Paramedics are racing to a Pittsburgh hospital with a man who suffered cardiac arrest. Paramedic Leonard Betts, played by the always-entertaining Paul McCrane -- now there’s a man who should be working the convention circuit -- briefly saves the patient’s life. Unfortunately, their ambulance gets T-boned and Leonard loses his head over it. I’m not talking figuratively; it’s completely severed from his body. His lucky partner, Michele Wilkes, walks away with just a few scratches. Looks like Betts isn’t OK with being dead. His headless body gets up, clocks a morgue attendant upside the head then wanders away. How can he see where he’s going? 
Sculder are called to the scene. Maybe they can wrap up this one quickly and catch a Penguins game. Nope, looks like they played the Sabres in Buffalo when this first aired on Jan. 29. 1997. Dana thinks Leonard’s body was stolen for profit. Fox disagrees. Security footage conveniently obscures the head area with visual snow. Our heroes root around in a drawer of medical waste and find Betts' head. Scully autopsies it and clearly he’s a miracle of modern medicine -- he looks normal and healthy, especially when he opens his eyes and tries to talk. Go ahead and explain that one away, Dana. No matter what you say, it will sound like you’re in denial. Meanwhile Fox goes to Leonard’s apartment, where the bathroom looks like a crime scene. I don’t even want to guess what that tub full of brownish-red water is supposed to be. I’m surprised Mulder didn’t drain it to see if anything was hiding in there. Think about it, Fox, if there was a body in there, it wouldn’t need to come up for air without a head, right? Scully calls Mulder to let him know her PET scans have been unsuccessful due to some type of radiation affecting the images. She partially explains away Betts' movements but doesn’t give Fox the whole story. By the way, care to guess where Leonard was hiding? Looks like he’s growing a new head too.
Paramedic Wilkes tells Mulder about Betts' gift for diagnosing people with cancer. Prior to the accident, he was never sick or injured. He’s David Dunn from Unbreakable until he, you know, broke. Dana continues testing Leonard’s original head and allows a pathologist to view a slice of the brain. They learn poor Betts was riddled with cancer. Wilkes goes back to work, but she zones out during a medical call when she thinks she hears Leonard on the radio diagnosing a patient. Wonder what that’s about. Maybe there’s a third head in the mix, but I guess he would need another hand to work the radio. Sculder go all the way to the University of Maryland to have scientist Charles Burks analyze another slice of Betts' head, this time via the use of aura photography. The image shows a shadow of the body, similar to Dr. Burks’ description of a lizard showing the aura of its severed tail. Luckily, Dana doesn’t try to explain away this result. Fox tells her he found iodine in Leonard’s apartment that has been used for limb regeneration in salamanders. Mulder suggests the cancer-ridden form is Leonard’s normal stasis.
Leonard Betts’ fingerprints come back to a man named Albert Tanner. The agents meet with Albert’s mother, Elaine, and see a picture of Leonard on her table. Apparently, Albert died in a car accident six years earlier. Guess we know what Leonard’s kryptonite is. Wilkes goes looking for the man who sounded like Betts and learns he’s the new paramedic on the block. Isn’t it weird how you can regrow your head at least twice and still suffer from male-pattern hair loss?
Leonard kills Michele to keep his secret. He tries to run from a security guard, who tackles Leonard and handcuffs him to a car door handle. Looks like Betts can also grow a new thumb. After learning Wilkes was killed with an injection of potassium chloride, Sculder find cancerous medical waste in the trunk of Betts' car. Mulder thinks it's sustenance for Leonard. After all, a regrowing boy has to eat. As it turns out, it’s Elaine Turner’s car. Back at Elaine’s house with a search warrant, Mom Tanner doesn't buy Scully’s claim Leonard committed cold-blooded murder, since God has a purpose for him. Betts goes to a bar to kill time while his thumb continues to regenerate. He follows a man outside who presumably has lung cancer and takes what he needs. Afterward, Betts regrows another head which comes up from inside his body and out his mouth. The extraordinarily cheesy special effects don’t help that scene at all. At the same time, Sculder find Leonard’s storage unit, the now-dead lung-cancer man (not to be confused with Cancer Man) and Betts, who tries to run them over with his car. Fox shoots and Leonard’s car bursts into flames.
Sculder argue while standing over Leonard’s charred corpse. Mulder still thinks Betts and Tanner are the same person. Scully doubts it, so they exhume Albert’s body, which is still in the casket. Mulder thinks there is still a live version of Leonard Betts out there somewhere. And he’s right, Elaine Tanner is bathing Leonard in iodine. Makes you wonder about Betts' father, doesn’t it? Fox and Dana stake out the Tanner home until paramedics show up. Thinking it’s Leonard in the ambulance, they hold the medics at gunpoint until they learn the call came for Elaine. Guess she had cancer because Leonard removed something from his mother’s chest.
Scully rides with Elaine and the paramedics to the hospital, then realizes Betts hitched a ride too. Leonard claims Scully has something he needs – does Dana have cancer?? – then attacks her. She manages to fight him off with some decent kicks inside a closed ambulance. He punches her but Scully charges the paddles and kills him with a zap to the head. Mulder drives them home, but Scully wakes up in the middle of the night with a nosebleed ... at least we know Gillian Anderson is going to get some meaty material in future eps. Now let’s discuss suspension of disbelief. I think I’ve been pretty liberal with it considering this is a show about unexplained phenomena. But the timeline of this particular episode can’t be more than a few days because Michele Wilkes has visible injuries from the ambulance crash at the beginning of the episode. So, over the course of a couple of days, Leonard establishes yet another alter ego – also a paramedic – gets credentials and falsified EMT certifications, completes an employment application and interviews, gets hired and immediately goes back to work at another Pittsburgh hospital without a trainer for his observation/probation period? Can you imagine any reputable medical transport company taking on those liability issues? I’ll believe Leonard coughed up yet another head before I’ll believe that.
Sestra Professional:
Sestra's Am's problems with suspension of disbelief aside, this episode had everything -- back story, a monster of the week, plenty of scares, cool quips courtesy of a trio of regular writers and the dramatic twist at the end. But that's not why "Leonard Betts" was the highest-rated show of all time. It aired right after the Super Bowl in 1997 and picked up an estimated 29.1 million viewers.
"We knew we'd get a huge audience," co-writer Vince Gilligan said in The Complete X-Files. "Chris really wanted to grab viewers who had never seen us before, and we knew the best way to do that would be with a really creepy stand-alone monster story."But just remember -- to mash Rudyard Kipying with Jeff Foxworthy -- if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you may be an X-Files fan. Of course, back during the original run, social media was basically message boards and mailing lists, so there wasn't quite the same reaction to each and every episode that we've seen in the two revival seasons.
I don't even know how to respond to that: Nevertheless, actually "Leonard Betts" probably would be considered under the radar of most X-Philes. It's a real wheelhouse episode, but it moves next week's Scully-centric "Never Again" behind this one. Gillian Anderson has long held that she would have made different acting choices during filming for that one had she known what was coming at the denouement of this one.
It's a phenomenal and another underrated guest performance by Paul McCrane (who I knew best from Fame, but later became well known for roles on 24 and E.R.) He really gets to do it all as the many incarnations of Turner/Betts. And we thought Cigarette-Smoking Man had a lot of lives. This might have been around the time we stopped calling Smokey "Cancer Man" and started sticking with CSM.I'm sorry, but you've got something I need: We're heading into a key run of Scully episodes, and it winds up starting here with one filmed after a couple of others we haven't seen yet. It wasn't just the Super Bowl opportunity that changed the landscape. Darin Morgan bowed out of his expected script so Gilligan, Frank Spotnitz and John Shiban reportedly whipped this one up based on a few old ideas and a couple of new ones. Spotnitz had broached the idea of Dana having cancer the previous season, according to the official fourth-season episode guide. It was tabled then, but fit pretty seamlessly into the tableau at this point.
Scully seems pretty unconvinced about what she's actually seeing throughout the episode, but she still works hard to make or break the case with science. And then she gets to save herself for a change, finally killing Betts in a way Mulder probably wouldn't have thought of in the same situation.
I think I got the toy surprise: Fox, who looked more uncomfortable handling the surgical remains than he has been since getting bile on his hands way back in Season 1's "Squeeze," is left to hazard the guesses that all of us were making while watching the show. His theory about evolutionary advances being more cataclysmic and less gradual is a little over my pay grade, though. Dana seems beside herself more than usual and she draws the best reaction shots, but at least Mulder gets the best banter (i.e., telling the pathologist examining the brain that they wanted "a slice to go.")Meta with Frank Shigan: A character named John Gilnitz becomes a hallmark of episodes written by Gilligan, Spotnitz and Shiban. The hapless soul in this one is one of Betts' victims. ... According to the episode guide, the faculty of the prestigious Berklee School of Music was so knocked out by Mark Snow's score for this episode that they asked him to focus his guest lecture on the seamless changes of mood and tempo from the opening teaser. ... And it doesn't play so well now, but the shot of Leonard's new head emerging from the old one actually netted Emmy nominations for the show's special effect supervisor Toby Lindala and key makeup artist Laverne Basham.
Guest star of the week: All Betts are off, McCrane, by a head! Actually by a whole body. The veteran TV-movie actor gets to play both hero and villain and really pulls it off. On top of that, I particularly marvel at scenes like the autopsy when Scully is coming at him with a scalpel or the heavily made-up Betts emerges from the tub with iodine liquid in his nose and mouth. We can see via the gag reel that it wasn't so easy.
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