I can identify three sorts of television skeptics who honor our heavy diet of storytelling tropes. We'll get fat on anything in front of the television. No doubt there are more than what I can discuss now.
The most benign, though like the others plain wrong in some form, is what I call the Well-Meaning Skeptic. He's so reasonable! As viewers, you and I know he is wrong. We have seen what the protagonist has seen (this tropey gent is not usually the star of anyone's show).
But with the best of intentions, here is the poor sap who more or less represents someone like me in real life: methodologically naturalistic with a penchant for using Occam’s Razor in the face of appeals to the supernatural, traits which probably make him rather a pest to family and friends, a real wet blanket.
The Well-Meaning Skeptic is employing the most reasonable answers in response to his frustrated comrade, our main character, who is initially at a total loss to get by WMS’s rational skepticism. I know this is fairly self-inflating, but I wouldn't be a general skeptic myself if I didn't believe it was steel-girded, now would I?
Eventually the supernatural/unbelievable is “proven” when the ghost arrives, or the interdimensional creepers appear. What have we learned by the time WMS discovers the folly of reason? What else by the time he understands the golden value of baseless assumption and an open-mindedness so unguarded that his brain may fall out? You tell me.
A brief example: Insidious, a sort of spiritual successor to Poltergeist, features a husband and father who will do anything to assuage his disturbed wife except cave to her fear that spirits are at play. Surely there are better explanations than those burdened by untenable necrology. And he's quite reasonable, but he's also quite wrong. He'll change his ways soon enough.
The second skeptic is not so unlike the first. She may be committed to mundane explanations about the nature of the universe, or at least fail to entertain the fantastic. But the Hard-Headed Ear Plugger sees the vicious subterranean mole monsters for herself and reveals then the key difference: she was never a true rationalist, but a devotee at the altar of rationalism as god, with no possibility of mistake. She might also have something to gain by sticking to her guns and ignoring the truth - subconscious maintenance of her self-esteem?
You bet she'll explain the mole people away with something Dickensian, a bit of undigested mustard, something contrived for our entertainment. As my old dad would say, what a dolt! This one plays into a mindset I encounter every so often, mistaking skepticism for pessimism or chalking atheism up to a religion of its own. Her heart is hardened to God, cut off. Another negative skeptic stereotype. I wish this model would allow the door to hit it on the way out.
The candy-colored frog bitch from Hogwarts, Dolores Umbridge, in whom can also be found the ingredients for totalitarian rulership, is a HHEP. She will not confess that Voldemort’s return is abundantly clear, and she does a spectacular job of ignoring the evidence. She'll sooner make a boy scrawl in his own flesh, the filthy rotten- wait, what are they saying about skeptics here?
The third and laughably bad skeptic portrayal is something apart from his predecessors. There always was something off about him, wasn't there? In fact, the Secret Villain is not a skeptic at all! He is a private believer and a fiend who profits from the cover-up. So long as he can keep others diverted from the protagonist’s truth, he will gain money, power, or both. Umbridge at least wasn't in on the scheme - this fellow is running the game.
Whatever it is he gains, by the time of the revelation he may have run the gamut of reasonable explanations. “Get some rest,” he has advised the flustered protagonist. “You're seeing things.” Or maybe he's transparently cruel, as you will know if you sat (for some reason) through the entirety of ‘God's Not Dead,’ in which mean old Kevin Sorbo illegally harasses a good-natured Christian student for believing what Sorbo darn well knows is the Truth.
Oh, boy. So skeptics are misguided, religiously devoted to a falsehood, or liars for personal gain.
I'm afraid stories would proffer the anticlimax if they didn't play things this way. If the strange woman who replaced your sister is, after all, not a body-snatcher but indeed your sister after a new haircut, why did we just waste an hour of our time on your dullard’s tale?
You know Agent Scully is wrong, but somebody has to provide cheap tin foil to Mulder with her courtship of the mundane. It is the conspiracy-peddling dream mongerer who reminds us that human commitment in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is some of what we do best. Apparently.
After all, you can't prove it's not true. Can you? Huh? Huh? Gotcha there!
