The show centers on FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files.

In this episode, Mulder and Scully are called in to investigate the unexplained deaths of several African and African-American people whose skin color has turned white as the result of either a rare medical disorder or a bizarre curse.

The episode features the second appearance by Laurie Holden as Marita Covarrubias, following her debut in the fourth-season premiere "Herrenvolk".

Before the plane lands in the United States, a flight attendant discovers the victim in the bathroom, devoid of his skin pigmentation.

Three months later, Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) calls in Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and informs her that four African American men have been kidnapped in Philadelphia.

Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) joins Scully and has some of the evidence samples from Sanders' autopsy analyzed by Agent Pendrell, who finds a seed from a rare West African passionflower.

Meanwhile, Samuel Aboah (Willie Amakye), an African immigrant who is seeking citizenship, attacks a young black man while he is waiting for a bus, kidnapping him.

A policeman finds Duff and requests an ambulance, and the police tell Mulder and Scully that they are sweeping the area for Aboah.

The agents stop at a demolition site after Mulder remembers that Pendrell found asbestos fibers on Sanders' body.

Scully, having heard Mulder's shouts for help, tracks him in the duct and is able to get him out, finding the depigmented bodies of the other victims.

She muses that Aboah's condition and survival may be discovered by science, but humans have a fear of an alien among them which causes them to "deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate".

Series creator Chris Carter approved the storyline, but the first draft of the script was met with disapproval by the writing staff, and the story was restructured and rewritten.

[4] This phrase is first spoken by Scully in conversation with Mulder after the post mortem on Owen Sanders, the fourth missing man.

Mulder later throws the same phrase back at her in frustration as he leaves the Mt Zion Medical Center (where Aboah has been examined) to meet Diabra, the Burkinabe diplomat.

[6] Fellow writer John Shiban suggested that the Teliko emerge from the country of Burkina Faso based on his former job of programming foreign air-mail rates for a computer software company.

[8] What sustains The X-Files' imagining of otherness is not merely the strangeness of the esoteric, but its coding as opposed to the Law and to civic order.

[12] Martin cites Mulder's joke about Michael Jackson as a self-aware comment on "another contemporary white negro" which reinforces a stereotype.

[14] Dean Kowalski agreed with the analysis in The Philosophy of The X-Files, commenting that one of the main themes of the episodes revolved around science's attempt to explain folk theories and paranormal phenomena.