death. After the fall of the Syndicate, Smoking Man has no more fellow conspirators who can match his power, so he begins to operate as he wishes. However, his cancer resurfaces and he requires the use of a wheelchair. At the end of the seventh season, Alex Krycek and Marita Covarrubias betray him and throw him down a flight of stairs, where they presumed him dead. Through the eighth and ninth seasons, he was presumed dead until Jeffrey Spender appeared in "William". It is learned that his attempted murder on his son failed which led him to subject his son to terrible experiments. In this very same episode it is revealed that he's supposedly Mulder's biological father. In the series finale, Mulder and Scully travel through remote New Mexico, and reach a pueblo where a "wise man" reputedly lives. It is in fact the Smoking Man. He is shown to be in the same condition as when he disappeared, but has degenerated further and is now quite unkempt. He has a shock of long white hair, and is living a primitive life in hiding from the New Syndicate. He reveals to Mulder and Scully all he has left to tell, including the fact that the aliens are scheduled to invade in 2012. Shortly after he is supposedly killed by a missile shot from a helicopter ordered by Knowle Rohrer, but is shown alive in the 2016 episode "My Struggle". Well-Manicured Man The Well-Manicured Man is a British member of the Syndicate. An Englishman, he is an important member, along with The Smoking Man and The Elder, and was a friend of Bill Mulder earlier in his life. 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 Alex Krycek to develop a vaccine, eventually testing it—successfully—on Marita Covarrubias. 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