When Fox acquired the rights for the Super Bowl in 1994, they would just air football coverage about both teams all day and then the game. In 1997, Fox used the most watched sporting event of the year as a lead in for The X-Files season 4 episode Leonard Betts. This started a tradition for Fox as they would use the Super Bowl’s ratings boost to premiere an episode of whatever show they wanted from that year on. While this particular episode is technically a monster of the week and not associated with the broader mythology of the show, it does have implications for the rest of season 4 and most of season 5. It’s the episode Agent Scully finds out she has cancer from removing the implant in her head in season 3.
I’ll also be discussing the two episodes that aired after this one today since both deal with Scully’s reaction to her diagnosis and subsequent treatments. Originally, Never Again was supposed to air before Leonard Betts, but Chris Carter wanted to use the Super Bowl as a catalyst to get more viewers interested in the show and believed Leonard Betts would do that. Switching the order also allowed for more insight into Agent Scully for they were able to use it as a reactionary episode to her worrying over her own mortality. Gillian Anderson liked this addition to her character’s storyline because it gave her some new material, but because they filmed Never Again before Leonard Betts, Anderson said she would have done things a little differently in Never Again.
Leonard Betts
The character of Leonard Betts was meant to be a sympathetic antagonist for he killed out of necessity and not for blood lust. He had a knack for diagnosing people with cancer because he himself was cancer and he needed to ingest cancerous cells to survive.
After Betts was beheaded in a car accident, his headless body attempts to leave the morgue, knocking over an attendant in the process before stealing the man’s scrubs. That is when Mulder and Scully are brought in. Scully attempts a necropsy on the head but the eyes suddenly open and the mouth moves of its own accord. Meanwhile, Mulder finds the attendants discarded clothes in Betts’ apartment. After Mulder leaves the supposedly empty apartment, Betts’ body rises from a tub full of opaque iodine and it has a new head.
When a slice of Betts’ head is examined, it is discovered that his brain was so riddled with cancerous cells that he shouldn’t have been alive to begin with. The agents also find out that Betts’ fingerprints match those of Albert Tanner, a man supposedly deceased. They visit his mother who confirms his death. Problem is, Leonard Betts is recognized by a coworker when he visits a hospital and is taken into custody by security by handcuffing him to his car. He escapes by breaking off his own thumb and driving the car away. Later, the agents find the car and find it is registered to Albert Tanner’s mother. In the trunk they find a cooler full of tumors removed from cancer patients – the reason Betts returned to the hospital in the first place. Mulder believes that he needs cancerous cells to survive and that he is the next step in human evolution.
After killing another person so he can eat his cancerous lung, in a gruesome scene filled with some convincing practical effects, Betts sheds his outer layer of epidermis and emerges through the mouth of his old skin. One of the more memorable effects of the series if I’m being honest. When Tanner’s mother sends them to an old storage locker where Betts is shedding his skin, he attempts to flee in a car which then explodes when fired upon. Mulder believes that Betts can regrow body parts AND a duplicate body which is how Tanner was able to fake his death.
The agents find Betts has returned to his mother’s home to extract a cancerous tumor from her. Scully ends up in an ambulance with him and he tells her she has something he needs. This is the moment Scully realizes she probably has cancer, but she must survive the encounter first buy putting a defibrillator to Betts’ head. Later, she wakes up coughing and finds she has a nosebleed. Fade to black.
Never Again
Writers James Wong and Glen Morgan were asked by Gillian Anderson to write an episode that explored Scully’s dark side. This episode also guest starred several actors from the short lived but underrated Space: Above and Beyond that aired on Fox the previous year including Rodney Rowland who has ties to Twin Peaks, Dark Angel, and The Walking Dead.
This episode revolves around Ed, just off a divorce and losing his job, as he gets a tattoo of a pinup girl. He begins hearing a woman’s voice (Jodie Foster’s voice, by the way). Meanwhile, Mulder and Scully are given information about a UFO from a Russian informant. Mulder leaves on a vacation to Graceland leaving Scully alone with the case she has no interest in. After an argument with Mulder, she begins questioning the direction of her career and in the context of the previous episode, her own livelihood. If you didn’t know this was filmed before the previous episode and cancer realization, you would never know the episodes are out of order. Regardless of the reason, it still fits the narrative that she is questioning her future.
What brings Scully and Ed together is Scully follows the Russian informant to the tattoo parlor Ed received his tattoo. By this point, Ed thought the voice speaking to him was his neighbor who he murders and puts into the building’s furnace. The voice continues and he realizes it is his tattoo. Ed is in the tattoo parlor arguing with the tattooist when Scully arrives. The two strike up conversation and end up having dinner. Ed convinces her to get a tattoo and she gets one of an ouroboros (a snake eating its own tail) on her back. Anderson originally volunteer to get a real tattoo for the episode, but was told it would take too long so their art department made realistic looking fake tattoos instead.
Detectives arrive at Ed’s apartment and inform Scully that the neighbor is missing and blood found in her apartment contains an odd chemical which Scully thinks is from the tattoos. She fails to convince Ed to get tested at the hospital but Ed’s belief that the tattoo is talking convinces him that Scully is guilty of investigating him. He wraps her in a sheet and brings her down to the furnace but thinks better of it at the last minute and puts his tattooed arm in it instead. His blood test confirms a chemical in his blood that caused hallucinations. Scully’s tattoo didn’t contain enough of the chemical to cause any of those symptoms.
Fun Fact: This episode was supposed to be directed by Quenton Tarantino but since he was not a member of the Directors Guild of America, he was not allowed to do so.
Memento Mori
This is the first episode to medically confirm Scully’s cancer diagnosis. She only tells Mulder and A.D. Skinner and she wished to continue to work. When Scully learns that fellow abductee Betsy whom she met in season 3 has passed away of cancer, as have all but one – Penny – of that UFO survivors group, she is still skeptical that there is a larger conspiracy in play.
While Scully stays at the hospital to begin chemotherapy and give support to Penny, Mulder enlists the help of The Lone Gunman to help him break into a high level security facility where he believes he can find more information about Scully’s illness. Mulder discovers that a doctor by the name of Scanlon works with a bunch of clones who show him Scully’s harvested ova. They also hope to subvert the alien colonization project the government is working on. Agent Mulder returns to the hospital with the ova and finds that Penny has passed away and Scully is mourning the loss.
Skinner pleas with the Cigarette Smoking Man for Scully’s life who is evasive. Of course he is. At the end of the episode, they come to an agreement.
This episode has some great cinematography and emotional moments from Scully but also feels cobbled together with Mulder’s investigation. It’s convincing enough to see the plot points from previous seasons come together which saves the episode a bit. The previous episode, which was meant to be aired before her cancer realization, explores themes of mortality far better than this episode does which is a bit off putting to watch when you watch all three of these episodes together.
Gillian Anderson’s performance during this run of episodes is brilliant and heartfelt. For me, it is what carries Momento Mori and keeps it from being a mediocre episode. Her willingness to give her character deeper meaning as the series went on is what made the show so great during the middle seasons.
Until next week, the truth is out there.
Discover more from Becky Tyler Art and Photography
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Becky Tyler Art and Photography 
When Fox acquired the rights for the Super Bowl in 1994, they would just air football coverage about both teams all day and then the game. In 1997, Fox used the most watched sporting event of the year as a lead in for The X-Files season 4 episode Leonard Betts. This started a tradition for Fox as they would use the Super Bowl’s ratings boost to premiere an episode of whatever show they wanted from that year on. While this particular episode is technically a monster of the week and not associated with the broader mythology of the show, it does have implications for the rest of season 4 and most of season 5. It’s the episode Agent Scully finds out she has cancer from removing the implant in her head in season 3.
I’ll also be discussing the two episodes that aired after this one today since both deal with Scully’s reaction to her diagnosis and subsequent treatments. Originally, Never Again was supposed to air before Leonard Betts, but Chris Carter wanted to use the Super Bowl as a catalyst to get more viewers interested in the show and believed Leonard Betts would do that. Switching the order also allowed for more insight into Agent Scully for they were able to use it as a reactionary episode to her worrying over her own mortality. Gillian Anderson liked this addition to her character’s storyline because it gave her some new material, but because they filmed Never Again before Leonard Betts, Anderson said she would have done things a little differently in Never Again.
Leonard Betts
The character of Leonard Betts was meant to be a sympathetic antagonist for he killed out of necessity and not for blood lust. He had a knack for diagnosing people with cancer because he himself was cancer and he needed to ingest cancerous cells to survive.
After Betts was beheaded in a car accident, his headless body attempts to leave the morgue, knocking over an attendant in the process before stealing the man’s scrubs. That is when Mulder and Scully are brought in. Scully attempts a necropsy on the head but the eyes suddenly open and the mouth moves of its own accord. Meanwhile, Mulder finds the attendants discarded clothes in Betts’ apartment. After Mulder leaves the supposedly empty apartment, Betts’ body rises from a tub full of opaque iodine and it has a new head.
When a slice of Betts’ head is examined, it is discovered that his brain was so riddled with cancerous cells that he shouldn’t have been alive to begin with. The agents also find out that Betts’ fingerprints match those of Albert Tanner, a man supposedly deceased. They visit his mother who confirms his death. Problem is, Leonard Betts is recognized by a coworker when he visits a hospital and is taken into custody by security by handcuffing him to his car. He escapes by breaking off his own thumb and driving the car away. Later, the agents find the car and find it is registered to Albert Tanner’s mother. In the trunk they find a cooler full of tumors removed from cancer patients – the reason Betts returned to the hospital in the first place. Mulder believes that he needs cancerous cells to survive and that he is the next step in human evolution.
After killing another person so he can eat his cancerous lung, in a gruesome scene filled with some convincing practical effects, Betts sheds his outer layer of epidermis and emerges through the mouth of his old skin. One of the more memorable effects of the series if I’m being honest. When Tanner’s mother sends them to an old storage locker where Betts is shedding his skin, he attempts to flee in a car which then explodes when fired upon. Mulder believes that Betts can regrow body parts AND a duplicate body which is how Tanner was able to fake his death.
The agents find Betts has returned to his mother’s home to extract a cancerous tumor from her. Scully ends up in an ambulance with him and he tells her she has something he needs. This is the moment Scully realizes she probably has cancer, but she must survive the encounter first buy putting a defibrillator to Betts’ head. Later, she wakes up coughing and finds she has a nosebleed. Fade to black.
Never Again
Writers James Wong and Glen Morgan were asked by Gillian Anderson to write an episode that explored Scully’s dark side. This episode also guest starred several actors from the short lived but underrated Space: Above and Beyond that aired on Fox the previous year including Rodney Rowland who has ties to Twin Peaks, Dark Angel, and The Walking Dead.
This episode revolves around Ed, just off a divorce and losing his job, as he gets a tattoo of a pinup girl. He begins hearing a woman’s voice (Jodie Foster’s voice, by the way). Meanwhile, Mulder and Scully are given information about a UFO from a Russian informant. Mulder leaves on a vacation to Graceland leaving Scully alone with the case she has no interest in. After an argument with Mulder, she begins questioning the direction of her career and in the context of the previous episode, her own livelihood. If you didn’t know this was filmed before the previous episode and cancer realization, you would never know the episodes are out of order. Regardless of the reason, it still fits the narrative that she is questioning her future.
What brings Scully and Ed together is Scully follows the Russian informant to the tattoo parlor Ed received his tattoo. By this point, Ed thought the voice speaking to him was his neighbor who he murders and puts into the building’s furnace. The voice continues and he realizes it is his tattoo. Ed is in the tattoo parlor arguing with the tattooist when Scully arrives. The two strike up conversation and end up having dinner. Ed convinces her to get a tattoo and she gets one of an ouroboros (a snake eating its own tail) on her back. Anderson originally volunteer to get a real tattoo for the episode, but was told it would take too long so their art department made realistic looking fake tattoos instead.
Detectives arrive at Ed’s apartment and inform Scully that the neighbor is missing and blood found in her apartment contains an odd chemical which Scully thinks is from the tattoos. She fails to convince Ed to get tested at the hospital but Ed’s belief that the tattoo is talking convinces him that Scully is guilty of investigating him. He wraps her in a sheet and brings her down to the furnace but thinks better of it at the last minute and puts his tattooed arm in it instead. His blood test confirms a chemical in his blood that caused hallucinations. Scully’s tattoo didn’t contain enough of the chemical to cause any of those symptoms.
Fun Fact: This episode was supposed to be directed by Quenton Tarantino but since he was not a member of the Directors Guild of America, he was not allowed to do so.
Memento Mori
This is the first episode to medically confirm Scully’s cancer diagnosis. She only tells Mulder and A.D. Skinner and she wished to continue to work. When Scully learns that fellow abductee Betsy whom she met in season 3 has passed away of cancer, as have all but one – Penny – of that UFO survivors group, she is still skeptical that there is a larger conspiracy in play.
While Scully stays at the hospital to begin chemotherapy and give support to Penny, Mulder enlists the help of The Lone Gunman to help him break into a high level security facility where he believes he can find more information about Scully’s illness. Mulder discovers that a doctor by the name of Scanlon works with a bunch of clones who show him Scully’s harvested ova. They also hope to subvert the alien colonization project the government is working on. Agent Mulder returns to the hospital with the ova and finds that Penny has passed away and Scully is mourning the loss.
Skinner pleas with the Cigarette Smoking Man for Scully’s life who is evasive. Of course he is. At the end of the episode, they come to an agreement.
This episode has some great cinematography and emotional moments from Scully but also feels cobbled together with Mulder’s investigation. It’s convincing enough to see the plot points from previous seasons come together which saves the episode a bit. The previous episode, which was meant to be aired before her cancer realization, explores themes of mortality far better than this episode does which is a bit off putting to watch when you watch all three of these episodes together.
Gillian Anderson’s performance during this run of episodes is brilliant and heartfelt. For me, it is what carries Momento Mori and keeps it from being a mediocre episode. Her willingness to give her character deeper meaning as the series went on is what made the show so great during the middle seasons.
Until next week, the truth is out there.
Discover more from Becky Tyler Art and Photography
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Share this: