Spoilers

“Sein Und Zeit”

“Closure”

The X-Files investigates the JonBenét Ramsey case.

Ok, not exactly, but they may as well have.

Only, they tied it into Mulder’s missing sister and his own family tragedy.

I was surprised when this turned out to be a two part episode as some horrible images were shown, including a mass graveyard of children. This was a shocking moment that I did not expect in this series.

You see, at first, I felt very dismissive of this episode, in particular “Sein Und Zeit” because it felt as if the fictional case of this episode was such a take off of the Ramsey case that it seemed exploitive. Then when they tried to connect it to Mulder’s sister, it really took another step away from what I wanted.

Then, Mulder’s mother, who had tried to contact him, committed suicide.

And the emotional power of the episode really took over.

David Duchovny brought some of the best work I have seen from him in a long time. The scene where Scully tells Mulder that his mother had a terrible disease and that she had committed suicide and not killed by some mysterious conspiracy was extremely powerful.

This was all building to answering the question about what happened to Samantha Mulder. As I am watching it, I did not believe that the show would give us a final truth. I saw on Wikipedia that Chris Carter believed that season 7 might have been the final season of the X-Files so I thought that maybe that elusive mystery would finally be revealed. The title “Closure” leads to the idea as well.

Cigarette Smoking Man showed up to see Scully, and I kept yelling at her to shoot him in the head. She didn’t.

As I continued to watch the episode, I started believing that the show might actually give an answer to the mystery. I did not grasp the idea of what in actuality happened. Samantha was apparently taken by “walk-ins” which was a concept told to Mulder by a psychic named Harold Pillar (Anthony Heald) who was also in search of his own missing son. A walk-in was a being made of starlight that would take children who suffered horrible fates.

That whole concept was strange, but the scene where the spirit of Samantha Mulder came to Fox Mulder and hugged him was quite beautiful and provided the character with some serious closure. He could accept that Samantha was gone and, as he said at the end of the episode, he said, “I’m fine. I’m free.”

I am still not sure how his mother played into this. What was her message? Did she know this was Samantha’s fate or what was going on. We saw Mulder’s mother’s spirit come to him and whisper something. I am just not sure that fit with what the show was telling us.

We also got the image of the little girl whose disappearance started this whole thing indicating that she too had become starlight and was, in fact, dead.

I am not sure I love the resolution of this seminal mystery, but I am happy that it is done. I am not sure that all of the different times when we learned bits about Samantha fit into this theory and it works best when you forget about some of those. The whole Samantha mystery was used multiple times over the seasons for episodes and I wonder how much they knew about what actually happened to Samantha.

No matter what, even if the resolution was not totally satisfactory, I am glad that it was addressed and that Mulder was given closure. It is good that this Samantha story ended here.