After the obituaries of four identical men are e-mailed to Mulder, the agents are contacted by a shadowy CIA agent who tells them about a bounty hunter sent to wipe out the beginning of a colony of clones. Meanwhile Mulder is distracted by the sudden reappearance of his sister Samantha.

The alien bounty hunter kidnaps Scully and wants to trade her for Mulder's sister, who is revealed to be a clone herself. After the trade goes badly and Mulder discovers the truth about Samantha, he tracks the bounty hunter to his ship buried in the arctic ice and demands the whereabouts of his real sister.

Mulder receives an encrypted computer disk containing the defense department's top secret files on extraterrestrial life and becomes a target. Scully takes him to a Navajo family that unearthed a buried secret to decipher the disk.

Scully finds her career with the FBI in jeopardy as Mulder is still missing and the Cigarette Smoking Man is pursuing the stolen files. The Navajo elders find Mulder's body in a cave and perform an ancient ceremony to call the spirit back to the empty vessel.

After his mother suffers a stroke under strange circumstances, Mulder searches for a strange, benevolent alien man that possesses miraculous healing powers. With the help from Mr. X, he learns about the involvement of the Cigarette-Smoking Man and uncovers some secrets kept by his parents.

The Cigarette-Smoking Man reveals all the government secrets from the past 50 years in order for his son, Jeffery Spender, to join him in his work. Mulder learns that the final stage of the conspiracy will soon begin with the hybridization of the Syndicate members, and he must stop it from happening. Agent Spender deceives his father and arranges for Mulder and Scully to be reassigned to the X-Files, which doesn't sit too well with the Cigarette-Smoking Man.