The X-Files, season 4

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.