S7E12 · X-Cops

The episode begins with the Cops intro before cutting to Keith Wetzel (Judson Mills), a deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. He and the Cops film crew are in Willow Park, California, a fictitious high-crime district of Los Angeles. Mrs. Guererro (Perla Walter) reports a monster in her neighborhood. Wetzel investigates, expecting to find a dog, but whatever he finds causes him to scream and flee. Wetzel and the film crew run back to Wetzel's police car, but whatever Wetzel saw flips the car over. Wetzel later claims to have encountered and been attacked by gang members.

Police soon surround Mulder and Scully, believing them to be criminals, but soon discover they are FBI agents investigating an alleged fatal werewolf attack during the last full moon. Mulder and Scully interview Mrs. Guerrero, who describes the monster to a sketch artist. To Mulder's surprise, she describes not a werewolf, but the horror movie villain Freddy Krueger.

Ricky, the sketch artist, is found murdered nearby shortly afterward. A broken pink fingernail at the scene leads Mulder and Scully to a local prostitute, Chantara. When the agents track down Chantara, whose face is pixelated, she claims that her pimp attacked Ricky and fears that he will kill her next. She pleads with the agents for protection. Mulder and Scully have Wetzel guard Chantara while they assist police in the raid of a crack house. The two are drawn back outside when Wetzel again encounters the entity, wildly shooting at it. Inside a police car, the agents find Chantara with her neck broken.

When Mulder questions Wetzel, he admits that he thought he saw the "wasp man", a monster his older brother told him about when he was a kid. Though other deputies express skepticism, an officer finds flattened bullets; indicating they physically impacted something, though no trace is found of what they struck. Mulder formulates a theory that the entity changes its form to correspond with its victims' worst fears. Wetzel, Ricky and Chantara all expressed fear shortly before their run-ins with the entity; it was visible to them, but not to others.

The agents think that Steve and Edy, a gay couple, may be the entity's next target because they were in the vicinity of Ricky's attack. They head to their house, only to find the couple in the middle of an argument. After Edy expresses fear of a separation from Steve, the couple reconciles. Based on this situation, Mulder proposes that the entity ignored Steve and Edy because they did not exhibit mortal fear.

Mulder believes that the entity travels from victim to victim like a contagion. At his request, Scully performs an autopsy on Chantara's body at the morgue. During the procedure, a conversation between Scully and the coroner's assistant (Tara Karsian) causes the latter to panic about a hantavirus outbreak. The entity suddenly kills her with the disease. When Mulder discusses the death with Scully, he realizes that Wetzel is in danger of being revisited by the entity. The agents and police return to the crack house, where the entity has trapped an injured Wetzel in an upstairs room. The agents are unable to enter the room until the morning comes when the entity disappears and spares Wetzel's life.