Moby Dick

In honor of the premier of Moby Dick on ENCORE this week (starring none other than Gillian Anderson, as Ahab's wife), I thought it appropriate to post a clip from my book that discusses Moby Dick (below). This novel is referenced multiple times in The X-Files and highlights some interesting themes relating to persistence, obsession, and refusing to give up.

In I Want to Believe, Scully also questions whether the cost of her persistence in Christian’s treatment is too high. She is in danger of becoming an Ahab, but in a way she is also a Jonah. . . . In Moby Dick, Father Mapple describes the bowels of the ship in which Jonah slept as a foretaste of the bowels of the whale that would later contain him. Scully too must enter a putrid and stifling place, the “vile box of monsters” where Father Joe lives, as the vehicle that will carry her back toward God. . . . When Scully is spit back onto dry land after the case is over, reeling from the experience, she must decide whether God really did answer Father Joe’s prayers for redemption and in that redemption sent a message to Scully that would help her save both Mulder’s and Christian’s lives. (We Want to Believe, p. 77)