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.
The X-Files is one of the divisions in the FBI, devoted to unsolved cases that appear to have some unexplained, paranormal elements. The files take their name from the filing cabinet where they were kept - originally filed under U for unsolved, they grew too big for the drawer and were moved to the less populated X cabinet. Soon, the X-Files became a dumping ground for reporting of UFOs, alien abductions, and other arcana that the FBI didn't want to investigate or didn't believe in.
Fox Mulder, a serial-hugger specialist and a believer in paranormal phenomena ever since, as a child, he witnessed the abduction of his younger sister, requested to be transfered to the forgotten basement and began to ruffle a few feathers in the Bureau. Eventually, he was assigned a partner - the skeptical and scientific Dana Scully, who was assigned to discredit Mulder's works.
Instead of discrediting him, however, Scully slowly became Mulder's ally. The pair began to investigate cases that no one else wanted to touch and that couldn't be solved.