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)
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