Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
Mulder and Scully continue tracing the hidden program behind alien abductions, cloning and the disappearance of Mulder’s sister. In the opening story, Mulder follows Jeremiah Smith to a field where identical girls, including Samantha’s clones, tend bees used in the conspiracy’s experiments. A later pursuit takes Mulder and Alex Krycek to Russia, where they are imprisoned and Mulder is subjected to black-oil experiments; Scully faces a Senate inquiry while trying to locate her partner. The agents return to investigations across the country, from a fungal outbreak mistaken for the work of a folkloric beast to a plane crash whose missing nine minutes point toward a UFO encounter.
The season’s personal crisis centers on Scully. After the agents investigate Leonard Betts, an EMT whose body can regenerate, he tells her that she has cancer. Mulder connects her illness to the other women abducted with her and searches for a cure, while Scully faces treatment and continues working. Her case and Mulder’s family history converge in “Demons,” when drug-induced memories lead him back to his childhood and the adults who concealed Samantha’s disappearance. The investigation leaves him with a gap in his memory and two deaths to explain.
In “Gethsemane,” evidence of a frozen alien draws Mulder to Canada’s Saint Elias Mountains. He helps recover the body and takes part in its autopsy, while Scully meets a Defense Department employee who claims the alien conspiracy is a government hoax covering military activity. The body disappears and two men connected to its discovery are murdered. Scully identifies an unseen body in Mulder’s apartment and tells an FBI panel that he apparently shot himself. The season leaves both that apparent death and the authenticity of the alien evidence unresolved.