The WORST episodes of The X-Files
Every episode of The X-Files ever, ranked from worst to best by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The worst episodes of The X-Files!
`The truth is out there,' and FBI agents Scully and Mulder seek it in this sci-fi phenomenon about their quest to explain the seemingly unexplainable. Their strange cases include UFO sightings, alien abductions and just about anything else paranormal.
#1 - First Person Shooter
Season 7 - Episode 13 - Aired 2/27/2000
The Lone Gunmen call Mulder and Scully to a virtual reality development lab where they learn that one of the program testers was killed inside the computer generated game environment by the digital image of a woman. Needing to get his yah-yah's, Mulder enters the game to fight the woman, but Scully must step in to save him.
#2 - Fight Club
Season 7 - Episode 20 - Aired 5/7/2000
Mulder and Scully cross paths with two women who are identical and have followed each other across 17 states in the last three years, causing chaos and mayhem wherever they are.
#3 - Signs & Wonders
Season 7 - Episode 9 - Aired 1/23/2000
Snakes are killing the unrighteous, but Mulder and Scully doubt that this is a case of divine intervention.
#4 - Teso Dos Bichos
Season 3 - Episode 18 - Aired 3/8/1996
The unearthing of an ancient Ecuadorian Amaru urn and its removal to America despite protests leads to a series of deaths linked to a shaman spirit released by the urn.
#5 - All Things
Season 7 - Episode 17 - Aired 4/9/2000
A series of coincidences leads Scully to a married man she had an affair with during medical school but left him to protect his family.
#6 - Excelsis Dei
Season 2 - Episode 11 - Aired 12/16/1994
Mulder and Scully uncover strange occurrences in an elderly care home when one of the nurses is attacked by an unseen force she claims to be one of the 90 year old residents.
#7 - The Field Where I Died
Season 4 - Episode 5 - Aired 11/3/1996
After an FBI raid on a doomsday cult called the "Temple of the Seven Stars", Mulder meets Melissa, a cultist who claims to have known him in a previous life during the American Civil War. Scully believes the woman is a delusional schizophrenic, but Mulder allows himself to be drawn into her fantasies.
#8 - Alpha
Season 6 - Episode 16 - Aired 3/28/1999
A mysterious dog thought to be the last of a rare Asian breed is responsible for several murders which Mulder and Scully are investigating. Now the agents have to find a way to stop the dog before it kills again.
#9 - Space
Season 1 - Episode 9 - Aired 11/12/1993
A mysterious force is sabotaging a space launch program, which leads directly back to the commander of the team who once led a mission to Mars and claimed to have seen an alien in space.
#10 - Babylon
Season 10 - Episode 5 - Aired 2/15/2016
An art gallery that's showing potentially offensive artwork is bombed, and Mulder and Scully try to communicate with the comatose bomber to prevent a future attack. A pair of younger FBI agents on the case push Mulder and Scully to examine their own beliefs.
#11 - Kaddish
Season 4 - Episode 15 - Aired 2/16/1997
Issac Luria, a Jewish man, is killed by a group of teenagers working for a racist shop owner, but one of them is soon strangled to death, and the fingerprints on his neck are from Issac. Despite other factors, Mulder becomes convinced that the man has returned from the dead to exact revenge.
#12 - Travelers
Season 5 - Episode 15 - Aired 3/29/1998
In 1990 Agent Fox Mulder visits an aging FBI Agent named Arthur Dales. He listens to a story of the agents assigned to a would-be X-File in the Cold War era of the 1950's and how Mulder's father was connected to a series of strange deaths.
#13 - El Mundo Gira
Season 4 - Episode 11 - Aired 1/12/1997
A strange yellow rain kills a migrant girl, and her family believes that a mythical creature was the cause and has manifested itself inside the brother of her fiancé, who has since disappeared.
#14 - Teliko
Season 4 - Episode 3 - Aired 10/18/1996
After several African-American men are killed and the color is drained from their skin, Mulder learns about the Teliko, an African folktale about a creature who must suck the pigmentation from a persons body in order to survive.
#15 - Schizogeny
Season 5 - Episode 9 - Aired 1/11/1998
A therapist working with children from abusive families is found to be implanting them with the memories of her own abuse suffered at the hands of her late father, when one of her patients tries to kill his stepfather.
#16 - Surekill
Season 8 - Episode 8 - Aired 1/7/2001
When a real estate agent is shot inside a prison cell by someone who apparently fired from the roof, Scully and Doggett track him to two exterminators, one of whom has x-ray vision.
#17 - Nothing Lasts Forever
Season 11 - Episode 9 - Aired 3/14/2018
While investigating human organ theft, Mulder and Scully uncover a mysterious cult consumed with macabre rituals.
#18 - Aubrey
Season 2 - Episode 12 - Aired 1/6/1995
When a detective mysteriously uncovers the remains of an FBI agent who disappeared in the 1940s while investigating a similar murder case to one she is now on, Mulder and Scully believe that the original killer had passed his genetic trait of violence to his grandchild.
#19 - All Souls
Season 5 - Episode 17 - Aired 4/26/1998
Scully faces her Catholic faith and the loss of her daughter Emily when she is asked to help a family whose adopted daughter was found dead in a position that looked like she was struck down by God himself.
#20 - Fearful Symmetry
Season 2 - Episode 18 - Aired 2/24/1995
Mulder and Scully investigate strange attacks from invisible animals inside a zoo which is near a known UFO hot spot.
#21 - Empedocles
Season 8 - Episode 17 - Aired 4/15/2001
Special Agent Reyes enlists Mulder's help in investigating a supernatural killer's connection to the unsolved murder of Doggett's son.
#22 - Hollywood A.D.
Season 7 - Episode 19 - Aired 4/30/2000
Mulder and Scully watch a movie with themselves as characters and are thoroughly disgusted at how they and their case are portrayed on the big screen. They recount how 18 months earlier they were followed around by a Hollywood producer while investigating a case concerning The Lazarus Bowl—a mythical piece of pottery reputed to have inscribed on it the words that Jesus Christ spoke when he raised Lazarus from the dead.
#23 - The Rain King
Season 6 - Episode 8 - Aired 1/10/1999
Strange weather phenomena in a small town leads Mulder to believe that a weatherman's deep emotions and unspoken love toward his workmate are becoming real in the form of snow and tornadoes.
#24 - Hell Money
Season 3 - Episode 19 - Aired 3/29/1996
The deaths of several Chinese men found to be missing vital internal organs that were removed prior to death leads Mulder and Scully to a deadly Chinatown lottery where men wager their body parts for a chance to win a cash jackpot.
#25 - 3
Season 2 - Episode 7 - Aired 11/4/1994
Mulder, back on the X-Files but alone for the first time, investigates a series of vampire-like murders in Los Angeles and finds himself falling for the one woman that may be the prime suspect.