Light one up for The Cigarette Smoking Man, The X-Files villain who broke TV's rules
To mark The X-Files' 30th anniversary, let's look back on the time the show revealed everything about its biggest antagonist...unless it was all a lie

J.J. Abrams has talked a lot about his love for the “mystery box” concept in storytelling, which is basically where you construct a puzzle so compelling—in theory—that finding new angles and complications is more exciting than actually solving it. To put a finer point on it, it’s why Abrams’ The Force Awakens is so much more entertaining than his The Rise Of Skywalker. A mystery box is good at introducing a story, but it’s not good at finishing one. But eight years before Abrams co-created Lost and popularized the mystery-box format, proto-mystery-box series The X-Files (which turned 30 on September 10) produced a fascinating counterargument to the gimmick in the form of a surprisingly atypical exposition-dump episode that shined a massive spotlight on one of the most enigmatic villains in TV history. And, depending on how you feel about it, not a single second of it mattered.
The episode, part of The X-Files’ excellent fourth season, is called “Musings Of A Cigarette Smoking Man,” and it opens with the eponymous villain—the mysterious, influential government operative known only at the time as either that or The Cancer Man—setting up surveillance on Mulder, Scully, and Mulder’s trio of conspiracy theorist buddies The Lone Gunmen. As he trains a rifle on their meeting place, one of The Lone Gunmen starts telling Mulder a story, one that he’s more paranoid than usual about sharing, and it makes The Cigarette Smoking Man hesitate … because the story is about him.
What follows is 40 minutes or so of a veritable X-Files dream. Easter eggs are dropped, conspiracies are confirmed, and at the center of all of it is a young unnamed military man given a series of top-secret assignments by the U.S. government. We see him assassinate John F. Kennedy from a secret sewer hideout in the name of bolstering the nation’s defense against communism. We see him smoke his very first cigarette afterward, an overt depiction of the cancer that begins eating at his soul. He even meets Fox Mulder’s father.
In the mix with MLK, Rodney King, and Miracle On Ice
We later see him conspire to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. in a sequence backed by the audio of King’s “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop” speech. He’s involved in Anita Hill’s testimony and the Rodney King verdict, he ignores phone calls from Saddam Hussein, he has a say in Oscar nominations, he rigs the Miracle On Ice hockey game, and after an existential freakout at the news that Gorbachev has resigned—“there’s no more enemies,” quips a member of his inner circle—and just as he’s about to accept contentment for the first time in his life, the government finds a crashed alien spacecraft and a living extraterrestrial, sending him down a path that leads to the events of The X-Files’ big “mythology” episodes.