In which episode do Mulder and Scully share their first on-screen kiss?

Mulder and Scully share their first on-screen kiss in “Millennium,” a seventh-season episode of The X-Files. The kiss occurs during the episode’s New Year’s Eve climax, when the agents confront a zombie outbreak and try to survive the approaching millennium.

The moment was deliberately designed as a payoff to the pair’s long-running romantic tension. Earlier stories had included near-kisses, mistaken identities, dream sequences, and the briefest contact in the 1998 feature film, but “Millennium” delivered their first actual kiss as themselves.

The episode also serves as a crossover and partial conclusion for Millennium, another series created by Chris Carter. Its story brings profiler Frank Black back into the X-Files universe after Millennium was cancelled. That connection sometimes distracts from the episode’s romantic significance, which became one of its most remembered scenes.

A common mix-up is “Triangle,” where Mulder kisses a woman resembling Scully, or the first X-Files film, where a bee interrupts an almost-kiss. Neither is the canonical first on-screen kiss between Mulder and Scully.