"Loin Like a Hunting Flame" featured guest appearances by William Lucking, Hrothgar Mathews and Harriet Sansom Harris.
The Millennium Group dispatches profilers Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) and Maureen Murphy (Harriet Sansom Harris) to aid the investigation.
Detective Thomas (William Lucking) feels uncomfortable working with Murphy, believing that women do not understand male sex offenders.
Meanwhile, the investigation has found traces of the drug in the other victims, with Black believing that the killer not only has access to it through his occupation but is likely consuming it himself while committing his crimes in order to readily act on his sexual fantasies.
Later, Detective Thomas tells Black that he really has no problem with Murphy—his true issue with the case is his own past, as his prior investigations of sex offenses left him unable to be intimate with his wife and lead to their divorce.
"Loin Like a Hunting Flame" was first broadcast in North America on the Fox Network on January 31, 1997;[7] and earned a Nielsen rating of 8, meaning that roughly 8 percent of all television-equipped households were tuned in to the episode.
Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated the episode two-and-a-half stars out of five, finding Mann's writing to lack tension and imagination.
[10] Bill Gibron, writing for DVD Talk, rated "Loin Like a Hunting Flame" 4 out of 5, describing it as being "handled in a subtle, somber manner".
Gibron felt that "the events unfold in this episode evenly and eerily", and it serves as an example of "what could have been done had the show's focus, both literally and metaphysically, remained on crime".
She also felt that "Loin Like a Hunting Flame" served as a prominent example of Millennium's "social conservatism", noting that it seems "fairly closed-off from other points-of-view" than that of the character Frank Black.