The 20 all-time greatest The X-Files episodes

Ryan Coogler’s reboot of The X-Files, once maybe an “extreme possibility”, is becoming reality with a pilot order set for Hulu. Coogler’s new show has already cast Danielle Deadwyler and Himesh Patel as two fresh FBI agents, very cool A++ casting. The X-Files’ original showrunner Chris Carter is on board as an executive producer too. Which leads us to the very important question: what are Ryan Coogler’s favourite episodes of the show?

Because as many dedicated X-Files scholars, from writer Darren Mooney to actor Kumail Nanjiani, have demonstrated, the original 90s series contains multitudes. Hey, this show was getting 20 million viewers a week at its peak for a reason. Alien abductions, monster horror, meta postmodern comedy, legit action thrills and paranoid government conspiracies across seven core Mulder and Scully seasons, nine seasons in total if you include the Reyes and Doggett years, two feature films then (phew) two more short revival seasons in 2016 and 2018.

Putting together a list of the best X-Files episodes - because there are just so, so many to choose from - inevitably reveals our own tastes: for starters, the first five seasons filmed in Vancouver are just classic X-Files to us so our picks skew early. There’s a different feel to the LA-shot Season 6 and onwards — still some great episodes, sure, but they rarely match the OG atmosphere.

• Watch every episode of The X-Files on Disney+

Likewise, most of the ‘mythology’ episodes are worth watching, at least up through Season 5, the first film The X-Files: Fight The Future from 1998 and into Season 6. If you’re a newbie, the ‘mytharc’ episodes deal with the overarching conspiracy story of what shadowy government figures know about aliens and UFOs and how it connects to the disappearance of Fox Mulder’s sister when he was a child. That said, many of the most iconic moments, villains, lines of dialogue, character beats and set-pieces come from the standalone ‘Monster of the Week’ episodes.

Ryan Coogler can do whatever he wants. While he decides which directions he wants to pursue for his new show, we’ve put together our own all-time top 20 episodes of The X-Files. Plus, some honourable mentions and some skips, including that god-awful second film.

The X-Files 20 best episodes of all time

1. Pilot (S1, episode 1)

Bellefleur, Oregon. A teenage girl is found dead in the forest with two strange marks on her back, the latest in a series of kids from the same school year who are going missing, getting ill or turning up dead. Could those bright lights in the night be UFOs? In Washington DC, Dana Scully, an FBI Special Agent just out of medical school, is tasked by higher-ups with partnering with Fox Mulder, and making field reports debunking his work. Mulder’s a brilliant profiler who has become obsessed with the “X-Files”, cases relating to unexplained phenomenon. It’s allll here in Chris Carter’s pilot except the theme tune: that spooky atmosphere, concepts like lost time, small town law enforcement, autopsy voiceovers, destroyed evidence, mist and torches and graveyards, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny’s chemistry as the two agents.. Even the mysterious Cigarette Smoking Man shows up, returning Scully’s silver object of unknown material to a secret evidence store inside the Pentagon. The first case remains unresolved with inconclusive evidence…

2. Deep Throat (S1, episode 2)

Ellens Air Base, Idaho. The one-two of the pilot and Deep Throat are absolutely core X-Files. The first ep sets up the alien abductions and the second deepens the conspiracy further. The case: military pilots have been disappearing then returning home with no memory months later and Mulder’s theory is that piloting planes made with alien tech has led to their breakdowns. Scully sees her first UFO (maybe, kinda - as always), Mulder gets briefly kidnapped and mind-wiped by the military and the informer Deep Throat shows up to tell Mulder “they’ve been here for a very long time”. We meet the first of many lovable UFO hunters at The Flying Saucer cafe (sucker!) and a couple of stoners breaking into the air base. Plus, there’s the iconic Mark Snow theme tune and charmingly retro opening credits, ending in THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.

3. Squeeze (S1, episode 3)

Baltimore, Maryland. Squeeze is the first and one of the best Monster of the Week cases where non-alien weird shit happens. Glenn Morgan and James Wong’s episode is a neat little horror film which set the formula for many timeless episodes. Cold open with a murder + Mulder pushing for outrageous theories + Scully offering many, many rational, medical, scientific explanations = turns out Mulder was right again! It was Eugene Victor Tooms, a being who rips five people’s livers out of their bodies and then hibernates for thirty years in a newspaper nest. Duh. The classic beats of normie FBI agents making fun of Mulder and Scully finding herself in danger are set up here but it’s the casting of magnetic, lived in character actors for Tooms and an old timey cop which puts The X-Files a cut above most procedurals. Scully decides to stick with “spooky” Mulder and his ‘out there’ methods.

4. Conduit (S1, episode 4)

Lake Okobogee, Iowa. OK we’re not just going to list all of season 1, don’t worry. But as in other shows, the central mystery has the tightest grip on the audience in some of these early eps. Darlene Morris’ teen daughter Ruby has gone missing and her young son Kevin is acting strangely. Kevin’s drawing lots of 1s and 0s and Mulder thinks he’s a ‘conduit’ from aliens who have abducted his sister, mirroring what he believes about his childhood: that his sister Samantha was abducted from their home when she was eight. With bright lights, scorched trees and shadowy NSA agents, Mulder and Scully rescue the missing girl but, as ever, end up with more questions than answers. At the close, Scully listens to a tape of Mulder doing Hypnotic Regression Therapy, talking about the night Samantha disappeared: young Fox is paralysed in place with a voice telling him everything will be OK. The therapist asks “do you believe the voice?” and Mulder replies with the timeless “I want to believe”.

5. Ice (S1, episode 8)

Arctic Ice Core Project, Ivy Cape, Alaska. Gloriously paranoid and claustrophobic, Ice is a lovingly made homage to John Carpenter’s The Thing, right down to the dog. The cast of characters here: our two FBI agents, a pilot, a doctor, a toxicologist and a geologist. Turns out a group of Arctic scientists drilled down into an ice core and awoke an ancient infectious parasitic worm that makes people get all angry and murderous. Oops. With snow storms swirling outside and vibey red lights inside the base, everyone turns on each other. From the superb cold open (hell, we’d watch that movie) to Mulder and Scully pointing their guns at each other, this is high action and high drama in which everything hinges on looking at infected blood through microscopes. Science is sexy!

6. The Erlenmeyer Flask (S1, episode 24)

High Containment Facility, Fort Marlene. Picking up threads from S1 episodes like Fallen Angel and E.B.E, the series finale ramps up the action. Mulder’s source Deep Throat sets the agents on the trail of scientific experiments using alien DNA on humans. At a murder scene, they find a mystery liquid named Purity Control which leads to Scully and Georgetown’s labs discovering two extra nucleotides that aren’t found in any life on earth. Gasp! One test subject can breathe underwater and is oozing harmful green stuff. Then boom, Georgetown scientist dead, Scully has to trade a baby alien that she stole from Fort Marlene for Mulder’s life and Deep Throat’s a goner. And not for the last time, the real cliffhanger: the X-Files are being shut down.

7. Duane Barry (S2, episode 5)

Downtown Richmond, Virginia. After some Mulder freelancing at the start of Season 2, we get a three episode run - Duane Barry, Ascension and One Breath - that is the true heart of The X-Files when it comes to Mulder and Scully. And all this drama and emotion because Gillian Anderson got pregnant and Chris Carter and his team had to write around it. The agents still aren’t working together and Mulder is drafted to help in a hostage situation because the dangerous dude in question believes he’s been abducted by aliens. Duane Barry is a former FBI agent who has escaped from a mental institution and, old-school-mental-illness-plot aside, this is a tight, tense nod to gritty 90s hostage thrillers. In the closing minutes, when all looks wrapped up, a captured Barry runs from the hospital and breaks through Scully’s windows late at night..

8. Ascension (S2, episode 6)

Skyland Mountain, Blue Ridge Parkway, off Route 229. Duane Barry has kidnapped Dana Scully. His plan: take her to the top of a mountain as a trade so he doesn’t get abducted by a spaceship again. As he’s driving along with Scully in the boot, there’s an uncharacteristic but groovy needle drop of Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand. As Mulder chases after them, with the double agent Alex Krycek alongside him, we get some primo perilous cable car action as Krycek tries to sabotage Fox’s unhinged rescue plan on behalf of big baddie, the Smoking Man. Mulder arrives at the summit to find only an elated Duane Barry, bright lights in the sky and no sign of Scully - she’ll return to earth in One Breath. Later, when Mulder lays out the details about Barry’s alien implant (that Scully had in her possession) and his case against Krycek and CSM, we get a ‘hells yeah’ moment as fan favourite and FBI assistant director Walter Skinner only goes and re-opens the bloody X-Files.

9. Colony (S2, episode 16)

Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The mid-Season 2 pairing of mythology episodes, Colony and End Game, is goddamn good, we tell you. Colony features one of the very best cliffhangers of the whole show following some up-there set-pieces involving cloned doctors, secret labs and that bubbling green ooze. Its power mainly comes via the Alien Bounty Hunter, a terrifying Terminator-coded, shape-shifting antagonist who’s like Mystique if she exclusively morphed into balding male CIA types. Back at the Vineyard, Mulder’s father calls him home as a long-awaited member of the family appears to have returned after 22 years...doo doo doo doo doo dooooooooo.

10. Humbug (S2, episode 20)

Gulf Breeze Trailer Park, Gibsonton, Florida. Squeeze proved that The X-Files could do horror and Humbug proved it could do kooky. The first episode written by the singular and very funny Darin Morgan, this is a slice of life story from the carnie subculture of sideshow performers. It features a delightfully subversive cold open and lots of visual gags and flourishes from director Kim Manners, including a Touch of Evil-inspired funhouse chase. Morgan pokes fun at David Duchovny’s straight-forward good looks and cleverly plays on the fact that the agents - and the audience - suspect anyone who looks different, which in Humbug is just about everybody: conjoined twins, bearded ladies, geeks, dog boys and blockheads. This flavour of The X-Files is nostalgic for a time when there was still so much potential weirdness on the edges of gleaming modern life. The lessons: “nature abhors normality” and “you never know where the truth ends and the humbug begins.” Comfort TV for sickos.

11. Anasazi (S2, episode 25)

Navajo Reservation, New Mexico. The Season 2 finale is hella ambitious and hella cinematic - this is as good as the X-Files gets. A mysterious boxcar is found buried in a quarry in New Mexico. A grimy 90s hacker gets the UN all het up over encrypted UFO files. The cassette makes its way to the agents by way of the adorable Lone Gunmen conspiracy theorists - always good to see them - just as Mulder starts acting even more para than usual. He punches Skinner, has run-ins with Krycek and even Scully, all while his father Bill Mulder is catching up over whiskeys with the Smoking Man. Mulder and Scully head down to the Navajo Reservation to decode the DOD files where they try to make sense of what they find: ancient aliens, smallpox vaccines and the rest. Anasazi is all intrigue with maximum threats to the agents and the people around them. Real eyes-glued-to-the-screen stuff.

12. Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose (S3, episode 4)

St. Paul & North Minneapolis. Clyde Bruckman often sits at the top spot of lists like this. And why. It’s Just So Perfect. Another Darin Morgan joint, this TV masterpiece stars Peter Boyle as the titular character, one of the most memorable characters ever to appear in The X-Files. Clyde Bruckman is a curmudgeonly insurance salesman who’s in permanent existential crisis stemming from his very specific psychic ability: he can tell how people are going to die. (To Scully: “you don’t”.) The agents cross his path when someone starts killing fortune tellers, palm readers and other ‘prognosticators’ and Bruckman finds one of the bodies. This meticulously constructed episode contains a creepy bellhop, the Stupendous Yappi, a banana cream pie and the finest melancholy monologue you’ll ever hear on Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. “Oh, it’s you” forever.

13. 731 (S3, episode 10)

Perkey, West Virginia. “Mulder, don’t get on that train”. Mulder, of course, gets on the train. And the (moving) train in question is housing a top-secret quarantine railcar, a Japanese scientist named Dr. Shiro Zama, a stern-faced ‘Men in Black’ enforcer-goon and... a bomb in the ceiling. Oh, and Mulder’s locked in with the bomb. All this intense Mission Impossible-style action is expertly directed by Rob Bowman, who would go on to direct the first X-Files film. In terms of conspiracy plotting, 731 comes around the mid-point of Season 3 and pulls together Scully’s implant from her Duane Barry abduction, the agents’ new informer Mr. X, government medical testing, alien-human hybrids and a switcheroo on “the truth”. Better than most action movies.

14. Pusher (S3, episode 17)

Fairfax Mercy Hospital, Loudoun County, Virginia. Robert Patrick Modell or Pusher is such a unique and fascinating X-Files villain; he has the power of suggestion to the extreme, as in Jedi mind trick levels of forcing people to act in certain ways or even harm themselves with “mere words” to quote our next pick below. So how to catch Modell for more than a dozen murders when he can sway every cop and judge to do his bidding? Well, the denouement is a Russian Roulette battle of the wills with the agents and Pusher and just the one loaded pistol on the table between them. The final minutes are absolutely electric TV.

15. Jose Chung’s From Outer Space (S3, episode 20)

Klass County, Washington. David Duchovny once said that what he liked about Darin Morgan’s scripts was that he seemed to be “trying to destroy the show”. Jose Chung’s self-parody is where he comes closest. From Outer Space is a meta masterpiece that twists and turns in on itself, squishing so many perspectives, storylines, references and easter eggs into a dense but delightful 44 minutes that you simply must rewatch and rewatch this episode. Inspired by Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Jose Chung nods to the Twilight Zone, Close Encounters and previous X-Files episodes while establishing a self-referential comedic strain within the show. As we move through UFO abductions, alien autopsies and military cover-ups, we get genius visual gags, character subversions and take it from us, multiple line readings that have become immortal for fans. If you’re an admirer of this one, listen to Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon wax lyrical about this episode on The X-Files Files podcast.

16. Quagmire (S3, episode 22)

Striker’s Cove, Heuvelmans Lake, Georgia. This Loch Ness meets Jaws episode is gorgeously cosy. Mulder convinces Scully, and her cutie-pie dog Queequeg, to go searching after a couple of missing persons around a lake that’s famous for its mythical sea creature, Big Blue. After encountering a grumpy scientist studying endangered frog species and a hypocritical sheriff who won’t close the lake, Mulder’s desperate to believe the locals’ tourist-friendly humbug and for the gnarly lake killings that follow to be pinned on the cryptozoological sea beast, Scully characteristically less so. Their boat sinks on a late night tour around the lake and the agents are stranded, leading to a lull in which Scully compares Mulder’s search for “the truth” to the monomaniacal Captain Ahab’s search for his white whale. Oh and there’s a lovely last minute twinkle before the credits.

17. Tempus Fugit (S4, episode 17)

Flight 549 Crash Site, Upstate New York. Tempus Fugit brings back abductee sweetheart Max Fenig, who we first met in Season 1’s Fallen Angel. He’s on board a flight that mysteriously goes down in this X-Files twist on the unexplained plane crash. This Season 4 mythology episode proves the potency of this show when the creators keep a tight focus on the sprawling conspiracy. The Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz story features a military whistleblower, nine minutes of missing time and underwater UFO wreckage but it’s Mark Snow’s music, the cinematography and the Bowman-directed action scenes which set it apart. In particular, a runway car chase underneath an aeroplane taking off is pretty special.

18. The End (S5, episode 20)

Vancouver, British Columbia. Don’t let the title fool ya, this wound up being simply another instance of the X-Files being shut down after the Smoking Man torches Mulder’s basement office in the closing scenes of Season 5. Spoiler alert: they’re reopened at the end of the 1998 movie. The End revolves around The X-Files’ standout kid character: Gibson is a psychic 12-year-old boy who beats chess grandmasters and stirs up jealousies between Scully and Mulder’s first FBI partner Diana Fowley. Relatably, though, all Gibson really wants to do is watch cartoons. The Syndicate are interested in his abilities but there’s plenty here about the central thrust of Mulder’s obsessions too. At one point Skinner, by this point a hero in any fan’s eyes, asks Mulder what his end game is. Mulder replies: “Maybe I’ll know when I find it.”

19. Triangle (S6, episode 3)

Sargasso Sea. Season 6 of The X-Files, coming after the film, really goes off the deep end but that means we get experimental gems like Chris Carter’s time travel episode. It’s stitched together to look like four single-take shots - separated by the ad breaks in the original broadcast - and follows Mulder as he boards a ghost ship in the Bermuda Triangle. The 1939 sections feature doppelgängers of Scully, Skinner, CSM and Jeffrey Spender, the latter few as Nazis, in the ship’s balloon-strewn ballroom. Somehow the whole of World War II comes to rest on the fate of the Queen Anne: it’s entertaining dream chaos. Freewheeling Carter deploys split-screen and a big band score as the two Scullys pass each other in the ship’s corridors. And the zoom through FBI headquarters as modern-day Scully tries to locate Mulder is just as thrilling, Much higher rate of smooching than you usually find in an X-Files episode too.

20. One Son (S6, episode 12)

El Rico Air Force Base. It’s funny which images from a long show stick around in your brain. The 1970s Smoking Man, Bill Mulder and co welcoming little grey men into an Air Force hangar, kids and wives at the ready is one for us. And the faceless alien rebels surrounding the Syndicate in an Air Force hangar in the show’s present day is another. Hazmat action, conspiracies within conspiracies, one wrong move away from an alien invasion.. If you’re inclined to want (almost) all the show’s central mysteries thoroughly explained - yes the abductions, the bees, the tests, the black oil vaccines, even Purity Control - this is a must watch episode that stays with you.

Honourable Mentions: Monster of The Week

• Beyond The Sea (S1, ep13) - Silence of The Lambs, Dana Scully redux
• Darkness Falls (S1, ep20) - Eerie forest FTW always
• Tooms (S1, ep21) - Tooms is soooo creepy they brought him back which like, almost never happens
• The Host (S2, ep2) - The sewer-dwelling Flukeman is and will always be iconic
• Irresistible (S2, ep13) - Another inspired human villain in the form of Donny Pfaster
• Die Hand Die Verletzt (S2, ep14) - A Satanic high school cult and Nick Frost’s favourite episode
• War of The Coprophages (S3, ep12) - That one with the killer cockroaches
• Syzygy (S3, ep13) - A fun teen witches story with lots of planetary alignments
• Wetwired (S3, ep23) - Classic X-Files with subliminal mind control via cable TV
• Home (S4, ep2) - Holy shitsnacks, this one is fucked up but remains a fan fave..

• Small Potatoes (S4, ep20) - A silly ep about a shapeshifter who tells Mulder to stop being a loser
• The Post-Modern Prometheus (S5, ep5) - The ve-ery strange black-and-white one about Frankenstein and Cher..
• Chinga (S5, ep10) - Co-written by Stephen King with mixed results
• Kill Switch (S5, ep11) - Co-written by William Gibson with mixed results
• Bad Blood (S5, ep12) - Flirty vampire silliness featuring Luke Wilson in a fab little turn
• Drive (S6, ep2) - Vince Gilligan directing and Bryan Cranston acting in an ace Speed rip-off
• The Rain King (S6, ep8) - A sweet Wizard of Oz-themed rom-com
• Tithonus (S6, ep10) - A crime photographer looks Death in the face - haunting
• Monday (S6, ep14) - A ‘Groundhog Day’ ep set in the middle of a bank heist

• Arcadia (S6, ep15) - The X-Files takes on Stepford suburbia and does not disappoint
• Three of a Kind (S6, ep20) - The Lone Gunmen get let out of the basement
• Field Trip (S6, ep21) - A rare late episode that feels like a classic - with hallucinogenic mushrooms
• Millenium (S7 ep4) - A crossover ep with Chris Carter’s Millenium with a New Year’s smooch for shippers
• Hollywood AD (S7, ep19) - Duchovny’s fun take on the making of a Mulder and Scully movie
• X-Cops (S7, ep12) - Vince Gilligan’s postmodern X-File as Cops episode really works
• Mulder and Scully Meet The Werewolf (S10, ep3) - Darin Morgan once again flips The X-Files concept upside down - chef’s kiss
• The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat (S11, ep4) - A bittersweet, nostalgic alt-finale of sorts, a mind-boggler exploring the Mandela Effect

Honourable Mentions: Mythology

• Fallen Angel (S1, ep10) - Max Fenig, our sweet baby boy
• E.B.E (S1, ep17) - The Conversation eat your heart out and the intro of the Lone Gunmen!
• Little Green Men (S2, ep1) - Mulder goes poking about an old SETI site in Puerto Rico
• One Breath (S2, ep8) - The end of the emotional ‘Duane Barry/ Ascension’ arc finds Scully returned and in a coma
• End Game (S2, ep17) - Following on from Colony, with a Scully kidnap and Samantha clones
• The Blessing Way (S3, ep1) - The mythology opener to a season that’s up there with Season 1
• Paper Clip (S3, ep2) - The agents learn quite a bit about how Mulder’s family has been involved with the Syndicate
• Nisei (S3, ep9) - Alien autopsy - gasp - in this set-up to the action-packed 731 episode

• Talitha Cuma (S3, ep24) - More Mulder family intrigue, this time focusing on Mulder’s mother
• Terma (S4, ep9) - Russian gulags, black oil, it’s all happening for Mulder and Krycek
• Memento Mori (S4, ep14) - A beaut episode on Scully’s cancer and the MUFON women
• Max (S4, ep18) - The follow-on from the A++ S4 plane crash ep Tempus Fugit
• Patient X (S5, ep13) - Back to Skyland Mountain for memorable scenes of fires and faceless aliens
• The Red and the Black (S5, ep14) - This is the Jeffrey Spender, Marita Covarrubius and Well-Manicured Man era
• Two Fathers (S6, ep11) - The first of the Syndicate two-parter with One Son, focusing on the hybrid Cassandra Spender
• Requiem (S7 ep22) - Mulder and Scully return to Bellefleur, Oregon where it all began and Mulder.. is abducted by a UFO?
• The Truth (S9, ep19 & 20) - A hit-and-miss, partly satisfying two-part finale taking in the secrets of Anasazi, Super Soldiers and a show trial

Which episodes to skip...

• Space (S1, ep9)
• 3 (S2, ep7)
• Fearful Symmetry (S2, ep18)
• Soft Light (S2, ep23)
• Teso dos Bichos (S3, ep18)
• Hell Money (S3, ep19)
• Teliko (S4, ep3)
• The Field Where I Died (S4, ep5)
• Alpha (S6, ep16)
• The Unnatural (S6, ep19)
• First Person Shooter (S7, ep13)
• All Things (S7, ep17)
• Fight Club (S7, ep20)
• Most of Seasons 8 and 9
• The X-Files: I Want To Believe (2008)
• My Struggle episodes of Seasons 10 and 11

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