X-Files: Aubrey

[AllanO]

https://sfdebris.com/videos/xfiles/xfiles2e12.php

So I remember watching this episode and then a few years later seeing the play The Bad Seed (checking Wikipedia the play is by Maxwell Anderson based on a novel by William March, it was also made into a movie) and thinking wait a second this seems familiar. I would swear there is at least one minor element of The Bad Seed in Aubrey (arguably fairly superficial).

The Bad Seed is about a mother who comes to realize that her little girl is a psychopathic serial killer. At some point it is revealed that the mother was adopted by her cop father from a mother who was a ruthless serial killer suggesting her daughters Bad Seed status is an inherited trait that skipped a generation. Obviously most of the plot, setting, action, characters etc. are completely different including the way the killer tendencies are inherited (in The Bad Seed it is just being a remorseless and easily motivated to murder killer that is inherited not some weirdly specific elements of the crime), but to me the inherited evil obscured by skipping a generation and adoption seemed similar. Maybe I was over thinking it.

Anyway I agree with Chuck even if not more at odds with the laws of physics etc. than say possession or witches etc. the crazy genetic memory engine of this story is somehow just so implausible and weird the reveal at the end leads to a really? Interesting how that works. Arguably lots of X-Files stories involve even more incredible stuff and yet somehow does not feel as unreal.

[Killerbee256]

I wonder if the writer of the episode ever read any of the Dune books. That's the only place I can recall the concept of generic ancestral memory being used. I'm kind of surprised Chuck didn't bring it up.

[Fianna]

It was a somewhat accepted theory during the 19th Century, back when people had debates about Darwinian evolution vs. Lamarckian evolution.

[AllanO]

I seem to recall that at least one Doctor Who episode invoking race memory to allow exposition about an alien threat (because the alien had been a threat previously). Googling there are various examples compiled in a Doctor Who wiki ( https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Race_memory ).

I've never seen Similitude (Ent), but according to Chuck's review Phlox invokes race memory to explain why Sim (the alien creature that has become a copy/clone of Tucker) gets Tucker's memories also.

More generally I'd have a problem coming up with too many concrete examples but I feel like race memory or the like is invoked in lots of goofy science fiction stories here and there as in Doctor Who. An example I can think of is in the story (first a TV show then a movie) Quartermass and the Pit (part of a series of stories Chuck has talked about at least one entry from). Here the discovery of ancient alien remains starts awakening latent memories modern humans have of the ancient aliens influence on their ancestors. This may well be representative of the sort of ideas Doctor Who was drawing from as Quartermass is a noted influence on Doctor Who. I can think of one more obscure example in a pretty forgettable 1920s book The Pallid Giant: A Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow.

Racial memory to my mind is more often invoked for how people can remember traumatic and strange things that happened to their ancestors on a massive scale (more how it is used in Doctor Who and Quartermass), rather than remembering specific details of a relatives recent life (as in Aubrey and Similitude). I associate it more with ideas about how human groups end up with a cohesive identity and attitudes (ideas like Jungian collective unconscious and the like) as a sort of biological backup or reinforcement of the way cultural stuff will transmit sets of collective memory and attitude. So stories like Aubrey that associate it with specific autobiographical memories seem weird to me, although as I said in my first post it's not really mechanically less plausible than other ideas (like a more generic collective race memory) so weird stuff.