"The Goldberg Variation" is the sixth episode of the seventh season of the science fiction television series The X-Files.

It was written by Jeffrey Bell, directed by Thomas J. Wright, and featured guest appearances by Willie Garson and Shia LaBeouf.

"The Goldberg Variation" earned a Nielsen household rating of 8.8, being watched by 14.49 million people in its initial broadcast.

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

Bell's original draft of the episode opened with a man falling thirty-thousand feet from an airplane and walking away unharmed.

Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) initially believes the man has the ability to cure himself, but Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) thinks he may just be very lucky.

As the agents leave, one of Cutrona's enforcers arrives to kill Weems, but dies in an improbable cascade of events.

Mulder notes that Weems was the sole survivor of a commuter jet crash that killed 20 people in December 1989.

Weems confesses that he has been trying to find a way to get $100,000 to pay for an expensive medical treatment for a boy in his apartment building named Richie (Shia LaBeouf).

In the end, it turns out that Cutrona is an organ donor and a perfect match for Richie, who gets his medical treatment and lives.

In order to compensate for this, additional inserts of the Rube Goldberg Machine were filmed as well as a scene featuring Mulder and Scully discussing the episode's back-story.

The latter of these scenes, which was filmed months after the majority of the episode, required Anderson to wear a wig because her hair style had substantially changed.

The Goldberg Variation is the perfect feel-good X-Files episode; not too soppy, not too harsh, but just the right mix of ludicrous gangster deaths and saving the cute kid.

"[10] Paula Vitaris from Cinefantastique gave the episode a moderately positive review and awarded it three stars out of four.

"[14] 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 stars out of five.