Guest Author - Jilly Florio

FBI Agent Fox Mulder was a dedicated fish keeper during his run on the X-Files. His ten gallon goldfish tank was always spotlessly clean, and the fish tank even featured prominantly in a few episodes as a plot point.

Mulder usually had two or three goldfish in his ten gallon, which I consider appropriate enough - his tank looked empty compared to how most TV shows depict over-stocked tanks. Since goldfish can get big, and are huge ammonia producers, showing only 2-3 fish was a relatively responsible way to depict a healthy goldfish tank.

During Mulder's frequent disappearances, Scully cared for his fish. In 8th-season premier Within/Without, fellow agent John Doggett "caught" Scully sleeping in Mulder's apartment. She excused herself by saying she had to feed his fish. While she fumbled around looking for the fish food, Doggett produced it from a drawer - obviously he had been caring for the fish himself. This was not the first time she used "feeding the fish" as an excuse to let herself into Mulder's apartment.

Mulder had a well-honed, wry sense of humor, which included making fun of himself. In his fish tank, he kept a "spaceship" bubbler toy, a flying saucer that rose and fell. In the 8th-season finale Requiem, we see Mulder and Scully start to get physically close, then cut to his fish tank and the flying saucer.

In the final season of the X-Files we understand that Mulder himself has been abducted. In episodes that show Scully in her home, we see she has moved Mulder's fish tank to her living room. Scary Monsters is one such episode. This is a nice example of understated plot continuity.

Other episodes show different fish tanks. The highly-regarded "loch ness monster" episode, Quagmire, shows a biologist with a large tank of several healthy Oscars in his lab. This scientist is also breeding frogs to release to a local lake that is experiencing a significant drop in wild frog populations. And while the aquatic menace that Mulder and Scully are searching for is a Plesiosaur, Mulder mentions that Bullsharks, a fish long thought to be extinct, was recently rediscovered in modern times.

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X-Files Articles on the SF/Fantasy Movie Site at BellaOnline