The X-Files, season 9

The programme has changed hands. What is left of it runs inside the government rather than alongside it, staffing itself with the replacements, and the people trying to expose it have no institution behind them. Doggett and Reyes carry most of the year while Mulder is in hiding.

Everything bends toward William. He does things an infant should not do. The people interested in him are interested for reasons they will not state, and the ones who approach Scully offering help are almost always working for someone else. She tries faith, medicine and force in turn. The chip in her neck, the missing weeks, the child in the care home years ago — the season makes explicit that these were never separate cases.

Her answer is the hardest thing the character does. She gives him up for adoption to people she will never meet, on the reasoning that the only way to make him not worth taking is to make him impossible to find.

The finale is a military tribunal. Mulder is tried for a murder that cannot have happened, and the trial becomes the vehicle for putting nine years of evidence on the record at once — and then the record is sealed and the verdict is decided in advance. He is told a date. The two of them drive south with nothing, no office, no institution, and a deadline.