Forensic profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen), a member of the private investigative organisation Millennium Group, is following the trail of a murderous couple who are trying to track down a child that had been sold to another family.
Twenty-year-old Maddie Haskel (Heather McComb) attends her mother's funeral in Joplin, Missouri, and returns to the family home afterwards.
There, Jim Gilroy (John Pyper-Ferguson) attempts to rape Haskel, but is beaten unconscious by her boyfriend, Bobby Webber (Jeffrey Donovan).
[5] Guest star Steve Makaj, who played one of the state troopers in the episode, would have a minor recurring role in The X-Files as assassin Scott Ostelhoff.
[9] "The Wild and the Innocent" was first broadcast on the Fox Network on January 10, 1997;[10] and earned a Nielsen rating of 7.1, meaning that roughly 7,1 percent of all television-equipped households were tuned in to the episode.
[13] Bill Gibron, writing for DVD Talk, rated the episode 1 out of 5, describing it as "irritating, poorly cast and terribly written".
Gibron felt that the episode's setting "reduces Millennium to a ridiculous movie of the week", adding that the voice-over narration makes it "a chore to sit through".
[14] 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 three stars out of five, describing it as "a quirky failure".
Shearman and Pearson felt that "The Wild and the Innocent" was a "curious mix of the cloyingly sentimental and the unremittingly bleak", finding similarities to the works of Cormac McCarthy; however, they felt that it did not work well as an episode of Millennium, finding the minimal involvement of the series' main characters and the distinct difference in setting to detract from the episode as a whole.