"End Game" is the seventeenth episode of the second season of the American science fiction television series The X-Files. It premiered on the Fox network on February 17, 1995. It was directed by Rob Bowman, and written by Frank Spotnitz. "End Game" featured guest appearances by Megan Leitch, Peter Donat, Brian Thompson and saw Steven Williams reprise his role as X. The episode helped explore the series' overarching mythology. "End Game" earned a Nielsen household rating of 11.2, being watched by 10.7 million households in its initial broadcast. It received positive reviews from critics. 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. In this episode, Scully is kidnapped by an alien bounty hunter and Mulder offers his sister Samantha (Leitch) forward as ransom. However, Samantha is merely one of several clones created as part of a human-alien hybrid project, leading Mulder to pursue the bounty hunter for the truth about her disappearance. "End Game" is a two-part episode, continuing the plot from the previous episode, "Colony". "End Game" was the first episode of the series written by Spotnitz, who eventually went on to become one of the series' executive producers.