Full
Name: Fox William Mulder
Job: Special Agent
Date of Birth: October
13, 1961
Eye colour: Hazel
Hair colour: Brown
Height: 6′
Weight: 170 lbs
Martial Status: Single …
… … married (? – he was wearing a wedding ring – kind of – in “Unusual
Suspects”)
Parents: Father:
William Bill Mulder, Mother: Teena Mulder
Siblings: Samantha
T. Mulder (Abducted November 27, 1973)
Address: Apt. 42,
2630 Hegal Place Alexandria, VA 23242
Phone number: (private)
202-555-0199; (cell) 202-555-0160
Badge Number: JTT047101111
Password: TrustNo1
Emergency: Agent
Dana Scully, FBI office, Washington
Special: red-green
color blind (Wetwired)
Personal file number:
118-366-047
History:
Recruited into the Bureau
after studying psychology at Oxford, Special Agent Fox Mulder showed an
inclination toward the offbeat from the beginning of his career. His early
monograph on serial killers and the occult led to the capture of a notorious
murderer. He was on a fast track in the FBI when he took a detour into
the paranormal. Convinced through hypnotic regression that his sister Samantha
was abducted by some unknown power when they were children, he became obsessed
with discovering the truths hidden in the X-files, a repository for cases
of the extraordinary, the unexplained and the supernatural.
Mulderís choosing to work
on the X-files may not have been entirely his own doing. The Cigarette-Smoking
Man, as a front for the Syndicate, alludes to placing the agent where he
can be controlled. They have never killed Mulder because he is so useful
in disseminating the lies they need spread.
Mulderís workaholic lifestyle robbed him of his parents, who were eliminated by the very covert elements he sought to uncover. He finally finds the secret about his sister, learning that after she was kidnapped and subjected to testing, a spiritual intervention came to her rescue and transported her soul to heaven.
With that preoccupation removed, Mulder himself became the X-file when he was abducted by a spaceship. His body returned dead, but with Scullyís help, Mulder was revived to perfect health. Yet his search for the truth led him to make the utmost in sacrifices: his removal from the FBI and his separation from Scully and their child.
More …
Childhood Address: Born and brought up in Chilmark, on Martha’s Vineyard (his file in Dreamland II puts his place of birth as Chilmark, which must have been a home birth, given the lack of medical facilities in that tiny place. Anyway…) Address at time of Samantha’s abduction given in “Conduit” as 2790 Vine Street, Chilmark Address given on Samantha’s smallpox vaccination certificate (“Paper Clip”) is 62 Greer Street, Martha’s Vineyard. (Needless to say, neither of these addresses exist)
Answering Machine message: Many and various, once even changing from one call to the next, despite the fact that he hadn’t gone home in the interim (“Colony”) Usually fairly laconic. “This is Fox Mulder. Please leave a message,” and such like.
Pseudonyms: Wrote an article in “Omni” about the Gulf Breeze sighting, under the name M. F. Luder. When separated from Scully, used tocontact her under the name “George Hale.” Jose Chung refers to him as “Reynard Muldrake,” Reynard meaning Fox. In “3” he uses the name “Marty Mulder” when contacting the blood banks, and the name “Marty” is also used on the message from the phone sex line in “Small Potatoes.” In “Pine Bluff Variant” he uses the name Mr. Kaplan when staying in a motel undercover.
Life before the X-Files
Childhood: His first words were “JFK” when aged 11 months. (“Musings…”)
In “Home” he tells Scully about his memories of playing “all-day pick-up games” of baseball with his sister, as well as taking their bikes to the beach, and eating baloney sandwiches. The family also had a swing, as Samantha fell off it and broke her collar bone. Young Fox climbed trees and once came face to face with a praying mantis and had a “praying mantis epipheny” in which he screamed (not a girly scream) at the thought that something so horrible could exist, and has hated insects ever since, except when they come complete with a glamourous entomologist. The family also made home movies of the children playing, and “Dreamlad II” shows young Fox dressed up as Mr Spock from Star Trek, though suffering somewhat from ears that keep falling off.
The family also had a summer house in Quonochataug, where the children would play on the grass while Bill Mulder and CSM went water-skiing on the water below.
He played right-field in baseball (“Blood”), and was wearing a basketball jersey when his sister was abducted. At home, he played (and won) “Stratego” with his sister, and liked watching “The Magician.”
He had at least one friend. When his friend’s house burnt down, he helped guard it. (See the fear of fire section, below.
Childhood ambitions: In “Space,” Mulder is very excited about the thought of meeting Colonel Belt, the space shuttle’s project director and former astronaut. “You didn’t want to be an astronaut when you were a kid?” he asks, when Scully wonders what he’s doing. “I guess I missed that phase,” she says. When they enter Belt’s office, Mulder tells him he’s a “big fan” and tells him it’s an honor to meet him – that he stayed up all night when he was 14 and watched his space walk. Later, when they have watched the shuttle launch, she tells Scully, “I have to admit that fulfilled one of my boyhood fantasies.”
Pre-X-Files life and career
After much wrestling with these facts, I’ve come to the conclusion that Mulder’s pre-X-Files life is such a mess that it needs a complete section all to itself. Some of the facts we have are directly contradictory. I advise writers to pick and choose – use whatever fact supports the view you want to have of Mulder’s background, and conveniently forget the rest.
Oxford from 1983-1986
Quantico (the FBI Academy) in 1986
The Behavioral Science Unit with Patterson, 1986-1988/9?
Violent crimes with Reggie Purdue etc. 1988/9-1991/2
Whatever timeline you take, Mulder was an outstanding agent before the X-Files (“commendations out the ying yang” – Unusual Suspects. Commendations apparently include an “Award for Public Service” at some point.) “Kill Switch” reveals that he graduated from Quantico “with honors,” having previously obtained his degree at Oxford “summa cum laude,” which is also a good thing. Dreamland II goes further, saying he was top of his class in both Quantico and Oxford. In the Pilot episode Scully says she’s heard he’s “brilliant.” In “Tooms,” Skinner says he had been talked about even while at the Academy, and Reggie Purdue (“Young at Heart”) says he was always “three jumps ahead” of everyone else. “It was scary, Mulder. Everybody said so,” he says, telling Mulder everyone at the Bureau had really big plans for him. Even Patterson, who doesn’t like Mulder, says he’s a “cracked genius,” while Scully has heard he was the “fair-haired boy” when he started working at the ISU.
Regarding his private life before he discovered the X- Files, Unusual Suspects reveals that, in 1990, he was already living in the apartment we see him in today, he was wearing a wedding ring (see below for a discussion on this) and he apparently smoked. In 1991, when he started the X-Files, he had a girlfriend, Diana Fowley, who worked with him on some cases. See below for more on her.
Starting the X-Files
In May 1989 (Unusual Suspects) Mulder was a normal FBI agent, until he was sprayed with an experimental drug that caused hallucinations and paranoia. He started raving about aliens. At this point he had never thought about conspiracies and things, hence his incredulous “what?” as Byers begins to tell his tale.
The following month he underwent hypnotic regression to find out what happened to Samantha, suggesting there is some relationship between the two. Did the gas make Mulder think about aliens for the first time – manufacture that image? Is the whole alien thing in Mulder’s memory all based on this? Or did the gas cause hallucinations in general (more likely, I think, unless the gas is very clever) and Mulder’s happened to be in the form of aliens because that image was somewhere in his subconsious anyway, though whether by real memory or by some earlier implanation by hypnosis as suggested in Gethsemene.
Anyway, the X-Files themselves seem not to have been opened until the end of 1991, suggesting that Mulder has a good 2 years as an agent in Violent Crimes, working on his paranormal theories in his spare time, and, perhaps, getting more and more impatient with his work and nagging on and on to be freed up to investiagate what he really wanted to.
(“Kill Switch” says that Mulder started the X-Files in 1990, but this contradicts both “Musings…” (the opening of the X- Files is discussed as a new and recent problem at the end of 1991) and the Pilot episode itself when Scully is assigned in March 1992, with Mulder’s obtaining of the X-Files again described as “recent.”)
At the time he started the X-Files, in 1991, he had a girlfriend called Diana Fowley, who was an FBI agent with knowledge about, and belief in, parapsychology. They did a few cases together. She later went abroad after they split up.