Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo.
OR
Elephants and tigers and gorillas, oh my!
I think this is the first time someone has actually laughed in Mulder's face when he brought up aliens. Even Scully just usually rolls her eyes. But Occam's Razor says he may actually be right here. There are no other plausible explanations, so why not a literal deus ex machina? Especially on The X-Files, where aliens may be the most likely answer.
We have all the telltale signs - bright lights, animals disappearing without a trace only to turn up later miles away, and aborted pregnancies. And actually, as I read over my post about 'Colony' and 'End Game', and reread some other recaps of those episodes, it was just one episode ago that they talked about the idea that the aliens couldn't trust the humans to take care of themselves and the planet. ONE EPISODE.
And now here's more potential evidence of it, but even if it's not evidence, it's a thematically similar idea. Except Sophie the gorilla seems to think the aliens won't be mankind's saviour, but that humans will, or at least should.
I think they could have done a better job of portraying the animal rights activists a little more sympathetically, but I do realise they needed a potential antagonist in the episode, or at least a red herring. I mean, I get that there are self-righteous activists out there who refuse to see anything other than their exact cause, even if pursuing it will actually cause more harm, but the WAO were depicted as an extreme stereotype.
I do like that they apparently used real live animals in the episode - well, the elephant and the tiger, anyway. Apparently Sophie was a person in a gorilla suit. A person who, according to imdb, has appeared in a number of other things also in a gorilla suit. Talk about typecasting!
The unfortunate part of this episode (well, OK, there were a few unfortunate parts) is that the message got kind of muddled, and despite seeing strong implications of aliens taking the animals, this episode seems otherwise unconnected to the rest of the alien storyline.
I'm going to choose to believe that there was an pro-conservation message buried somewhere in that muddle, though. The show isn't afraid to bring up sensitive topics (holy shit I can't imagine how much mail FOX must have got about 'Colony' regarding the abortion clinics) and while 'Colony' didn't exactly have an overt political message (not that that would stop people from writing angry letters), at least 'Fearful Symmetry' tried to.
The real message, or at least conclusion that can be drawn, is that animal conservation is actually complicated now - sure, it's complicated primarily by humans and their governments, but it's still not as simple as setting zoo animals free. I was reminded of the defence of zoos in Life of Pi (the book, as I haven't yet seen the movie) and the idea that zoo life is inherently different from wild life, and that both come with risks, neither is perfect, but neither is necessarily wrong, either. We get some of that in 'Fearful Symmetry', with Willa and Kyle's conversation about what would happen to Sophie in the wild, and I'm inclined to agree with Willa. Not necessarily that Sophie would be in danger from poachers, but that an animal that has spent so much time in captivity would be unable to adapt to life in the wild.
But I also think that, even with that message, and even with the highly questionable practices of Ambrose, Meecham, and their antagonists at the WAO, because the primary cause of the problems has been aliens (probably), a lot of the rest of the message - that even well-intentioned people can still screw things up horribly, even to the point of running counter to their purported goals - is really pretty badly buried.
Everything is pretty well wrapped up at the end, so it's just one more piece in the giant X-Files puzzle regarding what the aliens are here for and what they're trying to accomplish.
Or it's just a case of the week that will never again be revisited in any way.
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