The X-Files, season 3

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.