Characters / The X-Files

This is a summary page for the characters from The X-Files.

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Protagonists

Main Duo

Agent Fox Mulder

"Are we truly alone? Or are we being lied to?"

Portrayed by: David Duchovny, with flashback appearances portrayed by Marcus Turner (Little Green Men & Fight the Future, with archive footage used in The Truth) and Nick Lashaway (Dreamland II)
Dubbed by: Alfonso Obregón Inclán (Latin American Spanish), Jurota Kosugi (Japanese), Morio Kazama (Japanese; TV Asahi), Benjamin Volz (German)

"Now, when convention and science offer us no answers, might we not finally turn to the fantastic as a plausibility?"

Formerly a renowned profiler, he became something of a joke at the Bureau when he started to pursue an obscure side project known only as the "X Files", but he soon drew attention from more sinister quarters...

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• Agent Mulder: Trope Namer. He almost always believed in the paranormal explanation of the case of the week, but he could change his perspective if Scully's scientific theory was proving to be the solution.
• Agent Scully:
  • In a case of role reversal, if the case involved mysteries of religious nature and miracles, Mulder would be very skeptical and dismiss God as explanation.
  • Mulder dismissed Luther Lee Boggs' psychic claims out of hand in "Beyond the Sea", believing it was a ploy to get Boggs' death sentence commuted.
  • Mulder was also genuinely surprised by the existence of vampires in "3", having assumed such creatures to be purely legend.
• Always Save the Girl: In the very first episode, Mulder said that nothing else mattered to him except finding out the truth about the conspiracy and what happened to his sister. Early seasons of the show got a lot of mileage out of making him choose between pursuing his quest and saving Scully. Around the beginning of season 5, though, it ceased to even be an issue — he decided Scully was priority #1 and never looked back. (She saves his butt just as often).
• Ambiguously Bi: His reaction when Scully says Gary Shandling has a crush on him.
• Ambiguously Jewish: On more than one occasion, anti-Semitics accuse him of looking Jewish; Mulder always refuses to answer. What we know about his family background makes it somewhat unlikely that he actually is. (David Duchovny has said that until he is told otherwise, he considers Mulder Jewish.)
• Badass Bookworm: For some values of "badass" at least, although he does in fact get beat up quite a lot (mostly due to his tendency to recklessly charge into situations without thinking). His strength lies in great knowledge of paranormal phenomena and his determination to find concrete evidence and uncover the truth. He's fearless to a fault, has been shown to be a good shot (but he always drops his gun) and is physically fit. Also, he survives and that's saying quite a lot because in his world, almost everyone is trying to either kill or discredit him.
• Berserk Button: Hurt or threaten Scully and he will END you and it doesn't matter a damn if you're a powerful secret agent, a frightening serial killer or a goddamn alien. There is nowhere in the universe you will be safe from him.
• Beware the Silly Ones: He's a bit of...okay, he's a lot of an eccentric and few take him seriously due to his obsession with aliens, belief in conspiracies and his generally odd behavior. But piss him off and you'll discover that he's also an extremely skilled agent and profiler who can tear your life apart if he wishes and he's a trained FBI agent who knows how to handle himself in a fight if he has to. Those who write Mulder off as just a nut they can manipulate or push around tend to regret it very quickly.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: The FBI tolerates his obsession with the paranormal because he's a very, very, very good forensic psychologist. Mulder was a very strongly right-brained intuitive, who also engaged in free association thinking, and was able to detach his mind from conventional preconceptions. He was so good, in fact, that he'd earned the moniker 'Spooky' before even opening the X-Files: his partner at the time thought his ability to profile and understand people was downright uncanny.
• Byronic Hero: Brooding and comely FBI agent whose quest for the truth is just and right, although his means of trying to achieve that can be over-the-top and jackassery. Only very few people in the show's world seem to appreciate him.
• The Cassandra: Gets a fair amount of this though this can be expected. Sometimes, he may get the details wrong, but the overall theory will be right. Other times, he uses a shotgun effect and throws out a bunch of different theories, but one of them is right. Subverted at the times The Conspiracy takes steps to have him ignored.
• Colorblind Confusion: While working with The Lone Gunmen on one assignment, they were initially mystified that Mulder seemed to be immune to a subliminal message hidden in TV static. It was only when Mulder revealed he's red-green colorblind that they began to figure out what was going on.
• Commuting on a Bus: During season 8. He was abducted in season 7 finale, some presumed he was dead, and he appeared in mid-season episodes and towards the end.
• Conspiracy Theorist: A heroic conspiracy nut who is unusual both in almost always being right in his postulations about secret doings and in (usually) being a rational, shrewdly observant investigator who labors to find solid evidence to support his ideas.
• Cowboy Cop: A mild example, usually showing little regard for rules and regulations, caring only about uncovering the truth and solving the current case. However, while he has cases of dickishness, his means aren't as extreme as those of most examples, and he rarely takes a life or does something that endangers others. It's also justified in that the nature of his job as a paranormal investigator working for a skeptical FBI often demands he goes against standards and practices.
• Deadpan Snarker: He snarks at everything and everybody. His face is deadpan serious and sometimes people get confused with his jokes. At times people think he's kidding when he presents his paranormal explanation and is super serious.
  Mulder (upon seeing the Cigarette Smoking Man in a hospital): Please tell me you're here with severe chest pains.
• Determinator: He follows his quest for the truth with extreme grit.
  Scully: They could drop you in the middle of a desert and tell you the truth is out there, and you'd ask them for a shovel.
• Distressed Dude: Ends up in this role a lot, though this was more due to his inability to think before charging in than a need to show off Scully's competency.
• Eagleland: Type 1. His fantasy in "Founder's Mutation" has him launching model spaceships and quoting JFK with William.
• Embarrassing First Name: He's not too fond of his first name Fox but he's not too embarrassed either. He prefers people to call him Mulder. He once said that he had made even his parents call him Mulder but they actually call him Fox.
• Empty Fridge, Empty Life: As seen in "Chinga". His fridge contains nothing but a huge jug of orange juice. He takes a swig straight from the bottle, checks the date (which is at least 4 months expired) and spits the juice back into the bottle. He then puts the bottle back in the fridge. He manages to do this routine while he's on the phone with Scully who took a weekend off and whom he misses dearly.
• Expy: In keeping with the fact that this series is directly inspired by Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Mulder shares several very obvious similarities with Carl Kolchak, namely his enthusiastic belief in the paranormal and dealing with authority figures who see him as a weirdo at best.
• Fair Cop: Federal agent and tall, dark, handsome, troubled, frequently shirtless or working out...
• Fingertip Drug Analysis: His favorite investigative technique. Mulder once licked a substance he strongly suspected to be extract of foxglove.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Inverted. Mulder is usually the one who is more open to the supernatural elements of a case, even being well-versed in things like demonology. Yet, he remains somewhere between agnostic and atheistic, despite constantly witnessing paranormal events, even down to witchcraft and demonic presences.
• Guilt Complex: Feels responsible for his sister Samantha's abduction as a child while under his care and spent his adult life devoted to finding her. When Scully joins him, it continues. Scully is abducted in season 2, which he blames himself for. She later develops cancer and finds out that she is barren, which he also blames himself for. In season 3, Scully's sister, Melissa, is killed in Scully's apartment by mistake—the shooter was looking for Scully. Mulder blames himself, because if he hadn't dragged Scully with him onto his quest, all these things never would have happened.
  • Mulder also tends to blame himself for other deaths. It was shown in the late Season 1 episode "Young at Heart", where Mulder blames himself for a case gone bad from his earlier days in the FBI. The criminal, John Barnett, ended up executing a hostage and a fellow agent while Mulder had his gun on him, and the reluctance to shoot haunts him for years (despite it being a part of FBI protocol). His informant Deep Throat is shot and killed in season 1, which he blames himself for. He tells Scully she should leave the FBI and be a doctor, before she is killed during his quest. Scully handwaves this and continues on with him.
  • It doesn't help that other characters reinforce Mulder's guilt. In season 2, Samantha seemingly returns and Scully is kidnapped by the Alien Bounty Hunter. He trades his sister (though we find out she's really a clone) for Scully's life, and his "sister" is subsequently "killed". He calls his father to his apartment to tell him, and his father becomes angry with him. When Mulder offers to tell his mother, his father demands to know if Mulder knows how losing Samantha again will devastate her. On top of that, it's implied that his parents blame him for his sister's abduction in the first place. Scully's brother Bill also blames Mulder for things beyond his control; the two meet while Scully is dying from cancer, and he rips into Mulder for all the things that have happened to his family that he sees as Mulder's fault. He asks Mulder if his quest was worth it and if he'd found what he was looking for, and when Mulder responds that he hadn't, Bill labels him a "sorry son-of-a-bitch".
• Gut Feeling: His success as an investigator often comes from bizarre leaps of intuition that usually turn out to be correct. Frequently verges on Bat Deduction.
• Has a Type: Attractive colleagues, like Phoebe Green from Scotland Yard ("Fire"). He falls in love with his redheaded partner Scully.
• Hollywood New England: Mulder's family hails from Martha's Vineyard. Though given Duchovny is a New Yorker, there's not much of an accent.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Somewhat offset by his tendency to drop the gun in early seasons, but on the occasions he does get to fire his gun, he tends to display these. Probably best seen in "Young at Heart", where he faces a baddie who is using a hostage as a Human Shield and moving. The source of tension isn't the question of whether or not Mulder could hit him without harming the hostage, but whether he would allow himself to do it, as shooting would go against the book in that situation, and the baddie was wanted alive for questioning about some scientific research he had stolen. In the end, Mulder opts to do it, and successfully gets him in a single shot without even grazing the hostage. Bonus points for incapacitating him without killing him right away, leaving him alive long enough to be questioned.^note Not that it mattered in the end, as he refused to talk, but that's beside the point
• In-Series Nickname: In the Bureau, his nickname is "Spooky". He was so good at profiling criminals while in Quantico Academy that his ability felt spooky to other agents in training.
• Insistent Terminology: Widespread in general with the agents, but Mulder especially tends to say "Federal Bureau of Investigation" at times when "FBI" would be sufficient.
• The Insomniac: A well-known insomniac. We almost never see him sleeping, and when we do, he's usually in the throes of a nightmare.
• It's All About Me: Scully and Skinner sometimes call him on his tendency to assume that everything that happens in their lives relates to him or the X-Files.
• I Will Find You: His Goal in Life is to find his missing younger sister.
• Knight in Sour Armor: He has developed a bad reputation, frequently argues with his partner, and had his department on the bureau often screwed by the higher ups or the Syndicate. No wonder he's increasingly more cynical.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: Has a chiseled jaw-line and definitely represents the good on the show.
• Last-Name Basis: "I even made my parents call me Mulder," although that seems to be just something he tells Scully as a joke as they simply call him by his first name.
• Living Emotional Crutch: With Scully.
• Manchild: Downplayed. Mulder has quite a few immature touches to his personality. He is often extremely unwilling to compromise even a little on his theories regarding the involvement of the supernatural in crimes, almost always taking a My Way or the Highway stance, even when it becomes an outright obstacle to the investigation. When he is dissatisfied or bothered by something he frequently doesn't make any effort to hide it, but openly broods or sulks about it. He also tends to have very good rapport with children because he is already sort of tuned in to their wavelength.
• Men Don't Cry: Averted. He cried fairly frequently, almost as often as Scully cried in Seasons 1-7, and his crying is not exactly proud Manly Tears. Most often it had to do with his missing sister or something bad happening to Scully. He finally breaks down about his mother's death in Season 7 episode "Closure".
• Most Important Person: Scully is his, hands down — there is nothing he wouldn't do for her. It's very mutual.
• Mr. Fanservice: Unusually for an American show not particularly aimed at a female audience, he spends more time not fully clothed than Scully does.
• No Social Skills: At least at first. At the beginning of the series, he's generally disliked and avoided by his coworkers, has weird obsessions, and outside of his interactions with Scully, he's downright awkward sometimes in his conversations with others. His jokes often hit the wrong mark.
• Occult Detective: Investigates the paranormal.
• Official Couple: With Scully.
• Opposites Attract: With Scully. He's an agnostic UFO/supernatural enthusiast and she's a skeptical, scientifically oriented Catholic.
• Oral Fixation: He always chews on something, like pens or straws in drinks. Might explain his love for sunflower seeds.
• Percussive Therapy: He deals with his anger by hitting stuff.
• Photographic Memory: Mentioned only once, but it does generally seem like he has a very good and very visually-oriented memory.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Occasionally, including his Michael Jackson reference in "Teliko" and this one in the pilot
  Mulder: (revealing a deformed, short corpse in a coffin) It's probably a safe bet Ray Soames never made the varsity basketball team.
  • He also loves antagonizing and stereotyping Philadelphians for some reason.
• Porn Stash: And unashamed about it. His porn-watching habit is played as a Running Gag.
• The Profiler: His original forte before he found the title case files and went onto the supernatural tangent that made up his career from then on. In one episode, he found himself up against his own former boss, who had gone off the deep end and started imitating the criminal he was after.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • His ideas about government's conspiracy and shadowy organizations might seem far-fetched, but he's proved right most of the time.
  Mulder: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get you.
  • He eventually starts carrying a backup gun because he gets tired of losing his main one.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Can pull off a hurt look very well.
• Put on a Bus: Put on a spaceship for a while, and afterwards he was on the run.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: He is the impulsive and jovial red to Scully's stoic and serious blue.
• Saw "Star Wars" Twenty-Seven Times: Confesses to having sat through Plan 9 from Outer Space 42 times. He claims that the sheer badness of the film numbs his brain, allowing him to make intuitive leaps and solve problems that have him stumped.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: According to one Unreliable Narrator in "Jose Chung's From Outer Space", and he himself owns to that in "The War of Coprophages".
• Seeker Archetype: The truth is out there and he's determined to find it and uncover it.
• Silver Fox: Fittingly given his first name, the revival has him return with his good looks intact even as he is well into middle age.
• Single-Issue Psychology: The childhood trauma of his sister's abduction has defined much of his adult life.
• Survivor Guilt: David Duchovny invoked this word-for-word to describe Mulder's reaction to his sister Samantha's abduction.
• Tall, Dark, and Handsome: Tall, a well-built body (he works out!), brown hair and sad green Puppy-Dog Eyes, tanned complexion, nose... Yes, he's got it all. Being a Deadpan Snarker doesn't hurt.
• Tall, Dark, and Snarky: Tall, Dark and Handsome and a Deadpan Snarker extraordinaire. He's paired with one clever Agent who he respects greatly, and his boss is a Reasonable Authority Figure, but other than that, he's surrounded by idiots who do not understand that his crazy theories about the paranormal are in most cases actually true.
• They Killed Kenny Again: Mulder dies kind of a lot. He flatlines in the middle of season 2 and at the end of season 2 and in two episodes in season 8. He is never Killed Off for Real.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Sunflower seeds.
• Tranquil Fury: When Mulder gets mad, he doesn't shout or scream or even drop his usual snark. He just remains calm and thinks of all the ways he can make you suffer.
• Troubled, but Cute: Had a tough life, acts weirdly, but attracts many women during his journeys.
• What the Hell, Hero?: He got this several times in the first four seasons ("Paper Hearts" is perhaps the best example when Skinner rightfully tells him off for disobeying orders and being neglectful), mostly from Scully and sometimes Skinner. After that he managed to get a better grip on his issues.

Agent Dana Scully

"And while we share a faith in science, I have come to the understanding that the science that we were taught takes us but a distance towards the truth".

Portrayed by: Gillian Anderson, with flashback appearances portrayed by Tegan Moss (One Breath), and Joey Shea & Zoe Anderson (Christmas Carol)
Dubbed by: Gisela Casillas (Latin American Spanish), Keiko Aizawa (Japanese), Keiko Toda (Japanese), Franziska Pigulla (German)

"What I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there. You just have to know where to look".

A forensic pathologist with a background in physics, she was assigned to work with Mulder ostensibly in order to use her scientific knowledge debunk his work; however, she was less predictable than the conspiracy had hoped.

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• Action Girl: A trained FBI agent with Improbable Aiming Skills. She could kick some serious ass.
• Adrenaline Makeover: At the beginning of the show she's painfully serious and strait-laced, and seems to have terrible fashion sense. By the end she's still reserved, but has loosened up quite a bit and is dressing a lot better as well.
• Agent Scully: Trope Namer, and somewhere between a straight example and an Unbuilt Trope. All told, somebody had to try to tone down Mulder's crazy theories, even when Mulder was right. Somebody has to Scully him; Mulder was often Right for the Wrong Reasons, and it would fall to Scully to stop Mulder from jumping to conclusions. But Scully wasn't exactly a Flat-Earth Atheist, partly because she was a devout Christian who probably didn't want Mulder to be right in certain circumstances. When that wasn't an issue, she wanted evidence more than anything. She was an advocate for Occam's Razor, rather than a staunch unbeliever. Third, it's implied that she was very often right, albeit always off-camera. And lastly, once she has the evidence she ends up accepting it in later seasons, reversing her role in comparison to another character.
  Nothing happens in contradiction to nature. Only in contradiction to what we know of it.
• Agent Mulder: Later in the series, she was accepting the paranormal explanations. Agent Doggett tried to scully her.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Has an amazing talent for picking guys who turn out to be messed up in the head and often outright psycho. Mulder is probably the most stable person she's ever been with, and that's saying a lot.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Scully remains a hardcore skeptic long after she's seen shape-shifting aliens, watched Mulder be mind-controlled into things he'd never do on his own, etc. It's somewhat justified, though: later seasons tended to imply that Scully felt she had to take a more skeptical stance than she really believed anymore in order to keep Mulder's wacky ideas grounded.
• Badass Bookworm: A fully qualified medical doctor and pathologist and forensic examiner. What's fine is that Mulder and Scully are sometimes actually shown doing research and reading.
• Badass Labcoat: Whenever she performs autopsy or does some lab work.
• Bad Liar: It's not that the lies she comes up with are ridiculous, she's just so naturally honest that her discomfort is very obvious whenever she tries to lie.
• Candlelit Bath: Scully likes them, and sometimes they lead to bad things. Like serial killer attacks.
• The Chosen One: It's implied in many of the religiously-themed episodes that God has some sort of special task in mind for her, although exactly what she's called to do is never made clear. Unfortunately, this arc comes to a somewhat unsatisfactory end when she gives in to her anger and kills Donnie Pfaster, whom God had put in front of her as a test in "Orison".
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Mulder isn't quite a Cloudcuckoolander in the usual sense (though he comes across that way to lots of people in-universe), but Scully has the traditional role of stopping him from doing stupid reckless things, putting together the actual evidence to support his weird leaps of intuition, explaining and defending his crazy ideas to other people, etc.
• Combat Stilettos: She wears heels nearly all the time, no matter how much running and shooting she expects to need to do. When you're a five foot two FBI agent every inch probably helps.
• The Coroner: Specialized in forensic pathology at med school, and thus is frequently doing autopsies in the investigated victims.
• Crisis of Faith: Scully started the show as a non-practising Catholic. Part of her Character Arc involved her coming to terms with her faith and deciding she could pray and attend church regularly even if she didn't always agree with everything The Church said.
• Damsel in Distress: Unusually, though, she and Mulder trade off the Distress Ball about equally. Rule of Drama.
• Deadly Bath: Both subverted ("Chinga" — the music builds, we're sure something creepy's going to happen, the phone rings and... it's Mulder, he's bored) and played straight ("Squeeze", "Irresistible").
• Deadpan Snarker: So deadpan it's easy to miss. One particularly stand-out was when she asked with a poker face whether Luke Skywalker had brought a light saber.
• Deus Angst Machina: Oh boy, Scully has been through so much pain, tragedy and drama more than anyone else. Scully's angsting is completely justified.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: The more upset she is, the more emphatically she insists that she's fine.
• Dude Magnet: She has no problems attracting men and quite a few men have fallen under her charms.
• Expy: remarkably similar to FBI Agent Clarice Starling from 'Silence of the Lambs'. Rammed home when she goes to visit Mulder in jail in 'The Truth' and he greets her with "Hello Clarice".
• Fair Cop: She's a very beautiful FBI agent. Her beauty and hotness get acknowledged in-universe by several admirers.
• Fascinating Eyebrow: One of her trademarks. She would usually eye down Mulder for his crazy theories. It was known among fans simply as "the look".
• Fiery Redhead: Nearly inverted. It's true you don't want to get her really mad, but most of the time she hardly shows emotion at all; she rarely so much as smiles, especially in the early seasons.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Played with. Scully constantly belittles Mulder’s supernatural and paranormal theories, despite witnessing such events firsthand and his hunches usually proving correct. The weird part? She’s a Catholic.
• Groin Attack: Many men who have tried to tangle with Agent Scully have quickly learned to their regret that the first, second, and third move she makes is a groin attack, and she's good at it. She even stomped one guy in the balls while wearing stilletos. She's too smart to try and grapple with male opponents, as she is fully aware that her short height and slight frame would put her at major disadvantage.
• Hot for Teacher: Once had an affair with one of her instructors back in medical school, though she eventually broke it off. He, however, never got over her.
• Immortality: There are a few odd references to the idea that Scully will never die scattered across multiple episodes, like "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" and "Tithonus".
• Improbable Age: Her given birth year is 1964, thus making Scully 4 years older than Gillian Anderson herself, and since the pilot is set in November 1992, that made her 28 at the show start. To make her a medical doctor with a specialty in forensic pathlogy, she would have had studied for 13 years, and add the two years at the FBI before being sent to Mulder's office, Scully's clearly too young.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: She's an excellent shot. She shoots Mulder in his shoulder from quite a distance and was sure she would not miss.
• Informed Self-Diagnosis: Being a doctor, she tends to self-diagnose when she's sick or injured, most obviously in the first movie.
• Labcoat of Science and Medicine: She wears scrubs whenever she performs an autopsy. She's the scientist and sceptic of the Dynamic Duo.
• Last-Name Basis: It's just Scully for most agents. She and Mulder call themselves by their surnames, even when they bond and it's clear they are more then just colleagues.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: Scully's abduction left her infertile. It's a source of angst for her. It's played much more subtly — and with good reason; he'd never be enough of a Jerkass to actually bring it up, considering Scully's infertility — but Mulder is implied to be somewhat wistful about not being in a position to have kids too.
• Like Parent, Like Spouse: Scully once admitted to being turned on by men who reminded her of her father.
• Living Emotional Crutch: with Mulder, but to somewhat of a lesser extent than she to him.
• Loony Friends Improve Your Personality: Working with Mulder gradually helps her to loosen up and let down some of her emotional walls. She in turn encourages him to take responsibility for his actions and finally face his past traumas.
• Medical Rape and Impregnate: It's eventually implied that something along these lines (but involving alien tech and probably extraterrestrial DNA) happened to Scully during her abduction early in season 2.
• Military Brat: Her father was in the Navy, as is her elder brother.
• Ms. Fanservice: Downplayed. FOX was reluctant to cast Gillian Anderson as a lead, saying they wanted someone who'd look better in a swimsuit. Chris Carter informed them that Scully would not be wearing any swimsuits. However, Agent Scully was the only prominent female on the show and looked cute enough. Later as the series progressed, she had her fair share of more typically fanservicey moments and in 1998 was voted the sexiest woman in the world.
• Naïve Newcomer: Early in the series, to both paranormal investigation as well as government conspiracy.
• Occult Detective: Investigates the paranormal.
• Official Couple: With Mulder.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: She sometimes comments on psychological issues even though it's Mulder who has the degree in this area.
• Opposites Attract: With Mulder. She's a skeptical, scientifically oriented Catholic and he's an agnostic UFO/supernatural enthusiast.
• Reassignment Backfire: Scully was pulled out of being a professor at Quantico to debunk Mulder's work on the X-Files. She is unable to do it and starts siding with him.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The more stoic and serious blue to Mulder's impulsive and jovial red.
• Science Hero: Moreso than Mulder. She's a forensic pathologist and often performs autopsies. She also tries to explain the case by scientific explanations.
• Scully Syndrome: The Trope Namer. Though amusingly it gets inverted with more religious fare, where Scully believes but Mulder is the skeptical.
• Skeptic No Longer: After Mulder was Put on a Bus, she fully accepted that she lives in a weird world full of paranormal stuff and that she's often a target for the conspiracy.
• The Stoic: With several Not So Stoic moments, especially as the series goes on and she becomes more comfortable expressing her emotions around Mulder.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Very steely and professional towards most people. The only person who gets her to loosen up is Mulder.
• Surgeons Can Do Autopsies If They Want: Ironically it's autopsies that are her main specialty, but that doesn't stop her from being fully versed in any other field of medicine that's necessary for the plot.
• There Are No Therapists: Interestingly averted in the earlier seasons, at least for Scully. She sees a therapist a few times after her abduction in season two.
• Tragic Keepsake: Scully always wears a small gold cross necklace. When she's abducted near the beginning of season 2, it's torn off, and Mulder wears it himself for the three months she's missing. It shows up a few more times when they're separated as a symbol of their bond: Mulder finds it again when he's tracking down Scully in the first movie, and she apparently gave it to him to wear before he went off alone and got himself abducted at the end of season 7.
• Tuckerization: Once it was even lampshaded where the name comes from: "Um. I don't remember his name, but she was Scully, like that baseball announcer".
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Does not take kindly to anyone hurting her partner. She may be petite, but she's smart as a whip and has great aim. The episode "Biogenesis" and the "Sixth Extinction" arc was Scully kicking ass because the Cigarette Smoking Man and Diana Fowley had caused Mulder's fatally unusual brain activity. The same happens in Season 8, even though she's pregnant at the time. The second movie has her bashing bad guys over the head with firewood to get to Mulder. In "Beyond the Sea", after Mulder is shot:
  Scully: This was a trap for Mulder because he helped put you away. Well, I came here to tell you that if he dies because of what you've done, four days from now, no-one will be able to stop me from being the one that will throw the switch and gas you out of this life for good, you son of a bitch!
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Gal: She would really, really like to hear her father approve of quitting medicine and joining the FBI, and praise her for good work.

Allies

Informants

Deep Throat

See his entry below under The Conspiracy

Senator Richard Matheson

Portrayed by: Raymond J. Barry

"I have aided you in the past with information, Fox, and advice, which, right now, is to leave here at once and never again suggest to anyone my involvement in any such dark intrigue. Am I understood?"

A politician who occasionally gives Mulder information. He’s not particularly reliable, and is quick to cut ties with Mulder whenever it seems that his political career is in jeopardy.

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• Broken Pedestal: For Mulder, come "S.R. 819", who cuts off all future contact with the Senator when his culpability in The Conspiracy is exposed.
• Dirty Coward: He's only willing to help Mulder when he can do it with the minimum risk to himself. In episodes like "Ascension" and "731", he flat-out ignores Mulder and Scully's attempts to contact him.
• It's All About Me: He justifies his actions when working for the Syndicate as this.
  "I am a victim here! Don't you understand that? I'M FIGHTING FOR MY LIFE!"
• Sleazy Politician: We learn that he's working for the conspiracy in "S.R. 819".

X

See his entry below under The Conspiracy

Marita Covarrubias

See their entry below under The Conspiracy

Michael Kritschgau

"What you can have, what you may find, is so much more than that".

Portrayed by: John Finn

"I was destroyed to protect what Mulder knew all along. Now he’s the proof. He’s the X-File".

A bitter, disgraced former DOD Agent who turned against The Conspiracy, informed Mulder of a government disinformation campaign, aided Mulder in finding Scully's cancer cure and later returned to help a comatose Mulder suffering from exposure to an alien artifact.

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• Agent Scully: Zigzagged. He believes in government conspiracies and the psychic phenomena because he has witnessed both, but flatly doesn't believe in aliens. At least until eventually witnessing proof for himself.
• Anti-Hero: Though he is doing it mostly to avenge his son, and his methods and manner tend to be jerkass in nature, he does all he can to help Mulder, helps save Scully and ultimately gives up his life trying to continue Mulder's work.
• Born Unlucky: Between losing his son, his job, his pension and eventually his life, even being reduced to a crappy apartment that gets burned down as well, nothing in the poor man's life ever seemed to go right. It's no mystery why he was so bitter.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Courtesy of Krycek, who proceeds to steal or burn all his alien artifact data along with his crummy apartment. He doesn't even get to be killed on screen.
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: Never so much as mentioned again after his murder, despite everything he sacrificed for Mulder and Scully.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Seems to be the very definition of his dour character, especially when the Sixth Extinction trilogy rolls around. For instance, there's his quote when he sees Scully sleeping in her office:
  Kritschgau: Sleep is a luxury, Agent Scully. A self-indulgence we have no time for. Nor does Agent Mulder.
• Killed Off for Real: Murdered by Krycek in his last appearance, and has all his data stolen or burned, along with his corpse.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Despite his understandable bitterness towards his life being destroyed for aiding Mulder in the past and reluctance to do so again, he still rolls up his sleeves and helps as much as he can when Mulder needs his expertise again. In spite of only reluctant assistance from Skinner and scathing opposition from Scully, whose cancer he helped cure. For all the good it does Kritschgau.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The other definition of his character. In spite of assisting Mulder and Scully in vital ways, coming around to share Mulder's beliefs, and attempting to take up the torch of his quest when Mulder is incapacitated to bring everything to light, he receives no returned assistance from the heroes and utterly fails.
• Papa Wolf: Everything he did was to try to find a cure for his son who was dying from Gulf War Syndrome courtesy of the government. After he fails to do so, he still continues fighting the government, trying to avenge his son and reveal the truth about them.
• Skeptic No Longer: Initially doesn't believe in extraterrestrial life, until witnessing Mulder's alien condition, then jumps in head first, to fatal consequences.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: With Skinner when Skinner seeks his help for Mulder, Scully doesn't even bother trying to work with him.
• Trauma Conga Line: Good lord. It's difficult to find other characters in the series who went through as much as he did in such a short span, in spite of his scant appearances.
• Unwitting Pawn: To the Syndicate in his first appearance, used to make Mulder doubt himself and his work on the X-Files, his belief in alien life. Eventually realizes he is this and breaks free of it.

Agent Diana Fowley

"Nothing could be further from the truth, Fox. Nothing".

Portrayed by Mimi Rogers

"You’re allowed to investigate the X-Files as an indulgence. But draw the wrong kind of attention and they’ll close you down. Put an end to all your work. Something I happen to have an interest in myself".

Mulder's ex-lover and former partner. With Agent Jeffery Spender, replaces Mulder and Scully on the X-Files when they get reassigned in season 6.

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• Agent Mulder: She's a believer much like Mulder himself. Being the only person who truly believed in his theories (before Scully came around, anyway) was the major contributory factor for their partnership and romantic relationship back in the day. In the present, she's more than willing to use this status as leverage to wedge her way back into Mulder's life.
• Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: Tall and brunette, and while not quite as emotionally defensive as Scully, she definitely has an aloof air about her.
• Birds of a Feather: She suggests to Mulder that maybe instead of Scully he'd prefer a partner who was more open-minded toward the paranormal... like herself. He wouldn't.
  Diana: I sense you could have used an ally, though – someone who thinks like you, with some background.
  Mulder: She's a, uh ... she’s a scientist. She just makes me work for everything.
  Diana: Yes, but I’m ... I’m sure there were times when two like minds on a case would have been advantageous.
• Heel–Face Turn: At the start of the seventh season, she betrays the Cigarette-Smoking Man, giving Scully a book that can save Mulder.
• The Mole: Scully suspects she's working for the conspiracy pretty early on; Mulder still considers her a friend and believes in her. They're both right.
• New Old Flame: For Mulder. The "new" part largely being on her end, as Mulder's romantic feelings for her have clearly waned in the time they've been apart.
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: The psycho part is not obvious until "The Sixth Extinction", where she visits Mulder, who's confined in a psychiatric hospital and being Mind Raped by psychic influence from an alien artifact, and makes a speech that can be summed up as "I've always loved you, Fox, and now that you're in five-point restraints we can finally be together".
  "I know what's happened to you. I know what you're suffering from. I've been sitting back and watching. I know you know. I know you know about me... That my loyalties aren't just to you... but to a man you've grown to despise. You have your reasons but, as you look inside me now you know that I have mine. Fox... Fox, I love you. I've loved you for so long. You know that, too. And I won't let you die... to prove what you are, to prove what's inside you. There's no need to prove it. It's been known for so long. Now we can be together".
• Redemption Equals Death: She's initially compliant in the Syndicate exploiting Mulder's brain condition during the "Sixth Extinction" story arc, but ultimately can't go through with it, and gives Scully the tools she needs to save Mulder from the Cigarette-Smoking Man, who in turn has Diana assassinated for her betrayal.
• Romantic False Lead: Seemed to exist mainly for the purpose of teasing the fans and making Scully jealous. (Mulder gave little sign of still having anything but platonic feelings toward her, however, although she was clearly carrying a torch for him).

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Others

Assistant Director Walter Skinner

"This was close. Any closer and a thousand friends at the capitol won’t be able to help you".

Portrayed by: Mitch Pileggi, Cory Rempel (as Young Skinner)
Dubbed by: Yuu Shimaka (Japanese)

"You two came along and you taught me not to hide from it, but to... have the guts to shine a light directly into the darkest corners. And if given the choice between advancing my career by being blindly loyal to some faceless puppeteers pulling strings from the shadows or to throw in with you two, make no mistake about it, I'd make the same decision every single damn time".

Mulder and Scully's direct superior for most of the series. His motives were initially doubtful, but he later became a staunch, if irritable, ally.

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• Bait-and-Switch Tyrant: His first appearances made him look like the classic "boss who is a nuisance to the protagonists". But eventually he becomes one of the few in the bureau who really trusts Mulder and Scully.
• Bald of Evil: Played With because he started as a shady figure as someone who might be connected to The Conspiracy. However, he proved he's a Reasonable Authority Figure and a badass boss who is on the good side and can handle himself in a fight. Mulder and Scully could depend on him, and he on them.
• Benevolent Boss: Although his benevolence is most certainly confined to his actions, not his demeanor.
• Boxing Battler: He boxes to keep in shape, and it influences his fighting style.
• Da Chief: He is more reserved than the classical archetype, but he fulfills the same function to Mulder and Scully: giving them 48 hours to solve a case, demanding them to turn in their weapons, wearing suspenders, and generally being a Reasonable Authority Figure whenever he is not being pressured by The Conspiracy.
• A Day in the Limelight: Avatar, Zero Sum and S.R. 819 in earlier seasons. From Season 7 on Skinner became increasingly prominent, earning a starring credit in Season 9.
• Deadpan Snarker: Required to deal with his equally snarky agents.
• Foot-Dragging Divorcee: And he makes the decision not to sign them in the end.
• Immune to Mind Control: In "Pusher", he was the only one who Modell couldn't convince into following a command.
• Last-Name Basis: He is always called by his last name even after becoming more of a friend than a superior to Mulder and Scully.
• Minored In Ass Kicking: Though he's usually seen behind a desk, he can stomp the crap out of people when he has to.
• Near-Death Clairvoyance: Skinner had an out-of-body experience during his tour in Vietnam when his platoon was shot, which is implied to be the reason he doesn't completely dismiss Mulder and the X-files.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: In his first couple of appearances he seems intent on making Mulder's life as difficult as possible, but he quickly gets better as he sees that Mulder's paranoia is justified and his work is important. He still occasionally frustrates Mulder and Scully by trying to put the brakes on their investigations, but it's usually done out of a desire to protect them.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: He really does listen to Mulder & Scully if they can back it up.
• Resistant to Magic: In "Pusher," he recognizes and fights the titular antagonist, and seems completely immune to Modell's power unlike everyone else in the episode.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: It's implied that his experiences in Vietnam seriously damaged him.
  "I lost my faith. Not in my country or in myself, but in everything".
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Enjoys pulling these on the Smoking Man, culminating in his awesome "Pucker up and kiss my ass" speech in "Paper Clip".
• What the Hell, Hero?: He frequently calls out Mulder and Scully when they're reckless or out of line, "Paper Hearts" being a great example.
  Skinner: Where's your gun? How do you explain yourself, Agent Mulder?
  Mulder: I don't.
  Skinner: You don't. A predator is loose because of you. God only knows how many hours lead he's got.

The Lone Gunmen

Portrayed by: Tom Braidwood (as Melvin Frohike), Dean Haglund (as Richard Langly), and Bruce Harwood (as John Byers), with Gordie Giroux, Eric Pospisil and Matthew Munn portraying the young Frohike, Langly, and Byers in the Lone Gunmen episode, "Like Water for Octane"

John Byers, Melvin Frohike, and Richard Langly. An unlikely trio of conspiracy theorists who publish an underground newsletter called The Magic Bullet. Old friends of Mulder's, they occasionally show up to help out Mulder and Scully, usually by doing research (as well as providing comic relief).

Late in the show's run, the Gunmen received their own short-lived spinoff series.

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• Chivalrous Pervert: Frohike. First to comment that Scully is "hot" and also first to show up to her hospital room with flowers and wearing his best suit after she was abducted. This extends into the spinoff; he definitely admires women, but he always treats them respectfully.
• Conspiracy Theorists: In their first episode, one of them tells Mulder that they like to hang out with him because his theories are way crazier than theirs.
• A Day in the Limelight: Unusual Suspects, Three of a Kind and Jump the Shark. They even got their own spinoff.
• Did Not Get the Girl: Byers and Suzanne Modeski have absolutely zero luck. He got clobbered hard by The Dulcinea Effect, and she returned those feelings, but circumstances meant it wouldn't happen.
• Hacker Cave: Their headquarters/home is filled with computer equipment. Frohike and Langly were hackers before the three teamed up, and they still use their skills to help Mulder and Scully in their investigations.
• Information Wants to Be Free: Their basic motivation for going into underground journalism.
• Intrepid Reporters: They often embark on dangerous missions in order to uncover the truth and gather evidence, to the point they had their own spin-off series centered on their escapades.
• Killed Off for Real: Zig-zagged. All three of them, in the season 9 episode Jump the Shark. However, it was revealed in This that Langly of all people had his mind backed-up into a virtual simulation by Erika Price. Until he was killed again in that world for warning Mulder and Scully to shut the program down.
• Perma-Stubble: Frohike frequently sports a somewhat unshaven appearance.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Especially in their spin-off series, where they wound up teamed up with a handsome, but very dumb, guy named Jimmy Bond and an offbeat spy with a conscience who only used anagrams of Lee Harvey Oswald for her aliases.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Byers never wears anything less than a suit and tie, although he has no real need to look respectable.
• Tragic Dream: "Three of a Kind" opens with Byers'. He dreams of a world where America lives up to its ideals, and he can have a comfortable home and family with Suzanne. But it always ends the same...
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: Byers, especially in their Whole Episode Flashback. Frohike and Langly tend to be a little more cynical about things, but all three of them are idealistic enough to be in business righting what wrongs they can.

Jeremiah Smith

"You're putting people in danger - Abductees all over the country. I save them".

Portrayed by: Roy Thinnes

"And if you can't appease their conscience you kill them. But you can't kill them all. You can't kill their love, which is what makes them who they are. Makes them better than us. Better than you".

A peaceful defector from the Colonists who seeks to aid the humans against them.

---

• Armor-Piercing Question: Delivers one to CSM:
  Jeremiah: How many must die to preserve your stake in the Project?
• Cool Old Guy: Is of kind and mellow disposition for a member of the species attempting to destroy the world, helping the humans against them the best he can.
• Good Counterpart: To the Alien Bounty Hunter. He has the same powers but uses them for benevolent purposes, and is quite pacifistic in nature.
• Healing Hands: Just like the Alien Bounty Hunter, but unlike him using them to heal returned abductees who suffered at the Colonists' own hands.
• Humans Are Special: Believes in this.
• Killed Off for Real: Is abducted by the Greys/Alien Bounty Hunters by a UFO and is almost certainly executed there. Either way, he is never seen again.
• Shapeshifting: Into any human.

Agent Jeffrey Spender

"I'll be my own great man!"

^{SPOILER: Click here to see Spender as he appears in 2002.}
"When I look in the mirror, I see something much different than the world sees".

Portrayed by: Chris Owens

"I'm just trying to save myself any extra humiliation. I'd like to build a reputation here, not be given one".

Assigned to the X-Files as Agent Fowley's partner when they replace Mulder and Scully on the X-Files at the beginning of season 6. Mulder's half-brother, fathered by the Cigarette Smoking Man.

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• Always Second Best: Even CSM informed him he's just not as cool as Mulder.
• The Bus Came Back: Twice.
  • His last appearance in Season 6 had him being shot by his father. 3 seasons later, he returns as a scarred man who is hell-bent on having his revenge towards the CSM.
  • The season 11 premiere is his first appearance in the revival series, after having sat out season 10.
• Covered with Scars: After being subject to numerous horrific medical experiments.
• The Dog Bites Back: Eventually manages to get his revenge on CSM and the Colonists for what was done to him and his mother, sabotaging a vital part of their schemes.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Never outright evil, but is clearly slipping into it under his father's toxic influence in a number of his appearances. At least until he finds out what CSM, the conspirators and Colonists have been doing to his mother Cassandra Spender.
• Face Death with Dignity: Never once does his Death Glare waver at the CSM, who is holding him at gunpoint towards the head. But it ends up being Subverted when he didn't die, which was revealed in Season 9.
• Fate Worse than Death: Subjected to horrific and disfiguring medical experiments attempting to turn him into an alien Super-Soldier.
• I Just Want to Be Badass: The two quotes describing him at the top are emblematic of this. All he wants is to make his name mean something in the FBI, and he won't let anyone get in the way of that.
• Jerkass: At first. He's put in charge of X-Files department, a department that Mulder rescued and gave his soul into the work. Spender just sits in his office and keeps destroying documents about prospective cases.
• Long-Lost Relative: Mulder's unknown half-brother.
• Made of Iron: The poor man survived a hell of a lot.
• Morality Pet: His mother, which ultimately turns him against CSM and to the side of the heroes.
• Not Quite Dead: Presumed dead in season 6, shows up again in season 9.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Jeffrey somehow managed to escape from the Conspiracy's custody, despite being horribly mutilated by the experiments they performed on him.
• The Power of Hate: The explanation he offers up for managing to survive everything he did at CSM's hands, stating that only his hatred for his father could never be killed.
• Physical Scars, Psychological Scars: Is clearly tormented physically and mentally by the torturous experiments he managed to survive at CSM's hands, as well as surviving the gunshot to the head.
• Pretending to Be One's Own Relative: Played With. Upon his return in season 9, he strictly speaking never directly claims to be Mulder, and even denies it, claiming that his name is "Daniel Miller", saying that Mulder was merely someone who helped him. But at the same time, he clearly tries to leave just enough doubt about his identity to make people think he could be a heavily scarred Mulder operating under a fake name, in order to get close to William, and he is in no real hurry to disabuse people of this idea until after he has completed his objective.
• Redemption Equals Death: He is killed by CSM after he handed the X-Files back to Mulder and Scully. Or so it seemed.
• Secret-Keeper: "My Struggle III" reveals him as such, since he gave Scully's child, William, up for adoption towards a random family. He has kept the location and identity of the family a secret from everyone but Scully.
• Strong Family Resemblance: The fact that his actor, Chris Owens, also portrays the younger version of his father, the Cigarette-Smoking Man, means that this in play between them.
• 'Tis Only a Bullet in the Brain: He managed to survive getting shot in the head by his father.
• Walking Spoiler: Let's just say that his fate post-Season 6 contains many of these, since he was presumed dead for 3 years after the CSM put a bullet in his head.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Had this going for the Cigarette-Smoking Man, his biological father, of all people. Well, at least until he finds out what CSM and the Syndicate had been doing to his mother Cassandra for years.

Agent John Doggett

"Well, the way I look at it, calling something paranormal is just a way of avoiding a real explanation".

Portrayed by: Robert Patrick
Dubbed by: Hōchū Ōtsuka (Japanese)

"Now, maybe I'm just an old-fashioned cop, but I don't take leaps. In my experience, leaps only get people killed".

A former US Marine and cop in the NYPD, Doggett is an experienced investigator with a practical and straight-lanced outlook on life. But behind his stern exterior lurks a deep inner sadness. He is assigned to the X-Files as Scully's new partner following Mulder's disappearance at the beginning of season 8.

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• Agent Scully: A mild example. He acts as the skeptic to balance out Scully in season 8, and Reyes in season 9.
• Amicable Exes: He's still on good terms with his ex-wife. It's implied they just drifted apart after the murder of their son, as many couples do following loss of a child.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: He starts out this way, but slowly becomes more accepting of paranormal explanations while retaining some of his skepticism (more than Mulder, Scully, and Reyes, anyway).
• Badass Normal: Noticeably more action oriented than Mulder, owing to his Marine Corps training.
• By-the-Book Cop: The poor fellow's attempts to adapt from his world of by-the-numbers Law & Order-style investigating to the weird and wacky world of the X-Files can be somewhat charming.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Not mentioned at all in the second movie, even when Scully's looking for someone at the FBI who can help her. Not mentioned in Season 10 either, despite Reyes' appearance.
• Cowboy Cop: Has shades of this when the case involves child victims, stemming from his past.
• Dark and Troubled Past: His kidnapped and murdered son Luke Doggett.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: After working with Scully and Skinner for awhile he comes to partially resent the lack of trust and faith they place in him.
• First-Name Basis: Unlike most characters on the show, he and Reyes almost always refer to each other by their first names.
• Logical Latecomer: Arrives at the start of Season 8, very much out of his depth and questioning the bizarre nature of everything he suddenly finds himself involved in with the X-Files.
• Manly Tears: Sheds fewer of them than Mulder, being much more emotionally reserved, which makes it all the more noticeable when he does.
• My Greatest Failure: The kidnapping and murder of his son.
• Nerves of Steel: Despite being out of his element with the cases of the X-Files, he always saddles up and comes through. Especially noticeable in the episode 'Medusa' when he soldiers on with his mission and saves the day, despite being potentially infected with a bioweapon.
• Not So Stoic: Although more emotionally reserved than Mulder, when it does come out that makes it all the more noticable. He has been shaken by his paranormal experiences, or in regards to his son's death or abused children.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: His thick Brooklyn accent comes and goes, though considering that the character is supposed to be from Georgia by way of Brooklyn, an inconsistent accent would be in-character.
• Outliving One's Offspring: His son, Luke, was abducted and murdered.
• Papa Wolf: Gets noticeably sympathetic and protective when it comes to cases involving kids, particularly when they are victims of abuse.
• That One Case: The kidnapping and murder of his son. He finally solves it and gains some closure in "Release".
• Tuckerization\Theme Naming: To complement Scully, his surname comes from a boothmate in Dodgers broadcasts, Jerry Doggett.
• Unrequited Love: Very much implied to have developed this for Scully over the course of working together, and that she knows it. For his part he never brings it up verbally, realistically recognizing the futility of it, that her heart belongs to Mulder already.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Very much hinted at with Reyes throughout Season 9 as they grow even closer working together.

Agent Monica Reyes

Portrayed by: Annabeth Gish

"I just have certain spiritual notions. I believe there are energies in the universe. It might sound kind of cosmic but I think I'm sensitive to them. I mean, I get these feelings".

Born and raised in Mexico City, Reyes speaks fluent Spanish and has studied folklore and mythology at Brown University due to her interest in spiritual phenomena, before she eventually joined up with the FBI. Introduced as a believer from the beginning, though a somewhat different one from Mulder. Appears in a few episodes of season 8, then joins the X-Files as Doggett's new partner at the beginning of season 9.

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• Agent Mulder: She embraces the paranormal aspects of the X-Files and acts as this to Doggett's Agent Scully in season nine.
• Boom, Headshot!: In "My Struggle IV", she dies when the CSM forces her to drive towards Skinner, causing the latter to kill her in this way.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Not mentioned at all in the second movie, even when Scully's looking for someone at the FBI who can help her.
• Face–Heel Turn: She's an ally of the Cigarette-Smoking Man in seasons 10 and 11. Although it is implied to not be entirely by choice.
• First-Name Basis: Unlike most characters on the show, she and Doggett almost always refer to each other by their first names. She's also on a mainly first name basis with Scully.
• Genki Girl: By the standards of this show, anyway. She's by far the most cheerful of the major characters.
• If Jesus, Then Aliens: One of the points that distinguishes her belief in the paranormal from Mulder's is that she believes in the spiritual, New Agey stuff as well as the aliens and pseudoscience.
• Smoking Is Cool: Subverted; she recognizes that smoking doesn't really fit into FBI "culture," but she's having trouble quitting.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Hinted to be with Doggett in the later episodes of season 9.

Antagonists

The Conspiracy

The Syndicate

"The government knows about it, you know. They're even in on it sometimes. Right there in the room when they come. They work together with a, uh, secret, uh, corporation".

— Duane Barry

A mysterious and sinister group who essentially rule the world from behind the scenes. They're determined to conceal the existence of extraterrestrial life from humanity by any means necessary, but their motivation and ultimate goals remain unclear for much of the series.

Despite the name, not actually an example of The Syndicate. The term is actually rarely used on the show, so you'll often see fans referring to them as "the Consortium" or just "the Conspiracy".

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• The Adjectival Man: Members are listed in the show's credits as "Black-Haired Man", "Crew-Cut Man", and the like.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Sure, they're pretty nasty individuals, but it's hard not to feel sorry when they're incinerated alive with their families at the end of "One Son".
• Big Bad: They're the primary force behind The Conspiracy until the "Full Disclosure" two-parter, which ends with most of them being Killed Off for Real.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Suggestions to assassinate Mulder are constantly overruled by various members who are manipulating him for their own purposes.
• Les Collaborateurs: A complex example. Some of the leaders earnestly support collaborating with the Colonists, others hope to trick them to stave off the invasion until humanity's able to resist. Individual agendas vary.
• Cosmopolitan Council: Inverted. If you're not an older, upper-class English-speaking white male, you need not apply.
• A Day in the Limelight: They play a much bigger role in Two Fathers and One Son than any of their other appearances.
• Deal with the Devil: They conspired with the aliens. It meant they assassinated people looking into them, experimented on innocents, and generally had their own set of evil plots. Still, they were Well Intentioned Extremists rather than irredeemably evil.
• Death by Pragmatism: They delayed an alien invasion by half a century, tried to buy time to resist, and failing that to save at least a small portion of humanity. It was the only rational course of action, but yet they were STILL portrayed as villains.
• Don't Create a Martyr: This is the rationale that the Cigarette-Smoking Man and the Well-Manicured Man provide for not just outright having Mulder whacked.
  CSM: You can kill a man but you can't kill what he stands for... Not unless you first break his spirit. That's a beautiful thing to see.
• Even Evil Has Standards: They're furious at the Smoking Man in Paper Clip when his henchmen accidentally kill Melissa Scully instead of Dana, though in retrospect this seems extremely odd.
• Government Conspiracy: The main storyline away from the usual format dealt with them, a government conspiracy to cover-up the existence of extra-terrestrials.
• Kill It with Fire: Many if not all members of the Syndicate are burned alive by the faceless alien rebels.
• The Men in Black: They're the ones who employ them.
• Misanthrope Supreme: They're essentially selling out most of humanity in exchange for safety for themselves and a few select others.
• N.G.O. Superpower: They're considerably more powerful than any mere government.
  Krycek: You can't bring these men to justice. They're protected. The laws of this country protect them in the name of national security. They know no law.
• No Name Given: Only a few members' names are ever mentioned, and those names may not be real.
• Ominous Mundanity: Most of their titles, as well as the names they give their projects ("Area 51," "Purity Control," etc).
• Omniscient Council of Vagueness: Effectively controls the world with various conspiracies.
  Well-Manicured Man: We predict the future, and the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
• Politically Incorrect Villains: See the entry for Cosmopolitan Council above. And while they take Mulder somewhat seriously as a threat to their plans, they seem incapable of taking notice of Scully as anything other than how important she is to Mulder.
• Shadow Government: They are the brains of the series's big conspiracy and seem to have authority in multiple different countries.
• Surveillance as the Plot Demands: Just assume they're spying on everything all the time.
• Well Intentioned Extremists: Sort of. Their goals aren't exactly good, but most of them are genuinely convinced that actually resisting the aliens isn't possible, and saving themselves and their families is all they can hope for.

Russian Syndicate

• Amputation Stops Spread: They amputate their arms believing it will prevent infection from the black oil. It doesn't.

Original Members (First Iteration)

Cigarette-Smoking Man

See below under CSM's Group (Second Iteration)

Deep Throat

"When a shark stops swimming, it will die. Don’t stop swimming".

Portrayed by: Jerry Hardin

"Well, let's just say that I'm in a position to know quite a lot of things, er, things about our government".

Mulder's first informant.

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• Ambiguously Evil: Played with in some early episodes, particularly "Fallen Angel" where he tells an FBI Chief out for Mulder's head that it's best to "Keep their friends close and their enemies closer", and Scully warns Mulder against trusting him several times. This is ultimately subverted by his Heroic Sacrifice, effectively confirming that his more ambiguous actions were either to preserve his cover within the Syndicate, or to protect Mulder in the long term.
  Deep Throat: I'm the liar, you're the killer.
  CSM: Your lies have killed more in a day than I have in a lifetime.
• Anyone Can Die: He set the precedent for the entire series, considering he was the first main character to lose his life on-screen. And it wasn't even grand, which had the Crew-Cut Man simply shooting him in the chest with a mere pistol.
• The Atoner: His stated reason for helping Mulder.
  Deep Throat: I was with the C.I.A. in Vietnam. A UFO was sighted for five nights over Hanoi. The Marines shot it down and brought it to us. Maybe… it didn’t know what a gun was or perhaps they don’t show emotion but that… innocent and blank expression as I pulled the trigger has haunted me... until I found you. That’s why I come to you, Mr. Mulder, and will continue to come to you to atone for what I’ve done. And maybe sometime, through you, the truth will be known.
• Bat Signal: Mulder can set up a meeting between them by lighting a blue glowing lamp.
• Code Name: Named after the then anonymous Watergate informant popularized by All the President's Men. His real name, as revealed in "This", was Ronald Pakula.
• Fire-Forged Friends: With the Cigarette-Smoking Man and Bill Mulder...possibly.
  CSM: How many historic events have only the two of us witnessed together, Ronald? How often did we make or change history? And our names can never grace any pages of record. No monument will ever bear our image. And yet once again, tonight, the course of human history will be set by two unknown men... standing in the shadows.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Willingly walks into a trap that exposes him as a traitor to the Syndicate to save Mulder's life.
• Killed Off for Real: In "The Erlenmeyer Flask". Though he has a few appearances in dreams, "visions" and as the form of a shape-shifted Jeremiah Smith.
• Mysterious Informant: Atoning for his deeds and helping Mulder's cause. He's carefully feeding Mulder with some information that might help him on his quest to reveal the truth.
• Named After Somebody Famous: His real name is Ronald Pakula. He's named after Alan J Pakula, director of seminal 70s Conspiracy Thrillers The Parallax View, Klute and All the President's Men (the latter of which includes a portrayal of his codename's namesake, Mark "Deep Throat" Felt).
• Sink or Swim Mentor: To Mulder:
  Deep Throat: I knew that down the road I would have to steer you away. That I would have to lie to you. And a lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths. [A disgusted Mulder turns and starts to walk away] Mulder, when a shark stops swimming, it will die. Don’t stop swimming.
• The Watcher: He's within the Powers That Be but secretly working against them.
• The World Is Not Ready: Thought some truths should stay hidden for this reason, which was an occasional point of contention between him and Mulder.
  Deep Throat: You and Scully are excellent investigators and your motives are just. However, there are still some secrets that should remain secret – some truths that people are just not ready to know.
  Mulder: Who are you to decide that for me?
  Deep Throat: The world’s reaction to such knowledge would be far too dangerous.

First Elder

"I don't like being kept in the dark on this".

Portrayed by: Don S Williams

"The ruler of the world is no longer the country with the bravest soldiers, but the greatest scientists".

A high ranking member of the Syndicate, serving as their nominal leader when they convene in New York.

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• Affably Evil: Though more gruff than the Well-Manicured Man, he is generally polite even to his enemies.
• Big Bad: Of season 5, which had his role beefed up after the Cigarette Smoking Man was briefly "fired" from the Syndicate ^note While this also gave Krycek and the Well-Manicured Man more to do that season, the First Elder still appeared more frequently than either of them.
• Dragon-in-Chief: Since the Syndicate's true leader, Conrad Strughold, does not appear in the series proper, the First Elder is the highest ranking member we see.
• Killed Off for Real: In "One Son", due to the Faceless Rebels intercepting the Syndicate's plans for colonization.
• Large and in Charge: Stands at a towering 6' 4".
• Orcus on His Throne: Rarely seen outside the Lodge, and only has one notable encounter with Mulder and Scully (in "731").
• Resistance Is Futile: Believes this about the Colonists, so he refuses to even consider siding with the Rebels. This proves to be his undoing.
  First Elder: Survival means collaboration.
• Tranquil Fury: Even when he is very clearly angry, he is not seen raising his voice.
• With Friends Like These...: Seems to hate Cigarette-Smoking Man as much as the Well-Manicured Man does, but he doesn't see eye to eye with the latter, either.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Pulls this on the Cigarette-Smoking Man. It doesn't work.

Well-Manicured Man

"This is not a profession for men who make mistakes".

Portrayed by: John Neville

"The men I work with will stop at nothing to clear the way for what they believe is their stake in the inevitable future. I was ordered to kill Dr. Kurtzweil, as I was ordered to kill you".

A British gentleman who's one of the less overtly malevolent members of the conspiracy. His Code Name is never actually used in the show, but appears in the end credits (as with several other Syndicate members).

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• Affably Evil: But a good case can be made that he was never really particularly evil in the first place, especially by the time he died.
• Anti-Villain: Makes the Cigarette-Smoking Man look like a thug, but can still be fairly ruthless in his own right.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: His accent and the glimpse of what seems to be his family home in the first movie vaguely suggest an aristocratic background.
• Driven to Suicide: In The X-Files: Fight the Future. After disobeying his orders to kill Mulder, an act of defiance he knows is punishable by death, he kills himself with a car bomb to ensure the safety of his family.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He is introduced in the film watching his grandchildren playing outside his mansion.
• Heel–Face Turn: In the first movie.
• Only Sane Man: Within the Syndicate. He generally attempts to guide them away from Collateral Damage, shares the Cigarette-Smoking Man's belief on the consequences of killing Mulder, and once he gets an indication that the Colonists are not as invincible as previously thought, he suggests fighting them instead of continuing to serve them.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Tells Scully in "The Blessing Way" that he helps her more out of fear that the Smoking Man's recklessness will expose the conspiracy than any moral objection. Definitely open to interpretation though, as he seems genuinely disgusted by some of CSM's actions throughout the series.
• With Friends Like These...: Loathes the Cigarette-Smoking Man, and the feeling is mutual.

CSM's Group (Second Iteration)

Cigarette-Smoking Man

"I'm an old man now, I will leave my own mark upon history, more than presidents or tyrants".

Portrayed by: William B Davis, with flashback appearances portrayed by Chris Owens^note in Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man & Demons, Craig Warkentin^note in Apocrypha, and Jeremy Schuetze^note in My Struggle III
Dubbed by: Masato Yamanouchi (Japanese)

"Men can never be free - Because they're weak, corrupt, worthless and restless. The people believe in authority. They've grown tired of waiting for miracle and mystery. Science is their religion. No greater explanation exists for them. They must never believe any differently if the project is to go forward".

The closest thing the show has to a main villain, a constantly chain-smoking older man who likes to skulk around being ominous. He's clearly associated with the grand government conspiracy Mulder and Scully are trying to uncover, but little is known about what he's really up to for quite a while.

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• The Atoner: He claims to be one in "En Ami". Ultimately it's implied that while he might have some desire for redemption, it's only in the self-indulgent way where he doesn't want it enough to actually change.
• Archnemesis Dad: He is revealed to be Mulder and Jeffrey Spender's biological father, both of whom are his mortal enemies. His other figurative son, William, isn’t too fond of him either.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: He's responsible for the assassination of at least one democratically elected world leader; the abduction, medical rape and torture of hundreds or thousands of individuals, and making sure the Buffalo Bills never win a Superbowl. Supposedly.
• Ascended Extra: Was originally intended to be just a hawkish figure holding a cigarette. Fortunately for the production team, they'd cast an actor who was practically overqualified^note Davis had started out as a child actor, had even been an assistant director under Laurence Olivier at the National in London, and ran acting school in Vancouver and was more than able to rise to the occasion when his role expanded. Davis originally read for the larger (within the Pilot) role of an FBI bigwig (the "Third Man" played by Ken Camroux), and received his throwaway role as consolation. One character became one of the show's main villains; the other appeared only in a handful of episodes.
• Badass Boast: Gives an absolutely chilling one to Mulder when he's staring down the barrel of the agent's gun in "One Breath".
  Cigarette-Smoking Man: (completely unimpressed) Don't try and threaten me, Mulder. I've watched presidents die.
• Because I'm Good At It: He seriously considered retiring when Gorbechev pulled the rug out from under the Soviet Union. He even put in his resignation, intending to write novels like he'd always wanted to do. Unluckily for him, no one was interested in his far-fetched spy intrigues, so a disheartened CSM ended up skulking back to work.
• Being Evil Sucks: CSM doesn't seem to like his work at all, living a lonely existence and carrying himself with an intense melancholy and regret for how his life has turned out. It's shown he does what he does mainly because he doesn't know what else to do.
• Big Bad: Well, he likes to present himself that way. He's actually sort of middle management in the Syndicate, at least until the others are wiped out by the Alien Rebels. He does manage to become the true Big Bad in the revival, though.
• Body Horror: Although he survived the air strike in the Season 9 finale, he is severely deformed. He is shown to require extensive reconstructive surgery. He even wears a prosthetic nose.
• Calling Card: A still-burning Morley cigarette on the ground or in an office ashtray will indicate he's been there very recently—these seem to be left intentionally by him to toy with or intimidate his opponents or send a message. In the episode "The End", the imprisoned failed assassin hired by the Syndicate receives a threatening message on a cut-out side of a Morley carton. Right before he gets shot by the guard, he receives another Morley carton side with no message on it. It is not certain that the prisoner recognized the calling card, but the viewer does.
• Can't You Read the Sign?: An old pro who doesn't much cotton to these newfangled smoke-free offices.
• The Chessmaster: Zig-zagged. He's usually quite good at manipulating, pressuring or blackmailing people into doing his bidding, but he's certainly not infallible. Notably in The Blessing Way and Paper Clip, when his inability to recover the digital tape or discover Mulder's whereabouts puts him on the defensive throughout the arc, leading ultimately to Skinner putting him in his place.
• A Day in the Limelight: Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man and En Ami, the latter written by Davis himself.
• Decomposite Character: CSM and the Third Man were actually originally a single character named Luke Drazen, and this was the character Davis read for. Drazen was split into CSM and Third Man to give Davis his consolation role.
• The Dragon: His exact role in the Syndicate isn't clear, but it's implied he's outranked by Strughold, the Well-Manicured Man and the other elders. In this context, CSM's most frequently seen being chewed out for a security breach or botched cover-up operation.
  • Co-Dragons: Deep Throat tells him"You're the killer. I'm the liar." CSM took exception to this, claiming that Deep Throat had a much higher body count if one considered the fruits borne by those untruths.
• Deadpan Snarker: A rather audacious one. He'll snark to a hitman whose death he arranged over the phone while simultaneously trying to convince the other men in the room that the person he's speaking to is already dead.
• Establishing Character Moment: His first episode is dialogue-free. And why not? He is just a petty bureaucrat—or at least that's what he appears to be, until he blows kisses to a certain Spielberg film. "We have top men working on it..."
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He genuinely feels, or at least once felt, something for Mulder's mother, Teena. In a very rare display of tenderness, he can be seen privately holding her hand at the hospital after her collapse. Similarly, he is overcome with a notable bout of emotion when he visits his son's apartment after Fox is pronounced dead in Redux.
• Evil Old Folks: He always represented a "Baby Boomer vs. Generation-X" kind of theme, even if William B. Davis was a middle-aged dude. This new CSM from the relaunch looks like some demented Gore Vidal.
• Evil Plan: Seasons 10 and 11 reveal that he's been working on for decades - in fact, one that he's been working on even during the days of the Syndicate: Depopulate the human race through the Spartan Virus (ostensibly to prevent a complete extinction event), with the only survivors being the genetically engineered/augmented race of human-Colonist hybrids (including himself through gene therapy). Under the Cigarette-Smoking Man's leadership, this race of hybrids will inherit the Earth. It's also strongly implied that the now-depopulated planet will be then offered over to the Colonists (meaning that his Evil Plan is actually part of "Colonization"), and the human-Colonist hybrids and Colonists will learn to share the planet together.
• Faux Affably Evil: He tries to pass himself off as Affably Evil, telling both Mulder and Scully that he likes them on more than one occasion, even acting friendly towards Skinner. Mulder and Scully never buy it, while his outward friendliness only annoys Skinner.
  CSM: How does anything I do surprise you now? Aren't you expecting me to sprout vampire fangs?
• Face Death with Dignity: He shows no signs of distress when he is set on fire during the airstrike. Granted, the death part is averted, since he survived that.)
• For the Evulz: Frequently shields Mulder from assassination by his colleagues. In the last episode, he admits he spared Mulder just so he could see him crushed. It's up for debate, however, whether this was actually his intent from the start or a case of Motive Decay. It is notable that in Season 10, he admits to actually feel some kind of fondness for Mulder; enough to give him a We Can Rule Together offer and a vial of the cure to the Spartan virus to allow him to survive the disease.
• Grand Inquisitor Scene: Has one at the end of season 3, where he quotes Dostoevsky:
  CSM: Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him.
• He Who Must Not Be Heard: Appeared in the very first episode, but had no dialogue for much of the first season.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: CSM always keeps his cards close to his chest and never lets anyone, not even those working with and under him, know his real goals.
• Hidden Depths: He'd probably give it all up to be a writer, if he could get published. Though that was shown in one episode with Unreliable Narrator. That's what the Lone Gunmen dug up on him and believe, but to what extent it's true, we'll never know.
• Hijacked by Ganon: It appears that he secretly highjacked the Colonists' plans to pave the way for his own stratagem regarding the Spartan Virus.
• Hope Crusher: The CSM establishes himself as this in Season 6, showing a more villainous light to his typical decisions he believes are for the greater good of humanity.
  "You can kill a man but you can't kill what he stands for. Not unless you first break his spirit. That's a beautiful thing to see".
• Joker Immunity: Revoked in the series finale. However, even a missile to the face didn't last. He survives the finale in both the Season 10 comics and the actual Season 10 in the 2016 revival.
• Karmic Death: His demise in Season 11 has tons of these. Back in Season 2, Krycek asked him why Mulder couldn't just be killed immediately, the CSM justified this by saying that murdering Mulder would create others to take up his crusade for the truth. And later on, he reveals to Mulder in the season 9 finale that he always kept him safe just so he could destroy the latter's hope. Now, his death episode in season 11 has him shoot who he thinks is Mulder, only for it to turn out to be William using an illusion. Bereft of hope at seeing his presumed son again, Mulder angrily unloads five rounds into the CSM's chest, and shoves him into the ocean below. To rub more salt into the wound, Tad O'Malley reveals the CSM's plans revolving around the Spartan Virus to the world, crediting Mulder and Scully for the information. In short, if he had just killed Mulder earlier, his plans and life wouldn't go to shit in the long run.
• Killed Off for Real: After surviving an air strike in the Series Fauxnale, he dies for good in the Season 11 finale when Mulder shoots him dead.
• Lonely Bachelor Pad: He has a minimally furnished, dimly lit apartment that emphasizes how empty his life is outside the Syndicate. When Mulder ambushes him there, he points out that he has "no wife, no family, some power..". while describing why he does what he does.
• Luke, I Am Your Father:
  • He reveals himself as such to Jeffrey Spender.
  • Bill Mulder was not Mulder's biological father, in fact it was the Cigarette Smoking Man. Mulder does not find out until much later.
• Manipulative Bastard: His entire bread and butter is casually manipulating people from behind the scenes into doing what he wants.
• Misanthrope Supreme: From the aforementioned Grand Inquisitor scene:
  CSM: Men can never be free, because they are weak, corrupt, worthless and restless.
• Most Writers Are Writers: He was an aspiring novelist before he started working for the Syndicate and got a story published during the show's run.
• Multiple Gunshot Death: This is how he finally goes out in Season 11. A very pissed Mulder shoots him five times after he unknowingly shot William in the head.
• No Name Given: Up until Season 11, he was known as the Cigarette Smoking Man because he was constantly seen smoking cigarettes. He's revealed to have the initials C.G.B. in Season 6, and in Season 11 we find out they stand for Carl Gerhard Busch.
• Not Quite Dead: On numerous occasions, he turns out to have survived his apparent death, even surviving an air strike.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: His Evil Plan to wipe out the vast majority of the human race is Hand Waved as being necessary to prevent the complete extinction of life on Earth from overpopulation, but it's all but directly stated that he really wants to do this so he can lord over the "genetically superior" race of Colonist-human hybrids.
• One Last Smoke: In the Series Fauxnale, he takes one last drag, flicks away the butt, then calmly waits until he gets incinerated in an airstrike.
• Politically Correct Villain: In "Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man," his younger self respects Martin Luther King, Jr., and tells his fellow conspirators that if the issue were purely one of human rights, he'd side with King. Communism is the bigger concern.
• Punny Name: Karl Gerhard Busch, as revealed in "My Struggle III".
• Shadow Archetype: His private life turned out to be not dissimilar from Mulder's. Sure, he's got unlimited reach (screw you, Bills!), but he can't use it to live openly or extravagantly, so he goes home to his cruddy apartment (with no wife or kids to greet him) and watches B-movies.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Has a pleasant, avuncular New England accent (except for the times he has a pleasant, avuncular Canadian accent).
• Time-Shifted Actor: His younger self is played by Chris Owens, who also happens to play his son, Jeffrey Spender.
• Unreliable Narrator: He lies as easily as most people breathe. We never find out how much of what we know about him is true, and ironically, it's implied that his fiction novel about "Jack Colquitt" — the version we see almost none of — is the most truthful account of his deeds.
• Unwitting Pawn: ...Maybe. Season 11 makes it intentionally ambiguous as to whether or not his plans with the Spartan Virus are actually just another part of the delayed Colonization, or if he's actually been manipulating the Colonists into getting the necessary tech to make sure his Spartan Virus plans happen in the first place.
• Vader Breath: You can almost hear the Imperial March blare whenever he lights up.
• We Can Rule Together: In the Season 10 finale, which was revealed to be Scully's vision in Season 11, he offers Mulder a personal vial of the cure to the Spartan virus, telling him that he wants him to become part of his chosen elite. Mulder, of course, rejects the offer.
• While Rome Burns: This is when we're most likely to see him lighting up.
• Who Shot JFK?: He did, apparently. Martin Luther King, Jr. as well.

Monica Reyes

See her entry above under Allies

Operatives

X

"Don't unlock doors you're not prepared to go through, Agent Scully".

Portrayed by: Steven Williams

"Dead men can't keep promises. The next time the blood and regret could be yours. I'm not at your beck and call, Agent Mulder. I have nothing to gain and everything to lose by helping you. Promise you won't contact me again unless absolutely necessary".

Mulder's second informant, colder and less friendly than Deep Throat.

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• Anti-Hero: Although he was deeply ingrained in The Conspiracy and his motives are often ruthless and selfish, X was genuinely aiding Mulder in his pursuit of the truth and ultimately died for doing so.
• Bat Signal: Mulder summons him by making an X out of masking tape on his window and shining a light through it (hence the Code Name).
• Big Damn Heroes: Rescues Mulder from an exploding train.
• Combat Pragmatist: When he's in a fight, he'll resort to headbutts, sticks to the groin, and pulling a gun on his opponent.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: The opening episode of Season 4 of The X-Files had him writing a message in blood on Mulder's doorstep, having been shot trying to bring information.
• Darker and Edgier: Than Deep Throat. Where Deep Throat was always friendly and usually helpful, X is openly hostile towards Mulder and Scully, misleads them when it suits his purposes, and outright says he's helping them as a debt to his predecessor, not for any moral reasons.
• Deadpan Snarker: Can match Mulder on this nearly stride for stride:
  Mulder: How was the opera?
  X: Wonderful. I've never slept better.
  
  Mulder: He thinks the government is out to get him.
  X: It's tax season, so do most Americans.
• Headbutting Heroes: Often came up between him and Mulder and sometimes Scully, though ultimately after his murder Mulder notes that he considered X to be his friend.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: X is cynical, rude, irritable, is more prone to murder than his predecessor, and has a tendency to string Mulder and Scully along for his own ends, but he does care about Mulder deep down, enough to rescue him from an exploding train in "731".
• Killed Off for Real: In "Herrenvolk". Mulder sees him as a ghost in "The Truth"
• Knight in Sour Armor: Far more cynical, amoral, and rude than Deep Throat, but he does genuinely help Mulder.
• Mysterious Informant: Even more than Deep Throat, since he tends to leave out information when it suits him, and he occasionally manipulates Mulder for his own ends, such as in "Soft Light".
• Pet the Dog: In "Unusual Suspects" he spares the Lone Gunmen and warns them to "behave themselves" in the future.
• Scary Black Man: While he is firmly on Mulder’s side, he is far more hostile than Deep Throat.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: In certain later episodes, he's much meaner to Mulder and Scully than he was at first. He's still on their side, he just occasionally acts like a dick.
• Nominal Hero: Helps Mulder due to an unexplained debt to Deep Throat but is more concerned with his own survival than any real altruism and would just as likely off Mulder and Scully if it came down to a question of them or him.
• What You Are in the Dark: Rescuing Mulder from the exploding train car rather than save the hybrid in "731", something Mulder never learns about. Also for sparing an incapacitated Mulder in "The Unusual Suspects" when a subordinate suggested dealing with him.

Agent Alex Krycek

"You think I'm bad. That I'm a killer. We wanted the same thing, brother. That's what you don't understand".

Portrayed by: Nicholas Lea
Dubbed by: Yasunori Matsumoto (Japanese)

"It's shocking at first. The acceptance of the idea, it's... It's something you thought only children and fools believed in. It undermines your beliefs - in yourself, in the world... but then you come to understand".

Assigned to work with Mulder when the X-Files were closed in Season 2. He was eventually revealed as a double agent and reappears throughout the series in various shades of villainy.

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• An Arm and a Leg: Gets his left arm sawed off.
• Arch-Enemy: Firmly establishes himself as Mulder's when he murders Mulder's dad and tries to frame Mulder for it.
• Boom, Headshot!: This is his final fate, courtesy of Skinner. He had it coming from that guy.
• Chew Toy: For a triple-crossing assassin, he sure does suffer a lot of humiliating beat downs. Mostly by the hands of Mulder. If it was not for him managing to actually successfully kill the occasional target, he would strongly qualify as a Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Trying to figure out whose side he's on at any given time is a good way to give yourself a headache.
• Consummate Liar: It's best to not trust a word the man says. Krycek might not even be his real name.
• Double Agent: He's introduced as the Mole, but eventually just works for whatever side gives him the most advantage.
• Gratuitous Russian: He mostly uses it to swear at people.
• Handicapped Badass: After he loses an arm.
• Hazy-Feel Turn: It's always pretty clear that he's not a good guy, but he constantly switches between different bad guy factions, and his interests occasionally even coincide with those of Mulder and Scully, resulting in brief Enemy Mine situations.
• Hellbent For Leather: Usually wears a leather jacket, though thanks to the beatings he often takes, it's rarely the same one from episode to episode.
• Hero Killer: Murders Mulder's informant Michael Kritschgau and steals the alien data he had been accumulating.
• Informed Ability: Downplayed. Krycek is described as a trained and highly skilled assassin for hire, and while he does indeed kill some people over the course of the series, actually analysing his track record in detail, doesn't exactly make him come off as particularly impressive or even all that competent. The only target that the audience knows that he was explictly hired to kill and actually does succeed in assassinating, is Mulder's elderly father, who happens to be drunk at the time Krycek comes for him. Everyone else he ends up killing are either killed because he mistakes them for his actual target, such as killing Scully's sister, when he was actually going for Scully, or are killed on a whim because they happen to get in his way, neither of which are very professional acts for a supposedly covert assassin. And whenever he gets into a fistfight with Mulder, which happens surprisingly often, he always gets his ass so throughly handed to him, that he ends up being captured or has to beat a hasty retreat.
• Killed Off for Real: In the episode "Existence" he finally meets his end when he is shot in the head by Skinner.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Skinner is a frequent victim of Krycek, be it assault, blackmail, or an attempt of murder through nanomachines. No wonder the director is the one to put a bullet between Krycek's eyes.
• The Mole: When he's introduced, although it doesn't last long before his cover's blown.
• Not Quite Dead: On several occasions.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Obfuscating Incompetence. Pay close attention to his episodes and you'll realize he actually gets away with a lot more than he appears to. A perfect example would be "Tunguska", where he was the one who hired the Russian assassin who (temporarily) royally screwed up the Syndicate's plans.
• Out of Focus: Krycek was a proto-Spender. He was the "other metaphorical son" of the Cigarette-Smoking Man, up until the show started really pushing the idea that Mulder was the CSM's real son. At which point they introduced Spender. (Which leads to perhaps the most consistent piece of Krycek's characterisation: He is really resentful of Mulder and Spender, particularly in One Son and Requiem). Although the show hooks Krychek up with Marita solely so the show can have an "evil sexy Mulder and Scully!", this is somewhat undercut when Laurie Holden gets cast in The Majestic and is thus out of reach for the eighth season.
• Russian Guy Suffers Most: His parents were Cold War immigrants. (If he was being honest for once when he said that. He is fluent in Russian, though). He also regularly suffers from strings of bad luck (like getting left for dead in a decommissioned nuclear-silo, losing an arm) and his encounters with Mulder tends to result in him getting the stuffing kicked out of him, often repeatedly.
• The Starscream: He's had a few sneaky attempts at clawing his way to power, including his stint in charge at a Russian gulag, his recurring threats (and eventual attempt) to kill the Cigarette Smoking Man (and when that failed, attempting to ensure his place as CSM's successor) and manipulating Jeffrey Spender. You can practically see him waiting in the shadows, ready to seize power with both hands. Well, one hand anyway.
• Tall, Dark, and Handsome: A double agent and a dirty rat boy who charms and eventually betrays everyone must be fit and handsome to pull it all off. He has very dark eyes and black hair. Tall, dark, mysterious and very handsome.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The montage at the beginning of the season 8 DVDs shows Skinner shooting Krycek in the head.
• The Usual Adversaries: The show was generally quite good at axing characters who had served their purpose (Deep Throat, X, Spender, Fowley, etc), etc. Nick Lea was just too popular to actually loose, even if he didn’t really have an arc after Apocrypha.
• Wild Card: His loyalties are up in the air any time he appears.
• Would Hurt a Child: Tortures and infects a kid who has happened upon proof of aliens with the black oil to see him if he can blackmail the Syndicate into getting a cure.

Section Chief Scott Blevins

"I see no evidence that justifies the legitimacy of these investigations".

Portrayed by: Charles Cioffi

"Your choice is your own, but your failure to answer these questions will reflect poorly on the record of the formal inquiry".

Mulder and Scully's original boss, who was the one to assign the latter to the former from the very beginning of the series.

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• The Bus Came Back: He appears in three episodes of season one, and comes back in "Gethsemane" and the first two episodes of season 5.
• Never Suicide: His murder is staged as a suicide. Shot by one of his underlings after Mulder blows his cover, who conscientiously stuffs the gun in Blevins' hand.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: In Season 1, he's bemused by Mulder's obsessions but tolerates them, up to a point. Either it was a really good front or he's taken a level in jerkass because he's much less pleasant when he returns several years later.
• The Reveal: It turns out that this man was working for the Syndicate in "Redux".

Marita Covarrubias

"Not everything dies, Mister Mulder".

Portrayed by: Laurie Holden

"My office has to answer to the Secretary General of the United Nations. This is a very serious matter. I need to know what's going on".

Mulder's third informant. Her day job is Special Representative to the Secretary General of the United Nations, but she also has ties to the Syndicate.

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• Distaff Counterpart: To Senator Richard Matheson. She has a public identity as a government official, eventually has to keep her distance to avoid endangering her career, and is eventually revealed to be working for the Conspiracy.
• Fate Worse than Death: Used by the Syndicate for human experimentation as a punishment, after they figure out she was working against them.
• The Mole: Played it on both sides. She was helping Mulder, and telling on him to the conspirators.
  Marita: I'll tell him what you want me to tell him.
  CSM: Tell him what he wants to hear.
• Punch-Clock Villain: While not really a villain, this is essentially how she describes her relationship with the Syndicate; they paid her for her access, and she hated working with them.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: At some point between "Requiem" and "The Truth" she seems to have left The Conspiracy for a low profile private sector gig in Annapolis, Maryland, though she does reappear to testify as a witness on Mulder's behalf.

Diana Fowley

See her entry above under Allies

Knowle Rohrer

"Shoot me, Agent Doggett, if you think it will make a difference this time".

Portrayed by: Adam Baldwin

"You and I have been friends a long time, John. I tell you things. But this is a whole other level".

A Super Soldier who served alongside Doggett in the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit.

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• Evil Former Friend: To Doggett, before his reveal as one of the Super Soldiers.
• Fatal Flaw: Arrogance. He accepts his new strength and power as a Super Soldier far too easily, without considering his potential weaknesses. This can clearly be seen in three instances:
  • "Existence" has him engage in a car chase against Doggett and Skinner. On his way, he casually drives over another Super Soldier, Agent Crane. This causes him to swerve out of control and crash, blowing up the car.
  • "Nothing Important Happened Today II" has him so fixated on kiling Doggett, that he doesn't even see Shannon coming from behind to decapitate him.
  • Finally, in "The Truth II", he boasts to Doggett about bullets meaning nothing to him. But he says this as he is unknowingly walking towards the Super Soldiers' weakness: magnetite. As a result, his skin turns metallic and he is sent flying into the rocks, sealing his fate.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Being one of the Colonists’ Super Soldiers, who are human-alien hybrids intended to replace humans.
• Made of Iron: As he is a Super Soldier, he can survive hell being thrown at him, whether it's an explosive car crash or having his head lopped off.
• Killed Off for Real: Despite having survived being decapitated, he dies for good thanks to walking in an area full of magnetite, a metal that is toxic to Super Soldiers, in the Series Fauxnale.

Crew-Cut Man

"I'm afraid... your work is done".

Portrayed by: Lindsey Ginter

"Oh, I don't like talking on the phone. I have this thing about unsecured lines. When you feel like talking, let me know, though".

A mysterious Syndicate Operative who sports a crew cut and whose job consists of taking out anybody who knows too much about the conspiracy.

---

• He Knows Too Much: His job is to enforce this trope by killing anyone who learns too much about the conspiracy.
• Hero Killer: He is the one who guns down Deep Throat in the season 1 finale.
• Karmic Death: He performed experiments on Wisconsin children by injecting them with alien DNA, which escalated to the point where one of them actually died. This costs him his own survival when that kid's bereaved father shoots him down.
• Killed Off for Real: Sheriff Mazeroski shoots him repeatedly in revenge for killing his son.

Red-Haired Man

"You have no idea what you're dealing with here".

Portrayed by: Stephen McHattie

"Ask yourself, my friend. What could be more valuable than Star Wars? More valuable than the atomic bomb or the most advanced biological weapons?"

A Syndicate Operative assigned to kill the scientists involved in Unit 731.

---

• Affably Evil: He resorts to diplomacy and talk when Mulder turns the tables on him. It might have been an act, and he was certainly presenting himself as such in an attempt to break Mulder's walls down, but the mask doesn't really drop.
• Consummate Liar: He spins a fairly convincing cover story when Mulder has him cornered, but Mulder doesn't believe a word of it.
• It's All There in the Manual: Is never named on-screen. The X-Files DVD collection gives his name as Malcolm Gerlach, but it's unclear if this is his real name or simply his cover identity with the NSA.
• Impersonating an Officer: An NSA Agent named Malcolm Gerlach. Mulder doesn't buy it.^note In real life, the NSA is a communications intelligence agency that does not perform field operations.
  Mulder: Since when did they start issuing you guys piano wire?
• Hero Killer: Subverted. He tries to leave Mulder to die on a train set to explode, but X doesn’t allow that and kills him.
• Meaningful Name: An Evil Redhead named the Red-Haired Man.
• Non-Indicative Name: Despite the name, he's actually a brunet, not a redhead.
• The Quiet One: Starts out as a Silent Antagonist. Once he meets Mulder, he becomes quite eloquent.
• Razor Floss: Uses this on most of his targets.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: One moment, the Red-Haired Man has incapacitated Mulder and is heading his way out the train car rigged to explode. The next, he's fatally shot out of nowhere by X.

Grey Haired Man

"That can be arranged".

Portrayed by: Morris Panych

"When something is not on the menu, Mr. Skinner, there's usually a reason, wouldn't you say?"

A Syndicate assassin who appears throughout Seasons 3 and 4. Among other missions, he kills X in Herrenvolk and frames Skinner for murder in Avatar and Zero Sum.

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• Elite Mook: CSM and the First Elder assign him to carry out some of their most sensitive missions. Besides the above, he's the first human we see successfully using the alien gimlet weapon in Memento Mori.^note Krycek is the only other, in Two Fathers
• Hero Killer: Murders X on behalf of the Syndicate when he is outed as the insider aiding Mulder.
• The Quiet One: Practically his only dialogue comes in Piper Maru (and a few lines in Avatar).
• Shame If Something Happened: His first appearance comes in Piper Maru, unsubtly threatening Skinner to drop the investigation into Melissa Scully's death. Skinner doesn't take the hint.
  Grey Haired Man: You take your orders like those below you, Mr. Skinner. When a case is made inactive, say... the death of an FBI agent's sister; maybe that's because those above you have done the hard work of arriving at that decision.
  Skinner: Thanks for the enlightenment, I'm gonna go now.
  Grey Haired Man: It helps to know these things when a man looks forward to his career... to his plans for the future.

Scott Garrett

"A man, if he's any man at all, knows he must be ready to sacrifice himself to that which is greater than he".

Portrayed by: Greg Michaels

"Look out your window, Agent Mulder. You see the lights? Now, imagine if one of those lights flickered off. You'd hardly notice, would you? A dozen... two dozen lights extinguished. Is it worth sacrificing the future, the lives of millions, to keep a few lights on?"

A Syndicate operative assigned to recover/destroy evidence of the UFO responsible for the crash of Flight 549. He is Agent Pendrell's killer.

---

• Bad Boss: Orders divers to recover alien debris from the bottom of Lake Sacangaga, and is indifferent when they resurface with severe radiation burns.
• Hero Killer: Ends up killing Agent Pendrell, and very likely would have killed Scully if Pendrell hadn't taken the bullet meant for her.
• Impersonating an Officer: Disguises himself as an NTSB Agent.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Refusing to part with the UFO detritus he has retrieved results in him getting abducted by aliens.
  Mulder: I think he got the connecting flight.
• Lean and Mean: He has a wiry build, and isn't a very nice guy.
• Limited Wardrobe: Garrett, rather curiously, doesn't change his suit after he is shot by Scully. If he had been wearing something that did NOT have bullet holes, Mulder would not have recognized him as Pendrell's killer.
• Made of Iron: Shot in the leg by Scully and doesn't even have so much as a limp afterward.
• Shout-Out: Wields a non-metallic composite handgun similar to the one John Malkovich used in In the Line of Fire.
• Uncertain Doom: Is abducted by the Colonists, but at this point the Colonists still have a shaky alliance with the Syndicate, so he may or may not have been returned, or executed or experimented on. Either way, he is never seen again.

Black Haired Man

Portrayed by: Michael Shamus Wiles

A Syndicate assassin best known for shooting and nearly killing Mulder in Fight The Future.

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• Killed Off for Real: The CSM shoots him in the head in “En Ami.”

Quiet Willy

Portrayed by: Willy Ross

A very quiet operative.

---

• Killed Off for Real: Murdered by the Faceless Rebels.
• The Quiet One: Not very talkative, to say the least.
• Small Role, Big Impact: He's the one who shoots the Cigarette-Smoking Man in ''Redux II'.

Morris Fletcher

"Those who fight the good fight don't always win".

Portrayed by: Michael McKean

"Oh, you've seen the last of Mr. Nice Guy. I really am going to have you shot in the head".

A member of Majestic 12 who works at Area 51. As an "Information Control Specialist", Agent Fletcher is in charge of keeping all of Area 51's information out of the press, by any means necessary. Unfortunately, most of his time is spent being wrapped into misadventures with either Mulder or the Lone Gunmen.

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• Arch-Enemy: Intended to be one for the Lone Gunmen in their spinoff series.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: After the Syndicate is destroyed he leaves Majestic 12 and goes private sector, but still uses the years of inside information he's accumulated for personal gain.
• Dirty Coward: He has no combat training, so his resolve disappears the moment he's physically threatened.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: Undergoes one with Mulder in the "Dreamland" two-parter.
  Mulder: So you're the guy that wants my life. I assume that includes all the ass-kickings?
• Miles Gloriosus: He's essentially this for the Conspiracy. Sure, he may work at Area 51, but he's only middle management and no one at the facility has any real knowledge of the Syndicate or even extraterrestrials. After he goes private sector, he plays up his credentials to various crime lords and black marketeers but gets in over his head when they realize he can't really deliver on what he promises.
• Mr. Exposition: In "Jump The Shark" he's this for the Lone Gunmen's short-lived spinoff series:
  Morris: Once upon a time there were three... how shall I put this... geeks. Three more unlikely heroes there never were. It wasn't long before their naivete nearly got them killed. So they hooked up with an FBI agent and began publishing a... what shall I call it... rag, called "The Lone Gunman". From their cramped basement office, they pointed fingers at powerful, evil forces. And some not so evil. In their own unique way, the three Gunmen were patriots, fighting the good fight.

Luis Cardinal

Portrayed by: Lenny Britos

A Nicaraguan mercenary who often works with the CSM, and performs assassinations for him.

---

• Accidental Murder: When breaking into Scully's house, he saw someone enter, so he shot that person. Only it wasn't his intended target, Scully, it was her sister.
• The Adjectival Man: Initially credited as "the Hispanic Man" until his identity is revealed in Apocrypha. He's virtually the only Syndicate operative to be given a name and backstory in the original series.
• Killed Off for Real: The Syndicate makes sure that, shortly after being imprisoned, he ‘hangs himself’.

Colonists

The Colonists/The Greys

A mysterious race of aliens who are using the Syndicate as their pawns with the ultimate goal of colonizing Earth.

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• Abusive Precursors: They are Earth's original inhabitants, who ended up having to flee to another world during the Ice Age. They are less than pleased to learn that a certain species of primate has evolved and taken over the planet in their absence.
• Alien Blood: The Black Oil, which is actually their lifeblood, and at least once suggested to be the real Big Bad controlling them.
• Alien Abduction: One of their calling cards, and their habit of this is what set Mulder on his life's path.
• Aliens Are Bastards: Seeing how they want to colonize the Earth, Kill All Humans and spare only some as a hybrid Slave Race, they definitely qualify.
• Big Bad: Of the whole franchise, being the whole impetus for the Syndicate and having the ultimate goal of exterminating/enslaving mankind. However, Seasons 10 and 11 ultimately reveal that even they were Unwitting Pawns of the Cigarette-Smoking Man.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: According to Arthur Dales, they aren't carbon-based lifeforms. Also, their "child" form is actually the larger and more physically dangerous form, which their smaller adult form emerges from when they mature.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: They reproduce through the Black Oil. After it invades a human body, it will produce an alien inside the person's body, which will eventually be ripped open when the alien wants out.
• Gaia's Lament: According to Erika Price in 2016, the Colonists eventually gave up on their plans to recolonize their homeworld because humanity has despoiled the planet beyond any potential use to them.
• The Greys: They're intentionally designed to resemble the iconic "Roswell" aliens.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Part of what makes them so freaky is how little is revealed about them, even to the audience.
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: Their technology is so advanced that they were able to completely cure a young boy's terminal cancer through a single painless implant in the back of the spine (as shown in "En Ami").
• Ultraterrestrials: As noted above, they're actually the original inhabitants of Earth (supposedly, they first emerged millions of years ago and walked the Earth since before even the Mesozoic Era), but fled the planet in the face of the Ice Ages.
• Unwitting Pawn: Ironically, Season 11 shows that as clever as they were, even they were ultimately hoodwinked by the Cigarette-Smoking Man's machinations, as he was able to use the Syndicate's access to the Colonists' hyper-advanced tech along with stalling Colonization for a long-enough time to try and implement his true plan: Namely, create a highly lethal bioweapon (the Spartan Virus) to exterminate the vast majority of humanity and only allow for a select few - who have been made into a Superior Species through Colonist genetic tampering - to survive and "make a better world". Granted, it's worth noting here that it's possible that this in and off itself might be Colonization, but it's intentionally made ambiguous.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Seeing as 2012 came and went without an Alien Invasion, it's unknown what exactly threw off their plans. As noted above, Erika Price thinks that it fell through because of anthropogenic climate change, but nothing is ever made concrete and it's even subtly implied that for all his claims of it being his own plan, the Cigarette-Smoking Man's plan to exterminate most of humanity is the actual method for how Colonization will occur.

The Black Oil/The Purity

Mulder: This just wasn't ordinary diesel oil, I think it's, uh... I think it's a medium, a medium being used by some kind of alien creature that uses it to... body jump.

"They're infecting all other life-forms with a black substance called Purity. It's their life force. It's what they're made of".

— Cassandra Spender

A sentient black liquid whose primary goal is to infect any life forms and transform them into extraterrestrials.

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• Bad Black Barf: This goo causes black liquid to come out of the mouth, nose and eyes of its victims.
• Black Eyes of Evil: You can tell when a person's being controlled due to their eyes being either spotted or black.
• Eye Beams: An ability conferred upon its hosts. It's an incredibly intense hit of radiation that is guaranteed to fry anyone hit with it to a crisp.
• Grand Theft Me: The "black oil" can possess people and turn them into agents of the Colonists.
• Puppeteer Parasite: It's still a mystery whether the Purity is the aliens' servant or their master.

The Alien Bounty Hunters

"Everything dies!"

Portrayed by: Brian Thompson, various others

"Show me your true face so you can die with dignity. As your executioner, I show you my true face before I kill you".

A race of shapeshifting humanoid warriors commissioned by the Colonists to eliminate individuals who threaten the security of their operations on Earth. Once one of these guys is sent after a target, he will stop at nothing to corner his prey, and there is little humans can do to stop him.

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• Alien Blood: Bleeds green acid containing a retrovirus that is extremely toxic to humans.
• Aliens Are Bastards: They work relentlessly to uphold the project for the Colonists, enforcing their mandates, including executing clones, witnesses and defecting or rebel aliens who want nothing to do with exterminating humanity. Also abducts a number of people, including Mulder, so they can undergo brutal torturous experimentation and return as essentially comatose ticking time bombs, slowly turning into an alien Super-Soldier for them.
• Ambiguous Situation: "Emily" and "Without" both establish there is actually more than one Bounty Hunter, making it unclear if Mulder and Scully are encountering the same one each time.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: He holds fast to his own race's concepts of honor and dignity, but human morality is an alien concept to him.
  Alien Bounty Hunter: He shows you pieces, but tells you nothing of the whole... because he's inconsequential... a traitor to the project.
  Mulder: Kill me! Let him go.
  Alien Bounty Hunter: You'd trade your life for his?
  Mulder: For my mother's.
  Alien Bounty Hunter: Everything dies!
• Curbstomp Battle: How just about every fight with him ends for those fighting him.
• Don't Make Me Destroy You: If you're a human, fighting him is a suicidal gesture. He'll usually warn Mulder and Scully not to bother trying.
  Alien Bounty Hunter: If I wanted to, I could've killed you many times before.
• The Dreaded: Noticeably has a terror-inducing effect on nearly everyone who recognizes him, especially the clones he is sent to hunt.
• Evil Counterpart: To Jeremiah Smith and Josh Exley.
• Evil Sounds Deep: While he can mimic any voice he hears, this is what he sounds like by default.
• Guns Are Worthless: Shooting him just annoys him... and tends to result in the shooter being poisoned.
• Healing Hands: It is revealed that he has this power. Though as he typically shows up only when he has targets to kill, we see it on only one occasion.
• The Heavy: Every time he shows up, he is clearly this on behalf of the Colonists.
• Hero Killer: His ilk abduct and almost certainly murder Jeremiah Smith, who was healing the abductees the hunters were returning. He also murdered peaceful baseball playing alien Josh Exley and arguably came the closest to killing Mulder by abducting and nearly transforming him into an alien Super-Soldier.
• Kill and Replace: Frequently, but unlike many other examples of this trope, he has to steal the clothes of the person he's impersonating, except for later appearances in the series where the shapeshifting aliens can morph clothes as well, likely a script oversight/continuity error.
• Impersonating an Officer: Frequently disguises himself as a soldier or government agent to gain access to places and people.
• Implacable Man: He's almost impossible to kill, and nothing will get in the way of completing his objectives once he has been unleashed.
• Manipulative Bastard: Big time, utilizing his shapeshifting and cunning to manipulate people into doing much of the work for him in pursuing people and leads.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: We're told repeatedly he can be killed by piercing the base of his skull (which is how he kills other aliens), but in practice, this never seems to work. Mr X reveals even a shot to the back of the neck won't work, that only the alien stiletto to the back of the neck will do it (and even this fails to kill him in Herrenvolk). At least until Season Eight, when Scully finally does him in via Continuity Snarl. Assuming it was the same Alien Bounty Hunter.
• Non-Indicative Name: Partially. While they are inarguably alien, and demonstrably relentless hunters, bounties don't really fit the profile. The hunters don't seem to be a contracted third party, and they are never seen to collect compensation of any kind, material or otherwise. The term mostly seems to be there to sound badass.
• One-Man Army: Each of them. Ironically they are an army instead of just one 'man', meaning one of them is usually sufficient for whatever the mission is.
• Pet the Dog: Even this guy had his rare moments. He never goes out of his way to harm anyone in his path who isn't part of his mission and sometimes even averts You Have Outlived Your Usefulness, letting people go after he has finished using them. He tells Mulder the comforting lie that his sister is still alive before it seems like Mulder will die, and later heals Mulder's hospitalized mother at CSM's request, despite not being subordinate to him, even if it was clearly done for logical reasons instead of moral ones.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Has some shades of this in "Herrenvolk" and "The Unnatural". Just look at his folder quote.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Goes after only those victims which he is supposed to. Doesn't cause collateral damage unless he absolutely has to in which case he doesn't hold back. Mulder even warns people to stay out of his way when he is in pursuit mode. One example is when he holds Scully hostage waiting for Mulder to call her to find out his and Jeremiah Smith's location, gripping her shoulder and holding his stiletto threateningly next to her. Once he has found out the location he lets her go and leaves, even though it means she has time to warn Mulder that he is on the way.
• Psychotic Smirk: Every now and then he can't repress a faint one, especially when things are going his way, as they often do.
• Scarily Competent Tracker: Best summed up by this exchange:
  Mulder: How do I find him?
  Clone: You don't. He finds you.
• Shapeshifting: Into any human.
• Super-Strength: He's strong enough to hurl Mulder, a grown man, like a ragdoll. Another thing that makes confronting him so dangerous.
• Would Hurt a Child: Emily Sim and Gibson Praise. Though it's strongly implied that he was actually trying to save Emily, he hunted Gibson in earnest. He also murdered a number of clone children in Herrenvolk off screen when Mulder was incapacitated.

Others

Supporting Characters

Max Fenig

"Don't let them take me".

Portrayed by: Scott Bellis

"So just my luck that I'd eventually become an alien abductee. Now I'm never alone. Any minute, when I'm least expecting it... and the worst part is, no one believes you. Well, uh... almost no one. So, I've devoted my life to providing all you disbelievers out there with proof. Proof that there are extraterrestrial biological entities right now, as we speak, visiting our planet in alien ships for purposes of a rather troubling agenda known only to certain members of the government, uh, the F.B.I. and certain high-ranking members..".

A person who claims to be an alien abductee. Mulder forms a kind of friendship with him. First appears in Fallen Angel.

---

• Alien Abduction: Multiple times to the point of giving him seizures.
• Back for the Dead: He appears again in episode "Tempus Fugit", just so he could die a heroic death in a plane crash.
• The Cassandra: He looks like a complete nut but his accounts of alien abductions and tests performed on him are accurate.
• Convulsive Seizures: Convulsive seizures are symptoms he's been having since his abductions by aliens/conspiracy started.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: He desperately wants this, but the aliens won't let him.
  "Actually, all I ever wanted in life was to be left alone".

Scully Family

Portrayed by: Don S. Davis (as William), Sheila Larken (as Margaret), Pat Skipper (as Bill, with flashback appearances portrayed by Joshua Murray^*in One Breath and Ryan DeBoer^*in Christmas Carol), Melinda McGraw as Melissa, with Rebecca Codling portraying her younger self in Christmas Carol), and various unknown actors (as Young/Adult Charlie)

Dana Scully's father, William; mother, Margaret; older brother, Bill; older sister, Melissa; and younger brother, Charlie. Pop up once in a while to fret over and get caught up in her increasingly peculiar job.

---

• Big Brother Instinct: Bill Jr. Not quite a Knight Templar Big Brother, but he is kind of a dick to Mulder in the name of protecting his sister.
• The Captain: William Scully, Sr.
• Cool Big Sis: Melissa.
• The Dutiful Son: Bill Jr.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: The family seems to have seen the girls this way. Dana was the responsible one.
• The Ghost: Younger brother Charlie is mentioned, but only ever seen briefly, in flashbacks. Though never appearing onscreen, he does have a prominent role in Season 10's "Home Again".
• Granola Girl: Melissa
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Bill Jr. cares about his family. He also tends to flip out and get in Mulder's face as soon as he sees him, talks trash about him behind his back, and passive-aggressively shames Dana about her inability to have children, mocking her career as a way to fill the void. Flashbacks show he was kind of a douchebag even as a kid, telling Dana he was going to find and cook a baby rabbit she had found.
• Military Brat: All the Scully kids.
• Team Mom: Maggie Scully seems to like Mulder too — they bonded during Dana's abduction — though this is massively over-egged in fanfic.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Dana and Melissa, respectively.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Charlie is seen only in season 1 at Captain Scully's funeral and as a boy in flashbacks. He is only mentioned, giving his love, sending presents or promising to call, but he never appeared personally for holidays or for family crises, e.g. when his sisters were dying. We finally learn about Charlie in Season 10's "Home Again" where it's revealed that he's estranged from the family and appears to be completely out of touch with everyone except Bill Jr.
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: He was away at sea a lot, being in the Navy.

Mulder Family

Portrayed by: Peter Donat (as William, with flashback appearances portrayed by Dean Aylesworth^note in Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man, Demons & Travelers and two unknown actors^note in Apocrypha & Fight the Future), Rebecca Toolan (as Teena), Brianne Benitz, Vanessa Morley, Ashlyn Rose, Mimi Paley (as young Samantha), and Megan Leitch (as Adult Samantha)

Mulder's father, William; mother, Teena; and younger sister, Samantha. Troubled and fraught, with mysterious connections to the conspiracy.

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• Abusive Parents: Mulder's dad is implied to have become somewhat emotionally abusive after Samantha's abduction tore the family apart.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Samantha Mulder's ultimate fate. Angelic energy beings made of starlight turned her into one of them so she couldn't be murdered by the alien conspiracy.
• Chekhov M.I.A.: Samantha Mulder. Subverted. That's just what Mulder thinks and what the audience is lead to believe as well. She's really a Posthumous Character. Sort of, see Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence above.
• Dysfunctional Family: Bill Mulder gave his daughter to the Syndicate, divorced and is barely on speaking terms with his wife and is equally estranged from Fox. Decidedly not Played for Laughs in this case.
• Good Is Not Nice: Bill Mulder may have been the most moral member of the syndicate, but he's divorced from Teena and is clearly emotionally distant from Fox.
• Hollywood New England: They're from Martha's Vineyard.
• Mysterious Parent: Mulder knew nothing about his father's work until after he died.
• Opening a Can of Clones: By the time the Truth about Samantha is finally revealed, so many fake Samanthas had appeared that both Mulder and the audience had nearly given up on ever figuring the whole thing out.
• Sadistic Choice: The Mulders had to choose one of their children to be abducted.
• Token Good Teammate: Mulder's dad was a member of the Syndicate, but while he was far from a saint, he was the only member who voiced any objections to the really, really evil stuff the group was doing right from the start.

Agent Pendrell

Portrayed by: Brendan Beiser

Special Agent Pendrell helps Mulder and Scully doing lab work. He clearly has a crush on Agent Scully. Appeared in several episodes in seasons 3 and 4.

---

• Interrupted Declaration of Love: Interrupted Invitation for a Drink. He has a crush on Scully, and when he finally finds the courage to invite her, he is promptly shot.
• Killed Off for Real: In "Tempus Fugit", he is fatally shot by Scott Garrett and dies the following episode.
• Last-Name Basis: We never learn his first name.
• No First Name Given: Only his surname is known. Scully realizes she didn't know his first name after he died, although it was weird for her not to remember it as they were on friendly terms and he helped her and Mulder many times.

The Faceless Rebels

Second Elder: Someone's going to great lengths to sabotage our work.

Scully: But, Cassandra, the doctors weren't infected. They were burned.
Cassandra: By another race of aliens. A rebel force that are mutilating their faces so that they won't be infected.

A group of extraterrestrials with their eyes and mouths sewn shut, whose main goal is to thwart the Colonists' plans for Earth. While this would seem to make them a much-needed ally for Mulder (and humanity), they care nothing about humans, only destroying the Colonists (and their pawns) by any means necessary. Their favorite method of attack is by burning their targets to death with a specialized weapon, and they're of the same species as the Alien Bounty Hunters.

---

• Alien Blood: When killed like the other aliens, there is a green ooze inside them. Though unlike the Colonists, their blood isn't toxic to humans.
• Aliens Are Bastards: They are fighting the Colonists trying to colonize Earth, but their brutal methods make them as bad as the Colonists. Such as their ruthless burning of abductees... though given we find out the Colonists were turning them into alien-human hybrids and alien Super Soldiers to serve them all along, as foot soldiers of the Colonists, their actions are more understandable.
• Godzilla Threshold: The situation they are in against the Colonists calls for very drastic measures.
• Kill and Replace: They're not above murdering and then impersonating key humans if it gets them closer to their goals.
• Kill It with Fire: They carry sticks which, with just the slightest touch, can set anything and anyone on fire.
• La Résistance: The only organized military force actively fighting and resisting the Colonists.
• Nightmare Face: Their mouths, eyes, and noses are all sealed shut. It only makes it creepier that they can still see and hear what's going on around them perfectly fine.
• Saving the World: Their goal, though (from humanity's point of view) their methods leave much to be desired.
• Self-Harm: They intentionally disfigured their faces to avoid infection by the black oil.
• Shapeshifting: They share an Alien Bounty Hunter's ability to imitate humans, though their method seems to be cruder, involving masks that certain of their victims manage to peel off before dying.
• The Unfettered: Are willing to ally with the Syndicate, but when the latter refuse and push comes to shove, they'll do what has to be done to defeat the colonization.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Despite their brutal and ruthless methods, in the end they are trying to prevent The End of the World as We Know It from happening to Earth. And succeed at least in delaying it, as well as wiping out most of the Syndicate.
• Zerg Rush: While formidable individually, they prefer to conduct their assassinations by attacking en masse.

Arthur Dales

"It's a good thing I have a reputation. Otherwise, how could it be impugned?"

^{Click here to see Dales as he appears in the 1950s.}
"I don't interest myself in politics, Mr. Cohn".

Portrayed by: Darren McGavin, Fredric Lehne (as Young Arthur Dales)

"None of us are free to choose. I was ruined for my insubordination. You keep digging through the... the X-Files and they'll bury you, too".

Arthur Dales was an FBI agent assigned the task of catching communists until he found out that the folks he is catching are not quite communists due to which he faced a lot of opposition from the Bureau. The cases he was investigating were field under 'X' due to lack of space leading to the foundation of the X-Files.

The character is regarded as the spiritual father of the X-Files and so, Carter specifically sought out Darren McGavin (who portrayed the title character in Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a show which Carter states as having inspired the X-Files).

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• Captain Ersatz: He bears a lot of resemblance to Carl Kolchak, being a snarky guy crusading against corrupt and obstructive bureaucrats to expose the truth and prevent more deaths caused by some sort of paranormal phenomena. He’s even played by Kolchak himself, Darren McGavin.
• Deadpan Snarker: He has a very dry wit.

Assistant/Deputy Director Alvin Kersh

"One never knows when he might find himself having to survive on his wits alone".

Portrayed by: James Pickens Jr.

"Let me be unambiguous in the event that there are any questions about this in your conspiracy-addled minds: Walter Skinner's stalled career has everything to do with his blind loyalty to the both of you and your misguided search for some imaginary truth".

Mulder and Scully's replacement supervisor after their reassignment from the X-Files division in Season 6, and later A.D Skinner's direct supervisor. To say that he is unsympathetic to Mulder and Scully's work in the X-Files is understating the matter.

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• Ace Pilot: During Vietnam he was a Navy fighter pilot, flying A-6 Intruders. He and his wingmen would fly night sorties ten feet above the treetops at six hundred miles an hour. And this was before the advent of night vision and fly-by-wire technology.
  Kersh: 600 miles an hour and all we had was an idiot gauge and our wits.
• Ambiguously Evil: It's often hard to tell whether he's obstructing Mulder and Scully because he's an active agent of the Conspiracy or whether he's obstructing Mulder and Scully because he's just an officious jerk and the Conspiracy find that useful. Or both.
• Contemplative Boss: Has occasionally had to stay at his office all night because of a bureaucratic headache caused by the X-Files investigators. When this happens, he is seen watching the sunrise from his office window.
• Heel–Face Turn: In "The Truth".
  Scully: What's he doing?
  Kersh: What I should have done from the start.
• Jerkass: It's rare for him to do anything that casts him in a particularly favourable or likeable light.
• Jerkass Has a Point: He often has a point about Mulder and Scully's frequent and blatant disregarding of the rules and FBI procedure, including abandoning the cases they've been assigned to basically do their own thing. However, he's such a ball-busting jerk about it that it's hard to really side with him.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Unlike Skinner, he's not willing to give Mulder or Scully an inch.
• Pet the Dog: Even he has his moments:
  • In "One Son", he offers Spender his condolences for the loss of his mother.
  • In "Deadalive", he attends Mulder's funeral and is genuinely solemn.
  • Although Kersh firing Mulder seems like a dick move on the surface, it's implied that he was really trying to protect Mulder.
    Kersh: Say I told Mulder that he would be killed if he stayed? The same people who threatened to kill me if I didn't go along. Would you believe that, John?
    Doggett: No. Mulder wouldn't hear it, not from you, not from anybody.
    Kersh: I said I told him to go. I didn't say I persuaded him.

Agent Leyla Harrison

"What would Agents Mulder and Scully do if they were in this situation?"

Portrayed by: Jolie Jenkins

"But I know the X-Files, Agent Doggett. Inside and out. Other people don't even want to admit these questions exist but you face them every day. I am just so excited to be part of this. Aren't you?"

Leyla Harrison worked in the FBI's accounting office, where she processed Mulder's and Scully's expense reports and thereby knew more about their activities than almost anyone. She briefly landed her dream assignment of actually working on the X-Files.

The character was created as an homage to and named after a prominent Internet fan and Fan Fiction writer who passed away from cancer.

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• Affectionate Parody: Of Internet fans, particularly their encyclopedic knowledge of the show.
• Audience Surrogate: In a way she's what a hardcore X-Phile would fare like in the show's universe.
• New Meat: She's been at the FBI for some time, but it's her first field work. She gets on Doggett's nerve quite a bit.
• Tuckerization: She was named after a real person, in this case a devoted fan fic writer.

Assistant Director Brad Follmer

"Not sharing information creates an atmosphere of distrust and then, I'm less apt to share my information with you".

Portrayed by: Cary Elwes

"Agent Reyes, I'm trying to help you keep your job. But that's not going to happen if you insist on chasing shadows, chasing conspiracies".

Doggett and Reyes's sycophantic superior who was once in a relationship with Reyes who tries to get a higher position by sucking up to Kersh as much as possible, which also means he serves as an enemy to Doggett and the X-Files.

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• Corrupt Cop: "Release" reveals him as one, answering to a mobster named Nicholas Regali, the murderer of Doggett's son. He ends this agreement at the end of the episode with a bullet to Regali's eye.
• Even Evil Has Standards: He may not believe in Scully, Doggett or Reyes as much as he would, but there are moments where hard evidence convinces him otherwise.
  • In "Providence", he admits to Kersh that he wants to remove his signature from the report on Agent Comer's death by natural causes. This is because he read Agent Comer's monitor before his death, confirming the restoration of vital signs due to the alien spaceship fragment.
  • This comes full circle in "Release", where he is faced with a sadistic choice. Either he continues to accept money from Regali and keep his mouth shut, or kill Regali, which would causing a videotape of his own crimes to be sent to the Washington Post. He chooses the latter.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: He serves as one for the ninth season against Scully, Doggett and Reyes, making sure that their concerns regarding certain cases are pointed elsewhere.

Tad O'Malley

"I'm rattling some pretty big cages in the intelligence community, but I'm prepared to go all in - prepared to blow open maybe the most evil conspiracy the world has ever known".

Portrayed by: Joel McHale

"Today we're back, with facts threatening these forces yet again, the discovery of something that's so shocking you'll want to sit down and prepare yourself for the truth".

A conservative talk-show host and conspiracy theorist who seeks to find the truth and expose the shady inner workings of the government.

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• Nice Guy: Agree or disagree with him, he is actually pretty polite and friendly to everyone he meets and genuinely is on the side of good.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Shares characteristics with Glenn Beck and Alex Jones.
• Ship Tease: Very briefly with Scully.

Notable cases

Eugene Victor Tooms

Briggs: It's like all the horrible acts that humans are capable of, somehow, gave birth to some kind of, human monster.

Portrayed by: Doug Hutchison

"I contend that perhaps through genetic mutation, Eugene Tooms is capable of contorting and elongating his body in order to gain access to victims so that he may extract the livers which provide him with sustenance for the hibernation period of 30 years".

— Fox Mulder

A mutant with the ability to squeeze his body through impossibly narrow gaps, and the first Monster of the Week ever. Appeared in "Squeeze" and "Tooms".

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• Air-Vent Passageway: Justified since he is a mutant whose power is to be capable of squeezing through tiny openings.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Frank Briggs speculates that Tooms is some kind of personification of all of the worst, most evil impulses of humanity given human form.
• By the Lights of Their Eyes: A sickly yellow light eyes = EVIL.
• Compact Infiltrator: Has the ability to contort and distend his body at will, allowing him to enter his victims' homes through vents and other narrow passageways. His debut episode ends with him being imprisoned... only for him to eye the food slot at the base of his cell door with escape in mind.
• Contortionist: Tooms uses his extreme flexibility to squeeze into places to reach his victims that he couldn't have reached otherwise.
• Creepy Long Fingers: As a result of his mutation, Tooms's fingers become elongated when he uses his abilities. When Mulder and Scully are looking at fingerprints from one of the murders, Mulder stretches an image of Tooms's fingerprint and finds it matches.
• Creepy Monotone: He bare-ly has an-y in-flec-tion at all and talks real-ly slow-ly. It's ser-i-ous-ly freak-y.
• Creepy Souvenir: Tooms takes something from each victim, such as a coffee mug, an ornamental snowstorm or a hairbrush. Mulder and Scully find this kitschy collection of trophies in his apartment.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: He gets trapped and torn to shreds by an escalator.
• For the Evulz: Tooms needs to get human livers for hibernation, but he also obviously kills for the fun and because he enjoys it. He deliberately chooses places that are a challenge to get into as if it were some kind of sport. Moreover, he takes trophies from his victims, sometimes in advance.
• Gory Discretion Shot: His death. Gets crushed by an escalator, not shown in fully thankfully.
• Gunman with Three Names: Eugene Victor Toomes. Though technically, he's a Serial Killer rather than an assassin.
• Horror Hunger: Five livers will provide Tooms sustenance for 30 years. However, he can survive and function without them.
• Humanoid Abomination: Tooms looks human enough, but he needs to feed off of the bile in livers to survive and he has the ability to squeeze into small places.
• Hungry Menace: Tooms needs to eat five human livers every thirty years, and will readily murder innocents to obtain his meals.
• I'm a Humanitarian: He survives on human livers.
• Karmic Death: Tooms gets caught under an escalator and is literally stretched to pieces.
• Mutants: Tooms is a mutant capable of elongating his body.
• No Social Skills: Emphasised more in the episode "Toomes": Tooms can barely string a sentence together and is spoken to by his therapist as if he were a special needs child.
• Older Than They Look: He was a genetic mutant and Serial Killer who needed human livers to hibernate. He looked to be in his late twenties in 1993, but his first murder had occurred in 1903.
• Picky People Eater: He feeds on human livers.
• Regularly Scheduled Evil: He comes out of hibernation every thirty years.
• Rubber Man: He uses his unnatural stretching ability to invade victims' homes and escape through tiny openings, and is a rare example of this trope played absolutely seriously and for horror.
• Serial Killer: Tooms kills five victims in each cycle. His victims vary in age, race and gender, with no connections to each other. The pattern was the lack of point of entry and human livers extracted by bare hands.
• Smug Smiler: Despite his asocial, listless, and almost reptilian mannerisms, even Tooms can't help but smirk in triumph at Mulder and Scully as he leaves the court a free man.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: When Tooms attacks, his eyes glow bright yellowish-green (the color of bile, appropriately).
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: He looks like a perfectly normal young man, enough to pass for a sanitation animal control worker. He really isn't.
• Uncleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness: Tooms's apartment is a hell-hole of a place and his nest is made out of rags and newspapers with bile all over it.

Cecil L'Ively

Played By: Mark Sheppard

An unhinged man with pyrokinesis, the ability to control fire, which he uses to murder numerous people out of his own issues with women.

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• Dead Person Impersonation: Does that twice: first he impersonates house caretaker, then he impersonates the bodyguard.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Phoebe Green blinds him with a fuel, which causes him to become a human torch. He survives, though.
• Playing with Fire: His power is pyrokinesis.

Luther Lee Boggs

"Please understand that from here, we can return to the past. We can see the present. We can know the future".

Portrayed by: Brad Dourif

"I know my hell's going to be to go on back to that chair over and over again but in this life, my one and only life, I don't ever want to go back again!"

A murderer on death row who claimed to be a psychic and claimed that he could help Mulder and Scully in catching a serial killer. Appeared in "Beyond the Sea".

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• The Atoner: At least some part of him feels remorse which is why he helps Mulder and Scully.
• Death Row: He is a mass murderer whose previous experience on a Death Row triggered his psychic abilities. This time he's about to be executed once again and tries to gain a deal by saving two young people who were kidnapped.
• Knuckle Tattoos: KISS and KILL.
• Phony Psychic: Surprisingly, that's how Mulder saw him. In the end, it isn't made clear.
• Psychic Powers: He claims to have them, but ultimately, it isn't made clear whether he really did or was lying.

Eve

Portrayed by: Harriet Harris (Eve 6-8), Sabrina Krievins (Teena Simmons) and Erica Krievins (Cindy Reardon)

"We have extra chromosomes. Number 4, 5, 12, 16, and 22. This replication of chromosomes also produces additional genes. Heightened strength. Heightened intelligence".

— Eve 6

A group of clones created during the Cold War to compete with a similar project the Soviet Union was rumored to be working on, the Eves have superior intelligence and strength to humans, but are also violently homicidal and psychotic.

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• Artistic License – Biology: Apparently, having ten extra chromosomes makes you super strong, super smart, and super crazy. As opposed to just causing birth defects. (But of course, this is The X-Files.)
• Ax-Crazy: Cindy, Teena, and the Adams and Eves from the original Litchfield experiment. Eve 7, however, subverts it, as she was apparently raised by one of the scientists from the project, who helped her learn how to control her behavior. Cindy and Teena are even more Ax-Crazy than their predecessors, due to Eve 7's attempted genetic tinkering Gone Horribly Wrong.
• Clone Degeneration: The Eves displayed superhuman intelligence and strength, as well as homicidal psychoses. The last surviving clones were institutionalized and the project was cancelled, but one managed to escape.
• Coordinated Clothes: In the second half of the episode, the murderous girls wear matching red hellish outfits. It was probably a case of I Just Knew or Eve 7 might have bought the outfits for them.
• Creepy Child: They are look-alike cloned girls with super strength, super intelligence and murderous tendencies.
• Creepy Twins: Technically Teena and Cindy aren't twins but clones. However, a lot of the creepiness comes from their identical appearance.
• Enfant Terrible: Cute but psychotic little girls with growing homicidal tendencies.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Adams and Eves were created in a secret government project, and the adult Eves tried to carry on, even though they were aware of what problems their very existence created and how psychotic all the clones really were.
• I Just Knew: "We just knew". The girls work together in a spine-chilling coordination.
• Sanity Slippage: There's a reason why Eve 6 was admitted into the Whiting Institute for the Criminally Insane. Her being an Eve clone drove her mad, despite being smarter.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: The girls have flashes of high-brow conversation and they use sophisticated words.
• Super-Soldier: Eves' origin. They were created in a government's secret cloning project that meant to develop superior humans with extraordinary strength and extraordinary intelligence. It also gave them extraordinary psychoses, complete with suicidal and murderous tendencies.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Teena and Cindy slip 4 ounces of foxglove into Eve 7's drink, killing her within seconds.
• Twin Telepathy: Though raised by different parents 3000 miles apart, they "just knew" about each other's existence and murdered their fathers in the same unusual manner, so as to reveal their location to the other. They actually aren't twins, though, but clones.
• Would Hurt a Child: Sally Kendrick, aka Eve 7, puts a gun to a girl's head to make Mulder back off, pointing out that Mulder knows she's psychopathic and capable of shooting her.
• You Are Number 6: Cloned boys were named Adams and cloned girls were called Eves. They were appropriately numbered.

Flukeman

Scully: Mulder, nature didn't make this thing. We did.

Portrayed by: Darin Morgan

"That creature came off of a decommissioned Russian freighter that was used in the disposal of salvage material from the meltdown. It was born in a... in a primordial soup of radioactive sewage".

— Dana Scully

A humanoid mutant with characteristics of invertebrate flatworm physiology. Created by radioactive waste, he/she/it (despite its name, it's actually a hermaphrodite) lurks within the waters of New Jersey's sewer systems. Known to bite humans with its scolex-like mouth and inject them with its own parasitic larval offspring. It's implied he can also reproduce asexually, as when a real flatworm is cut in half and develops into two separate organisms. Though it's possible that only one half of him survived getting chopped, and was able to regenerate itself.

Flukeman only appeared in one episode, but became very famous with the fans and even causal viewers, and has been immortalized in the form of figurines, models, Pez dispensers, action figures, etc. Also was referenced several times in future episodes as a Running Gag.

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• Ambiguously Human: They never really explain whether he was a man who got turned into a flukeworm or a flukeworm who got turned into a man.
  • Until the now retconned Season Ten comics revealed he Was Once a Man, specifically a Ukrainian hazmat worker named Grigori.
• Lamprey Mouth: His most distinguishing characteristic. Which is a bit of a goof, since 1) it's based on a tapeworm scolex, and 2) scolexes aren't mouthparts, but anchoring structures that attach the tapeworm (which doesn't even have a mouth) to the intestinal lining.
• Monster of the Week: A particularly effective one.
• Nuclear Mutant: Its origin story.
• Running Gag: As mentioned several times, neither Mulder and Scully wouldn't change a thing about their time together... except this case.
• Shaped Like Itself: Flukeman is a humanoid flukeworm.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: At one point in the episode, the authorities want to try it as a suspect, and it's mentioned that there are plans to have it psychologically evaluated. Mulder reacts by insisting that it's not a human, but an instinctively vicious monster. To be fair, he’s right.

Augustus D. "Preacher" Cole

"The righteous shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance".

Portrayed by: Tony Todd

"They cut out a part of my brain. They made me into somebody else. I can never get back what they took away from me, and I’m gonna stop them from taking anything more".

A religious U.S. Marine who served in the Vietnam War. Cole and his squad were subject to experiments that took away their ability to sleep and making them aggressive and psychotic. Cole’s guilt over the atrocities he and his squad committed and his inability to sleep drove him insane and led to him being committed to a mental asylum. The experiments’ effects resulted in Cole gaining the psychic ability to project his dreams onto others. Breaking out, Cole decided to punish everyone involved in the experiments for their sins.

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• Affably Evil: When talking to one of the few remaking members of his platoon, Cole is friendly and personable, even after revealing he’s going to kill him.
• Anti-Villain: A mix of Type I and Type II. Cole has become insane and suicidal insane from his psychic abilities, guilt over his crimes, and inability to sleep and believes himself to be an angel of vengeance. He is perfectly willing to harm or kill people in his way with his powers, but he does his best not to harm innocents. In the end, Cole is just a tired, sad man who just wants to die.
• Affectionate Nickname: Preacher was always quoting from the bible he carried with him. This earned him the nickname "Preacher" in Vietnam.
• Cop Killer: Not directly, he causes an illusion (Possibly of himself armed) to two police officers, causing them to shoot and kill each other.
• Driven to Suicide: Cole, desperate for the peace he wanted for so long, holds out his Bible to Mulder, creating the illusion of a gun, causing Krycek to shoot and kill him.
• Irony: Cole, after being shot by Krycek, utters the words "Good night" to Mulder before dying.
• Never My Fault: Downplayed and subverted. One of the doctors who performed the operation on him and his men is quick to point out that they volunteered for the procedure, and Cole could have said no, though he’s not the most reliable source. For his part, Cole finds his own actions to be unforgivable and views himself as just as deserving of punishment as his victims.
• Pragmatic Villainy: He prefers to use his abilities in ways that allow him not to be noticed. His escape from the mental asylum was him using his powers to get the asylum head to sign him out, and all of his kills and other uses of his powers are either quiet and subtle or cause so much attention that no one notices him.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Preacher took it upon himself to kill his former squadmates for the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians, and the doctors who performed the experiments on them. Just look at his Pre-Mortem One-Liner towards Dr. Gerardi.
  "We shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn. Wound for wound, strike for strike. As he has disfigured a man, so shall he be disfigured. And he who kills a man shall be put to death".
• Scary Black Man: Subverted. He has this air, due to being played by Tony Todd, but at the end he breaks down to Mulder and goes into a tearful speech about how tired he is and that he just wants to die.
• Shoot Him, He Has a Wallet!: Wanting to sleep eternally, Preacher holds up his Bible and uses his abilities on an armed Krycek. Mulder tries to warn Krycek of the deception, but Krycek fatally shoots Preacher.
• Tragic Villain: He was the victim of an experiment that took his ability to sleep and gave him psychic abilities as a side effect. Now he just wants justice for what was done, and peace from his four decade long sleepless torture.

Duane Barry

"You don't understand. They're waiting for me, I, I can't be late".

Portrayed by: Steve Railsback

"They're coming again. They're coming again, I can feel it. They're going to take Duane Barry to this place".

A former FBI agent who escapes from an insane asylum after claiming he was abducted by aliens. Appeared in "Duane Barry" and "Ascension".

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• Alas, Poor Villain: A traumatizing event destroyed his sanity and ruined his life. He was then used as an Unwitting Pawn against Mulder, and eliminated when he served his purpose.
• Ax-Crazy: Severe psychological trauma has left him dangerously unstable.
• Fallen Hero: Was an exemplary FBI agent before it went From Bad to Worse.
• Killed Off for Real: Heavily implied to be done so by Krycek.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Implied to be this from Vietnam, also implied to still be on an even keel until his first abduction.
• Third-Person Person: Often referred to himself as "Duane Barry".

B.J. Morrow

Portrayed by: Deborah Strang

An inspector in Aubrey and a grand daughter of serial killer and rapist. Appeared in "Aubrey".

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• Ax-Crazy: After her homicidal DNA activates, she mutilates her grandmother and kills her grandfather with a razor.
• Fallen Hero: She was a good person before her DNA activated and became a murderer.
• Generation Xerox: Her grandfather had homicidal genes and it later passed on her, causing her to become a murderer.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Inverted. She tried to perform abortion of her child in prison, but failed. It was implied she did that because she didn't want the baby to be like her or her grandfather.
• Like Father, Like Son: Her father also was a policeman. A dark example with her grandfather who was a serial killer.
• Offing the Offspring: She tried to kill her unborn baby in prison, but failed.
• Psycho Knife Nut: She uses a razor, the one her grandfather used to kill and mutilate women.
• Red Right Hand: Her rash, similar to her grandfather's.
• Sleeping with the Boss: She had a romance with her police boss and had a child with him.

Donald Addie "Donnie" Pfaster

"Would you say your hair is normal or dry?"

Portrayed by: Nick Chinlund

"My violence is always waiting... for an instant. For when His back is turned. You can see it now".

A necrophiliac fetishist who devolved into serial killing. Appeared in "Irresistible" and "Orison".

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• Bathe Her and Bring Her to Me: He prepares a cold bath for his victims and pays particular attention to their hair.
• Fetish: He was explicitly written as a necrophiliac in the original script, but this was toned down to be a fetish for hair and fingernails in the final version. Which manages to be even creepier.
• Humanoid Abomination: Possibly. "Orison" definitely leaned towards "probably" in regards to this.
• I Love the Dead: He's a necrophiliac with a serious hair and nail fetish. "Irresistible" manages to be one of the creepier episodes, even with a completely mundane villain. Donnie's still highly creepy several years later in "Orison", when he escapes prison and comes after "the one who got away", namely Scully.
• Killed Off for Real: In "Orison", he is shot by a very pissed Scully, who he had tried to kidnap, kill and have her fingernails and hair stolen.
• Knight of Cerebus: Notably, his is the first case that Scully is visibly shaken by, leading her to a Heroic B So D when he finally gets his hands on her and just narrowly surviving him.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: He changes his appearance several times, including into a demonic form. In Irresistible it appears his transformations are Scully's panicked delusions, but in Orison they're more strongly implied to be real.
• The One That Got Away: Actually calls Scully this in Orison. He says she's all he ever thinks about.
• Secret Test of Character: God may or may not have been using him as one for Scully, which she apparently failed.
• Serial Killer: Technically doesn't meet this requirement in Irresistible, as he only kills one person before he's arrested (though not for want of trying). He does manage to kill two more victims in Orison.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: This is the main reason why he's one of the creepiest villains in the entire series. His personality and appearance suggests an amicable man at first glance, with nothing hinting he's out of the ordinary. He hides his hair and fingernail collection very well, and charms women into baths prepared for them, who remain blissfully unaware of his real intentions.

Phyllis Paddock

"You're right. It is already too late".

Portrayed by: Susan Blommaert

"I heard on the grapevine what happened, and, well, I know how hard it is to talk to adults sometimes, even though you feel like you want to... well, because you're young adults... What I'm trying to say is, if you feel like talking, I'm here to listen, ok?"

An extremely powerful and profoundly displeased demon taking the guise of a substitute teacher. Appeared in "Die Hand Die Verletzt".

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• Cruel and Unusual Death: Specializes in this partly as a way of punishing particularly unfaithful believers, but mostly just to be an asshole.
• Demon Lords and Archdevils: Heavily implied to be either an avatar of Azazel or his upper management. Either way, she's clearly very powerful.
• Eye Scream: Rips out the eyes of the kid who unwittingly summoned her.
• Evil Is Petty: That chain of affairs was all because she was pissed about not receiving proper worship.
• Faux Affably Evil: Leaves Mulder and Scully a parting message thanking them for their valuable assistance.
• Hellish Pupils: Gains reptilian eyes when commanding her snake familiar.
• Humanoid Abomination: Looks human, but it quickly becomes clear that she most definitely is not.
• Jerkass Gods: Something akin to it, anyways. Everything that she did was simply because the cultists had moved away from some of the crueler and more brutal rites associated with her.
• Manipulative Bitch: Spends most of the episode tricking Mulder and Scully into doing a good deal of her work for her, though she does reward them in the end by saving their asses.
• Neck Lift: The first thing she's seen doing.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Has a slight snake motif and uses a python as a familiar.
• Would Hurt a Child: Brutally killed the kid who summoned her and later forced the daughter of one of the cultists to kill herself.

Chester Ray Banton

"It'll kill you, it doesn't care who you are".

Portrayed by: Tony Shalhoub

"If I could control it, do you think I would let it go around killing people? All I can do is study it, try and divine its true nature before they do".

A particle physicist who, following a Freak Lab Accident, had his shadow become a lethal weapon that reduces people to ash.

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• Apologetic Attacker: The only time he deliberately kills someone is technically in self-defense, and he makes it clear that he is only reluctantly doing it.
• Fate Worse than Death: At the end, he's captured by X and subjected to experiments that are meant to analyse his abilities.
• Freak Lab Accident: Chester went into an activated particle accelerator, by acting as an alpha target to be repeatedly hit with beta particles. Unfortunately, he had made a mistake in the room he was in, and thus, his deadly shadow was born.

Darin Peter Oswald

"I'm not going anywhere, not without Mrs. Kiveat".

Portrayed by: Giovanni Ribisi

"Okay, it's a leap, Scully, but what if Oswald's electrolyte imbalance is somehow enabling him to generate electricity at levels much higher than normal?"

— Fox Mulder

A mentally challenged teenager who also happens to be able to control electricity. Appeared in "D.P.O"..

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• Ax-Crazy: If you associate with him at all, you are in danger, and if you piss him off, he will kill you.
• Idiot Savant: Quite skilled with cars.
• Leitmotif: Filter's "Hey Man Nice Shot".
• Murder the Hypotenuse: Tried (and failed) to kill his teacher's husband.
• Psycho Electro: One of the most Ax-Crazy characters in the series.
• Self-Disposing Villain: The only reason "D.P.O". ends happily is because his fit of rage against a sheriff, while searching for Sharon, summons bolts of lightning. He succeeds in killing the sheriff, but in the process, he electrocutes himself.
• Shock and Awe: He called down lightning and controlled electricity in general.
• The Sociopath: Thoroughly amoral and thinks that randomly frying cows with bolts of lightning is a boatload of fun.
• Stalker with a Crush: Towards a former teacher.

Clyde Bruckman

"Now, if you'll excuse me... I think I've seen enough death for one night".

Portrayed by: Peter Boyle

"Why do we do any of the things we do? Why do I sell insurance? I wish I knew".

An insurance salesman who possessed the ability to tell when a person would die. Appeared in "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose".

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• Blessed with Suck: Psychic powers sound great on paper, but all it does is cause him to see gruesome visions of people’s deaths, and he is almost always unable to prevent these deaths, something that’s left him extremely depressed.
• Deadpan Snarker: In spite of only appearing in one episode, he easily winds up being the snarkiest man in the series, which is set in a World of Snark,
• Death Seeker: Clyde is blatantly depressed and suicidal, and the only reason he assists in trying to catch Puppet is because he saw himself die at the killer’s hands.
• Driven to Suicide: He suffocates himself on a plastic bag. Probably because of his "gift" — he can no longer deal with the gruesome visions of death and predictions of how people die.
• Wham Line
  Scully: All right. So how do I die?
  Bruckman: You don't.

Simon Gates

"I was called upon".

Portrayed by: Kenneth Welsh

"The sun will be turned into darkness, and the moon will turn to blood, because of you, son".

A wealthy and respected businessman who traveled to Jerusalem after he ran over a child in a drunk driving accident. He returned to the US a changed man and a disciple of the Devil, having gained the ability to burn people to death with his hands and murdering alleged stigmatics.

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• Cruel and Unusual Death: His final fate is being hacked to pieces by a garbage shredder.
• Determinator: He doesn't stop pursuing Kevin, the last stigmatic person on his list of twelve he wants to kill. Even when he's caught him, he will make sure that the kid is absolutely dead, by throwing the two into a shredder.

Robert Patrick "Pusher" Modell

Mulder: This man has a unique ability to force his will upon others - to push his victims into hurting or killing themselves.

Portrayed by: Robert Wisden

"Two warriors of equal skill fight to the death. One is a student of Japanese budo... the way of war. Budo teaches the warrior to leave himself outside the battle. In other words... to disregard his own death. Because of that, the budo warrior always wins. I am that warrior. I don't fear my death".

A serial killer who would drive his victims to suicide by manipulating their minds. Appeared in "Pusher" and "Kitsunegari".

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• Alas, Poor Villain: Tries to protect Mulder from his vengeful sister and ends up taking a bullet. His death is poignant with his sister putting him at ease through the pain.
• Compelling Voice: He was a hit man who could make people do anything, including kill themselves. In the sequel episode, his sister had the same ability.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: In "Kitsunegari" it is revealed that he's protecting his twin sister, who has his same powers.
• Faux Affably Evil: He never loses his manners but it's clearly superficial and a mask for his true sadism.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: He was just a regular guy with a track record of failures to be anything more. His powers finally allow him to be the feared "big man" he always wanted to be.
• Gratuitous Japanese: He calls himself as Ronin, a warrior without a master. He defined his feud with Mulder kitsunegari, which means "fox hunt". Subverted in that it is Modell's sister hunting Mulder not Modell.
• Gunman with Three Names: Presumably not named after Robert Patrick, who wouldn't join the cast for another 5 years
• Occidental Otaku: Like many dangerously unhinged white loners, he has an unhealthy obsession with samurai. Shaenon K. Garrity's X-Files parody webcomic Monster of the Week has a lot of fun with this.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Discussed and Lampshaded. Modell has spent a lifetime trying to make himself into a "big person" - applying to join the Green Berets (he washes out and serves in a mundane position in the Army instead), the FBI and several similar jobs, but invariably being turned down due to his lack of experience and/or his off-putting personality, which only causes his resentments (and ego) to grow. Developing psychic abilities finally gives Modell a chance to put his fantasies into action.
• The Sociopath: Disturbing even by this show's standards: Modell manipulates and kills people for fun, even those who don't pose any kind of threat. This is exemplified in Pusher when he talks Agent Burst into a heart attack, when the latter refuses to hang up so his agents can trace Modell's call. Moments later, with Burst dying, he casually tells Mulder his location then gloats over Burst's death.

The Peacock Family

Mrs. Peacock: And you got to know, Edmund, you can't keep a Peacock down.^note Top picture from left to right: Sherman, Edmund and George. Bottom picture: Mrs. Peacock.

Portrayed by: Chris Nelson Norris (as Edmund), Adrian G. Griffiths (as Sherman), John Trottier (as George) and Karin Konoval (as Mother)

"Maybe one day you'll learn... the pride... the love... when you know your boy will do anything for his mother".

— Mrs. Peacock

A murderous, inbred family living in Home, Pennsylvania. Appeared in "Home".

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• Ax-Crazy: The whole family goes baseball-bat-crazy on the Sheriff.
• Booby Trap: They are smart enough to have set them around the house. It's successful in killing a local policeman, but it eventually becomes a fatal hindrance for George.
• Cool Car: A white 1958 Cadillac kept in better condition than the farm and the family, it's also a sign of how the Peacocks are stuck in the past.
• Darker and Edgier: While many of the MOTW were pretty dark and vicious, these were extremely nasty to the point that the episode received a TV-MA rating as opposed to the TV-14 rating of the show.
• Evil Counterpart: To the Sheriff. Both do not like the way their small town is changing but while the Sheriff adjusts with it, these folks lash out.
• Evil Cripple: A hissing limbless mother of the incestuous Peacock clan. She approves of her sons' murderous behaviour. In her eyes they are only protecting their family.
• Evil Matriarch: The Mother Peacock who indulges in incest with the eldest son and condones their murderous activities.
• Gonk: They're so inbred they might as well be orcs.
• Hypocrite: For all Mrs. Peacock's talk of family and loyalty the Peacocks still murder their newborn child because it isn't up to their standards.
• In the Back: George goes out by having a booby-trapped spike lodged into his back.
• Karma Houdini: Mother Peacock and the eldest son escape and are last seen having sex in the car. They then drive off to places unknown, without any authorities spotting them.
• Karmic Death: As George is chasing after Scully to protect his mother, he swings his weapon at her. Scully dodges, causing George to fall onto a booby-trapped wire. A rigged spike is then swung at his back, killing him off for good.
• Leitmotif: "Wonderful, Wonderful" by Johnny Mathis seems to be the only song the Peacocks listen to in their car.
• Made of Iron: The ill and deformed Peacocks are surprisingly resistant to gunshots and baseball bat hits. This is Truth in Television, as properly motivated (as in "animalic adrenaline rush") people can do a lot of damage before succumbing themselves. Plus it seems like the inability to feel pain runs in the family as Mrs. Peacock took getting crudely stitched up after the car crash that left her crippled years prior as one would getting breakfast. She even has to examine her sons to see if they injured themselves.
• Mundanger: They're a trio of murderous inbred hicks, but not paranormal at all.
• Parental Incest: They all engage in it, and are the products of it.
• Still Fighting the Civil War: At one point, Mrs. Peacock rages to Scully about the "War of Northern Agression". Since this episode is set in Pennsylvania, a northern state, we can draw one of two conclusions: 1) The Peacocks were southern invaders, or 2) they were Confederate sympathizers.
• Villainous Incest: The Peacock family involve a female matriarch who engages in incestuous relations with her sons, one of them is the father of the other two sons. The mother has also given birth to severely deformed offspring which she and her sons murder during infancy.
• Womb Horror: Mrs Peacock gives birth to a horrifically disfigured and deformed baby that is later buried alive by the Peacock brothers. Agents Mulder and Scully are both extremely uneasy during the autopsy. The baby's face is distorted and its legs are bent out of shape.

John Lee Roche

"You bring me my hearts... and maybe I'll tell you more".

Portrayed by: Tom Noonan

"I can't just tell you. I know you don't believe me. You need me to show you, you need me to lead you through because... after all these years, anything less than that's not going to satisfy you, right?"

A repulsive child molester and chronic liar who likes playing Mind Games with Mulder. Appeared in "Paper Hearts".

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• Consummate Liar: A chronic liar. Tries to troll Mulder with his stories just to amuse himself.
• Evil Is Bigger: He's a reprehensible child molester and played by Tom Noonan who stands at a massive 6'6, even towering over Mulder who, at around 6'1, is not a small man by any means.
• Faux Affably Evil: Never gets angry and remains polite and cheerful throughout the episode, even when holding a child at gunpoint.
• I Lied: Claims to have abducted Samantha. Turns out to be a complete lie he created just to screw around with her brother Mulder.
• Karmic Death: Mulder finally grows tired of Roche's mind games and shots Roche dead with a bullet to the head at point-blank range.
• Manipulative Bastard: He knows exactly which buttons to push in dealing with Mulder.
• Paedohunt: A disgusting child molester who doesn't have a shred of remorse.
• Psychic Link: Seems to have some kind of psychic link with Mulder due to which he can see his dreams and accordingly manipulate Mulder with it. Though as Scully suggests, it's also possible he just researched Mulder's background enough to mess around with him.
• Taking You with Me: Tries to kill a child while held at gunpoint by Mulder, Scully and Skinner. Mulder gets him first.

Nathanial Teager

"Teager, Nathaniel J. Sergeant, Green Beret detachment B-11. Service number 82278. Date of birth: March 7, 1952".

Portrayed by: Peter LaCroix

"May you forgive me as you forgive him, as a man and as a soldier, for restoring the honor and the memory of the B-11".

A Green Beret sergeant who fought in the Vietnam war and became a POW after his helicopter was shot down in 1971. The U.S Government left him for dead and denied any POWs were in Vietnam by 1973 and covered it up. Nathaniel eventually escaped and sought revenge. He apparently had the ability to vanish at will. He appeared in the episode "Unrequited".

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• Alas, Poor Villain: After being fatally shot by the police, he can only repeat his credentials over and over, just like he did when being a prisoner of war back then. On top of that, his death is covered up by the government, painting him as an insane asylum escapee, and the existence of the rest of the Vietnam prisoners remain covered up as well. Mulder, Scully and Skinner are each noticeably perturbed by his fate and the events of the episode.
• Anti-Villain: Sure, he kills high-ranking military generals, but only because he was abandoned in the Vietnam war by the country he trusted and served. And whenever he has time, he attempts to give closure to family members grieving for fallen soldiers, as well as inform a fellow comrade of other POWs that need to be rescued.
• Dead All Along: It's implied, given at the end of his episode, his name appears on the Vietnam Veteran's memorial wall. Unless this was a part of the government's cover-up.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: He goes after the military generals who left him to die in Vietnam.
• Setting Update: Teager is a Darker and Edgier post-'Nam version of classic Two-Fisted Tales icon The Shadow, an American veteran who learned how to become "invisible" by psychically manipulating people's perception while in Asia.
• Shellshocked Veteran: Big time from his experiences in the war and the torturous prisoner camp he spent years in after his government abandoned him.

Greg Pincus

"For my part, I’m happy to let this entire matter drop".

Portrayed by: John Apicella

"I’m also conducting my own internal investigation – interviewing employees, seeing if they’re happy..".

CEO of a vinyl siding corporation. Also an insectoid monster that converts others to zombie slaves. Appeared in "Folie a Deux".

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• Achilles' Heel: Needs the light to be able to maintain his human guise, which is how Mulder becomes aware of his true nature.
• Affably Evil: Honestly comes off as a perfectly pleasant and unassuming individual in his human guise.
• The Assimilator: He kills and turns people into his undead minions via a quick bite and the injection of some toxic substance. And when it’s over, they are completely subservient to him.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: His true form resembles a giant insect.
• Glamour: How he conceals both his true nature and that of his zombie slaves.
• Glamour Failure: Happened with Gary Lambert (which eventually led to the hostage crisis that got the FBI involved), Mulder, and Scully.
• Humanoid Abomination: Looks human to the unaware, but is actually some sort of insectoid horror that can project a glamour.
• Karma Houdini: Had a close call with Scully, but managed to escape with his slaves to a different location to start all over.
• Manipulative Bastard: Spends the second half of the episode convincing everyone that Mulder is going crazy.
• Our Zombies Are Different: His bite converts victims to undead slaves that appear perfectly normal to those affected by his glamour, but are very visibly dead to the aware.
• The Virus: Injects victims with some sort of toxin that kills and reanimates them and brings them under his thrall.

Patrick Garland Crump

"You got to go faster. It's getting worse".

Portrayed by: Bryan Cranston

"You think I don't know, huh? You think I'm just some ignorant pudknocker, don't you? But I get it, man! I see what this is! I am not sick and I do not have the flu. Vicky and me were just some kind of... Government guinea pigs".

An ordinary man who over the course of a terrible day is forced to rob a car and drive it with maximum speed towards the west side failing to do which the pressure in his ear drum will release, killing him. Appeared in "Drive".

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• Jerkass: He is rude and racist but considering his desperate situation, you do not really blame him. And he mellows down a bit later.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: By the time Mulder gets him to Scully who was going to try and relieve the ear pressure, he has died already.
• Troubled Sympathetic Bigot: He is Anti-Semitic but portrayed with sympathy and he does come to a degree of understanding with Mulder.

Alfred Fellig

"You want me to make like I feel sorry for them? I don't. Lucky bastards. Every one of them".

Portrayed by: Geoffrey Lewis

"Pills don't work. Razors... gas... bridges - I can't tell you how many bridges I've jumped off of. All I get is wet. I got left behind. I don't want to be here anymore. I can't even remember a time when I did. And... this... this is all I know... to do".

An immortal photographer who pursued people who were going to die so he could be finally taken by Death. Appeared in "Tithonus".

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• The Ageless: Unlike the legendary Tithonus, he stopped aging when he looked in his sixties.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: He believes that people who wish to live forever are fools.
• Blessed with Suck: He genuinely hates being immortal as he explains to Scully.
• Camera Fiend: He is a professional photographer.
• Complete Immortality: The only way he can die is to watch into Death's eyes.
• Death Seeker: His m.o. is to capture Death's image by photographing people at the moment they die. He finally gets his wish at the end of the episode.
• Driven to Suicide: He tried in various ways (gas, pills, jumping from bridges), but it never worked.
• Healing Factor: He gets stabbed but his wounds regenerate quickly.
• Immortality: He managed to escape Death during an epidemic of yellow fever. At the end of the episode, he probably passed this condition to Scully, thus making Clyde Bruckman's prediction correct.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Based on Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee the Famous, a street photographer famous for his ghoulish pictures of crime and car crash victims and his uncanny ability to find such scenes faster than any other photographers.
• Older Than They Look: A photographer who unfortunately gained immortality by tricking Death.
• Really 700 Years Old: He mentions being alive during the Yellow Fever epidemic in New York City and seeing bodies buried in Washington Square Park, making him at least 200 years old at the present time.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: He documents violent crime as soon as it happens in the hope that he will see death and allow death to finally come for him because he is bored with living after two hundred years and wants to know what happens to people after they die.

Robert "Rob" Roberts

"I am sick and tired of pretending that I'm something that I'm not".

^{Click here to see Robert "Rob" Roberts in his mutant form.}
"Do you believe in monsters?"

Portrayed by: Chad Donella

"I have an eating disorder. I'm definitely a meat-eater, not a vegetarian. I've always had these cravings my whole life and just... just recently, the last month or so they've just become too powerful to resist".

A young mutant who tried to resist his craving for human brain. Appeared in "Hungry".

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• Alas, Poor Villain: Rob's death is not played as a victory, instead as an empty waste of life, considering his hard journey of putting behind his cannibalistic ways. His last words, "I can't be something I'm not", can be seen as him admitting that his hopes of a happier life without brain-eating were always futile.
• Bald of Evil: When he removes his human disguise.
• Black Eyes of Evil: He wore contact lenses to hide his all black eyes that point to him being a monster.
• Brain Food: He sincerely tries to resist his cravings for human brains.
• Hungry Menace: He needed brains... not that he didn't try to live as a non-mutant.
• I Am What I Am: Rob eventually comes to terms with and accepts his nature as a monster. It is a rare instance of this trope not being a positive outcome. Rather, it is what ultimately motivates Rob to commit Suicide by Cop to stop himself from harming more people.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: He really tries to be a normal man and control his hunger for fleshy brains. This struggle is what gets him killed.
• Meat-O-Vision: Starts seeing other people's heads this way. Also inverted when he hallucinates that the hamburger patties he's cooking look like little brains.
• Obsessed with Food: He is consumed with eating people. He tries to control it by going to Overeaters Anonymous, but ends up killing & eating his landlady (who he bonded with when he discovered she was also in OA).
• Picky People Eater: He eats the brains of humans.
• Repetitive Name: Robert Roberts.
• Stages of Monster Grief: He viewed his compulsion to eat meat (i.e., human brains) as an addiction, and went to Overeaters Anonymous. He bonded with another attendee, his downstairs neighbor... but eventually he ate her brain.
• Suicide by Cop: Against their wishes, Roberts suicidally rushes Mulder and Scully, who fire in defence, killing Roberts.
• Sympathetic Murderer: Apart from the last homicide, all his victims were Jerkasses
• Tragic Villain: Rob never wanted to harm anybody at all, but only does so because of his powerful urge to consume human brains. As a result, he repeatedly tries to do good and repress this bloody attitude, whether it's by attending a psychiatrist or a Overeaters Anonymous meeting. When he finally tries to eat his psychiatrist, she doesn't even scream, only expressing her pity for his suffering.
• Tropaholics Anonymous: He goes to Overeaters Anonymous, but it doesn't work.
• Villainous Breakdown: By the ending, he has killed one of the two people who have expressed sympathy towards him, had a Freak Out with the other one and found himself cornered by the police.
• Villain Protagonist: He's the character most on-screen in the episode. Even Mulder and Scully make only some appearances.

Darryl Weaver

"Would it bother you if I lit one up?"

Portrayed by: Tobin Bell

"I got a good thing going here. I got cash money. I got all the coffin nails I can suck down. Although... lately, I've been thinking this particular brand... it doesn't, um... do anyone else any favors - healthwise".

A test subject chain-smoker who kills others by smoking deadly cigarettes initially unwittingly, later maliciously. Appeared in "Brand X".

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• Evil Is Petty: Oh so petty, and materialistic.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Darryl's smoking is portrayed as a terrible thing since it literally kills people. He may not have directly intended said thing but he couldn't care less even after coming to know of it, and keeps right on puffing.
• Greed: Immediately tries to capitalize on his situation, human cost be damned.
• It's All About Me: The only thing that matters to Darryl is Darryl.
• Jerkass: Looks at a No Smoking sign and immediately starts smoking. He is just an unpleasant individual. Then there is his malicious smoking to kill people for kicks.
• Lack of Empathy: Zero empathy for his victims:
  Mulder: You don't seem surprised that he's dead.
  Weaver: I guess his number come up. I'm just glad it wasn't me.
• Smug Snake: Tries to browbeat Skinner claiming Skinner won't shoot him since he needs him and tries to walk away but Skinner shoots him in the shoulder instead.
• The Sociopath: Only cares about himself, his cigarettes and what he can get out of the situation he is in. Unlike most examples of test subjects gone wrong in the series there is absolutely nothing sympathetic or redeemable about him.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Initially. He is a routine chain-smoker and is chosen as test subject for Morley's new brand of "safer" cigarettes. However, they produce a smoke that causes carnivorous tobacco beetles to settle inside anyone who inhales the smoke ultimately killing the person from inside. Since, he is a chain-smoker, the beetles don't affect himself. But later, he starts smoking to get rid of people.
• You Wouldn't Shoot Me: Tries to pull this on Skinner. He would.

Guy Mann

"Because if there's nothing more to life than what we already know, then there's nothing but... worries, self-doubt, regret and loneliness".

^{Click here to see Guy Mann in his real form.}
"I didn't even get a chance to shoot blood out of my eyeballs".

Portrayed by: Rhys Darby

"I know this sounds weird, but... until a few days ago, I didn't know we die. I mean, I always knew we could die. I instinctively knew to avoid death, but what I didn't know is... no matter what we do, eventually you end up in a place like this".

A lizard-like monster who, after being bitten by a human, transforms into a human during the day. Appeared in "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster".

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• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Ends up as the manager of the phone store he begins working at, despite not having a clue what he's doing.
• Canine Companion. Dagoo.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: His unfamiliarity with human culture has him coming off as this.
• Non-Malicious Monster: Turns out to be a friendly, good-natured monster. The killings in the episode were actually the work of a human Serial Killer.
• Whole Costume Reference: To Carl Kolchak.