X-Files Season 5 Breakdown: Why This 20-Episode Run Built Toward The First Movie

Season 5 of The X-Files averaged 20 million viewers an episode and was building straight into the franchise's first feature film. Because of that, this run comes in at just 20 episodes, four fewer than the previous season, at a time when a 20-episode order was still seen as a shorter season. This was also the first season planned entirely in advance, and it was originally meant to be the show's last before Fox greenlit two more seasons and everyone signed back on.

The workload behind the scenes sounds like it was brutal. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were shooting the show, shooting the film, doing reshoots for the film and reshoots for the show, constantly learning lines from completely disconnected scenes. Because of that, several episodes barely feature the two leads at all, with some entries centered on side characters instead, which pushed the writers into some genuinely creative choices, including Postmodern Prometheus and what I still consider the scariest episode of the entire series, Chinga.

Redux and Redux II reveal the mole and cure Scully's cancer

The premiere picks up right after Gethsemane, with Mulder faking his own death alongside Scully after learning a Department of Defense agent had been spying on him. Investigating unchecked, Mulder gets into the Pentagon room seen at the end of the pilot, finds a room of alien bodies, and takes what he believes is the cure for Scully's cancer to the Lone Gunmen, only for them to reveal it's just deionized water. Scully tells a hearing that someone in the room caused her cancer and that she has proof, but her nose starts bleeding before she can present it.

In part two, Mulder learns Blevins is the mole working against him, and the Smoking Man arranges a meeting where he reveals a chip hidden in the vial can actually cure the cancer. Scully's brother gives Mulder a brutal dressing down about endangering his family before Scully decides to trust him anyway. The Smoking Man also brings Samantha to meet Mulder, who calls him father and describes her abduction, before offering Mulder the full truth in exchange for working for him, an offer Mulder turns down once he learns Blevins is the mole. Blevins, on the payroll of the biotech front company Roush, is later killed and made to look like a suicide, while a sniper called Quiet Willie shoots the Smoking Man. Scully's cancer goes into remission. I think this is by far the best two-part premiere and the best alien-centered episodes in the show's history, playing on real 90s mistrust around Watergate, Iran-Contra and the Tuskegee syphilis study.

Unusual Suspects gives the Lone Gunmen a full origin story

Taking us back to 1989, this is the first episode to lean on the wider cast, telling how Byers, Langley and Frohike met. Byers actually worked for the government, and Vince Gilligan wanted to give the previously interchangeable characters real personalities, with Bruce Harwood getting the most to do. The episode crosses over with NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street via detective John Munch. Byers meets a woman named Holly at a computer convention who turns out to be Suzanne Modeski, wanted for sabotaging a facility developing a mind-altering gas meant for Baltimore. The group is confronted by a shadowy agent named X, part of the government cleanup crew, who eventually lets them live after Byers keeps demanding answers, including bringing up JFK, which is when X delivers the line about hearing it was a lone gunman. Byers was born on November 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was killed. Director Kim Manners said the trio were modeled on the Lion, Scarecrow and Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, with Suzanne as their Dorothy. I called this a hat-trick of three incredible episodes in a row and one of the best origin stories I've seen on TV.

Detour hides its Mothman-style creature in the Appalachian woods

Two surveyors are attacked in the Appalachian National Forest by a seemingly invisible camouflaged creature. The team, including Mulder and Scully, get pulled in en route to a team-building seminar. Frank Spotnitz said he wanted something like Deliverance, but I think it plays a lot more like Predator, right down to the heat-signature hunting scene. Scully sings Joy to the World by Three Dog Night to Mulder overnight in the woods, a detail Chris Carter reportedly wanted deliberately off the wall rather than the originally pitched Hank Williams song. Mulder later theorizes the creatures might be descendants of Spanish conquistadors who settled in the forest 500 years ago. The episode ends on an anticlimax, with a creature hiding under Scully's bed rather than attacking, which I think is actually the best choice, playing into the idea that these things have survived by staying hidden. It's one of my favorite monster-of-the-week episodes despite the backlash it apparently got.

Postmodern Prometheus reworks Frankenstein in black and white

Shot entirely in black and white and mixing Jerry Springer with Cher and Mary Shelley, this follows a genetically engineered creature called the Great Mutato. Roseanne Barr was reportedly the first choice to play Mrs. Berkowitz and the part was written for her, but scheduling conflicts meant she couldn't do it. Mutato watches 1985's Mask, based on the real story of Rocky Dennis, and the episode draws further from The Elephant Man. It's revealed the geneticist father has been artificially inseminating unconscious women to create Mutato a companion, and after the geneticist's son kills him, a torch-wielding mob accidentally sets fire to the barn, an obvious Frankenstein nod, before Mutato wins the crowd over with a monologue about beauty being skin deep. He ends the episode getting pulled on stage at a real Cher concert. I was surprised to learn how many fans think the ending is entirely imagined by Mulder, but I just take it as him getting accepted by the community. Cher reportedly turned down actually appearing because she wanted a real acting role rather than a cameo, though she has since said she'd have jumped at the script if she'd known how good it was.

Christmas Carol and Emily reveal Scully's daughter and end in tragedy

David Duchovny was largely absent from these episodes while promoting his film Playing God, so the script pivoted around Scully learning her late sister Melissa may have had a daughter, Emily, who turns out to actually be Scully's own child from her abduction, conceived and placed with a family paid off by a company called Prangen. In Emily, Mulder suspects Emily is an alien-human hybrid after a cyst on her neck oozes green blood-like fluid, and confronts a Prangen doctor, putting a gun to his head. The doctor is later killed by a shapeshifter who takes his form. Emily dies after slipping into a coma, and when Scully opens the casket at the funeral, it contains only bags of sand and the cross necklace she'd given her daughter. I think this shows everything Scully went through meant nothing, with the shadowy syndicate erasing every piece of progress and denying her any real closure.

Kitsunegari brings back Vince Gilligan's psychic villain Robert Modell

This sequel to Pusher opens with Robert Modell using his hypnotic voice to talk his way out of prison, banging his head against a wall in a moment I always remembered and later wondered if it was inspired by real footage of Jeffrey Dahmer's capture. Modell forces a prosecutor into joining the Blue Man Group and paints a therapist's death scene in cerulean blue. Mulder eventually corners Modell but is talked into letting him go, and questions whether he's seeing things straight. The twist reveals Modell has a twin sister, Linda, separated at birth, who shares his abilities and has been orchestrating revenge on the people who caught her brother. Linda poses as Scully at gunpoint before shooting the real one who appears behind Mulder. Modell dies in the fallout, and Skinner tells Mulder he won the game, though Mulder feels he lost, having nearly shot his own partner.

Schizogeny is one I think ranks among the show's weakest entries

Written by Jessica Scott and Mike Wollaeger in their first episode for the series, this centers on a boy named Bobby suspected of murdering his abusive stepfather, who is actually pulled underground by something living beneath the surface. His therapist Karen is eventually revealed as the culprit, controlling trees after childhood abuse by her own father created a dissociated personality in her, letting her force others into the victim role she couldn't face herself. A mysterious man eventually kills Karen and ends the hold over Bobby and Mulder. I agree with the general consensus that, while First Person Shooter remains the worst episode for me personally, this one is definitely in contention, with weighty themes the episode doesn't really deliver on.

Chinga was written by Stephen King and remains the episode that scared me most as a kid

Written by Stephen King, who reportedly met Chris Carter on an episode of Jeopardy and asked to write for the show, this follows Scully on vacation in Maine encountering a haunted doll belonging to a girl named Polly, whose tantrums are enforced by the doll attacking anyone who upsets her. The line "I want to play" and the supermarket eye-clawing scene left a lasting mark on me, along with a woman's face appearing at a car window, a moment that made me turn the episode off as a kid. It's revealed the doll is tied to old New England witch folklore and was originally dragged from the sea by Polly's father, who then killed himself after hearing it talk. Scully eventually destroys the doll in a microwave, but the episode closes with another fisherman pulling up a second doll, Chungo, showing its reign isn't over. I'm honest that being objective, without the personal impact this had on me as a child, it might just be a good but not great entry, but it will always sit in my top ten because of what it did to twelve-year-old me.

Kill Switch imagines a rogue AI years before it became a familiar sci-fi trope

Written by William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, this follows Mulder and Scully tracking a rogue artificial intelligence created by an inventor of the internet, alongside a hacker named Invisigoth who had tried to upload her consciousness with her late lover David to escape her physical body. Mulder is captured and, inside a virtual reality construct, imagines his own arms being amputated to force him to reveal the location of a CD that can kill the AI. I only realized partway through that this was drawing on Neuromancer, and felt a bit silly for not clocking Gibson's name in the credits sooner. Invisigoth ultimately uploads herself into the AI before destroying the trailer housing its core. Although I used to think this one was weak enough to skip on rewatches, I really enjoyed it this time.

Bad Blood plays Mulder and Scully's mismatched memories for laughs in a vampire town

Framed as Mulder and Scully recounting conflicting versions of events after Mulder stakes a teenage vampire, this is one of my favorites in the whole season, possibly top five, maybe even top three. Both leads get to exaggerate their view of each other and of themselves, with recurring gags like the pizza delivery guy also being the vampire, Mulder's sunflower seed habit, and the reveal that the entire town, including the sheriff played by Luke Wilson, is made up of polite, tax-paying vampires trying to keep a low profile. It fuses folklore, unreliable narration and pure comedy, and I think it's a true ten out of ten that shows exactly how good this show can be.

Patient X and The Red and the Black push the alien mythology toward civil war

This mythology two-parter continues from the Gulag storyline, introducing alien rebels with their mouths and eyes sewn shut to keep the black oil from entering. Krycek captures a boy believed to hold a cure for the black oil, while Marita Covarrubias is revealed to secretly be working with Krycek against the syndicate. Abductees are burned to death at Skyland Mountain by the rebels, and a vaccine derived from the boy eventually works on Marita. The story plays as a Cold War metaphor both on Earth and among the aliens themselves, with a civil war between rebels and colonists, and closes with the mysterious letter from the opening revealed to be from the Smoking Man.

Travelers digs into the McCarthy-era origins of the X-Files

Set largely in the 1950s Red Scare, this follows a young Arthur Dales investigating Edward Skur, a man carrying a parasite implanted by Nazi experiments that could explain the FBI's earliest X-Files. Real McCarthy-era figures like Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover feature, with Cohn's dialogue drawn from an actual McCarthy speech. Dales' unnamed partner has led fans to speculate he might be the Smoking Man. Bill Mulder appears here too, depicted as a shady figure who ultimately helps Skur escape. Gillian Anderson doesn't appear in this episode at all, reportedly because her scenes were being shot for the film during this production block.

Mind's Eye gives Lily Taylor an Emmy-nominated turn as a blind woman who sees through a killer's eyes

Lily Taylor plays Marty, a blind woman who has spent her life seeing through her killer father's eyes and takes the fall for his crimes. The writers deliberately made her abrasive rather than the typical sympathetic blind character, and Taylor, a former drama school classmate of Anderson's, received an Emmy nomination for the role. The concept draws on the CIA's real Project Stargate remote-viewing research and the film Eyes of Laura Mars. Marty ultimately uses her father's own sight to line up the shot that kills him, ending the episode finally at peace.

All Souls lets Scully confront her grief over Emily through a battle between angels and the devil

Centered on quadruplet sisters being claimed one by one, this allows Scully to properly return to the story after being written around in prior episodes, dealing directly with Emily's death and her own faith. Scully appears to encounter both a seraphim and a priest who may be linked to the devil. I think it's a pretty bad episode overall, one where the metaphor for Emily doesn't really land, and I suspect the confession scene was added in post-production because the script wasn't fully working. It did, however, inspire the band Technotronic Versus Horse... more accurately, it inspired a real song by a band referencing the plot.

The Pine Bluff Variant makes you question Mulder's loyalty

Set around a fictional anti-government militia, this deliberately plays with the idea that Mulder may have gone extremist after everything he's seen, with the writers citing The Spy Who Came In from the Cold as a reference point. Mulder goes undercover under the alias Mr. Kaplan, a nod to North by Northwest, and is forced to prove his loyalty during a bank robbery where the gang contaminates money with a flesh-eating virus rather than stealing it. The twist reveals militia leader Bremer is actually a deep-cover federal agent testing Mulder's loyalty, while the operation turns out to be a government-run biological weapons test overseen by a shadowy official named Lemus. I think this is one of my favorites from the season and shows the show doesn't need aliens or monsters to be gripping, with the reveal about Bremer genuinely surprising me even though the episode kept pointing at him the whole time.

Folie a Deux delivers a genuinely unsettling insect monster

Set at a call center, this follows an employee named Gary Lambert who believes his boss is a giant insect that psychically hypnotizes people into zombie-like drones, tied to the psychiatric concept of folie a deux, a shared delusion between two or more people. Mulder eventually sees the creature himself when the lights go out during a hostage situation, and later Scully catches just enough of a glimpse to leave her questioning her own perception. I love the effect used for the creature, an unnatural, almost stop-motion movement created because the practical suit reportedly looked bad in full light. The episode closes on another call center worker starting to notice the same thing, keeping the cycle going. I think this is a great standalone monster episode, even if the reduced Mulder and Scully interaction shows the toll of the film production.

The End sets up Mulder's half-brother reveal and burns down the X-Files office

Introducing Gibson Praise, a young chess prodigy suspected of being a human-alien hybrid whose brain may hold the key to everything in the mythology, this also brings back Mimi Rogers as Diana Fowley, an old flame of Mulder's from the Academy. The episode reveals that Agent Spender is the Smoking Man's son, making him Mulder's half-brother, in a scene where the Smoking Man tells him directly, "I am your father." The season ends with the Smoking Man stealing Samantha's file and setting fire to Mulder's office, destroying the X-Files archive entirely, closing out what was originally meant to be the show's final season on a genuinely definitive-feeling note before the leap to the big screen.

Looking back across the whole run, I think the creative team made the best of a genuinely difficult production, and necessity bred a lot of creativity here. A lot of these episodes work as standalone recommendations for newcomers, even if I did miss the steady thread of Mulder and Scully running through every entry given how often the film pulled the actors away.

Which of this season's twenty episodes do you think deserves more credit, and does Bad Blood belong in your own top five?