Case 04, File 07: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man

AKA: The Most Evil Thing You Can Do Is Write Tom Clancy Knockoffs

The X-Files is, on the whole, not overly interested in the people who make up its villainous conspiracy. They exist, they live and they die, but they're not generally explored beyond that. The exception is, of course, the Cigarette Smoking Man, the longest running and most well known member of the conspiracy. The desire to flesh him out, to make him less of a force of nature and more of a person, had to be handled carefully, lest they risk making him less interesting or less of a threat.

Case 04, File 06: Sanguinarium

AKA: The Gritty Scrubs Crossover We've All Been Waiting For

There's a lot to be said about episodes like The Field Where I Died or the next episode Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man. Episodes like that take the show in new, interesting directions, expanding the types of stories the series can tell, flesh out the world and characters and are just generally incredibly healthy for the show. But there's also a hell of a lot to be said about episodes that are just right in The X-Files' wheelhouse.

Case 04, File 05: The Field Where I Died

AKA: Ripped From Last Centuries Headlines

One of the side effects of being a concept heavy show is that its very rarely on the actors to carry the episode. Oh there have been some really great individual performances such as Brad Dourif in Beyond the Sea or Tony Todd in Sleepless, but that's the actor carrying the concept rather than the actor carrying the episode. So it's pretty interesting to see an episode with a pretty light concept being held up by the acting, especially when the heavy acting is coming from one of our two leads.