Reception
| "I love it when women come up to me and tell me I'm a positive influence on their lives and the lives of their young daughters. That's a great feeling." |
| — Gillian Anderson talking about the reaction to Dana Scully from female fans. |
Actress Gillian Anderson won many awards for her portrayal of Special Agent Scully during the nine season long run of The X-Files, including an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 1997, a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Drama Series in 1997, and two SAG Awards for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series in 1996 and 1997.
Film critic Scott Mendelson, writing in The Huffington Post, cited Scully as an example of strong female characters on television, calling her "one of the most iconic characters in the science-fiction genre". Radio Times's Laura Pledger also named her as a strong TV woman, placing her at #1. Rebecca Traister of Salon.com opined that Scully had a better character arc than Mulder. She wrote, "The very fact that her character was such a hard sell made her repeated brushes with the supernatural all the more powerful. Mulder's desire to believe was so expansive, his credulity so flexible, that it's not as though he was ever going to have either shaken from him. But Scully's surety was solid, stable, rigid; every time she saw something she thought she'd never see, we saw it crack, sparks fly from it. She was forced to question herself, grow, change". She praised her for being more "rational, resilient, mature" than her partner and for their mature relationship. In a review of "Irresistible", Todd VanDerWerff of The A.V. Club wrote that it was a cliché to put Scully in danger, as "Scully is heart, and any time she's in danger, it feels like the show itself is about to be stabbed through the heart".
The character of Scully has become something of a sci-fi heroine due to her intelligence and resilience, frequently appearing on lists of important female science fiction characters, such as Total Sci-Fi Online's list of The 25 Women Who Shook Sci-Fi, where she came fourth. TV Squad named her the thirteenth greatest woman on television, while the site also listed her among the most memorable female science fiction television characters. She is also often cited as being an unlikely sex symbol, frequently being included in lists of sexy TV characters. AOL named Scully the 13th Most Memorable Female TV Character. She was listed in AfterEllen.com's Top 50 Favorite Female TV Characters.
Read more about this topic: Dana Scully
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)