Sometimes The X-Files edges towards absurdity but that’s a key part of its restless quest for the arcane. “Fearful Symmetry” is one of those episodes that seems to be quite disliked in the fan community but for me splits the difference between the absurd and arcane perfectly. It opens with one of the most powerful summations of the series’ networked aesthetic, in the form of two discrete but related events. First, a series of shudders and shock waves ripple through a small town, and actually crush a man to death, without any visible cause. Second a truck comes face to face with an elephant on a backroad in Middle America, evoking the exotic conjunctions of a fully globalised world.

From here, the agents deduce that the animals in a nearby zoo are somehow dematerialising and causing havoc in the nearby town and farmland. The animals are like digital natives housed in a physical zoo, continually involuting the distinction between real and virtual space. The latter is usually equated by the series with the inner space of Scully’s autopsies; here, she has her most cosmic autopsy yet, standing in the body cavity of an elephant before shifting to minute microscopic examination of its tissue. In a harbinger of found footage horror, cameras become a point of transition between these real and virtual realms, and the main way that the animals mediate their different selves. At one point, the zoo camera seems to stimulate an invisible lion to break free even as this same footage testifies that it is no longer in the physical plane.

That would be an interesting enough premise in itself but “Fearful Symmetry” wraps this real-virtual threshold in an extra level of the arcane. It turns out that the zoo is close to a UFO hotspot and that reports of alien abduction and insemination are rife, leading Mulder and Scully to speculate that these extra-terrestrials are compiling a kind of zoo of their own, cataloguing terrestrial species for their own scientific purposes. The slippage between real and virtual space thereby becomes a slippage between human and alien space, as the extra-terrestrials end up depositing the animals back a couple of miles from where they dematerialised and abducted them. In other words, this is another episode that juxtaposes two spatial schemes as a way of making sense of a networked world. The enduring question is what “fearful symmetry” we might make between these two spatial schemes, and which is most beneficial to humankind – or, as the agents speculate in ths closing scene, whether our own survival might depend upon this alien conservatorship of biodiversity.