The X-Files, season 11

The bridge resolves as a vision rather than an event — a warning of what is coming rather than a report of what happened — and the year proceeds from a threat that has not occurred yet. It also proceeds from a lie: the man who has driven the whole series claims a paternity that Scully has never accepted, and the season leaves the claim standing long enough to do damage.

William is seventeen and does not want to be found. When they find him it is through a hospital, two girls, and a shape that is not his, and the meeting is nothing like the reunion either parent had imagined. He is angry, powerful, and clear that being their son is a thing that was done to him rather than a fact about him.

The standalones are the best of the revival — an episode with almost no dialogue about machines that do exactly what they are asked, and one about the memory of a decade nobody else remembers correctly.

The end is a dock, a gunshot and a choice. The plan that has been assembling since a boxcar in the desert stops because the person it depended on refuses it. What Scully takes away from it is the same thing the series gave her in the first season and kept taking back: something growing that the programme did not put there.