The X-Files, season 7

Whatever is written on that hull is rewriting him. Getting him back takes a bargain Scully does not want to make and a choice made on his behalf while he is unconscious, and the artefact goes back under the sand without anyone reading it properly.

Then the season stops chasing conspiracy for two hours and does the thing it has been circling since the pilot. A missing-children case pulls at a thread Mulder has not been able to leave alone for twenty-five years, and this time it does not dissolve. What happened to Samantha is smaller than the programme he built around her, and sadder, and it is finished. He stops looking. It is the only file in the series that closes.

Elsewhere the Smoking Man makes his last real play — a road trip with Scully, a promise of a cure for every disease, and nothing at the end of it. Krycek reappears with an agenda that changes every time he does.

The finale returns to the site of the very first case, in Oregon, where a craft is crashing and recovering in a pattern the abductees can feel. The people who were taken there years ago are being collected again. Mulder is among them when the light comes down, and Scully — who has been told for seven years that she cannot have children — finds out that she is pregnant.