Cigarette Smoking Man. Krycek plays an important part in several events that are harmful to Mulder and Scully. Jeffrey Spender is portrayed by Chris Owens (season 6; recurring season 5; guest seasons 9, 11):Spender is a skeptic who is assigned to The X-Files after Fox Mulder's forced leave. He is the son of Cigarette Smoking Man and his ex-wife, multiple abductee Cassandra Spender, as well as possibly being the half-brother of Mulder. Initially thought to have been murdered by Cigarette Smoking Man, Spender returns, horribly disfigured, in the ninth season and helps Scully's son William. Alvin Kersh is portrayed by James Pickens Jr. (season 9; recurring seasons 6, 8; guest season 11):As an assistant director (and later deputy director), he temporarily becomes supervisor to Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully when they are assigned away from the X-Files division. During this time, Cigarette Smoking Man often visits him in his office. Kersh assigns Mulder and Scully mostly to menial tasks, such as terrorist details and Federal background checks. Kersh is largely antagonistic to Mulder and Scully but in "The Truth" somewhat redeems himself by helping Mulder escape capital punishment. Production Conception California native Chris Carter was given the opportunity to produce new shows for the Fox network in the early 1990s. As Carter was tired of the comedies he had been working on for Walt Disney Pictures, a report that 3.7 million Americans may have been abducted by aliens, the Watergate scandal and the 1970s horror series Kolchak: The Night Stalker all contributed to trigger the idea for The X-Files. He wrote the pilot episode in 1992. Carter's initial pitch for The X-Files was rejected by Fox executives. He fleshed out the concept and returned a few weeks later, whereupon they commissioned the pilot. Carter worked with NYPD Blue producer Daniel Sackheim to further develop the pilot, drawing stylistic inspiration from the 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line and the British television series Prime Suspect. Inspiration also came from Carter's memories of The Twilight Zone as well as from The Silence of the Lambs, which provided the impetus for framing the series around agents from the FBI, in order to provide the characters with a more plausible reason for being involved in each case than Carter believed was present in Kolchak. Carter was determined to keep the relationship between the two leads strictly platonic, basing their interactions on the