“Aubrey” is one of the strongest episodes of the second season and often anticipates the aesthetic of both Mindhunter and Hannibal. Interestingly, it touches on an intersection between the paranormal and police procedure that the series hasn’t really addressed yet – the recourse to psychics to help with the location of bodies. Perhaps this was too banal, or too absorbed into normal investigative work, for The X-Files before this point in time. Certainly, “Aubrey” feels the need to supplement it with the arcane texture of UFOs to achieve the requisite amount of strangeness. The plot revolves around Betty June “B.J.” Morrow, a small town policewoman played by Deborah Strang, who has a vision of the location of a corpse, intercut with bright bursts of light constellating the sky.

It turns out that the victim is Tim Ledbetter, an FBI agent who went missing in 1942, right when he was on the cusp of cementing his theory of “stranger killings” or serial killing. Ledbetter is a John Douglas-like character, and during his autopsy (the corpse is a skeleton by this stage), Mulder reads from his casebook, which contains Mindhunter-like speculations on whether “stranger killers” are a product of nature or nuture. Aubrey thus leans into the deep history of the 90s arcane, imagining Ledbetter as a figure who might have put us forward a couple of decades in our understanding of serial killing if he hadn’t been murdered himself.

The prehistory of the 90s and the mid-90s come together when a killer starts operating with the same modus operandi as Ledbetter’s murderer. Between this killer and Betty’s psychic visions, which continue to escalate, Mulder and Scully find themselves faced with one version of the fundamental question of the series – how do we situate the networked 90s within a broader historical context, given that it seems to represent such a radical departure from history as we understand it? Scully offers cryptamnesia as a possibility, suggesting that Betty may have seen the images of the crime scene when her policeman father was investigating Ledbetter’s disappearance, although Mulder is sceptical of this “genetic memory” possibility: “I don’t think Mendel had serial killers in mind when he formulated his theories.” Like so many other mid-90s investigators, the agents also turn to the copycat as a figure for contemplating and periodising serial killer discourse, momentarily wondering whether an insider at the police station might have been inspired by the discovery of Ledbetter’s body.

In a terrific twist, it turns out that Betty is actually the grand-daughter of the serial killer, meaning that the visions that seem to be assailing her from the ether are also coming from deep inside. Inner and outer space are fused, as so often occurs in the series, and serial killing becomes a semi-heritable trait, albeit one operating just below the level of conscious awareness, like the sphere and triangle that Betty sees in one of her visions, which Mulder eventually links to the Trylon and Perisphere that the original killer gazed up at at the New York World’s Fair in 1939-1940.

There’s also a particularly flirtatious subtext to “Aubrey”, as if dwelling on the deep past only intensifies the precious sensuality of the present. Mulder makes a lewd joke about Betty’s nickname “BJ,” Scully invokes her “women’s intuition” to discern that Betty is having an affair with her superior, played by Terry O’Quinn, and at one point His Girl Friday is playing on a television in the background, taking us back to the media ecology of the original victim but also contouring Mulder and Scully’s professional romance. This playful focus on their gendered selves intersects with a specific subgenre of forensic fascination at this moment in time – the relationship between bones and digital technology, between nicks and notches and ethereal computer imaging. In that sense, “Aubrey” feels like a distant precursor to Bones in its fixation on how to “read” a body when all the flesh and organs have gone. We see something of the perkier, flirtier rapport between later iterations of the forensic couple here too, most memorably when Mulder and Scully hunch over a late-night computer (normally Scully’s personal province) trading zingers about male and female ribcages.