Last year I wrote what I believed would be my one and only Krycek essay, into which I poured nearly everything I could possibly deduce about his character. If you has I will reiterate the most basic summary of his character: Krycek is mostly defined by three major on-screen relation ships the Smoking Man, Assistant Director Skinner, and Agent Mulder with a handful of others along the way, and his motives could be broadly defined as survival, power, and revenge.




 while it is a thought experiment, just another excuse to play in the playground The X-Files, I have two goals in mind. Firstly to re-contextualise some of what I wrote last year. The idea of it being The Alex Krycek Show is that there is an Alex Krycek Big Picture that is not made explicit to us in The X-Files. For example, last year I focused heavily on revenge as his primary motive, and this creates a probl emnamely, what is he doing after ‘Requiem? Secondlyand the two are relatedto examine the power of context itself. If we flip the narrative perspective then Krycek attacks Skinner in a stairwell” can become Krycek retrieves the digital tape from the possession of the FBI” and while both are true, words like attacks and retrieves  paint different pictures. Even reducing Skinner to the faceless authority of the FBI has certain implications.


I aim to carry out this experiment by assuming my usual anti intentionalist stance, and without resorting to head-canons to make Krycek more palatable. You will see how the latter becomes a challenge, what with the many gaps in his X Files story, but it’s all part of the experiment!


Lastly before I begin, Krycek may not be the villain that some people make him out to be, but he is villainous. Now, I am neither capable nor willing to determine the precise relationship between fiction and real-world morality, but I am writing this essay in view of: a my own sympathetic bias our collective willingness to brush over the misdeeds of certain FBI Agents and ADs just because they are the protagonists. 


Alex Krycek is a man leading a double life. His mission is to spy on an FBI agent and report back to the sinister Smoking Man. He wants to succeed at his mission, possibly he wants to impress The Smoking Man ; he is ambitious, and people-pleasing. He is a good liar, and a good shot. But he isalso a believer in the paranormalhes curious, bordering on paranoid, and growing more suspicious of his employer every day. His distrust of authority is established early on  When he learns that he is nothing but an expendable grunt, his mission becomes one of revenge.


From the start, Krycek is being pulled in two directions. On the one hand, he is loyal to his mission, going to extreme lengths to see it through. On the other hand, as he gets to know Mulder he sees that he’s not such a bad guy he could even be a mentor  as he indulges Krycek’s curiosity in the paranormal. Furthermore, in ‘Ascension’, he suspects his employer is responsible for the abduction of an innocent woman. Krycek is an avatar of the Syndicate’s evil whim  . As he begins to see The Smoking Man for who he really is, the audience begins to hope that Krycek might be the one to take him down.