The X Files - Conduit

“Do you believe that voice?” - hypnotist

“I want to believe.” – Mulder

Conduit was a good vehicle for devoting significant time and energy to Samantha, the missing sister that Mulder has never recovered from. Or Conduit is a good vehicle for spotlighting Mulder’s agony. He tells Scully that as a child he’d walk into a room eyes closed hoping that if when opened Sam would be standing there. Abducted while he was in the room, Fox has never been able to get past Sam’s disappearance. That anguish drives his mission towards finding the truth and exposing it to the public. His mission to find Samantha if possible never stays far from his mind. When a mother (Carrie Snodgrass) awakens in her trailer to a bright light, realizing her daughter is gone as her son stands outside calling her, she appeals for help with no one taking her account seriously. Believing her daughter, Ruby, has just run off with one of the many guys she’d be found in parked cars by the police with. Her brother (Joel Palmer) tells Mulder that the binary codes he puts to paper comes from the television set. Fragments of music pieces, DNA, and “the universal man” are just some of what those binary codes create. At first, the NSA believe these binary codes are a “threat to national security”, so the mother isn’t keen on Mulder and Scully being anywhere around them, causing her and the son more harm than good. But Mulder is driven to find Ruby despite Scully’s reservations. A girl that knows Ruby tells Mulder and Scully that she was pregnant with a guy named Greg’s child. This girl turns out to be pregnant with Greg’s child, not Ruby; when Greg’s body is found, the girl’s story blows up in her face. Meanwhile, Scully addresses Samantha to Mulder…confronting the elephant in the room isn’t easy for Scully but she sees he’s in pain and feels she must.

During the early part of the first season, Mulder’s “fringe exploits” in the FBI were under considerable scrutiny and Scully’s assignment as a partner to him always had her questioned about his “personal ties” demonstrating their indifference to his role as an agent. She had to answer to FBI Division Chief Scott Blevins (Charles Cioffi) about Mulder’s odd requests to follow up on cases the Bureau might consider a waste of time and money. Travel, hotel, and the hours on the road based on a newspaper clipping regarding Snodgrass’ situation involving her abducted daughter were put before Scully by Blevins as an example of his using his professional time for a quest for a truth none of them but him believes in. There are lingering shots of Scully witnessing sympathetically Mulder’s broken heart. There are lingering shots of Mulder’s face, his eyes, countenance, and slumber. There are no quips or witty rapport. Mulder is focused on finding Ruby and when she is seemingly returned, his desire for her to tell others her experience (he asks Scully about certain signs of weightlessness, similar to astronauts in space, and she is startled that they appear on her medical chart) is denied…Snodgrass will not allow her girl to face a similar experience she had (as a girl scout she and those of her troop witnessed a UFO at a Sioux City, Iowa park, with her story used as an object of ridicule, revisited when her own daughter was abducted as a mother). So Mulder, once again, faces resistance. The truth he knows is out there once again concealed. Scully listens to his hypnotic recollections, recorded on a cassette tape while under with a doctor speaking about the night Sam was abducted, as Mulder achingly weeps in a cathedral all alone in the night…she knows what drives him and he so often faces the reality of his pursuit’s neverending failure.