasses, removing Scully's cross from inside her badge before placing her other belongings into the cabinet.

Mulder then started to investigate a trio of vampires known as the Trinity Killers but, soon after he began investigating them, a Commander Carver remarked with surprise that Mulder was an FBI agent without a partner and seemed to want to work that way.

When Kristen Kilar (an associate of the Trinity Killers) first met Mulder – in Club Tepes – she realized that Mulder had lost someone and that the person had been a friend, not a lover. She later noticed that he was wearing Scully's cross and, though Kristen Kilar half-jokingly guessed that he was doing so because he was trying to ward her off, he explained that the cross was from someone he had lost. She hoped he found the person, correctly assuming both that the person could be found and that the person was a female. Kirsten Kilar killed herself soon thereafter and, moments after learning of her death, Mulder withdrew Scully's necklace from under his shirt to momentarily look at it. (TXF: "3")

Not long thereafter, Mrs. Scully told Mulder a story of how, one day when Dana Scully had been a young girl, she had made an effort to join in with her brothers by shooting at a garter snake but had later realized what she had done and unsuccessfully tried to keep the snake alive. By this time, Mrs. Scully had had a headstone for her daughter, Dana, crafted, despite Mulder believing that it was too soon to give up. He had brought paperwork about Scully's abduction home with him, including an image of a gagged Dana Scully and the X-file on her that he had opened. (TXF: "One Breath")

Scully's Experiences

While she was gone, Scully was experimented on. (TXF: "Ascension", "One Breath", et al.) At one point, she lay on an operating table in a white-lit room where crosses of light shone over her arms and two figures watched from nearby. A spinning drill approached her from above and Scully's eyes suddenly opened. A suction-like tube, seemingly attached to her belly button, began to inflate her stomach, which grew very large as the procedure continued to be observed by the nearby figures. (TXF: "Ascension")

Furthermore, branched DNA was added to Scully's blood during her abduction. This highly sophisticated form of DNA had the possible applications of being a tracking system, the developmental stages of a biological marker or part of an effort to graft a human to something inhuman. (TXF: "One Breath")

Return & Medical Complications

Shortly after her mother had told Mulder the story of her early encounter with a garter snake, Scully was returned and taken to the Intensive Care Unit of Northeast Georgetown Medical Center. She was comatose and hooked up to various machines when Nurse Wilkins arrived for the evening shift. Scully was in critical condition with complete unawareness of self or environment, exhibiting no evidence of language comprehension or of voluntary responses to external stimuli. Her immune system had been decimated and her blood contained abnormal protein chains, with a highly unusual amino acid sequence. The protein chains were by-products of the branched DNA that was now an inactive waste product and constituted a biological poison.

On the same night when Nurse Wilkins found Scully in this condition upon arriving for the evening shift, Mulder received a call that informed him of Scully's return. He hurried to see her (bursting into her ward, even though it was off-limits to anyone but authorized personnel) but Mrs. Scully had made her way there before him and was visiting her daughter upon his arrival. Doubting that Agent Scully had simply just arrived, an angry Mulder considered the possibility that she had been brought to the hospital by paramedics, FBI or military and that, whoever they had been, a Dr. Daly might be working with them. Daly later apologetically notified both Mulder and Mrs. Scully, however, that no-one at the hospital could determine how Agent Scully had arrived there, been administered, or how she had been attended to in such a critical condition.

Because Scully had been away for so long, there was an absence of her recent medical history, so Daly was unsure how long she had been in such a state and was therefore at a loss for a prognosis. By the time the doctor delivered this news to Mulder and Mrs. Scully, the facility's staff had conducted every possible test on Agent Scully, determining that there were no indications of acute injuries – traumatic or non-traumatic – and finding no signs of degenerative or metabolic disorders; the medical staff consequently did not know why Scully was in such a condition. Despite Mulder requesting that she be examined for trace evidence, Scully had been bathed and cleaned since her admittance. As Daly had been informed by the FBI, Scully had a living will that Mulder had signed as a witness and the will indicated that Scully did not wish to live in such a critical condition.

Her sister, Melissa, believed she could sense Dana's soul, including her thoughts, and tried to show Mulder her own method of doing so. In fact, Dana Scully saw both her sister and Mulder in a reality she was conscious of wherein her visitors stood on a dock as she watched them from a small boat, tied to the dock but far from it. Mulder found the method to be unsuccessful, concluding that it was nothing more than waving his hands in the air, but Melissa claimed that was because his fear and anger were blocking any positive emotions Dana needed to feel.

The comatose Agent Scully was thereafter visited by Melvin Frohike, who noticed an anomaly in her medical charts and smuggled them out of the hospital. After Mulder and Frohike took the charts to the other Lone Gunmen, they learned of the branched DNA, with the remote help of a hacker known as "the Thinker". This evidence established, for Mulder and the Gunmen, that whoever had been experimenting on Scully had no intention of continuing to do so. When asked by Mulder if Scully would survive, Byers – aware of the decimation of Scully's immune system – doubted that even a healthy human body had the ability to combat the biological poison that was now in her blood.

Blood was taken from Scully's ravaged body by Nurse Wilkins but was stolen by a man who Mulder chased until once again being confronted by X, who insisted that he accept Scully's death and stop searching for whoever had experimented on her. The man who had taken Scully's blood would not reveal who wanted it, when Mulder finally captured him, and was killed by X moments later. (TXF: "One Breath")

Appendices

Appearances

Additional References

Background Check

  • The storyline of Scully's abduction was created to cover the forthcoming absence of actress Gillian Anderson, who had discovered – in the first season of The X-Files – that she was pregnant with her first child. Frank Spotnitz recounts how Anderson's pregnancy effected the series' overarching storyline; "The mythology of the series didn't really blossom until an unexpected event late in Season One, which was the pregnancy of Gillian Anderson, the real-life pregnancy of Gillian Anderson, which forced The X-Files to be serialized in a way I don't think it was ever intended to be serialized. Suddenly, there had to be an arc of stories that dealt with the fact that Scully was going to be gone for who-knew-how-many episodes." (The X-Files Mythology, Volume 1 - Abduction; "Threads of the Mythology: Abduction") According to Spotnitz, "The 'mythology', quote-unquote, was very undefined at that point. There had been some mythology episodes the first year of the series, but I don't think anybody really looked at it as mythology, if you will, at that point. What really began the mythology in earnest, or kicked it into a higher gear anyway, was when Gillian Anderson got pregnant, at the end of the first season. They had to account for her absence, so the writers came up with the idea that she would be abducted by aliens." (TXF Season 2 DVD Special Features; "The Truth About Season 2")
  • Originally, there was some discussion over whether to have Scully give birth to an extraterrestrial infant. Chris Carter recalls, "There was talk of actually making her have an alien baby, which would have been a terrible idea." Writer Howard Gordon remembers, "We knew we had a window where we had to write her out and, fortunately, this is a show about abduction, so we abducted her." Regarding the writers' ultimate decision of how to deal with Anderson's pregnancy, Chris Carter remarks, "What we ultimately decided to do was to shoot around her pregnancy and her pregnant stomach. What we did is, we had Scully abducted during the two-parter of 'Duane Barry' and 'Ascension' and then she went off and had her baby and she came back." (The X-Files Mythology, Volume 1 - Abduction; "Threads of the Mythology: Abduction")
  • The decision to have Scully be seen bound and gagged in the boot of Duane Barry's car, in the episode "Ascension", proved to be controversial. Chris Carter recalls, "I remember that the censors were very nervous about us putting Scully in a trunk and also we were very nervous about putting a pregnant Scully in a trunk, but she was just a champ, she got in that car and you walk this fine line on television trying not to be too graphic and that was one of those images that we fought for and it made the show very scary because you believe that Agent Scully was really in danger in the hands of a psycho and that she was riding around in that back of car as it was climbing that mountain." (TXF Season 2 DVD Special Features; Chris Carter Talks About Season 2 Episodes; "Ascension")
  • A shot of Scully with an enlarged stomach, in "Ascension", actually features Anderson's pregnant torso. The actress left routinely working on the series about a week before her child – Piper Maru Anderson, a daughter – was born and the actress belatedly gave birth a few weeks after she had appeared in the aforementioned scene of "Ascension", on 25 September 1994. Her daughter was delivered via cesarean section, which was unanticipated and required that Gillian Anderson spend the next six days in hospital. Meanwhile, her absence from the set of The X-Files facilitated the filming of "3", the first ever episode in the series in which Scully does not appear. Four days after Gillian Anderson's period of hospitalization, she was back working on The X-Files, filming scenes for the episode "One Breath".
  • Frank Spotnitz sums up the ultimate effect that Anderson's pregnancy had on the series, "It was sort of a happy accident and there is a beautiful irony in all that because, ultimately, Gillian Anderson's real-life pregnancy leads to the storyline about Scully not being able to have a baby and then miraculously, by the end of the series, having a child and all of that is a piece, and it's a wonderful sort of blur of real life and fiction, because it was all, you know, one would not have happened without the other. If Gillian Anderson had not had Piper in Season 1 of The X-Files, the show never would have evolved the way it did." (The X-Files Mythology, Volume 1 - Abduction; "Threads of the Mythology: Abduction")
  • Although both "Ascension" and "Memento Mori" use original footage to show the white-lit location where Scully is tested upon, archive footage from "Ascension" is used in both "Nisei" (together with original footage of the location) and "The Truth" (using footage exclusively from "Ascension"). "Nisei" first features an original shot of Scully's face, with her eyes closed, before later showing a shot from "Ascension" of a drill descending toward Scully. Another shot in a subsequent scene of "Nisei" is the same shot from "Ascension" that features Gillian Anderson's pregnant torso. A later scene of "Nisei" features the original shot of Scully from earlier, amid footage of surgically masked scientists peering down at Scully as she druggily opens her eyes to them. A segment of archive footage that accompanies Scully's testimony in "The Truth" includes a shot of the bright light in the sky speeding away, a sped up shot that pans down from Scully's captors to her herself, a shot of Scully opening her eyes and the start of a close-up shot of Scully's torso being enlarged.
Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.
More Fandoms
Advertisement

Fan Feed

More X-Files Wiki