The X Files / Conduit / Notes

 Do you believe the voice? - Hypnotist

I want to believe. - Mulder

"Conduit", for me, is such a critical early episode of the X Files. A few nights ago I watched "End Game" from the second season and Mulder won't stop asking Brian Thompson's alien bounty hunter if his sister is alive. No matter the criticism, no matter the ridicule, no matter the snickers or "Spooky Mulder"s exchanged by agents behind his back, Mulder wants to believe. He has to. Those who have lost loved ones to abduction, none of them want to feel as Mulder does at the end of "Conduit", alone in a church with a picture of him and his long lost sister in his hands, weeping and hurt because Samantha is still somewhere. Whoever (or whatever) that voice is that told Mulder she was okay, who could really blame him for pursuing every lead in search for her.

Can you imagine how frustrating it is for Mulder when Snodgrass' Darlene refuses to allow her once-abducted daughter to tell anyone of what happened to her? Mulder walks away once again frustrated, while Scully absorbs how much in pain her partner is. The entire episode of "Conduit" has Mulder refusing to leave the area, particularly the lake where a teenage young woman vanished. A "UFO hotspot", Lake Okobogee, Mulder had petitioned for an assignment there to conduct an investigation into the girl's whereabouts. Darlene had told the authorities or anyone who would listen about her daughter's abduction and the great light that burned the top of her camper, causing the doorknob to sizzle, as her son looked up at her afterward. Darlene's son, to Mulder, is a possible conduit, seemingly receiving information possibly from "them", eventually leading back to the spot of her abduction by the episode's end. Darlene doesn't want her daughter to suffer the same ridicule and bad publicity she has about what she experienced that night. Division Chief Blevins asks Scully if Mulder is driven by his personal feelings and letting them effect his professional job. Scully clearly realizes that might be the case but she wishes to help Mulder conduct his affairs without that being an issue that undermines him. Obviously, Mulder is very driven by his own experience as a child, and Scully even listens to recordings of Mulder under hypnosis. She realizes he sees himself in Darlene's boy. At least Darlene gets her daughter back, the boy gets his sister back. Mulder, on the other hand, isn't so lucky. 

Scully has the unfortunate task of telling Mulder that his pursuit of the location of Darlene's daughter isn't going to locate his own sister. But Mulder won't just go home. Even after the body of a boyfriend of the missing girl's is found dead in the forest of Lake Okobogee, and the one responsible is a lover scorned, Mulder wants to know about what happened to Darlene's daughter.

Yes, this is about Mulder's quest. It tells us quite well why Mulder cares so much about alien abductions. Why he is willing to "carry the millstone around his neck", to labor forward with the "spooky" moniker. To find Samantha would be worth all that.