Introduction:

Six years after the events of The X-Files series finale, former FBI agent Doctor Dana Scully is now a staff physician at Our Lady of Sorrows, a Catholic hospital, and treating a young boy named Christian who has Sandhoff disease, a terminal brain condition. FBI agent Drummy arrives to ask Scully’s help in locating Fox Mulder, the fugitive former head of the X-Files division, and says that the FBI will call off its manhunt for him if he will help investigate the disappearances of several women, including young FBI agent Monica Bannan. Scully agrees and convinces Mulder—who is living in a nearby small home, bearded and clipping newspaper articles about the paranormal—to help, despite Mulder’s initial misgivings that this is an FBI trick to capture him.

The duo is taken to Washington, D.C., where Agent Dakota Whitney wants Mulder’s expertise with the paranormal as they have been led to a clue by Father Joseph (Joe) Fitzgerald Crissman, a priest defrocked for pedophilia who claims God is sending him visions of the crimes. Mulder wants to believe the man, but Scully is disgusted by Father Joe’s past and disregards his “visions”.

Whitney and Drummy take Father Joe and Mulder to the kidnapped Bannan’s home, where the former priest overcomes the others’ skepticism when, in anguish and on his knees in pain, he begins bleeding from the eyes. A second woman, driving home after swimming in a natatorium, is run off the road by Janke Dacyshyn, a snowplow driver who then smashes the window of her wrecked car and abducts her.

The following morning, Scully and Mulder, in bed together and briefly mentioning “our son” (the otherwise unmentioned William, birthed by Scully in the television series), discuss both the FBI case and that of Scully’s patient. Scully mentions that the severed arm found by the FBI contains traces of acepromazine, an animal tranquilizer. This new clue energizes Mulder into pursuing the FBI case further. He shaves his beard and leaves to visit Whitney. Father Joe is recruited for help with the second abducted woman. After a grueling nighttime search in the snow, he leads the FBI to what turns out to be a frozen burial ground of people and body parts. Scully is frustrated by Mulder’s seeming obsession with finding these women, telling him that his sister is dead no matter what he does. Mulder pushes on, trying to ignore her. Father Joe then tells Scully, “don’t give up.”