Shipping is a major thing, with swaths of Tumblr and Twitter dominated by fandoms actively engaged in either celebrating canonical fictional pairings, scouring canon for passages that prove their OTPs are real, or creating fanfic that goes where canon dares not tread. While Star Trek’s Kirk and Spock are widely recognized as the OG ship, it’s actually believed that the term “shipping” was coined for another sci-fi pair: The X-Files’ Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson).

During the show’s original run on Fox back in the ’90s, a lot of X-Philes became heavily invested in what they nicknamed MSR (“Mulder/Scully Romance”). I mean, duh, have you seen the chemistry between Scully and Mulder? All his dopey charisma and her eye rolling intensity? They’re a mismatch made in fanfic heaven, and the show became super aware of the MSR sub-fandom on its journey from cult favorite to mainstream hit. Around that time (1998-2000) is when something… curious… happened on X-Files–and it’s something that the the all-new Season 11 may have just altered in a major way!

But let’s not jump ahead. Let’s take our time and first talk about the fan theory itself, the theory known as The Season Of Secret Sex.

The season in question is Season 7, specifically the span of episodes ranging from “Millennium” (7×4, 11/28/99) and “all things” (7×17, 4/9/00) wherein Mulder and Scully start taking a subtly hands-on approach to solving their supernatural cases. After the couple’s near-kiss in the 1998 film The X-Files: Fight the Future, a kiss interrupted by a very sinister bee sting, something started to happen in-between lines of dialogue in Season 7. Suddenly in the episode titled “Rush” (7×5), Mulder and Scully seemed a lot more… familiar. There’s one moment where Scully does a casual head tilt and gives Mulder a flirty look, and some even interpret the moment as Scully playing with Mulder’s tie.

I don’t really see the tie thing, but I do see a new level of laid back ease in Scully’s interaction with Mulder, the guy that she used to reserve all of her exasperation for. There is a sudden shift in the two’s dynamic, something that it’s rumored the actors added into the show, possibly with an assist from series directors Kim Manners and Rob Bowman. Seriously, there’s a deep dive on all this on the Tumblr campaignofmisinformation, specifically this tag. They spotted a pregnancy and family planning book that was sneakily placed on the set! But yeah, it is widely assumed by those invested in MSR that Scully and Mulder did the deed in-between “Millennium” and “Rush.”

Anyway, this sudden flirting continues into “The Goldberg Variation” (7×6), where Mulder and Scully don’t interact without a cheeky smile on their faces. The flirting gets playfully physical in “The Amazing Maleeni” (7×8) when Mulder performs a little street magic for his partner.

And then… there’s “all things”(7×17). Oh lordy, here it is!

The episode was written and directed by Gillian Anderson and begins with a shot of Scully getting dressed in Mulder’s bathroom, which is the universal sign for “we just had sex but primetime TV can be prudish so here’s just a hint.” The episode then flashes back to show the events leading up to that fateful night, but the episode ends with Scully asleep on Mulder’s couch instead of sexy times. Or does it? This right here proves that by this point, X-Files knew exactly what it was doing: the episode ends with Mulder putting a blanket on Scully and presumably going to bed. So, no sex was had. But then, like, what’s up with the way Mulder tenderly brushes the hair from Scully’s face? And also that look of intimate longing he gives her?

That is really hot and heavy, made even hotter and heavier by the way the camera slowly pans away from the two of them while the sultry, pounding beats of Moby’s “The Sky Is Broken” plays. You know what’s another code for “these characters are doing it”? The slow pan away while sultry music plays! This is, of course, complicated by the fact that Scully is asleep at this moment, but it doesn’t rule out her waking up in a bit for sexy times.

The Season of Secret Sex was seemingly made canon in the Season 7 finale “Requiem” (7×22) when it was revealed that Scully is pregnant. That came as a shock since it had previously been established that Scully was infertile, but love (or rather MSR) finds a way! The show even tried to explain her pregnancy with a flashback episode showing Scully asking Mulder to help her get pregnant via in vitro fertilization, but that attempt failed. So, again, fans were left to assume that William was conceived during “all things.” Scully and Mulder have since treated William as their son, referring to him as such on numerous fraught occasions (things are always fraught with William).

The new season of The X-Files, however, wants you to question everything you thought you knew about William’s parentage. The Season 11 premiere, “My Struggle III,” contains one reveal that potentially undoes the one firm bit of canon that cemented the Season of Secret Sex as an X-Fact. If the mysterious and generally nefarious Cigarette Smoking Man is to be believed, Scully’s son William was not, in fact, conceived during an offscreen lovemaking session with Mulder. Instead, he’s claims to have impregnated her with “alien science”!

But when, how, why?! Those last two, who knows, but there is a concrete answer to the when, and it’s an episode from (dramatic music sting) The Season of Secret Sex. The episode is “En Ami” (7×15), an episode wherein Scully goes on a sinister road trip with Cigarette Smoking Man. “My Struggle III” even includes scenes from that episode, an episode that took place just a little bit before the previously presumed conception episode “all things.”

Whether or not CSM is telling the truth, who knows? And even if so, The X-Files has no problem with retconning retcons, so again, who knows? By making Mulder not the father, it does undo the firm bit of canon that confirmed the Season of Secret Sex. But, kind of like the end of “all things,” you can view this another way. Even if Mulder isn’t the father, Mulder and Scully have spent the last 17 years acting like they are William’s parents, and we know the in vitro attempt failed. Therefore, just the fact that Mulder and Scully believe they had a kid together (they know where babies come from!) is enough to confirm that they have indeed had sex, and were definitely doing it during The Season of Secret Sex.

The truth is out there, and the truth still stands: Scully and Mulder totally did it.

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