An eight-year-old girl named Teena Simmons is witness to her father's murder by bloodletting, but remembers no details of the crime. Mulder compares the details of the father's death - rapid draining of blood with no traces, puncture wounds in the neck, no memory from witnesses - to cases of cow mutilation, drawing a potential connection to UFO's. Mulder and Scully travel to Greenwich, Connecticut to interview Teena, who talks about seeing red lightning and "men from the clouds" that wanted to hurt her father. The agents then get a call about an incident near San Fransisco involving a father named Doug Rearden, also killed in front of his daughter in an identical manner. That night, Teena Simmons is abducted. Mulder and Scully visit Doug Rearden's wife and daughter, discovering that his daughter, Cindy, looks exactly like Teena Simmons. The agents learn that Cindy Rearden was conceived in vitro, and decide to investigate the Rearden's fertility clinic, the Luther Stapes Center, seeking a link between the murders.
At the Stapes Center, Scully discovers that both the Simmons and Reardens used the services of a doctor named Sally Kendrick, who was fired for genetic experimentation on fertilized eggs at the Center. Scully speculates that Kendrick and an accomplice are responsible for the murders. Mulder meets with Deep Throat, who tells him about the Litchfield Experiment, a Cold War-era project in which a group of children, all codenamed Adam or Eve, were engineered to be super-soldiers. Mulder and Scully meet with the last survivor of the project, Eve 6, in a hospital for the criminally insane. Eve 6 looks exactly like Dr. Kendrick and reveals that Eve 7 and 8 escaped from Litchfield and are still free. Mulder and Scully determine that Dr. Kendrick is Eve 7, and that she cloned Teena and Cindy from herself. The agents stake out the Rearden house, where Cindy is abducted by Kendrick. Kendrick brings both the girls to a motel, where it is revealed that they killed their own fathers. Kendrick tries to convince the girls to let her help them, but they poison her.
Mulder and Scully arrive at the motel, where the girls tell them that Kendrick tried to poison them. Mulder and Scully take custody of the girls, who attempt to poison the agents at a truck stop. Mulder notices a trace of poison, outwitting their plan. The girls attempt to escape, but are unsuccessful. The girls, identified as Eve 9 and Eve 10, are sent to the same mental institute as Eve 6. The episode ends with the Eves receiving a visitor: the still-free Eve 8.
What "Eve" lacks in contribution to the series as a whole, it makes up for in being a tightly plotted standalone episode. The Eves, played by Sabrina and Erika Krievans, swing from innocent to sinister effortlessly, and there's a certain brilliance to the way Teena plays on Mulder by telling him exactly what he wants to hear about her father's death. The background of the Litchfield Experiment and the performance of Harriet Harris as the adult Eves, meanwhile, address societal fears about the dark potential of new technologies, and the idea of creating something we do not fully understand and cannot control.
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