The Bill Scully Jr. Hate Page

After careful consideration of who to make the subject of a hate page, I've come to a decision. The fact that it should be X-Files-related did not pose much of a problem (after all, it appears that the Spice Girls' 15 minutes are up, and there are more than enough Kathie Lee Gifford hate pages out there to amuse us, much as I'd like to make my own contribution). Elsewhere in these pages, I spend much time and effort defending someone I consider most worthy (although I find that I'm one of the few). However, there's someone else who's been hanging around lately that I don't find worthy of much at all. Remember "Gethsemane"? The fourth season's finale? We meet him at a Scully family dinner, where he acts as he apparently usually does: arrogant, self-important, and possessed of a thin venier of family values covering a core of selfishness and mean-spiritedness. Bill Scully Jr. makes his presence known at this dinner through a few vocal plastic platitudes and proceeds to be the subject of the tell-tale unmotivated closeup during Dana Scully's telephone conversation with Mulder. What's up with that?

With every appearance, he's been almost the personification of several undesirable human characteristics. Consider: Scully had been diagnosed with an inoperable tumor. Since then, Mulder had been doing everything he could, trying to move Heaven and Earth in a search for some way to gain a cure for her. Enter Bill Scully, strutting with the knowledge that he, being "family", undoubtedly knows better how to deal with this crisis than some spooky nutcase whose chase for his "little green men" is assumed to be the cause of the illness. It's obviously a textbook example of misplaced aggression when Bill confronts Mulder, as he has several times, and lays out some lame reason or another rationalizing why he, not the Scully family as a whole, but he, knows what's better for his sister. If it were just Mulder that he was second-guessing, there might at least be some kind of justification for it, but Bill tips his hand when he reveals his assuredness that he knows what's better for his sister - his grown sister - than even she does.

I could ask where the hell he was when his sister disappeared, and why it was Mulder who was giving her mother much needed support and not the guy who allegedly knows better what's needed for any given situation, but I won't (after all, that was a couple of years before the character as an adult had even been created, so we won't get into that). All one must do is to look at one thing he says. When he asks Mulder if his search for answers has been worth it and receives a reply, consider Bill's answer. "Do you know how that makes me feel?" Instantly he's turned a situation that threatens his sister's life into something about himself. Self-centered? You betcha. Later, after Scully's recovery, when you'd think he might have learned at least a little about humility, there he is again with the same self-righteous attitude, without a single thought that his apparent belief in his own omniscience would have meant the certain death of his sister. Does he resent the fact that his own sister trusts her partner more than her brother? It's certainly likely, but that in itself isn't enough of a reason to hate him (although we might ask why that situation has come to be). What does provide sufficient reason is his adamant insistence on foisting his own unsolicited views on anyone, willing to listen or not.

We also have the fact that he's a Navy man, but I don't base my judgments on this. The Scully patriarch was Navy as well, and he was obviously a decent guy. Is Bill involved somehow in the conspiracies with which the X-Files are are so often concerned? It's very doubtful. In the first place, the effectiveness of any covert operation is inversely proportional to the number of people perpetrating it, which severely limits the feasibility of pointing at any given suspicious-seeming person and saying, "He must be in on it." More importantly, Bill Scully's motives are all too obviously focused on himself. Say what you want about those involved with the Consortium, but at least they have some kind of vision and, more importantly, the drive to realize it. Bill is too busy pontificating with his ideas about how things should be to concern himself with how exactly those things should come to be. In short, he's a talker, not a doer.

For example, consider the custody question that comes up with Emily. Bill's family walks out of their questioning session, and Bill makes a half-hearted attempt to stare down Mulder. He resents that Mulder is closer to his sister than he is. Could it be that he's taking this frustration out on his sister and the little girl who, we learn, actually is his own niece? If he's really as concerned about his sister as he wants all those around him to think he is, then why isn't he putting his differences with Mulder aside for the time being? One might say he is, but I remain unconvinced. What was he willing to do to assist his sister at this time? "Moral support?" I don't think so. I think he sees Mulder as what a judge might call "poisonous fruits": anything associated with him is tainted and as such deserves nothing from him. If Emily is his niece, it was a result of something associated with Mulder. So singleminded is his resentment of Mulder's relationship with Scully that he even thinks of himself as the focal point of Emily's situation.

True, there has been some extrapolation in deriving the above arguments in the absence of actual evidence, but given his earlier actions, the ideas seem perfectly logical to me. Until the guy grows up and can prove that he accepts the fact that his sister is her own person not just another snack to feed his own self-serving ego (and by the way, how much did this attitude play a part in his procreative desires?), I'll have no other choice but to stand by these arguments.

Late breaking news!!!   Suspicious of Bill Scully (SOBS) has recently set up shop on the FBI's Most Unwanted message board. Actually, yours truly has become the SOBS Televangelist (based on my neverending rant here). For more details, check out the SOBS webpage, or if you can't wait, just go on over to the FMU forum, start a thread titled "1-800-SOBS", and give any or all of your own reasons for distrusting this vile person.