The X-Files, season 6

They come back from Antarctica with nothing that survives contact with a review board, and get reassigned to cases that are deliberately dull. Someone else has the X-Files. Mulder works them anyway, from the wrong desk, and a man in a car with a countdown in his blood makes it clear the old arrangements have not stopped.

The centre of the year is two hours in which the Syndicate finally explains itself. A woman is returned after decades and is the first successful hybrid, which means the work is finished, which means the timetable everyone has been negotiating around is now real. The men in the room have spent fifty years collaborating in exchange for a promise that their own families would be spared. They gather at an airfield to complete the exchange. The faceless rebels are waiting for them, and there is very little left afterwards.

What that removes is the negotiating party. What it does not remove is the thing they were negotiating with.

The last hours push the story past anything a boardroom could manage. A ship's hull surfaces off the African coast, covered in writing that predates every civilisation that could have made it, and being near it does something to Mulder's mind that no doctor can name. Scully flies out to find him and finds the beach instead.