6. Leonard Betts (Season 4, Episode 12)
"I'm sorry, but you've got something I need." - Leonard Betts
The episode begins with an unfortunate accident: an ambulance crashes, decapitating EMT Leonard Betts in the process. His body (and head) are taken to the morgue, from which they soon disappear. As surveillance shows only one man exiting the morgue--without a corpse and with the surveillance feed obscuring where his head would be--Agents Mulder and Scully are called in. Mulder thinks that Betts must have regenerated a new head and walked out of the morgue himself. Scully, because she is a normal non-crazy human being, thinks anything
other than head regeneration. Together, they work to uncover what happened...and how on earth that it did. Guest-starring Paul McCrane as Leonard Betts, this episode has a little bit of everything that makes
The X-Files great. And it has one hell of a cliffhanger. "Leonard Betts" originally aired in early 1997 in the coveted post-Super Bowl time slot. The episode was chosen because it would function as an effective introduction to and hook for the show, theoretically attracting new viewers who hadn't turned off their TVs after the big game. It gave a basic enough introduction to the format of the show, and the main characters are presented sympathetically so that if, say, something mind-blowing were to happen to one of them in the last few minutes of the episode, viewers would care enough to tune in again. For the unspoiled, this would be a great first episode. For the spoiled, this is still a great episode. For the people who first saw it on Super Bowl Sunday in 1997, it meant that they had to wait two full weeks to find out what would happen next (see #16).