Truth Is Out There in Elsinore: Mulder and Scully as Hamlet and Horatio, The

Conversely, the limitations of Scully's and Horatio's rationality also validate Mulder and Hamlet. Frequently, the imaginative otherworldly beliefs of Mulder and Hamlet enable them to deal with, explain, or at least better understand the unknown that frightens or stymies Scully and Horatio for being beyond their frame of reference. Horatio's logic does not permit him to accept, initially, the existence of a ghost, and so when he meets one he is ineffectual at communicating with it and even understanding the reason for its appearance. Plumbing contemporary seventeenth-century science on supernatural manifestations, he cites almost every expected reason for ghostly appearances (Hamlet 1.1.45-178; Thomas 590, 595-602); but he cannot use creativity or imagination to deduce the correct one. He tries to dissuade Hamlet from hearing that ghost's revelation because it is an unknown quantity, while his fears over the possibility that it is Satanic outweigh his desire or responsibility to find the "truth" "out there." Later, when he deduces from Hamlet's doubts and Claudius's recent history of murderous plans that the duel proposed by Claudius is one more plot, Horatio urges Hamlet not to trust himself to higher powers and to decline the duel (5.2.202-14). In all cases, Horatio's choices are reasonable, safe, and cautious; but they also will allow the continued hidden festering of the corruption and disorder that Hamlet's passion seeks to unveil and redress.

"Amor Fati" brings to the fore Scully's Horatio-like limitations that require the balance of Mulder's passionate drive to find a truth outside the given order. In this episode, Scully has been using all her scientific wiles to find a cure for Mulder, but she admits to a Native American shaman "I can't understand the [alien] science" that has infected him. Her rational powers, her use of the rational codification of the universe through drawing on the laws of physics and biology in medicine, fail her in the face of greater (alien/extra-worldly) intellect. The answer the shaman gives her curiously echoes Hamlet's advice to his comrade-"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (1.5. 174-75): "There are more worlds than the one you hold in your hand." He tells her to look within herself and to meditate or pray with him. Like Mulder, she cannot rely on others' truths, but must rely on her own spiritual strength-a point emphasized by the later revelation that the shaman must have made a "scientifically" impossible spirit visit to her since he was in a coma across the continent at the time. When Scully wakes from her experience, the key card to Mulder's place of imprisonment is slipped under her door. Still, if here a "Providence . . . shapes" Scully's "ends" to find Mulder, it has benefited from her personal involvement. The key card was left by Diana Fowley as a result of the fact that Scully had earlier worked on her guilt and one-time loyalty to Mulder. That Fowley's change of heart apparently occurred while Scully was bonding with a spirit shaman suggests that the effect of her personal involvement may have been strengthened by opening herself to the "undiscovered" reality that frightens her.