The X-Files Humanized Its Best Character In The Silliest Way

This X-Files revelation about Mulder occurred in the season 1 episode “Space.” This was the story where Mulder and Scully must help NASA figure out who is sabotaging shuttle launches.

It eventually becomes clear that all of this may be connected to an astronaut who had a bizarre encounter during a spacewalk years ago, one that continues to haunt him in the present day.

The astronaut at the heart of this X-Files episode is Marcus Aurelius Belt, and we quickly find out that Mulder is a huge fan of this guy. He excitedly tells Scully about the mission where Belt nearly died, and when Scully expresses surprise that her partner remembers that mission, Mulder asks her if she never wanted to be an astronaut when she was a kid.

Scully dryly replies that she must have “missed that phase,” and when they meet Belt, Mulder wants to shake his hand, nervously admitting that he’s a “big fan” and that the astronaut was “a big hero to me when I was a kid.”

Even if you’ve only watched a few X-Files episodes, you know how out of character it is for Mulder to geek out over somebody like this.

However, the reason for the agent’s outsized enthusiasm is that series creator Chris Carter wanted to show that there were at least a few interesting cracks in Mulder’s otherwise cool exterior. Specifically, he wanted to provide at least one moment in “Space” that helped fans discover what Mulder’s “‘aw shucks’ quality is.”

It’s an open secret that much of Mulder’s personality was inspired by Chris Carter, and because of that, you might assume that he was also a huge astronaut fanboy when he was growing up. Interestingly, though, that’s not the case: the X-Files creator later clarified that he wasn’t all that invested in astronauts growing up and simply took for granted that humanity would make it to the moon.

However, Carter seemed to realize that he was the exception rather than the rule, and when the time came to give Mulder a revealing background detail, the showrunner decided the future agent would have once dreamed of being an astronaut.

Later, Carter would agree with many X-Files fans that “Space” was the worst episode of the first season, but had several bright spots in it, including this background detail about Mulder.

It’s a detail that takes on a very bittersweet quality when you consider that young Mulder’s obsession would soon shift from astronauts to aliens after the abduction of his sister. Fortunately, his later adventures with Scully helped him find closure regarding his stolen sibling, but Mulder’s own abduction would eventually give him something in common with his astronaut hero: direct knowledge of the terror waiting for all of us in the stars.