The most heart breaking episode of the shows run is also one of its most optimistic.
The mystery of what happened to Samantha Mulder is the most important plotline in The X-Files. At the tender young age of eight she vanished from her family home in Marthas Vineyard ostensibly abducted by aliens. The only witness was her brother, a young Fox Mulder and experiencing such a traumatic event instigates his lifelong obsession with the paranormal so he can discover the truth about her disappearance. When we are introduced to his adult version in the form of David Duchovny he has spent twenty years searching for proof of extraterrestrial life a pursuit that had led the FBI profiling golden boy to take a job in the far less prestigious X Files division where he is eventually put under the watchful eye of Agent Dana Scully Gillian Anderson.
Throughout the first seven seasons of the show Samanthas abduction proved to be a vital element of the overarching alien conspiracy plotline. Multiple episodes teased Mulder with the possibility that he was finally on the right path only to pull the carpet from under him yet again. Whatever information he did find served only to raise more questions such as when he encountered a woman claiming to be an adult Samantha who is later revealed to be just a clone and who meets a very violent end soon after.
Her disappearance even worked its way into the Monster of the Week episodes most notably in Season 4s excellent Paper Hearts which posits that she was never abducted but rather the victim of a child murderer instead. Its no secret that series creator Chris Carter had not planned out the shows narrative in advance and while that did lend itself to some excellent spontaneity based on what was proving successful and what was not Cigarette Smoking Man Walter Skinner and The Lone Gunmen were all originally set for just one episode appearances it also resulted in a tangled web of a plot that contradicted itself yearly. Samanthas storyline was no different and while it had started as one of the shows highlights the subsequent years of wheel spinning had made it lose its appeal.
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