Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – The Smoking Man’s Unreliable Narration

It took until season 4 for The X-Files to give us an entire episode featuring the Smoking Man. Or Cigarette Smoking Man depending on who you talk to. Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man follows our most enigmatic of villains as he writes about his job and plans on killing Lone Gunman member Frohike as Smoking Man spies on Mulder and his paranoid friends. Producers of the series have never confirmed that what transpires here canonically provides any insight into the reality of the series. And that is very telling as the how unreliable of a narrator this character is. You can never believe anything when he is involved.

It’s ironic that I get to this episode during a time of political turmoil. Chris Carter’s distrust of the government is one of the main themes of the show. While I’m not going to discuss current events here, the themes within the show are ever present today, on this second Sunday of 2026.

This episode follows the Smoking Man as he was involved in the Bay of Pigs Invasion, assassinates JFK and frames Lee Harvey Oswald, and assassinates Martin Luther King as he writes a novel that he tries to have published multiple times.  In the 1990s he orchestrates the Anita Hill controversary and Rodney King trial, and somehow keeps the Buffalo Bills from winning a Super Bowl. He apparently even drugged a Soviet goaltender so that the Americans would win in the Miracle on Ice hockey game. When Mikhail Gorbachev finally resigns, Smoking Man is disappointed. He receives a phone call from Deep Throat and the two characters plot what happens in previous X-Files episode E.B.E. On the day that Scully is assigned to the X-Files, Smoking Man is seen typing a resignation letter because he finally is getting his stories published in a magazine. He quits smoking and purchases the magazine only to discover that the ending of his story has been changed.

Back to present day, the Smoking Man still listens and when he points the rifle at Frohike to finally kill him, he decides not to. His reasoning is not explained, but in reality, the idea of him killing Frohike was vetoed by the higher ups at Fox. Christ Carter got away with a lot show wise, but he didn’t get away with that.

I’ve often found this episode to be equal parts likable and unreliable. The more I watch it, the more it feels like a parody of the show.  It took all of the cliché conspiracies to happen since the 1960s and made the Smoking Man part of all of them. Then, it took a man with that much power and turned him into an unhappy writer who wanted something different life. I have a love/hate relationship with this in 2026.

On some level, I want him to be responsible for all of that. I also want him to just stay in his lane and be part of the larger conspiracy of using smallpox vaccinations to put alien DNA into American citizens so that aliens can one day colonize the Earth. The writer in me wants him to be a successful writer and give it all up to create stories. The sci-fi fan in me wants him to be a ruthless, manipulative government employee with a license to kill. It can’t be both ways, Chris Carter.

Teenage me loved this episode. Adult me still loves it, just for different reasons. I love it for all of its unreliability now much in the same way I love reading a Tana French novel. Sometimes, you just can’t trust the narrator and it makes for a more interesting story. None of those things really happened in the context of the show, but the Smoking Man wanted to believe that he was part of those things. In his wildest imagination, he was part of all the biggest events in modern American history. In the year 2026, a certain orange hued politician shares those traits – the delusions of grandeur common with big egos. Smoking Man also feels like the Forrest Gump of the FBI, just replace the mental disability with cigarettes. Life is like a box of nicotine. You never know what you’re smoking until the cancer eats you alive.

Until next week, the truth is out there.