The X-Files, season 4
24 episodes · 1d 0h · 10 kept in The Essentials
Season 4 recap
Scully gets a diagnosis, and the men who caused it turn out to be reachable.
The year opens with the programme's scale laid bare — a farm of clones, all of them grown from one girl, all of them tending crops for reasons nobody explains — and then narrows to something much smaller. Scully starts getting nosebleeds. The cancer is in a place that does not usually produce one, and it is the same place the other abducted women had theirs.
That gives the season its spine. She works the case of her own illness like any other: finds the women, finds the records, finds that every one of them was taken and returned and marked. Mulder works it differently, which is to say he starts trading with people he should not trade with. A trip to Russia to chase a rock that is not a rock costs him more than the rock is worth, and the substance inside it is the same one from the salvage operation.
The Smoking Man is closer this year than he has been. There is a version of his life in which he is a failed novelist and a lonely man, and a version in which he shot two presidents, and the season declines to say which is true. Skinner makes a private arrangement to help Scully and spends the rest of the year paying for it.
It ends with a body in an ice sheet that would settle everything, and then a phone call saying the body is a fake and the whole thing has been staged for Mulder's benefit from the start. He goes home. Scully sits in front of a panel and says he is dead.
Safe if you have finished season 4. Nothing here refers to anything after it — checked, not assumed.
Every episode
Mulder finds himself with Jeremiah Smith, who will meet his end on a small farm tended to by clones bearing resemblance to Samantha. Meanwhile, the Syndicate suspects a traitor is in their midst and plan a trap. Mrs Mulder survives, in spite of Mulder's failure.
A baby is found buried alive in shallow ground and appears to have birth defects resulting from generations of inbreeding, leading Mulder and Scully to a reclusive family who have a history of inbred children.
After several African-American men are killed and the color is drained from their skin, Mulder learns about the Teliko, an African folktale about a creature who must suck the pigmentation from a person's body in order to survive.
Several kidnappings of young women linked by distorted photographs lead Mulder and Scully to a man who can imprint his darkest fantasies onto undeveloped film and is trying to save the women from the 'Howlers'.
After an FBI raid on a doomsday cult called the "Temple of the Seven Stars." Mulder meets Melissa, a cultist who claims to have known him in a previous life during the American Civil War. Scully believes the woman is a delusional schizophrenic but Mulder allows himself to be drawn into her fantasies.
When a series of bizarre murders take place in a hospital's plastic surgery unit, Mulder finds a link to the four witches Sabbaths. This leads Mulder and Scully to question if supernatural forces maybe responsible when they begin to suspect a nurse of practicing witchcraft and causing the deaths of the patients.
Frohike pieces together and recites to Mulder and Scully what could be the possible life story of the Cigarette Smoking Man; from a young captain in the US Army recruited to assassinate President Kennedy, to becoming the mysterious man in the shadows at the height of a global conspiracy. What measures will the CSM take to ensure that he remains a mystery forever?
A rock sample taken from Mars is intercepted at an airport and infects a security officer with the Black Cancer, while Mulder is given a tip about potentially dangerous paramilitary operations but is doubtful when the informant turns out to be Alex Krycek. Reluctantly, Mulder accepts Krycek's help and tracks the rock to Russia where he discovers an elaborate test being performed by Russian scientists.
While imprisoned in Russia and infected with the Black Cancer, Mulder learns that Krycek is working with the men responsible and everything has been a setup from the start, while Scully and Skinner are called to a suspicious Senate hearing where the only question is the whereabouts of Agent Mulder.
Mulder's dreams help him in finding the body of a little girl which re-opens one of his old cases in the Violent Crimes Unit and leads him to believe the killer he captured had more victims and may have taken his sister many years before.
When a deadly yellow rain falls in a migrant workers camp and kills a young woman, Agents Mulder and Scully come to investigate what happened. After questioning the family the agents learn that they believe a mythical creature is responsible for the death and before long Mulder and Scully are on the trail of a mythical beast known as El Chupacabra. Mulder and Scully have to work out where the beast will go next before it can kill anyone else.
After the body of a decapitated EMT disappears from the morgue and an identical man starts work at the same hospital, Mulder believes that the man has the ability to regrow parts of his body, including his head. The agents soon discover that Betts' body is riddled with cancer and he is able to live in that condition but needs to feed on cancerous tumors to keep up his strength.
While Mulder is forced to take a vacation he leaves Scully with an assignment to keep her busy until he returns. She however, decides to start living and goes on a date with a man who believes that his tattoo talks to him and is telling him to stay away from other women.
Scully's recent failing health is revealed to be inoperable brain cancer which is common among abductees. She meets with other abductees with the same condition and forms a special bond with a dying woman, while Mulder tries to save her from a doctor who may be connected with the abductions.
Issac Luria, a Jewish man, is killed by a group of teenagers working for a racist shopowner, but one of them is soon strangled to death and the fingerprints on his neck are of Issac. Despite other factors, Mulder becomes convinced that the man has returned from the dead to exact revenge.
When a US military general is unexplainably murdered in the back of his limousine, a paramilitary group is suspected and they believe it was a soldier whom they liberated from a Vietnam POW camp and is plotting to kill certain corrupt military figures.
A strange woman informs Mulder that NICAP member Max Fenig (see Fallen Angel) has recently died in a plane crash. After observing Max's body, Mulder suggestion that the plane was intercepted by a UFO is rapidly being covered up by the military.
The investigating into a plane crash lands an FBI agent dead and its main witness in military jail. Looking further into abductee Max Fenig's prior whereabouts, Scully and Mulder find evidence of alien technology, which is intercepted before being brought to light.
A strange old man foresees events surrounding the use of an experimental flash-freezing compound. Mulder believes that one of the scientists involved has come from the future to stop his own scientific breakthrough from becoming reality.
Five babies in the same town are all born with tails and the local OB-GYN is blamed for tampering with fertilised eggs. However, Mulder discovers the culprit to be a simple man with a genetic deformity who may have the ability to alter his appearance.
Skinner destroys evidence to cover up a woman's death and poses as Agent Mulder to complete the task. Mulder finds out about Skinner's deception and confronts him and Skinner reveals that he is working for the Cigarette Smoking Man in order to obtain a possible cure for Scully's cancer.
After a man sees a woman trapped inside a bowling alley pin setter, he goes for help and finds police standing next to the body of the same woman. Mulder and Scully join the investigation and follow up this lead which the police won't bother with and they are led to a retarded man who works at the bowling alley.
Mulder undergoes an experimental form of hypnotherapy to recover his memories about his sister's abduction but the treatment has side effects including psychotic behaviour and Mulder wakes up one morning in a motel room with someone else's blood all over him.
While investigating the discovery of a preserved alien body found in the mountains of Canada, Mulder is contacted by Michael Kritschgau who tells him about a government conspiracy not to keep alien activity a secret, but to make people believe in them without question and Mulder has been the prime target. With the idea that everything he believes is a lie, Mulder appears to take his own life.