In narrative terms X-files has been an astounding failure so far; twenty-something episodes, nearly twenty hours of narrative time, and we basically know that Mulder lost his sister and wants to believe, and Scully lost her father and is sceptical.
It boggles the mind that we're only at around this time beginning to know a third character outside the two with any dimension at all, Skinner.
It boggles the mind that in place of sketching a broader world for the main couple, we've chased around the dumbest monsters for episode after episode. That Scully keeps asserting logical explanations in spite of the many encounters she's had, that we've seen vampires, ghosts, werewolves and alien hybrids and the show hilariously still tries to entertain some ambiguity.
Here, perhaps for the first time we have something of what the show may have been in capable hands. It's all in the prologue—a baffling disappearance and discovery, with someone watching from behind a mirror, responsible for some part of it but we're not sure which. I don't mind that we go on to stitch on that the usual 'secret experiment' and 'government cover-up' plots, because pieces of the larger narrative just fall from the sky as in a film noir.
But we actually seen nothing extraordinary, we are small pawns tossed about in a larger game of control. Hints of broader mystery. Why was the man watching, filming? This is never addressed in its sexual dimension, which only adds. Both leads in the show are so asexual, it is something they'd overlook. It is a powerful causality outside the detective plot, the disappearances linked to secret experiments linked to secret watching each one generating the next level because there is so much pent-up energy in the gears of this world.