Introduced in the third season, the Well-Manicured Man served to highlight discord within the ranks of the Syndicate, and ultimately betrayed them by leaking information to Mulder before committing suicide in the series' first feature film.
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.
[3][4][5] 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).
[8][9] John Neville has stated that he was originally hired for just two episodes of the series, but that his character "was regularly brought back, because the audience simply doesn't know if he stands for good or evil".
MTV's Tami Katzoff has called him a "legendary TV character", noting his "moral ambivalence about the work of his shadow organization" and his ability to show "empathy for Mulder and Scully".
[15] The San Francisco Chronicle's Bob Graham has praised Neville's portrayal of the character in the feature film, calling his expository monologue "a Wagnerian demonstration of the art of declamation".
[16] Writing for the Los Angeles Daily News, Michael Liedtke and George Avalos described the character as "white-haired, urbane, genteel[—]and dangerous", noting that he was "equally at ease in Virginia's horse country, the tony rooms of Manhattan's Upper West Side and the antiseptic halls of facilities that house bizarre medical experiments".