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.


After a brief framing device in which the Lone Gunmen tell Mulder and Scully about Cancer Man's past, the episode kicks off with us learning more about his backstory: His dad was executed as a Soviet spy and his mom died of lung cancer because irony. He ends up in the army, hanging out with his friend Bill Mulder (naturally), gets called into a meeting with a general and some men in suits and after some brief dialogue about how life is about seizing control of your own destiny, he gets assigned to assassinate JFK.

He arranges for some guy named Oswald to be the patsy and follows through on his assignment shooting him from the sewer. It is, at this point, that he picks up smoking, incidentally. A few years later, he's still working in the shadows and trying to be a sci-fi writer. While listening to Martin Luther King on the radio, he gets convinced that MLK is going to convince black people to not fight in Vietnam, he decides (in a meeting including J. Edgar Hoover) to assassinate him too and also decides to do it himself. He's a little assassination happy that one.

"Hey, why are you reading that book?"
"The director knew it would be an ironic choice."

We jump forward in time again to Cancer Man in the 90s fixing the world stage (and the NFL, oddly enough) and spying on Mulder and Scully's meet cute first meeting, while still failing to be a writer. He gets a call, telling him there's a crashed UFO and a live alien pilot. He goes and meets Deep Throat, where they muse about the nature of their work and flip a coin to decide who has to kill it. Deep Throat loses, incidentally.

Later, after sending out his book again, one magazine likes his book and agrees to publish it in their magazine. He types up a resignation letter and goes to check out the magazine. But it turns out they changed the ending to his book and the magazine is also an ill regarded rag. He gives a speech about how life is a joke and tears up his resignation letter. Back in the framing device, the Cancer Man has the opportunity to kill Frohike but decides not to, quoting his own writing and saying "I can kill you any time I want to, but not today."

In case you can't tell from my shorter plot summary (and from, you know, the title of the episode), this episode is less interested in plot or concept and more in a character study of the titular Cigarette Smoking Man. It's framed as a story being told rather than necessarily legitimate flashbacks (and I seem to recall that some of it turns out to be non-canon) but it does go a long way to understanding one of the central characters in the conspiracy and making the world of The X-Files feel real.

"We all float down here." 

The central element of any character piece, and that's what this is, is going to be dialogue. The actual events of the episode are kind of tensionless frankly, since we know what's going to happen for the most part (spoiler alert: JFK dies). But the dialogue, the dialogue is what sells it. Cancer Man's conversation toward the end of the episode with Deep Throat is one of the best exchanges in either character's entire tenure on the show, a great look at how Cancer Man sees himself.

Its also got the intelligence to recognize the vast gulf between how Cancer Man sees himself and how he actually is. The element where he's writing what amounts to heroic reworkings of his reprehensible actions is not only authentically pathetic, but it's also a great way of highlighting to the audience how he sees himself. He is literally trying to rewrite his life to cast himself as the hero, a lone man standing against the tide even as he takes increasingly inhuman actions to protect some nebulous amoral agenda, while living alone and isolated in a sad apartment.

William Davis does a great job at conveying all this, as does Chris Owens as young Cancer Man (he'll also end up playing Jeffery Spender a little ways down the line). Its rare for a character not named Mulder or Scully to get this much focus in an episode, but Davis has always been one of the best actors in The X-Files and he manages to strike the balance between the intimidating persona he's always had and the real human underneath it.

"And then Aragorn took Legolas into his manly embrace..."

If the script has one major flaw it's that it doesn't have the room to breathe I wish it had. The MLK assassination should be the most interesting of all, since he openly states he respects Martin Luther King, but instead it gets brushed aside quickly and without much fanfare. I'd also like to have known more about his day to day life in the modern day, when he's not fixing the Super Bowl or spying on Mulder and Scully, but I guess that would give too much of the conspiracy's machinations away.

Still, minor nitpicks aren't enough to keep this from being a fantastic episode, one of the most solidly written and engaging of the series. It may not accomplish much, in terms of moving the plot of the Myth Arc forward, but who cares? A lot of much worse episodes did a lot more to move the plot, and I for one am always going to be fond of episodes that make our characters, even our villains, feel human.

Case Notes:

• For some reason the version of this episode on Hulu only keeps the Henry IV quote up for like a second. Give me a chance to read it, dammit.
• The detail that Cancer Man has "Trust No One" on his lighter amuses me.
• I like the casualness with which Cancer Man cuts through their scrambler. It really helps reinforce what a threat he is.
• The fate of Cancer Man's parents (killed for being a spy and died of lung cancer) are just a little too on the nose frankly.
• "I'd rather read the worst novel ever written than sit through the best movie ever made," is supposed to be a telling line from Cancer Man, but it's actually just a dumb thing to think and makes him seem super pretentious.
• Mulder's first word was JFK. That's also super on the nose but it makes me smile.
• This episode establishes its primary nihilistic tone from the scene where Young Cancer Man meets with the general. That's not a complaint.
• "If you do this, you will cease to exist, but I'm gonna tell you about the assignment before you agree to it."
• The explanation they give for why the military might want to assassinate JFK is better than most, but I'm a little less interested in JFK conspiracy theories than I was when I was younger.
• Again, the assassin being in the sewers is an interesting twist, but I'm not sure that ballistics wouldn't have recognized the bullet was coming from below. Also there was a dude who got struck by a bit of pavement that got hit by a bullet, but that's nit picky.
• Oswald yells that he's not resisting arrest, but he DID punch a cop, so I'm not sure that holds up.
• Cancer Man's writing name is Raul Bloodworth. So EDGY.
• "If he convinces [black people] not to fight in Vietnam, we'll lose." I have bad news for you.
• I think it's pretty smart to not have any of Cancer Man's assassination targets actually show up on screen, it would feel cheap.
• The meeting in act 3 is jusssssssssst this side of silly. I feel like maybe it shouldn't work (the Saddam Hussein call has aged poorly) but it works. At least, I think it does.
• Cancer Man writing self-insert fiction is so viscerally pathetic that it actually hits pretty hard.
• Hey, Deep Throat cameo. Has it really been three seasons since he died?
• The conversation between Deep Throat and Cancer Man and subsequent killing of the alien really is the best scene in the episode.
• William B. Davis sells the hell out of the finale. All it is is he talks on the phone to the publisher and reads of the magazine, but he does a lot with it.
• I love the Box of Chocolates speech, partially because it's a great speech and partially because I hate Forest Gump.
• As always, these reviews are supported by Patreon. This one was painstakingly released on my birthday, so maybe check it out as a birthday present? Or don't, I can't control you.