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Direct Influence on Cases[]
In 1993, twenty-one years after Samantha had disappeared, Section Chief Scott Blevins questioned Scully about whether Samantha's disappearance might be involved in Mulder's reasoning for recently petitioning the FBI to permit himself and Scully to investigate the disappearance of Ruby Morris, a recent incident that had been reported in the media as an abduction. Blevins presented Scully with the X-file that Mulder had opened about his sister's disappearance. When the Section Chief then asked Scully if Mulder had shared with her any details about the incident, Scully recalled that Mulder had claimed to have been in the room when it had occurred. She also revealed to Blevins that Mulder had told her about his memories of the bright light outside the living rooms' window as well as some mysterious presence in that stood in the doorway.
After Scully became convinced that their role in the search for Ruby Morris had come to an end while working on the case with Mulder, he refused to abandon the investigation, as he walked down a street, but Scully, following close behind him, urged him to stop running after his sister, advising him that his determination concerning their current investigation would not bring his sister back. Although he momentarily stopped in his steps, Mulder continued working on the case with Scully, not only ignoring her advice but also convincing her to remain with the investigation, and later told her about his childhood ritual of closing his eyes before entering his room. Shortly thereafter, Ruby Morris was returned.
Following the agents' departure from the case, Scully reviewed the audio recordings of Mulder's regression hypnosis therapy as well as the X-file he had opened. He, meanwhile, sat on a pew in St. Mary's Cathedral, gazing at the photograph of himself with his long-lost sister, together at a swimming pool, and began to cry. — (Conduit)
While the agents were investigating the possibility that healer Samuel Hartley had murdered several people who had come to him to be healed in 1994, Samuel was apparently able to recognize, when the agents questioned him in the aftermath of a bar brawl he had started, that Mulder had an old pain regarding a brother or sister, a pain that had never been healed. Despite Scully doubting Samuel's demonstration of his supposed powers, he continued to announce his findings that Mulder's sibling had been a sister whom he had lost, when he was quite young, because someone had taken her away. Additionally, Samuel claimed he could see strangers and a bright light. He suggested that Mulder should have come to him earlier, claiming there was a chance he could have healed the FBI agent's pain. Mulder was extremely interested in these claims but, as Sheriff Maurice Daniels prepared to take the healer into custody, Samuel told Mulder that he could no longer help the FBI agent because his gift was gone.
After Samuel advised Mulder to be open to signs from God as the healer was being led away and, on the next day, Samuel was tried in a courthouse that was suddenly swarmed by grasshoppers, Scully asked Mulder whether Samuel's claims about his sister were connected to the reason he now believed that the swarm had somehow been caused by the healer. Mulder did not directly answer Scully's question but instead tried to persuade her of his theory that Samuel was a genuine psychic healer.
A vision of Samantha that appeared to her brother in 1994.
When the agents were later interviewing Reverend Calvin Hartley (Samuel's father) at his residence, Mulder thought he saw his sister as a little girl, standing outside Reverend Hartley's abode, as the reverend invited him and Scully to attend that night's Miracle Ministry (the regular ceremony at which Samuel supposedly healed the event's participants). Ignoring the invite and excusing himself from the meeting, Mulder raced outside but found that neither his sister nor any other girls were there. He noticed Samuel gazing out of a window in his father's house and told Scully of his vision but kept his description of the little girl to a minimum.
The agents did indeed attend that night's Miracle Ministry and, as Samuel was being introduced to the audience of participants, Mulder again believed he saw his sister. He left his seat in the audience and tried to search for the girl in the crowd but was once more unable to locate her. When Scully later questioned him about who he had been pursuing, he told her that he had thought he saw someone he knew. Without Mulder revealing any more details to her, Scully made a comment that implied she believed he was being fooled by Samuel. She reminded Mulder that Samuel had mentioned his sister in the bar and asked him if it was his sister that he kept thinking he was seeing. Mulder responded by indirectly confirming that he believed he had seen his sister on two occasions. After Scully suggested that a possible reason for his visions was that he simply wanted to see his sister, Mulder defensively replied that he was not delusional but Scully advised him not to discount the power of suggestion as a cause for his visions.
A similar vision of Samantha that appeared to her brother while he was at Miracle Ministry.
Later, when Mulder alone unsuccessfully tried to persuade Samuel of his own innocence after the healer was jailed, Mulder alluded to the healer's earlier claim of being able to see his pain and asked Samuel what he now saw when he looked at the FBI agent. Even though the healer now metaphorically claimed he was blind and saw nothing, Mulder insisted that he did not believe this statement. He revealed that he had seen his sister and asked if his belief that the healer had made her appear to him was accurate. Samuel was not forthcoming in his reply, sharply stating that he was very tired, but Mulder continued to question the healer and loudly asked if his sister was alive, whether he was supposed to believe she was or if his visions were a trick. Samuel replied with a question himself, asking whether Mulder was referring to a trick of the devil. The healer's mysteriousness exasperated Mulder and he soon left the healer's cell.
Following Samuel's death, later that night, and the discovery that Leonard Vance was the true murderer, Mulder packed away his belongings from his motel room, including a framed photograph of Samantha in her youth. The third and final vision of his sister appeared to him moments after he concluded that reported visions of Samuel, following the healer's death, were due to people looking so hard for miracles that they possibly made themselves see what they wanted to see. On this occasion, Mulder seemingly saw a reflection of his sister in the door window of his and Scully's car. He immediately whirled to look behind him but again found that his sister was not there and he left, moments later, in the car with Scully. — (Miracle Man)
After the X-Files Closed[]
Following the closure of the X-Files in 1994 and after Mulder was assigned a desk in the Bullpen Hallway of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, he displayed, in a picture frame on his desk, the photograph of his sister on a climbing frame. The picture frame and the image it contained were turned down on the desk by Agent Scully, when Mulder was not present, as a secret means of communicating to him that she wanted to speak privately with him. When they consequently then met covertly, Scully cited his sister's abduction as one of the few beliefs he had held onto since the closure of the X-Files but he revealed he had begun to wonder if even that had ever happened. Shortly thereafter, he awoke abruptly from a nightmare in which he apparently recalled all that he had actually witnessed of his sister's abduction.
While Mulder subsequently traveled to the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Scully searched for him, unsuccessfully trying the name "Samantha" as a possible password for Mulder's home computer. He, having been sent to Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory to determine whether extraterrestrial contact had been made, recorded himself admitting to Scully, amongst other details, that his life had so far been about the need to see "her" again, indirectly referring to his sister. He believed that extraterrestrials visited the area, moments later, and, when Scully later came for him, he claimed to her that the aliens had been the same ones who had taken "her", again implying a reference to his sister. — (Little Green Men)
Fox Mulder sitting beside a cabinet bearing photographs of himself and Samantha in their youth.
By the time Mulder first encountered Agent Alex Krycek later that year, the set of photographs of himself with his sister, consisting of three black-and-white pictures and one color image, had been affixed to a cabinet next to his desk. — (Sleepless)
Shortly after being taken hostage by self-proclaimed multiple abductee Duane Barry, Mulder admitted to his captor that his own sister had gone through the same ordeal as Barry had been through. Barry, however, was aware that Mulder was an FBI agent and was skeptical of him. Once Mulder gained his captor's trust, Barry asked how old Mulder's sister had been when she had been taken. Mulder answered the question truthfully and Barry claimed that, during his abduction experiences, he had seen young girls being tested on by their abductors, who had hurt them even though Barry had told the girls not to cry. — (Duane Barry)