While the grand narrative of Scully’s abduction produced a distinct mystery all of its own this mystery was singular in its focus – what happened to her? With Scully back in full gear as an FBI agent, “Red Museum” returns to the overdetermined opacity of the first season, by way of a narrative that is genuinely difficult to follow, but in an exhilarating way, evoking as it does an unfathomable complexity and informational sublime. This narrative, which requires a formal summative explanation from Scully by the end, operates associatively, by way of an intensifying series of free-floating images, rather than according to the linear logic that characterises the Scully abduction arc.

You see this associative arcana in the cold open, one of the best to date, which takes us through a 90s occult metonymy, a chain of obscure yet related “happenings” – a figure walking through an abbatoir, a drug deal on television, a man watching a private bathroom through an unseen keyhole and finally the disappearance of a teenager, who turns up again a day later with “He is one, she is one,” written on his back. This commences a suite of episodes that are particularly preoccupied with the role of children in this arcane 90s sphere and seems to be gesturing towards the murders at Robin Hood Hills in particular. From a 2020s vantage point these crimes seem tragically banal, the likeliest explanation being that a stepfather accidentally beat his stepson to death and killed his two best friends to remove any witnesses. Yet in the 90s that banality was unthinkable and the case was instead invested with every possible figment of the arcane that the media, participants and broader public could imagine.

Something of that insatiable taste for the strange percolates throughout “Red Museum,” which revolves around a vegetarian church in the midst of “cow country” that frames itself as “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, eighteen years from the beginning of the new kingdom.” Mulder and Scully first encounter the church as its pastor is giving a trance-like invocation, while another member touch types his words onto a computer. The agents soon learn that the church believe in “walk-ins” – enlightened spirits who inhabit receptive souls – while contending with the possibility that a bovine growth hormone is causing local adolescents to descend into fits of uncontrollable rage. Add a pile of videotapes found in the interstices of a local house and you have one of the most overdetermined and figuratively dense episodes in the series so far – a synecdoche for the aesthetic palette of the entire series itself.

As with “Firewalker,” the complexity of the episode remains open-ended but tends towards a more emphatic sense of government conspiracy in the wake of Scully’s abduction. The episode gradually converges on the threshold between the legal system and religious rights, especially for new American religious movements that haven’t yet differentiated themselves from cults. This is mirrored in the thresholds that the vegetarian church has erected around itself, as when its leader Odin informs Mulder and Scully that as meat-eaters they cannot enter his house, whatever their FBI credentials might supposedly empower them to do. These reticulated thresholds occasionally give “Red Museum” the metonymic sprawl of a class action narrative, so it makes sense when we move away from the initial suggestion that the church are bovine growth hormone as part of their vegetarian activism, to the suggestion that the government are feeding these same children alien DNA through meat, disguising it as bovine growth hormone and using the vegetarian church as their control group.

This takes the episode one step beyond the ambit of even the most complex narratives of the first season. The catalyst comes in the form of a salt-of-the-earth farmer who responds to Mulder’s reassurances that the bovine growth hormone is safe for consumption with an incredulous retort: “Says who – the government?” Scepticism of governmental agendas and belief in conspiracy has turned into a new form of common sense here, and so the episode ends with this same farmer looking out his car window on Main Street as the camera pulls back to the long shots that signify open-endedness at the end of episodes, and Scully’s voiceover notes that the case remains unsolved. Like “Firewalker,” “Red Museum” also ends with a quarantine, reminding us of the government’s need to spatially contain the very open-endedness for which the series aesthetically and ideologically stands.