Reception
If Deep Throat was a cheat code to the quest for truth, X is an walkthrough written by somebody who doesn't want to share his secrets, doesn't like you, and might not even be playing the same game.
—A.V. Club's Zack Handlen on the series' informants.The character of X has been well-received by critics. Entertainment Weekly included the character in the list of the top 20 Black Sci-Fi Icons in 2009, at number 17. Todd vanDerWerff, writing for The A.V. Club, has praised the "gravitas" of Williams' acting, adding that he wished that the writers "had figured out a way to have him around more often than they did". VanDerWerff's fellow writer Zack Handlen felt that the character's assassination in "Herrenvolk" was "appropriately shocking", calling the scene "one of the most memorable death's in the series"; although he felt that the immediate introduction of the character's successor, Marita Covarrubias, "deflates the importance of X's loss" in the episode. Handlen has also called X "the best of Mulder's informants", explaining that this is "because he's always pissed off, he's always reluctant to provide information, and you can't ever be sure what play he's really running". Series writer Frank Spotnitz has called X "the meanest, nastiest, most lethal killer on the planet".
Steven Williams has noted that he feels the episodes "Nisei" and "731" were chiefly responsible for the character's popularity with fans. In 1997, Williams was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series for his work as X, alongside Gillian Anderson, William B. Davis, David Duchovny and Mitch Pileggi.
Read more about this topic: X (The X-Files)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)