For an episode titled, 'Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man', this was remarkably more obtuse than a lot of previous episodes. I kind of expected that maybe we'd learn something about him, and while we did, I don't know that we really learned anything particularly useful.
Either way, I think this was clearly an unusual episode, both in its presentation and its content, as compared to the rest of the series so far.
The thing that initially confused me in 'Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man' was what reality actually was. Were the scenes from the 1960s real, or the Cancer Man's imagined memories? Or were they the plot of his failed novel? After thinking quite a lot about it, I believe it was mostly fabricated in some way.
I do find it kind of hilarious that this man - this extremely powerful, extremely shady man - has the primary ambition of being a published author. It seems a little strange, but humanising in a way, even if his actual text was crap. He's not just part of the global conspiracy, but an aspiring novelist. It's a shame his novel wasn't published to his liking, because then maybe he wouldn't be there to cause so much trouble for Mulder and Scully, but mostly Mulder.
Obviously that isn't true, because someone else would have just as easily taken on that role. It's kind of like the theory that if Fidel Castro had followed through with his Major League Baseball career, Cuba might never have fallen to Communism. It still would have - it's not like Castro was the only person with his views at the time. It would have just been someone else in charge.
But Communism was just a red herring.
Actually, this whole episode was a red herring, because as far as I can tell, none of it actually happened.
It turns out that in the Cancer Man's fantasy, he was responsible for the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., as part of government and military conspiracies. I'm not sure what Chris Carter is trying to imply with this plot line, and I don't subscribe to any of the conspiracy theories regarding either of those assassinations. So my conclusion is that this episode exists almost entirely in the Cancer Man's delusional and megalomaniacal imagination.
And since he chooses not to kill Frohike at the end, he can't have been that much of a threat, which seems to further confirm that the flashbacks were mostly wishful thinking on his part.
But what really confused me is that the actor playing the younger version of the Cancer Man was terrible. He didn't look, act, or sound like what we know now of the Cancer Man, which wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except for two things. The first is I didn't even realise he was supposed to be the Cancer Man until after the episode was over.
And worse, he was played by someone else in 'Apocrypha', when he was already part of whatever powerful group he is part of as of 1953, and he acted and sounded exactly like he does now. Plus, he was already working with Bill Mulder at the time, and that was ten years before the first flashback in this episode.
So his story is pretty well contradicted by 'Apocrypha', at the very least. Further evidence that things Did Not Really Happen That Way, I guess. Maybe there was a huge conspiracy to assassinate a President and a Civil Rights leader, but I'm guessing the Cancer Man was already in a position of power and directed some enlisted kid in the Army to commit these crimes and disappear, but wishes he could have done it himself.
The only real thing was his novel and maybe even his childlike excitement at it being accepted by a publisher - at least until his dreams came crashing down when they butchered his original ending.
It makes me almost feel sorry for him.
Almost.
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