A convict in Mississippi is reprimanded by a dictatorial warden, who puts the convict in a solitary confinement box located outside during a huge storm in which several tornadoes touch down. When the storm subsides, the box has been destroyed, but its former occupant has escaped and wreaks havoc on those that wronged him. Mulder and Scully try to figure out his next move and how the convict is able to move through seemingly impassable barriers.
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.