The X-Files, season 1

Fox Mulder has spent years in a basement office nobody visits, working cases the Bureau would rather forget. His interest is not academic: his sister vanished from their home when they were children, and everything he does proceeds from that. When Dana Scully is assigned to work with him, it is not as a partner but as a check — a medical doctor with a hard scientific training, sent to write the reports that will close the office down.

The year is mostly cases. A killer who fits through spaces no body should fit through. A research team in the Arctic turning on each other. An astronaut who brings something back with him. Individually they explain away; collectively they wear at Scully's certainty, and the reports she files stop reading like debunkings.

Running underneath is something colder. A source Mulder knows only as Deep Throat feeds him pieces — enough to confirm that the government knows more than it says, never enough to prove it. A crash site is sanitised before they arrive. A live specimen is moved between facilities. Each time they get close, the evidence is gone by morning, and the pattern of the removal is itself the clearest evidence they have.

It ends badly. The last case produces the first physical proof either of them has held, and holding it costs Deep Throat his life. By the time Scully has the material in her hands there is nobody left to give it to. The X-Files are closed, the two of them are reassigned, and the man who signs the order is a smoker nobody introduces.