“End Game” continues the extraordinary mythological arc of “Colony.” This new iteration in the extra-terrestrial grand narrative of the series renews the aesthetic focus on networked culture that was part of its mission statement from the earliest episodes. Now, the colonising aliens are the ultimate network, clones spreading out across every American city, omniscient yet invisible except from the perspective of the network itself. Moreover these clones are hybridising with humans, naturalising the network until it becomes indistinguishable from the human body. In one especially memorable plot point, the alien clones are working in abortion clinics to get access to foetal tissue, thereby framing the 90s fixation on (female) bodily autonomy as part of a wider anxiety about the cybernetic thresholds of the body politic. When Scully does make contact with Mulder again, it’s in a random phone booth, an anonymised node in the network, a distant harbinger of the dial tone that sets The Matrix in motion.
This all contours Mulder’s relationship with sister Samantha in an interesting way. At first, Samantha is adept at “spotting” alien clones, suggesting that she can “feel” or intuit the network even more acutely than Scully (although, interestingly, inner space is framed as a feminine persuasion in both cases, whether it involves digital culture or autopsy procedure). However, in a further twist, it turns out that “Samantha” herself is another clone, rendering the real Samantha, the origin of her clone selves, elusive. Just when Mulder seems to have rediscovered his sister, she recedes further from view. Along the way, it starts to feel as if Mulder himself is distantly related to the aliens.
The ending of this episode is quite deft too. On the one hand, it’s an epic as the conclusion to a double episode mythology-building exercise needs to be. We return to where Mulder emerged from the ice at the start of “Colony” and witness a strange nexus between submarine and extra-terrestrial craft. Yet “End Game” also does a good job of cordoning off this burgeoning grand narrative for the moment with a pair of evocative voiceovers from the two agents that harken back to the opening of the second season. Scully reflects that she will continue to maintain her faith in science whenever she can, while Mulder admits that he didn’t find exactly what he was looking for, both in terms of his sister and enduring evidence for extra-terrestrial life, but he did come across something he thought he’d lost – the courage to keep searching.