WALTER SERGEI SKINNER Spouse: Sharon Skinner BACKGROUND: FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner is Mulder and Scully's immediate superior, a loyal Bureau veteran who nonetheless sympathizes with the X-Files agents. He has largely kept them within a sphere of acceptable boundaries, obviating the need to terminate either. At age 18, Skinner enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in Viet Nam. There he underwent a seminal experience that influenced what would become his affinity with Mulder and the X-Files: After his entire patrol was killed by enemy fire, and he had been placed in a body bag, a corpsman noticed he was barely alive. Two weeks later, Skinner awoke in a Saigon hospital, having had visions of an old woman whom he believed had led him back from death, and who reappeared to him years later, well into his FBI tenure, during a traumatic time when his wife was herself near death. The Syndicate — that group of conspirators who'd traitorously allied with the colonizing aliens in return for lap-dog status — did attempt to terminate Skinner after he, against their wishes, had maintained an unofficial investigation into the friendly fire death of Scully's sister, Melissa. Officially, the Syndicate feared an investigation of this civilian collateral damage could lead to the unthinkable: a credible media leak of its existence. Our analysis also indicates that the Syndicate's action was as much a fit of pique over its inability to terminate its intended target, Scully herself. Once this had passed, the Syndicate did not reattempt to kill Skinner. Years later, Alex Krycek, a former Syndicate operative turned rogue, blackmailed Skinner by injected him with nanotechnology that regulated Skinner's health — bringing Skinner again to the brink of death before reversing the process at the last moment, ensuring control of Skinner's actions until subsequent events interceded. back to top