Who Is the Cigarette-Smoking Man on 'The X-Files'?

As one might expect, tonight's premiere episode of The X-Files will be a big one for The Cigarette-Smoking Man.

The series' primary antagonist, whose real name may or may not actually be C.G.B. Spender, was introduced in the series' pilot and is one of the only characters to have remained with The X-Files throughout (although not without being killed and brought back at least once).

Much of his history is hazy and unclear; the C.G.B. Spender identity was introduced in 1999's "Two Fathers," and almost immediately had doubt cast on it, as Scully noted it was almost certainly an alias.

For the sake of convenicence, we will refer to Cigarette-Smoking Man as "Spender" from here on out.

Between "Two Fathers" and "Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man," Spender's backstory has been laid out in some detail, although it has likely been embellished, especially since the latter episode centered on his idea of himself more than any objective history.

In the early 1950s, Spender was one of a group of Washington officials sent to Pearl Harbor to recover information from a survivor of the Zeus Faber, a submarine whose captain had been infected with the black oil.

Twenty years later, in 1973, Spender and other State Department officials attended the first meeting with alien colonists. The State Department members voted and decided to form the "Syndicate," and initiated attempts to create a vaccine to stop the planned alien colonization. They informed the colonists of their plan to prepare for the colonization in exchange for postponing it for a period of time, as well as providing them with an alien fetus. The colonists agreed, taking the families of Syndicate members as collateral.

There were numerous other cultural touchstone moments that Spender may have been a part of, from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to touching off the 1991 Los Angeles riots.

In 1992, he attended the meeting -- seen in the pilot -- where Walter Skinner assigned Dana Scully to The X-Files. He lingered over the X-files and obsessed over Mulder for years, including sending Syndicate and sometime-FBI Agent Alex Krychek to spy on and obstruct Mulder's investigations.

Spender's motives are often inscrutable. With the alien colonists, he was part of a plot to fool them into believing that the Syndicate was "on their side." Similarly, with Mulder and Scully, he would often obstruct or outright terminate their investigations, only for evidence to later indicate that he had quietly set up a situation where they would find something different. It was not that he wanted the truth to be out there, but on The X-Files, the truth was fluid -- and often, it would be Spender who would be manipulating that fluid nature to get a version of events that served his purposes into Mulder and Scully's heads.

Spender was often at the center of discontent or outright revolt within the Syndicate, and at one point he brought his biological son, Jeffrey Spender, to kill members of competing factions.

While there had long been implications that Spender, who had engaged in an affair with Fox Mulder's mother, might in fact be Mulder's biological father, he does not act with parental compassion often (although he has more than once spared Mulder's life in situations where killing him might have been easier). After Mulder came into contact with a substance that made him immune to the effects of the black oil used by alien colonists, Spender extracted biological material from Mulder, even though he knew that doing so might kill Mulder. Attempting to make himself immune to the alien threat eventually cost Spender his ability to walk and forced him to get a tracheotomy.

In the series finale, Spender was killed by black helicopters gunning for Mulder and Scully -- but in 2016's revival, he reappeared.

By the end of the revival, Spender revealed that he had been secretly attempting to destroy a huge chunk of the human population by reducing human immunity; sneaking toxins into vaccines, he had created a weakness in much of the population that could be exploited to kill millions. He invited Mulder, sick as a result, to work at his side and accept a vaccine that could save his life, but Mulder refused, setting the stage for a cliffhanger that will be resolved tonight...!