Mulder Moment

"Dear Diary, today my heart leapt when Agent Scully suggested Spontaneous Human Combustion."

—Fox Mulder, The X-Files, "Trevor"

The show's usual skeptic or The Watson, who normally challenges all assumptions and disbelieves even in the face of overwhelming evidence of aliens on the front porch, has an intellectual pursuit that he or she takes on faith, possibly when a situation forces them into Giving Up on Logic.

Examples of Mulder Moment include:

Live Action TV

• Term comes from The X-Files, where on any issue regarding religion, Scully becomes the believer and Mulder becomes the skeptic. Also, in an early episode, Scully is working alone and has become convinced she has found evidence of a vampire, but Mulder (whom she consults by phone) tries very hard to present more mundane explanations for her discoveries. This also happens in the episode "Chinga", when Scully realizes there's something just a bit weird about the doll and Mulder (again participating by phone) keeps coming up with the more mundane explanations that would normally be her department.
  • Another episode features Mulder doubting the claims that a death row inmate, who is facing the gas chamber in a week, can talk to the dead and they are giving him the locations of two kidnapping victims (on the grounds that this is within the inmate's character to pull some stunt). Scully, while not openly saying such, starts to believe the man as she inteprets more and more of his predictions after they happen, as well as what appear to be messages from her father.
  • An arguable justification for Mulder's strange behavior in the non-faith related episodes could be that, being Genre Savvy, he recognizes that Scully is calling him not to have him confirm her initial concerns, but to act as a sounding board for her apparently crazy ideas. He might not be trying to convince her of the more mundane explanation, but instead allow her to convince herself that the crazy explanation is the right one.
    • Or, being Genre Savvy, he recognizes that their dynamic is effective, so if Scully starts doing what he normally does he responds by doing what Scully normally does.
    • Effective? How many cases did they solve?
    • Techically? None. But how many extrememly plausible theories did they have to explain their cases? That's a pretty fair batting average.
    • Actually in S01E21 Scully states they have a 75 percent case solution rate.
  • In X-Files: I want to believe interestingly, Scully doesn't believe that a pedophile priest recieves psychic visions from the god but Mulder believes. Normally it's the other way around when it comes to religion.
• In the CSI Furries episode "Fur And Loathing", the normally sexually-open Catherine is weirded out by the Furries while Grissom is intrigued.
  • It's only remarkable for Catherine, as Grissom is intrigued by just about anything that does not directly kill people...and even then...
• Season two of Lost had John Locke, self-described "man of faith", becoming skeptic of the "Magical Computer that saves the world". And all throughout the show many skeptics such as Jack ("the man of science") are lead to believe the weird things the island is making them go through.