#”Fox your parents chose to give up Samantha because they thought it would keep her safe and help save us all”“lol no the other guy abducted

[limnsaber]

To explain what I was talking about late late last night but ended up talking around: The X Files wonderfully embodies a spectrum of human emotion, but to me, does none so as well as the way it talks about wonder and love.

On the part of love it says: the truths we look for are in other people. The way we love other people is how we win. Not out of fear but out of love and the bonds we have with each other are the most important truth we can hope to know.

On the part of wonder the X Files says: to look into the unknown is so wonderfully human. To gaze at the stars and wonder at what we find there is human nature. To search for truth -- the truths of the universe, of the unknown, the truths between me and you, is wonderfully, essentially human. It's part of our nature to search for these things and Samantha is the heart of this. Aside from Samantha's disappearance being the inciting event of the show, she is the embodiment of this mystery. To wonder at the stars knowing she's up there, to search for the truth and find greater ones in turn -- Samantha is the key to this.

So to kill her off as an aside just to reach 'closure'; to make her nothing more than a victim rather than the person who invites and embodies for both Mulder and Scully the part that's so achingly unknown seemed like a horrible tragedy to me. Where did it go. Was the truth we found human cruelty??? Was that it the whole time????

In s4-s5 and Fight the Future, it seemed that we inched ever nearer to finding Samantha. It was teased that she was alive: that like the truths we hoped to find, she was still out there, waiting. There was a point at which the extraterrestrial mirrored the human. FTF and these middle seasons almost seemed to say: no, there is no fundamental difference between extraterrestrial and human cruelty. The extraterrestrial forces were in conflict just the same way human forces were. Samantha was sent away embodying the hopes of humanity, however horrible that decision was. Of course, we can't ignore that Samantha was a victim, and the later seasons of the X Files lean into this. Abduction is a violent act, and what Scully, Samantha, and the MUFON women went through was horrible. I really would've loved it if they explored this more, but they didn't, and still there's this contrariness to Samantha's abduction.

It's said in FTF that Bill Mulder held two hopes -- that Mulder would uncover the abuse of the Syndicate and reveal the truth, and that Samantha would be allowed the chance to survive and would be able to give that to the world. There were extraterrestrial rebels fighting against colonization and the Syndicate the same way Mulder and Scully do. This contrariness, this uncertainty, is part of the X Files too.

Samantha's abduction always implied that she would be returned. We were teased that she would be found. Over and over, we are told that she is alive, that she is still out there for Mulder to find. Whether she was a human test subject or off in the stars, the truth was living and breathing, waiting to be found.

The X Files says the truth is out there, that looking to the stars is part of the human experience, that our connections to each other are so fundamental to our worldview and that they enable us to endure anything. The X Files is wonder at the heart, the intersection of the unknown and known, and that the truth is each other. Samantha was Scully and Mulder's first step to that truth. Even with everything that they endured, the wonder and love that is the motivating force of everything that we see is inextinguishable. Samantha is the vessel for these beliefs.

Retconning Samantha Mulder from her place embodying the hopes and dreams of humanity, however horribly that came about, to a child that was abused until she died weakens the sentiments at the heart of The X Files.

yk i’m at the point that i literally don’t accept s7e11 “closure” as canon. it makes me ANGRY now because the more i look at all the past seasons and everything they’ve done with the samantha arc and how important it’s been to mulder’s character, it just defaces and denies all of it. it just- it’s not fair. after all mulder has been through to continue to believe that samantha was abducted just for it to be thrown out the window? for him to accept it finally in a way which was supposed to be meaningful and big but altogether uncharacteristic and hollow? it’s like they tried to abide by paper hearts ideologies but through a seemingly unnessary dark meandering of new paranormalities. it also creates so much more inconsistency along with what we started to see from s5 and beyond in the samantha plot, it doesn’t explain it. for instance, in the colony arc, the samantha-looking clones say “how could we know so much about her” and WHO if not samantha is this woman they were modeled after??? did the clones just grow old from the little samantha’s on that bee farm thing so they knew what she’d age like?? IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE!!! IT’S NOT ENOUGH!! CC YOU CANT GET AWAY THAT EASY!!