The X-Files - The Complete Fourth Season
In season four,The X-Filescontinued to expand the  breadth and complexity of the mythology established in the previous two  seasons while developing a deeper, romantically ambiguous relationship  between its photogenic leads, FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder (David  Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). New players such as  United Nations official Marita Covarrubias and virus-carrying bees  joined familiar faces like Cigarette Smoking Man, Alex Krycek, the  blockheaded Alien Bounty Hunters, and the Consortium in the growing  cast of a global struggle involving multiple factions of alien forces.  It was a season in which Mulder and Scully seemed to lose ground to the  global forces surrounding them, in which Mulder was infected with the  black oil and Scully discovered she had cancer. With even the loyalties  of Assistant Director Skinner and Mulder's mother in doubt, Mulder and  Scully learned to trust only each other in their pursuit of the  truth.The show also continued to take breaks from the dizzying, heavy  mythology to serve up standalone episodes with the show's unusual blend  of sophisticated humor and creepy paranormal explorations. In "Musings  of a Cigarette Smoking Man," the show parodied the scope of the  public's conspiracy paranoia, implying that Cigarette Smoking Man was  involved in everything from JFK's assassination to the Buffalo Bills'  four straight losses in the Super Bowl. The three previous seasons had  not exhausted the list of popular paranormal phenomena to tackle, and  season four covered a wide range of topics from invisibility  ("Unrequited"), past lives ("The Field Where I Died"), and inbreeding  ("Home") to shape-shifting ("Small Potatoes") and golems ("Kaddish").The X-Filesproved, again, to be that rare science-fiction show  that could both frighten and touch its audience, telling intelligent  stories that resonated with the skeptic in each of us, all the while  sprinkling in a few laughs.--Eugene Wei