After having investigated the X-Files between 1994 and 1998, FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder was reassigned off those cases in 1998. (TXF: "Ascension", "The End") Mulder continued to work with usual partner, Dana Scully, but the nature of their assignments changed. (The X-Files Movie - TXF: "One Son")
History[]
1998[]
No longer able to investigate the X-Files as the department had been closed by their superiors in the FBI, Mulder and Scully were assigned to search for a bomb in Dallas as part of a large task force directed by Special Agent-in-Charge Darius Michaud. In a building he chose to search on a hunch, Mulder discovered the bomb hidden within a vending machine in a room that locked when he entered it. He was eventually freed by other FBI agents, including SAC Michaud, who insisted on remaining in the building until it was evacuated in an attempt to defuse the bomb. However, Michaud was killed when the bomb exploded.
After coming late to a hearing with the FBI's Office of Professional Review - led by Assistant Director Jana Cassidy - and meeting a paranoid doctor, Alvin Kurtzweil, who professed to have been watching Mulder's career since before he was a "promising young agent", Mulder came to believe that SAC Michaud had intentionally let the bomb in Dallas explode under orders from people who wanted to hide evidence of an alien virus that had infected two firemen and a young boy whose deceased bodies had been in the building when it had exploded. He also learned that the virus would be unleashed during colonization.
Mulder running through a swarm of bees.
After traveling with Scully through Texas on the trail of several trucks he believed were transporting the virus, Mulder and his FBI partner discovered a cornfield in the middle of the desert, surrounding two white lit domes in which bees were stored. They entered the domes but ran out of the structures when the bees were released. Two helicopters then chased them through the cornfield but left when the agents were almost out of the field. (The X-Files Movie) Though he never returned to the cornfield, Mulder ultimately learned that the corn featured pollen that was genetically altered to hold the virus, which would be transported by the bees and transmitted in their sting. (The X-Files Movie; TXF: "The Beginning")
After Scully was later stung by a bee carrying the virus that had remained hidden inside her clothing, Mulder called for an ambulance but he was unaware that his call had been intercepted. When an ambulance arrived, he assumed it was the one he had called for but he was shot in the head by the driver of the vehicle, which quickly carried Scully away. Though the bullet had only grazed his left temple, Mulder lost consciousness moments before the ambulance he had called for soon arrived and transported him to a hospital. When Mulder regained consciousness, he discovered that the bullet had grazed his brow and temporal plate, just slightly missing an area where the injury would have been lethal.
Mulder later managed to escape from the hospital and searched for Dr. Kurtzweil, who had been killed by the Well-Manicured Man. Mulder met with the man, who gave him an antidote for the virus and co-ordinates to a base in Antarctica where Scully had been taken. In his car, the Well-Manicured Man told Mulder that victims of the alien virus, like the firemen and the young boy whose infected and deceased bodies had been destroyed in the bomb, had begun to gestate and would do so during colonization, a fact only recently discovered by the Well-Manicured Man and his colleagues, who had been working collaboratively with the aliens. The Well-Manicured Man also revealed what had happened to Mulder's sister - she had been abducted so that she could be cloned and would eventually survive the viral holocaust as a human/alien hybrid. Although the man admitted he had been instructed to kill Mulder, the Well-Manicured Man instead shot the driver of his own car but died himself in a car-bomb explosion shortly after providing Mulder with help.
Inside an alien ship Mulder found in Antarctica.
Mulder journeyed to Antarctica where, two days after witnessing the Well-Manicured Man's death, he discovered a vast alien ship that contained many cryogenically frozen humans in pods. Finding himself on an upper level within the craft, Mulder attempted to climb to a lower level but lost his grip and slid down the side of an enormous wall, only managing to save himself by catching hold of a ledge. After he climbed to safety, Mulder found Scully and injected her with the cure to the alien virus. As she was connected by a tube to the alien ship, Mulder simultaneously administered the vaccine to the craft. The body of each cryogenically frozen human, having been infected with the alien virus earlier, produced a vicious, long-clawed alien, several of which struggled to attack Mulder as he tried to escape with Scully, carrying her unconsciousness body over his shoulder. (The X-Files Movie)
Mulder luckily managed to escape from the ship with Scully but the craft, which had been buried under ice, rose beneath the agents, causing the ice to superheat and collapse. (The X-Files Movie; TXF: "The Beginning") The agents fell with the ice but landed on the hull of the alien ship as it continued to rise. They slid down the ship's hull and fell back on the ice where Mulder, before finally losing consciousness, witnessed the craft leave the ground. Reinvested and determined, he returned to Washington, D.C. with Scully and the X-Files were finally reopened. (The X-Files Movie)
- Though the alien virus is seen to be the black oil in the movie, Mulder never learns this information and neither makes nor investigates any comparison between the two.
Mulder attempting to restore an incinerated X-File in his new office.
Several months after the cases had been destroyed in his office fire, Mulder had been given a new office, a small and dark room with a computer which he used to determine that he would probably be able to recover a large percentage of the destroyed case material by a reassembling of fragments and by using an admittedly tedious process that restored moisture to the documents. (TXF: "The Beginning") He reported this discovery at an OPR meeting led by Assistant Director J. Maslin, who had replaced AD Cassidy. (TXF: "The Beginning"; The X-Files Movie) At the meeting, Mulder attempted to persuade Maslin to permit himself and Scully to begin immediate work on the X-Files, which fragments he had already recovered and reassembled would allow, and recounted the events that had taken place in Antartica. Mulder intended to continue work on the X-Files by first investigating the bees and corn he and Scully had seen in the desert earlier. Although he had no scientific evidence to support his account of the events in Antartica and presented no other information to justify his reassignment to the X-Files, the FBI officials at the meeting announced they would consider his reassignment to the cases. He returned to his attempts at restoring the files but was notified soon after that his request for reassignment had been unanimously refused.
At first, Mulder questioned how it could have been denied when he and Scully were the only reason he knew of for reopening the X-Files. After Mulder learned that a file folder in his old office might lead to proof that the virus was extraterrestrial and caused the growth of an alien being inside a human host, he went to his former office and discovered it had been redecorated. Mulder also learned that Agents Spender and Fowley, having recovered from her gunshot wound, had been assigned to investigate the X-Files and he stole the specific file he was looking for from the office.
The file led him and Scully on the trail of a ferocious alien that had only recently been produced but had already killed several humans in Phoenix, Arizona. However, the agents were discovered working on the case by Special Agent Spender, who threatened that he would get Mulder censured for ignoring his superiors and investigating without cause or permission. When he and Scully found Gibson Praise shortly thereafter, Mulder suggested using the telepathic boy to find the fierce alien but realized that Praise could be the evidence he had been searching for to prove all his claims of paranormal phenomena. Mulder left Gibson with Scully as he accompanied Diana Fowley to a nuclear power plant sixty miles east of Pheonix, where he and Fowley believed the alien had gone in search of heat essential to its survival. Mulder and Fowley saw Gibson Praise in the power plant, with a man who had kidnapped Gibson. After Gibson led the man, who was also searching for the alien, to a locked room, Mulder watched from a window as the vicious alien killed the man but did not attack Gibson. Though Fowley had left, telling Mulder she was going to look for another way into the room, she returned with armed guards who held Mulder at gunpoint.
Upon returning to the FBI Headquarters, he and Scully attended another OPR meeting at which AD Maslin warned them that refusal to cease all material association with the X-Files would result in their immediate dismissal from the FBI. The agents were informed that a probationary period would be set and they were ordered to report to Assistant Director Kersh from then on. In complete disregard of the instructions they were given, however, Mulder continued work on restoring the burnt X-Files. His theory that Gibson Praise was part alien, a belief he had postulated earlier, was proven by Scully, who had discovered that alien DNA in Gibson Praise was the same as in the fierce alien, in the alien virus and in every other human, meaning that all of humanity was part alien. (TXF: "The End", "The Beginning")
Mulder and Scully were subsequently assigned to investigate possible cases of domestic terrorism. Mulder found the routine checks he and Scully conducted boring and suspected that their superiors meant to humiliate the agents by assigning them such tedious work. One suspect he and Scully investigated was farmer Virgil Nokes, who had recently placed an order for five thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. When the agents visited Nokes' home in Buhl, Idaho, he explained that he used the fertilizer for growing sugar beets, believing he had better things to do with it than "going around, blowing government buildings sky high".
Mulder saw a television news report in Nokes' home about the mysterious death of Vicky Jenkins Crump, who had apparently died from some kind of explosive rupture inside her head after a high-speed police chase had ended in Elko, Nevada. Interested in the report, Mulder called a captain presiding over the case who allowed him and Scully to become involved in the investigation. However, Mulder was soon taken hostage by Vicky Crump's husband, Patrick Garland Crump, and was forced to drive at high speed so that Patrick Crump would not die in the same way as his wife. Mulder dodged other cars, evaded pursuing police and stole another vehicle in an effort to save Crump, who nevertheless died when the pressure in his head became overwhelming.
Upon reporting to Kersh at FBI Headquarters, Mulder complained about the checks for domestic terrorism he and Scully had been conducting, calling the assignment "bozo work, investigating huge piles of manure". Mulder asked if he and Scully would be required to continue working on the routine checks, prompting Kersh to teasingly suggest he could always quit. According to Kersh, Mulder and Scully were done investigating X-Files and the sooner the agents recognized that, the better for them both.(TXF: "Drive")
Mulder adrift in the Bermuda Triangle.
On November 16, 1998, Mulder learned that the SS Queen Anne, a ship that had disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in 1939, had inexplicably reappeared. He went looking for the ship but became lost in the Sargasso Sea during a storm that destroyed his boat, the Lady Garland. In an effort to recover him, Scully and the Lone Gunmen journeyed to the Bermuda Triangle, where they found the Queen Anne with no passengers aboard and Mulder floating in the water. In hospital, he claimed to have traveled back to 1939 and been forced to evade Nazis aboard the Queen Anne, which had included Scully and Skinner as passengers. He believed that, though the ship had been heading away from the Bermuda Triangle, which he suspected was some kind of time warp in which the Queen Anne had become caught, he had convinced Scully to turn the ship around so that history would resume as normal. (TXF: "Triangle")
After returning to work, Mulder was contacted by an anonymous source within the classified Area 51 Air Force base in Nevada. Believing that the proof he and Scully had been searching for was in Area 51, Mulder ignored the fact that he was now once again only a General Assignment Agent and returned to Nevada with his FBI partner to investigate rumors that, for the past fifty years, the military had been using the base to conduct classified experiments involving alien technology. However, he and Scully were stopped by soldiers while driving to the base.
As the agents stood talking to an employee at the base, named Morris Fletcher, an unidentified aircraft left Area 51 but crashed soon after taking off, causing Mulder to switch bodies with Fletcher. Mulder was forced to adopt Fletcher's life, as Fletcher assumed Mulder's identity. As an Area 51 employee, Mulder discovered two bizarre incidents similar to his own, while attempting to contact Scully in order to warn her about what had happened. However, Mulder struggled with Fletcher's roles as a husband and father of two. Mulder eventually discovered that the anonymous source who had contacted him earlier was a general named Wegman, who had accidentally caused the UFO to crash earlier. When the space-time continuum eventually corrected itself, Mulder and Fletcher returned to their rightful bodies, although they lost all memories of the events and only a few changes remained, such as Fletcher's tidying of Mulder's apartment. Kersh never learned of the agents' visit to Area 51. (TXF: "Dreamland", "Dreamland II")
- An X-File on Mulder is seen at the beginning of "Dreamland II", while Morris Fletcher inhabits Mulder's body. It is unclear whether the file exists after the correction of the space-time continuum and why the file exists at all, unless the document mostly concerns the disappearance of Mulder's abducted sister, though the information shown pertains to Mulder himself and does not focus on his relationship with his sister.
Mulder later discovered, in Agent Spender's trash, a shredded report regarding a woman who claimed she had given birth to an abnormal baby which had horns and a tail. According to the woman, her baby had been taken from her by a demon or devil while she had been lying in bed one night. Mulder reassembled the shredded report and, acting as if he were Agent Spender's deputy, immediately began investigating the case on a day when he was meant to meet with Scully and help her to run background checks. He managed to persuade a reluctant Scully into allowing him to consult with her, by way of cell phone. Though medical evidence seemed to suggest that the baby's mother had killed her own child, Mulder suspected the woman's husband of being the kidnapping demon, usually hiding in the physical form of a human.
When Mulder began following the baby's father, the man reported him to AD Kersh, accusing him of harassment, to which Mulder responded that he was "doing a background check on someone". Scully soon joined Mulder on the case at his request and they, occasionally assisted by the local police department, uncovered evidence suggesting that the baby's father was indeed a demon who had previously lived in Czechoslovakia under another name and that, both there and in the US, he had been destroying countless women's lives and pre-natal infants in his search for a normal human child and a regular family. Both Mulder and his FBI partner were tricked into believing that another of the demon's pregnant wives was innocent, though she was actually a demon herself who took her newborn demonic baby with her when she left her home. Mulder only realized this revelation after the baby's father was shot and later died in hospital. (TXF: "Terms of Endearment")
On Christmas Eve, 1998, Mulder decided to explore a supposedly haunted house in Maryland with Scully. According to legend, the house was haunted every Christmas Eve by lovers Maurice and Lyda, who had forged a lovers' pact in Christmas 1939, before killing themselves in the belief that doing so could allow them to spend eternity together. In the house, Mulder and Scully encountered several highly peculiar phenomena, including their discovery and the later bizarre disappearance of two extremely decomposed corpses who seemed to have been shot to death and appeared to be the agents themselves.
Mulder later became separated from Scully and they each once met a man and woman who they believed were the ghosts of Lyda and Maurice. Mulder suspected the ghost of Maurice had been responsible for the strange phenomena he and Scully had encountered and was insultingly psychoanalysed by the man. The woman who Mulder believed was the ghost of Lyda tried to convince him to shoot Scully before she appeared to both Mulder and Scully individually, making them believe she was their FBI partner while apparently shooting them both. However, after he was reunited with Scully, Mulder realized that he had been tricked into believing he had been shot and helped Scully realize the same was true of herself before the agents finally managed to escape the house together. (TXF: "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas")
1999[]
At FBI headquarters in early January 1999, Mulder spoke to a female co-worker of a Ms. Ermentrout while conducting routine background checks, by use of phone, in a large darkened room - the bullpen hallway - where several other agents, including Scully, also carried out background checks. Even though Mulder seemed bored when questioning the employee about Ms. Ermentrout and generally dissatisfied with his assignment, he revealed to Scully that he was not ready to quit the FBI as "that would make way too many people way too happy". He seemed dismayed after Scully was assigned to work with an Agent Peyton Ritter on a case that Mulder correctly suspected was an X-File, although Scully initially believed otherwise.
Mulder provided information to Scully while she worked on the case with Agent Ritter, discovering evidence that suspect Alfred Fellig was at least 149 years old, having used several false identities during his lifetime and having committed murder twice in 1929. Mulder relayed news of Fellig's guilt to Agent Ritter, who shot Fellig but also accidentally shot Scully. After Fellig died, Mulder visited Scully as she recovered in hospital and revealed that he believed Fellig would have lived forever, had he not been seeking death's opposite. (TXF: "Tithonus")
- Even though Mulder is shown to be working from an office that is exclusively his own in "The Beginning", it seems likely that, by "Triangle", he and Scully have been assigned to work from the crowded bullpen hallway. Scully can be seen working there in the episode and "Dreamland II" shows not only her but also Morris Fletcher, in disguise as Mulder, "working" there. Neither Mulder nor Scully are shown working in an office in the earlier "Drive" and it is not until "Tithonus" that the bullpen hallway is established as being also Mulder's place of work.
While working late one night, Mulder left the bullpen hallway to find that Assistant Director Skinner was having trouble with his eyes and had a nasty bruise on his ribcage. Mulder learned that AD Skinner had received a phone call in which a scrambled voice had told him he had 24 hours to live. With help from Scully, Mulder attempted to determine who was responsible for Skinner's condition, as it continued to worsen. Mulder found that, although the incident seemed to be connected to Senate Resolution 819 - a funding bill that also seemed to involve one of his informants, Senator Matheson - Skinner was most probably the victim of someone whose motive concerned the X-Files, which the Assistant Director still supervised. Mulder admitted this conclusion to AD Skinner after he suddenly recovered and requested permission to continue the investigation. Although Skinner secretly knew that he had been infected with microscopic, atom-sized machines by Alex Krycek, he did not reveal this information to Mulder or Scully and inhibited them from continuing their work on the case, reminding them that they were to perform their duties "as directed by AD Kersh and only AD Kersh". (TXF: "S.R. 819")
Shortly after, Mulder worked some hours of a day but did not return from an intermission, instead choosing to play basketball. He told Scully that he was ready to work but only if it weren't on "some background-checking jagoff shoeshine tip". He soon learned, however, that Cassandra Spender, the subject of an X-File, had recently been recovered in a train car where she had been the subject of operations conducted by a group of doctors who had been burned alive. Mulder continued to learn more about the Cigarette Smoking Man, the Syndicate and their collaboration with the race of aliens that intended to recolonize Earth, the alien black oil virus, and the race of alien rebels. Mulder also discovered that Cassandra's doctors had been incinerated by the alien rebels because the physicians had been working for the Syndicate, but both he and Scully were indefinitely suspended by the FBI when Agent Spender, who was unwittingly working for the Syndicate, found that they had been using his office, where the X-Files were stored, to aid in their inquiries. (TXF: "Two Fathers")
After Cassandra Spender and virtually all members of the Syndicate were killed by the alien rebels, Agent Spender, who had realized he had mistakenly been supporting the Syndicate, strongly recommended to Assistant Director Kersh that Mulder and Scully be reassigned to the X-Files and AD Kersh began to realize that Mulder could be a valuable source of information, even if occasionally cryptic. (TXF: "One Son")
| Fox Mulder's history on the X-Files | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st stint on the X-Files | 1st closure of the X-Files | 2nd stint on the X-Files | 2nd closure of the X-Files | 3rd stint on the X-Files | Abduction |