Character Arc
Introduced at the beginning of the third season, the Well-Manicured Man is an English member of the Syndicate, a shadow organization within the United States government that exists to hide from the public the fact that aliens are planning to colonize the Earth. He is an important member of the Syndicate, along with The Smoking Man (William B. Davis) and The Elder, and was a friend of William Mulder earlier in his life.
The Well-Manicured Man prefers subtlety to brute force, and will attempt to manipulate those in his way before using physical violence. Although the Syndicate's goals are opposed to those of Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), the Well-Manicured Man will, at times, aid them with clues or information, believing that letting out a certain amount of information would help to keep the two close, and consequently allow for them to be controlled. The Well-Manicured Man openly despises The Smoking Man, seeing him as impulsive and unprofessional. The two maintain a bitter relationship within the Syndicate throughout the series. The Well-Manicured Man is instrumental in the Syndicate's secondary agenda, to develop a vaccination against the black oil used by the aliens as a means of mind control. To this end, he works with Russian double agent Alex Krycek (Nicholas Lea) to develop a vaccine, eventually testing it—successfully—on a Syndicate mole, Marita Covarrubias (Laurie Holden).
In the 1998 feature film The X-Files, when Scully is infected with the black oil and taken to Antarctica, it is the Well-Manicured Man who, having grown disillusioned with the Syndicate, gives Mulder the coordinates needed to find her and a sample of the vaccine needed to cure Scully. The colonists had kept secret a secondary characteristic of the black oil—that those infected with it for prolonged periods would gestate a new colonist lifeform, killing the host. Upon discovering this, the Syndicate vowed to work more closely with the colonists in the hope of being spared this fate, while only the Well-Manicured Man wished to continue working on a vaccination for resistance. This rejection led to his betrayal of the Syndicate, and to him committing suicide by car bomb before his duplicity was discovered.
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