"Empedocles" is the seventeenth episode of the eighth season of the American science fiction television series The X-Files.

The show centers on FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and John Doggett (Robert Patrick), who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files.

The episode included an elaborate special effects sequence wherein actor Jay Underwood rips off his face to reveal fire underneath his skin, which was created via green screen technology.

In New Orleans, mild-mannered white-collar worker Jeb Larold Dukes (Jay Underwood) is fired from his job.

Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish) arrives at the crime scene and meets NOPD detective Franklin Potter, who has called her in out of his belief that the murders are related to satanism.

Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) takes a pregnant Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) to the hospital when she doubles over in pain.

There, Reyes phones him to ask about the case, but Mulder cedes to the authority of John Doggett (Robert Patrick), who is formally running the X-Files.

Mulder and Reyes meet in an FBI records room, where she divulges that she was one of the agents called in to investigate the murder of Doggett's son Luke years previously.

Doggett storms off, but Reyes refuses to let it go, finally revealing her theory: she believes that the boy's murder was part of a "thread of evil," an interconnected series of terrible events.

Katha calls the agents and tries to separate her daughter from Jeb, but he realizes what she is planning and uses his niece as a hostage.

A matte of the scene was then cut and various fire effects were placed into Underwood's face via green screen technology.

In order to make the "cracks" appear, digital technology was created to "smooth over" the skin and then slowly reveal the pre-cut slits.

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-and-a-half stars out of five.

Shearman and Pearson, however, did positively write that the episode is "a character study which gives its new leads some background and depth and, better yet, somewhere new to develop.

[13] Paula Vitaris from Cinefantastique gave the episode a negative review and awarded it one-and-a-half stars out of four.

[14] She criticized several of the plot points in the episode, most notably how a "big-city" New Orleans detective could mistake Marilyn Manson CDs as signs of blatant satanic imagery.

He criticized the downsized role Mulder and Scully played in the episode, noting that they had been "reduced to mere footnotes".

[17] Sarah Stegall awarded the episode five stars out of five and noted "Being dead has done wonders for Fox Mulder.