the strange appeal of Walter Skinner
or SKINNER IS ZADDY!!!!!
I’m rewatching The X-Files (spoilers for season 3 below!) and repeatedly find myself thinking, damn, Skinner is hot.
As a teen, I only had eyes for Mulder (and Scully, but I didn’t realize I was queer yet) (how many sapphics owe it all to Dana Scully?!). At 40, I still love Mulder and Scully, but I admire Mitch Pileggi/Skinner in a way I never did before.
Skinner is TIRED. He’s fed up with your bullshit. He’s weary from dealing with bureaucracy and meetings and paperwork all day. He doesn’t get to be out in the field playing with aliens like Mulder and Scully. He has to deal with budgets and the Smoking Man and his wife filing for divorce. It’s way too relatable!
Mulder’s the impulsive youngest child, making a mess, and Scully’s the oldest daughter who has responsibility foisted on her. Skinner’s the parent. The realities of life and adulthood weigh on him. He’s stuck behind a desk all day. Again, RELATABLE. How many of us watched The X-Files in the ’90s and dreamt of being detectives or doctors or whatever, only to grow up and work in a cubicle? Turns out life is way more Office Space than it is Nancy Drew.
Skinner may lack Mulder’s obvious charm and jocularity, but he has a dry, sarcastic wit (and ripped bod hiding under those boring suits). We even get to see his sexy side in season 3. Mulder and Scully may be wish-fulfillment fantasies, but in the episode Avatar, Skinner has to deal with very real relationship problems: pushing away his wife of 17 years, not confiding in her, until she finally asks for a divorce. At the very end of the episode (I TOLD YOU THERE WOULD BE SPOILERS!), as she’s lying in a coma, he whispers to her that she’s kept him going all these years, and that even though he’s witnessed things he can’t explain or make sense of, coming home to her every night is what’s kept him going. 🥹
For the grown-ass viewer, it’s a seductive moment of vulnerability, a peek behind the stoic facade someone has erected around themselves in self-defense. (I would argue that the truly grown-up thing would be go to therapy and figure out how to stay open and vulnerable and confide in your partner BEFORE they’re comatose, and the bar shouldn’t be so low for cishet white men, but I digress.) Skinner’s usually the strong silent type, but for a moment, he gets to be soft. He tells his (still unconscious) wife he wants to stay married, and at the very end of the episode, he gets his wedding ring out of a desk drawer and puts it back on. It’s tender and touching. We know as viewers that Skinner will probably go back to being that grouchy, walls-up guy in the next episode, but this 43-minute slice of character development is a kiss to build a dream on.
P.S. As a feminist, I think your spouse should be more than “that nice person I come home to every night,” but this was 1996 so I’ll give them a little grace.