"Herrenvolk" featured guest appearances by Roy Thinnes and Brian Thompson, and introduced Laurie Holden as recurring character Marita Covarrubias.

FBI special agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) is shown more evidence of his sister's abduction by the mysterious Jeremiah Smith (Thinnes) and makes a desperate attempt to rescue her, whilst being pursued by the Alien Bounty Hunter.

The episode featured scenes filmed using swarms of bees, which caused problems due to the difficulty of taming and directing the animals.

Five identical boys approach and watch as the lineman adversely reacts to the sting, causing him to fall to the ground and die.

At a remote industrial site, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Jeremiah Smith (Roy Thinnes) are approached by the Alien Bounty Hunter (Brian Thompson).

Smith takes Mulder to a mysterious field where they find a group of identical children; the girls all resemble Samantha at the age when she was abducted.

As he corners them in a large bee hive, the Bounty Hunter is crushed and stung repeatedly in a trap set up by the trio.

The letters lead Mulder to Marita Covarrubias (Laurie Holden), the assistant to the Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations.

Covarrubias tells Mulder that the fields in Canada have been abandoned but shows him a picture of the drone children tending to the shrubs.

[1] The appearance of Samantha Mulder, this time as a clone of her from when she was still a little girl, was due to series creator Chris Carter's desire to bring her back.

The writers felt that they could only do so much with the character and decided that they would either make him a bigger player on the show, or have him pay the price for collaborating with Fox Mulder.

[3] Director R. W. Goodwin has noted that he is responsible for directing the episodes that featured the deaths of X, Deep Throat, Mulder's father, and Scully's sister.

[3] The cold open for the episode, with multiple cloned boys, was achieved with motion control photography, allowing for two children to play all five of the clones; multiple takes were recorded with the boys in different positions, and with the camera controlled by a computer to follow exactly the same motions for each take, these could be seamlessly composited together.

[4] During the production of "Herrenvolk", Carter had already begun the pre-production phases of the series' feature film adaptation, which would be released in 1998.

It was noted that the episode "makes good use of locations", and the ambiguous resolution to Jeremiah Smith's plot arc was seen as a positive, as it "opens the door to all sorts of provocative potentialities".