Is The X-Files Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot

The skeptic gets assigned to the believer

Mulder is an FBI profiler who is certain that aliens exist, because his sister Samantha was claimed to have been abducted when he was twelve. His colleagues call him "Spooky Mulder" and park him in a little-known department that handles unsolved cases, the X-Files. In the pilot, Scully, a medical doctor and natural skeptic, is assigned to work with him so she can debunk his theories, and over the years she rarely manages to refute them completely. Many of the early episodes are standalone cases. In Ice, an Arctic research team turns on each other and themselves after drilling deeper into the ice. In Tooms, a man who was locked in a sanitarium for assaulting Scully is released and needs to kill. Season two turns personal when Duane Barry, an ex-FBI agent who escaped a mental hospital, holds hostages in a travel agency. Scully is then attacked, vanishes, and reappears comatose in a hospital. Later, an alien bounty hunter kidnaps her to trade for Samantha. The season ends with a stolen set of files that need a Navajo code talker to decode.

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The Cigarette Smoking Man gets a speaking schedule

Season three splits the show into two kinds of episode. The mythology episodes follow the Syndicate, a group of men inside the U.S. government who act as the go-between for humanity and aliens, and their most visible face, the Cigarette Smoking Man. He works to recover the stolen files, and Mulder and Scully chase down an old photograph of Mulder's father with unnamed men. The standalone episodes are all over the place. A serial killer seduces women through an online service, a small town fills up with bodies covered in cockroaches, and two people say aliens took them, and the agents try to sort out their story.

Home, the episode with a warning label

This is the episode to know about in advance. Home is the second episode of season four, right after Herrenvolk, in which Jeremiah Smith, pursued by an alien bounty hunter, takes Mulder to a farm. In Home, the agents go to a small, otherwise peaceful town because an infant with disturbing birth defects has died. That is the part to know before you press play. If it is where you draw the line, skip the episode. Later that season, Sanguinarium sends them to a hospital's plastic surgery unit, where the deaths hint at something supernatural, and in Leonard Betts a body disappears from a morgue. Fear for Scully's health sends Mulder back to her abduction, and in Small Potatoes babies are born with tails. The finale, Gethsemane, has researchers in northern Canada finding what may be proof of alien existence, a syndicate assassin going after Scully, and a shocking conclusion.

Season five starts with Mulder dead on paper

Season five opens with Scully helping Mulder fake his death, and then Scully lies on her deathbed while the Cigarette Smoking Man decides to help Mulder. Then the series gets playful. The Post-Modern Prometheus is filmed in black and white. In Bad Blood, Mulder kills a teenage boy he mistakes for a vampire. In Emily, Scully tries to keep her daughter alive while Mulder looks into where the girl came from. Season six reopens the X-Files. In How the Ghosts Stole Christmas, Mulder talks Scully out of wrapping presents on Christmas Eve to go on a stakeout, and in Alpha, several killings are pinned on a Wanshang Dhole, an Asian dog that was supposed to be extinct. In the mythology, the alien colonists plan to use a sentient virus called the black oil to turn humanity into a slave race. In the episodes Two Fathers and One Son, the rebel faction of aliens destroys the Syndicate, and the colonists send in Super Soldiers who look human but are biologically alien.

Mulder is abducted and the show keeps going

The seventh season finale, Requiem, ends with Mulder abducted by aliens, and afterward Scully is a reluctant believer who still reaches for science first. John Doggett takes Mulder's place as Scully's partner and joins the search for him, and later Monica Reyes joins in too. Mulder gets a funeral, a former abductee wakes up from the dead, and Scully's labor starts somewhere remote while the Super Soldiers replace key people in the government. In season nine, Scully is reassigned to the Quantico Training Academy, and one of Doggett's old Marine associates tells him she is a Super Soldier. The show then comes back for two more seasons. In season ten, Mulder is contacted by Scully at the request of Skinner, the X-Files reopen, and a panic starts when people all over the country fall gravely ill. In season eleven Scully is hospitalized after a seizure triggered by a vision involving their son William, and the season also has two teenagers who each believe the other is a monster, a boy attacked by an animal in Connecticut, and a man abducted and stripped of his organs.