Taking inspiration from suspenseful, speculative series like The Twilight Zone and Twin Peaks, The X-Files was a groundbreaking, monster-of-the-week style show centering on the FBI's unsolved cases. Often, these “X-Files” appear to involve paranormal phenomena. intriguing the eager-to-believe Special Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), a skilled FBI profiler and passionate conspiracy theorist. However, it challenges Special Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), a medical doctor and ardent skeptic.
Tasked with applying a scientific lens to Mulder’s findings, Scully is less-than-thrilled about being partnered with “Spooky Mulder” at first. Over the course of the series, viewers learn more about the root of Mulder’s belief in extraterrestrials — his sister, Samantha, was seemingly abducted by aliens when they were kids. Audiences also watch as Scully’s skepticism is both reaffirmed and drastically shaken. It becomes clear that Mulder and Scully can only truly trust each other, making recurring side characters, like the Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis), all the more unnerving. So, who is the ever-mysterious Smoking Man in The X-Files, and what does his enduring presence mean for Mulder and Scully?
Who Is The Cigarette Smoking Man?
Chris Carter, the mastermind behind The X-Files, created two beloved characters in Dana Scully and Fox Mulder. At the time, Carter felt he was flipping the script on gender norms by casting Scully as the logic-driven skeptic and Mulder as the intuition-driven believer. While he might have realized the impact his protagonists would have on pop culture, television, and storytelling at large, Carter probably didn’t anticipate that a character defined by his chain-smoking habit would become such a lasting figure, too.
In one instance, Scully suggests that the Cigarette Smoking Man has “hundreds” of aliases, from his alleged name — C.G.B. Spender — to his monikers, like Cancer Man and the Smoking Man. His actual name, Carl Gerhard Busch, is finally revealed in Season 11 of The X-Files. The Smoking Man appears in the pilot, but his dialogue only amounts to four words during the entirety of Season 1. But why?
It turns out that the Smoking Man wasn’t meant to become the series’ overarching antagonist. In fact, when Carter cast actor William B. Davis in the role, the character was dubbed the “Smoking Man” because it was an easy way to identify this random extra in the pilot episode.
Is The Smoking Man Good Or Bad?
After a few Season 1 appearances, the Smoking Man’s propensity for being someone with more appeal, influence, and meaning grew. At first, he menaces in the background, often chain-smoking in the offices of Scully and Mulder’s FBI supervisors. In the first episode, he oversees Special Agent Scully’s briefings, and even disposes of evidence Mulder and Scully brought to the FBI from the scene of a supposed alien abduction. That small act helped make the character more than just an extra.
The Cigarette Smoking Man goes from looming large in Assistant Director Walter Skinner’s office and foiling Mulder’s efforts, to looming over a shadowy government conspiracy group known as the Syndicate. The Syndicate’s aim — to keep the evidence of extraterrestrial life hidden from civilians — is in direct opposition to Mulder’s goals, making the Cigarette Smoking Man a perfect nemesis. Even though his character arc wasn’t planned from the outset, the Cigarette Smoking Man not only figures into the ongoing story of The X-Files, but comes to augment the show’s themes, too.
What Does The Smoking Man Represent?
Given his constant thwarting of Mulder and Scully’s efforts to reveal the truth, many fans have deemed the Cigarette Smoking Man to be the show’s central antagonist. Series creator Chris Carter seems to subscribe to this, too; he once referred to the Smoking Man as the devil. After all, the Syndicate isn’t just hiding the truth about alien life. The U.S. government shadow organization has also covered up those aliens’ plans: to colonize Earth.
“If people were to know of the things that I know,” the Cigarette Smoking Man warns Mulder, “it would all fall apart.” At the core of it, he wants to protect humanity. At one point, the Smoking Man is involved with developing a vaccine to protect people from an alien parasite, which would further the extraterrestrials’ efforts to colonize Earth. Yet, he’s relentless and cruel in his pursuit of safeguarding the truth. Clearly, he believes secrets are necessary to maintain order. For Mulder, on the other hand, the truth is freeing — and owed to him and others who have been impacted by these extraterrestrial events.
At the end of the day, The Cigarette Smoking Man is a puppeteer. He pulls the strings of information — what’s revealed, what’s hidden — and creates the very conspiracies Mulder is drawn into. He ends up having the power to decide who lives and dies — if society stands or crumbles, as he himself puts it.
In Season 4, Episode 7, “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man,” viewers learn more about the character’s supposed backstory as well as how he (seemingly) shaped key moments in United States history. Should viewers take the episode’s contents as the truth? As always with the Cigarette Smoking Man, it’s hard to say. Still, it seems plausible enough, given the intensity with which he pursues his mission.
Viewers are led to believe that, as a young agent, the Smoking Man isn’t interested in, well, smoking. But after he (spoiler alert) assassinates President John F. Kennedy, he picks up a cigarette for the first time. Each time he does something regrettable — a bad deed in the service of a supposed “greater good” — he smokes. Given that he's at the center of so many conspiracies, it's no wonder the habit sticks. His calling card stems from regret, from a kind of self-punishment or anxiety release (or both).
The conspiracies the episode looks at, which range from JFK’s death to Roswell, are orchestrated by a few powerful and deluded people, and the Cigarette Smoking Man is chief among them. After all, he picks up smoking — and with it a whole new identity — because he believes himself a hero, holding the whole world together by committing the bad deeds no one else wants to carry out.
What Happens To The Smoking Man In The X-Files?
In a mid-series season, the Syndicate is essentially destroyed by its own selfishness. In trying to survive the alien colonization, while damning everyone else, most of these all-powerful men meet their demise. Of course, the Cigarette Smoking Man, who’s been part of the meetings with the alien colonizers since the beginning, survives.
Things get more convoluted for him from there on out. It’s revealed that FBI Special Agent Jeffrey Spender, one of the two agents who took over the X-Files cases after Mulder and Scully’s forced leave of absence, is actually the Cigarette Smoking Man’s son. The Cancer Man even attempts to kill Jeffrey at one point, proving his ruthlessness. Afterward, he goes on to survive several near-death experiences, from being thrown down a flight of stairs to getting hit by a rocket (yes, a rocket) in the series’ initial finale.
Presumed dead for over a decade, the Cigarette Smoking Man returns in the 2016 reboot. In the eleventh and final season, which aired in 2018, he becomes a much more clear-cut villain. Evidently, he’s been working on a terrible plan for decades. The Cigarette Smoking Man plans to release chemtrails into the atmosphere that will trigger immune system breakdowns, thus depopulating the United States. The only problem? Now at odds with other surviving Syndicate members, the Smoking Man needs to find Scully’s son, William, to succeed. (It’s a long, long story involving alien tech and, yes, the Cigarette Smoking Man himself.)
In their efforts to locate William, the Season 11 finale culminates with The X-Files gang all in one place. The Smoking Man not only runs over Skinner, Mulder and Scully’s long-time superior, but he also shoots William during a waterfront standoff. Mulder appears and shoots the Cigarette Smoking Man, who then falls into the water. Although his body is carried away by the water, it seems like the Cigarette Smoking Man has finally died. Given that Season 11 also marks the end of The X-Files, we want to believe it, anyway.