The X-Files, season 3
24 episodes · 1d 0h · 7 kept in The Essentials
Season 3 recap
The tape gets translated, the black oil surfaces, and the conspiracy turns out to be older than the men running it.
He gets out of the car. The recovery takes a Navajo ceremony and a good deal of insistence from people who owe him nothing, and while he is gone Scully and Skinner spend the interval protecting a tape neither of them can decode. The men who want it are not subtle about wanting it, and the price of keeping it is paid by Scully's family.
The documents, once read, are personnel records: a programme of experimentation running since the 1940s, with the same names appearing across four decades. A train carriage in the desert, a leper colony that is not one, a boxcar of remains — the season keeps producing physical sites for a thing that had only been rumour. Scully finds an implant in her own neck and a group of women who all have one, all with the same cancer, all with the same missing weeks.
Then a salvage operation off the coast brings up something none of the files describe. A diver comes back changed, an oily black substance moving behind his eyes and passing from person to person by touch. It is looking for something, and what it is looking for is buried in a missile silo. Whatever the men in the boardroom think they are managing, they did not make this and they are not certain they control it.
The year ends with the Smoking Man having a conversation with someone who has been alive a very long time, in a room where the balance of power is not what it usually is. Mulder's mother has a stroke before she can finish a sentence, and there is a weapon in the story now that nobody has explained.
Safe if you have finished season 3. Nothing here refers to anything after it — checked, not assumed.
Every episode
Scully finds her career with the FBI in jeopardy as Mulder is still missing and The Cigarette Smoking Man is pursuing the stolen files. The Navajo elders find Mulder's body in a cave and perform an ancient ceremony to call the spirit back to the empty vessel.
Assistant Director Skinner and Scully are at a standoff when Mulder bursts in and discovers that Skinner has the digital tape. Reunited, Mulder and Scully travel to a secret vault inside a mine and find an elaborate filing system of medical records which reveals that Mulder's sister may not have been the first choice for abduction. Meanwhile, Skinner deals with the Cigarette Smoking Man for their safety.
When a small town chalks up five lightning-related deaths, Mulder suspects something is amiss in rural America. Despite the apparent validity of the autopsy results Mulder asks her to review, Scully, for once finds herself in perfect agreement with her partner- especially when the suspect jump-starts his boss's heart-bare-handed.
In the midst of a psychic sideshow while on a murder case, Mulder and Scully enlist the help of a man who may have a true psychic ability to foresee how people will die to help the agents catch a man killing fortune tellers.
No-one takes much notice when a death row inmate vows on the electric chair to come back from the dead and kill 5 men who have wronged him during his time in prison; until a guard is mysteriously murdered in the former inmate's cell.
A serial killer with unusual tastes is doing his stalking on the internet, luring women to him by capitalizing on their vulnerabilities, using his knack for playing into the most desperate desires. His 'long distance' approach makes apprehension difficult-and complicating Scully and Mulder's investigations further in his habit of digesting his dates, making it nearly impossible to identify his victims.
After a suicide attempt and multiple murders at a military hospital, Mulder and Scully meet a quadruple amputee who has gained the power of Astral Projection and is taking out his personal frustrations on his commanding officers.
Mulder seeks the help of a woman whom he believes has a special connection with a young girl who has recently been kidnapped by the same man who held her captive many years earlier.
An investigation into a video of an alien autopsy puts Mulder and Scully in the middle of a conspiracy involving WWII Japanese scientists brought to America to continue their experiments which may shed light on Scully's abduction.
Mulder is trapped inside a train car which contains a suspected alien-human hybrid and also a bomb, while Scully pursues the truth about her abduction and the mystery behind the implant in her neck.
Mulder and Scully swap roles as they pursue a man killing priests who claim to have the wounds of Christ. The agents find and must protect a young boy who may be a real stigmatic. While Scully's faith draws her closer to the boy, Mulder is convinced of another explanation.
Widespread panic is caused in a small community after numerous deaths are linked to killer cockroaches and a government agricultural agency is discovered to have set up a secret experiment involving insects.
A rare planetary alignment causes strange behaviour in the residents of a small town but particularly in two teenage girls who were born at the exact same moment on that particular date.
A serial killer is captured after a three year manhunt and he claims an evil spirit is responsible for the crimes. When the killings continue as he sits in jail, Mulder's battle with a former colleague gets more heated when he suggests that something more paranormal may be involved.
A French salvage ship searching for a lost WWII fighter plane unknowingly surfaces an alien which appears in the form of black oil and has the ability to jump hosts. Mulder heads to Hong Kong to investigate the salvage broker who sold the information to the French and he encounters Krycek, who has been selling information from the MJ Documents. As Mulder prepares to take Krycek back to the US, the alien makes its way to Hong Kong and takes control of Krycek.
Mulder pursues Krycek, not knowing about the alien that has taken over his body, to get back the DAT tape containing the MJ Documents. Meanwhile, the shooting of AD Skinner uncovers evidence that could lead Scully to her sister's murderer.
Mulder and Scully are asked to help in a case involving Robert Patrick Modell, a murderer possessing a psychic ability to force his will onto people. Due to a brain tumor that is slowly killing him, he is searching for a "worthy adversary" and he forces Mulder into a battle of mind over matter.
When a series of deaths occur immediately after an ancient artefact is brought to Boston from an excavation site in South America, Scully believes the deaths appear to be the result of political terrorism, but Mulder suspects something more improbable. He thinks that the deaths are linked to a shaman spirit released by the Ecuadorian Amaru urn.
The deaths of several Chinese men found to be missing vital internal organs that were removed prior to death leads Mulder and Scully to a deadly Chinatown lottery where men wager their body parts for a chance to win a cash jackpot.
An alien abduction of two teenagers with different versions of the same facts prompts a science-fiction novelist to write a book about the incident. However no one involved with the investigation can tell him the full story with any accuracy.
During a one-night stand in the midst of his divorce, AD Skinner becomes a murder suspect, and Mulder and Scully return the many favors that he has done for them by analyzing evidence that someone doesn't want uncovered to prove his innocence.
When a series of mysterious deaths and disappearances are reported near a lake in a small town, Agents Mulder and Scully are called in to investigate. With local folklore of a killer sea serpent running rampant amongst the locals, the agents must take their search for the truth to the water. But before long the agents find out that there may be more to the legend then they first thought.
After a man kills three people and his wife because he mistook them for a ruthless Bosnian dictator, Mulder and Scully discover a test involving mind control using television signals that make people's worst fears become real in any form.
Mulder and Scully search for a mysterious man with the power to heal, whose actions risk exposing the existence of aliens on Earth. Meanwhile a confrontation between Mrs. Mulder and the CSM leads Mulder to the discovery of the only weapon which can kill the aliens.