Vol 2: Conduit, Squeeze. Rating: B

Some friends of mine have a cat called Spooky. They got him from a cat rescue and for the first three months he wouldn't come out his box in the cupboard under the stairs. If you were lucky and peered in with a torch, you could sometimes just make out a single shining eye staring back at you from the inky blackness. Even today, although he'll tentatively come allow himself to be made a fuss of, the slightest sudden movement will send him straight back under the stairs.

The reason I mention this isn't just for a bit of colourful background, or because it's more interesting than any of Thc X-Files' basic plotlines, but because sometimes, even in the face of fairly solid evidence (disappearing Whiskas, miaowing sounds, cat poo in the hallway), people openly doubted whether he existed at all, and that's the situation Spooky's namesake, FBI Agent "Spooky" Mulder, finds himself in in The X-Files.

The FBI has dumped Mulder in a dingy basement office so he can harmlessly pursue his obsession with the eponymous X-Files: FBI files on strange happenings which can't be explained by conventional scientific theory. Accompanying him Agent Dana Scully, a hard-faced-but-cute college girl who goes to bed with all her make-up on, takes showers at the first sign of impending crucial plot revelations and has the kind of big, round eyes that are absolutely ideal for looking credulous and stupid with.

Mulder (catchphrase: "Then you explain to me") drags Scully around for most of the duration of these four episodes, gradually dispelling her hard-bitten FBI cynicism with irrefutable, sometimes first-hand evidence of flying saucers, ETs and strange creatures who can dislocate their limbs at will, only to have the two-dimensionally dim Scully forget it all ten minutes later and revert to "But surely there's a rational explanation for this seven-armed purple corpse in my bathroom?" - seemingly to emphasise her role as a bit of gratuitous sexual chemistry for the sincere-yet-dreamily-hunky Fox, (Interestingly, the pilot show shows Scully as a more fresh-faced kind of gal, but by the first proper episode she's had a power hairdo and Nancy Reagan-style makeover - presumably so she can shake her hair down saucily at a later date for some snog-tension-relieving action.)

Luckily, the stories rescue things somewhat. The actual plot construction is laughably shoddy (high-security airbases infiltrated by, er, crawling through a hole in the fence, phone taps given away by a loud continuous clicking noise on the line, even the classic "mysterious stranger who appears from nowhere to divulge top-secret information when all seems lost" gambit last seen in Oliver Stone's JFK), but the tales do twist and turn satisfyingly so that just when you think you know what's coming, you're thrown off track (the last episode here, "Conduit," has some particularly inspired moments where a small child is collecting data through aTV tuned to Interference); you'll find yourself resolving to put up with the niggly bits just to see what happens next.