A gem tintype album of Elizabeth (Almy) Cobb Hall, with portraits of the Almy family and friends 1900-1905. Schlesinger Library, RIAS, Harvard University, via Wikimedia Commons
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Do we control our own destinies, or do outside forces limit our decision-making so much that we don’t have free will?
Historians address this issue, but instead of “destiny” and “free will,” they often use the word “agency.” The term “agency” (or “historical agency”) typically refers to a conscious decision to act and to deal with the consequences, intended or not, of one’s actions.1 But agency, as some historians have recently pointed out, assumes that nearly everyone, living or dead, has or had at least a fair amount of control over their lives—at least enough to resist even in hellish situations.2 But what if that assumption is wrong?
The X-Files writers found the subject of agency irresistible. Viewers can see this in episodes on free will/agency in the context of religion (especially Catholicism), different personalities (the “spooky” but irreligious Fox Mulder and the scientific but religious Dana Scully), and external pressures (the ruinous job of Fox’s father, Bill Mulder, a participant in the government-alien conspiracy, who may have been forced to allow the kidnapping of Fox’s sister to ensure his loyalty). In the 1996 season four episode, “The Field Where I Died,” however, The X-Files seemed prepared to deny the existence of agency altogether.3
In the episode, Mulder and Scully participate in a raid against a Branch-Davidian-like cult, Temple of the Seven Stars, led by the charismatic Vernon Ephesian (portrayed by actor Michael Massee). Ephesian says he was present when the apostle prophesied what is now recorded in Revelations.
Mulder feels a special connection to one of Ephesian’s six wives, the emotionally fragile Melissa (played by actor Kristen Cloke). With him and Scully at the Temple, Melissa suddenly speaks in a Southern accent. The field where they stand was once the site of a victory by the Union Army, where Melissa “remembers” finding her dying Confederate paramour, whom she identifies with Mulder: “This is the field where I watched you die.” Mulder insists he be hypnotized, and he recalls his past lives.
Mulder sees himself as a mother with her son during Kristallnacht. But the son is actually a past-life version of Mulder’s missing sister, Samantha. The father of Mulder/the woman is dead: “He is Scully.” Her husband (Melissa) is in a concentration camp. The Gestapo officer overseeing it all? The Cigarette Smoking Man, of course. 1930s Mulder continues, “Evil returns as evil.” By contrast, “love [is] eternal.” Mulder then sees the field where he, Sullivan Biddle, died, cradled in the arms of his love, Sarah Kavanaugh (Melissa). Sarah is sad because she is unaware that “we will live again.”4
Scully, doubting that these recovered memories represent facts from Mulder’s past lives, nevertheless discovers nineteenth-century records and photographs of Sullivan and Sarah. Melissa, hearing a recording of herself speaking as Sarah, raises to Mulder a reasonable objection to his view of past lives. It could lead people to believe that all of their decisions have already been made. She wishes she were meeting old loves, even dropping Mulder’s trademark “I want to believe.” But in the end, she returns home with Ephesian, who gathers his followers and forces them to drink poison. Even after the massacre, though, Mulder stands in the field, speaking floridly about past lives.5
This view of agency—the Smoking Man cannot help but do evil because his ancestor was a Nazi, and Mulder and Scully might be good only because they were in past lives—would have made The X-Files’ nearly seven remaining seasons far less compelling. Who wants to watch a show whose characters never make real moral choices? After “The Field…,” though, a more conventional approach reigned. Just two episodes later, the show explored Smoking Man’s eventful, immoral life by tracing his younger self’s motivations and actions.6
In fact, one of The X-Files’ central themes is that agency may have little power over fate. Throughout the series, Mulder and Scully struggle to uncover a decades-long government conspiracy to hide a coming alien invasion. A group of men (including Bill Mulder) with ties to the government, called “the Syndicate,” has been working, and continues to try, to negotiate with the aliens for a better outcome for humanity, especially themselves. Looming in the background is that even if Mulder and Scully discover the whole truth and tell the world, the invasion is likely inevitable, so what is the point of their work? In the early seasons of the show, the credits end with the all-caps tagline, “I want to believe.” Later, it becomes, “fight the future.” But in The X-Files universe, can the future really be fought?
So The X-Files raises the question of whether history’s traditional view of agency—that we have the power to make the right choice—is really the correct one. Perhaps we, as Americans living at the end of 2023, should at least consider another option: the idea that every individual makes personal choices, largely unaffected by unjust societal structures, and could have the effect of hiding these structures from full view and thus perpetuating them. Some people may have less agency than others, regardless of what we want to believe.
- See, e.g., Peter Seixas, “Historical Agency as a Problem for Researchers in History Education,” Antíteses 5, no. 10 (Mar. 2013): 539. See also Anna Yu. Krylova, “Agency and History,” American Historical Review 128, no. 2 (Jun. 2023): 883-937. Krylova cites “William H. Sewell’s foundational article” on agency, “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation” [1992], in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn, ed. Gabrielle M. Spiegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), esp. 158–59.
- Krylova, “Agency and History,” 885–86.
- The X-Files, season 4, episode 5, “The Field Where I Died,” written by Glenn Morgan and James Wong, directed by Rob Bowman, aired Nov. 3, 1996, on FOX (Century City, CA: Ten Thirteen Productions).
- The X-Files, “The Field Where I Died.”
- The X-Files, “The Field Where I Died.”
- The X-Files, season 4, episode 7, “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man,” written by Glenn Morgan and James Wong, directed by James Wong, aired Nov. 17, 1996, on FOX (Century City, CA: Ten Thirteen Productions).
