X-Files Retrospective: Why Won't The Smoking Man Just DIE Already?

 

In the 21^st century the first rule any TV watcher knows of drama is don't get too attached to anybody. Not the recurring characters, not series regulars, not even the leads. This is true of drama, limited series and even some comedies. Peak TV will kill your darlings.

I'd like to say that viewing The X-Files as a teenager helped prepare for the carnage that was to come in the last twenty five years. That would be as perfidious a lie as any the Syndicate tried to fob off on you. And looking back on it one of the major weaknesses Chris Carter seemed to build into his series pretty early on was that he just couldn't let his characters so, whether they were good, evil or in that grey area.

I could argue that part of this was the fact that he had only two series leads: Mulder and Scully for the first seven seasons of the show and therefore any real threat to them, whether by shape-shifting alien, liver eating mutant or the evils of the Syndicate was almost certainly a false one.  But for all the rules X-Files broke at the time it was still a network show that aired in the 1990s and Carter was going to play by them. Characters were only killed off when they wanted to be written out and even then it was often the sole property of shows like Melrose Place. When George Clooney wanted to leave ER, Dr. Ross was suspended and moved across the country. (Cook County would only start to get a higher mortality count AFTER The Sopranos debuted.)Law and Order only occasionally killed off character throughout its entire run (and when it did it was offscreen). It wasn't until the decade was nearly over that two of the three major Davids (Milch and Kelley) began the practice of killing off series regulars and both of them had much larger casts to work with than Carter did.

So while the cliffhangers that put one or both of our series regulars in jeopardy at the season finale became monotonous because you knew the show had been renewed for another season, it was something you accepted. And you could live with it because everyone in proximity to Mulder and Scully had a ticking clock next to him and Carter and his writers showed no mercy with them.

This was true in the very first season finale when Deep Throat (Jerry Hardin) was executed in order to save Mulder's life. From that point on, we knew that once you were in Mulder and Scully's orbit you were on borrowed time. However this created its own problems which when combined with the fact that we couldn't trust anyone we met made the showrunners have a lot of trouble making these recurring characters multi-dimensional. In truth after Season Two, once we met Mulder's new informant X and Alex Krycek most of the recurring characters we met became increasingly one-dimensional and were seen as either potential obstacles or outright villains. At a certain point when they were being killed off, most viewers were less shocked and probably saying: "Well, how is Carter going to bring them back this time?"

Because that was the other problem. Carter kept finding ways to bring his recently departed regulars back in some form. It was one thing to bring them back in flashbacks or some kind of limbo as the characters were between life and death; this was The X-Files. And you didn't mind if an alien would shape shift into one. The bigger problem was that Carter seemed unwilling to just let his villains go after they used up their dramatic value.

Take Krycek for example. When he came back in Piper Maru after having escaped the assassination attempt of the Syndicate it was a genuine shock to find him in Japan. When he was then taken over by the black oil and became a vessel for it as it moved across the country to the silo where an alien ship was being kept it worked well and the final image of Apocrypha where Krycek is banging against a locked door with no food or water and no means of escape is one of the most powerful images in the entire run of the series. And if Carter had let that be the final word on Krycek it would have resonated.

But then in Season 4 Tunguska he turns up having given Mulder and Scully details on a domestic terrorist threat. When he tells us he was liberated by those terrorists and that they were amateurs our credibility hasn't entirely been stretched. The problem is by the time the series gets to the title location in Russia Carter completely rewrites who Krycek has been for the last two seasons. He's been a Russian double agent the entire time, which somehow escaped the Syndicate's notice and despite being not much older than Mulder, he's apparently as high up in the Russian syndicate as some of the much older men in America. Oh and by the way the terrorists never actually liberated him from the silo.

After that Krycek just pops up when Carter needs him as a ready villain and he switches sides on a whim. He betrays the Russians to try and get material for the Syndicate so he can be the only game in town, when it backfired the Syndicate takes him as one of their own without a second thought.  He managed to survive the conflagrations that kill it off and by that point the show has no idea what to do with him. By the time he's finally executed at the end of Season 8 his death has no dramatic power because the show ran out of ideas what to do with him years ago. All things considered it would have better off to leave him to die.

But at least with Krycek and some of the other characters who were given nine lives, Carter basically played fair. We never saw them actually dead and in the cases of those who were killed off, he only used their returns in flashbacks or dream sequences. This can not be said about his truly original sin: the Cigarette Smoking Man and how he just couldn't let him die. And by that I mean the first time, not all the others.

During the first four seasons of The X-Files Carter and his writers had done a superb job building up the Smoking Man as their ultimate villain. He'd barely had a word of dialogue in the first season; we only saw him lurking with shadowy figures during the second and it wasn't until 'One Breath' that Mulder finally confronted him in a magnificent face off.  During the next two seasons he went from being the face of evil to a group of conspirators and it was never clear where exactly he ranked in the hierarchy.

By Season 4 the relationship became more personal as we now learned that Smoking Man had an affair with Teena Mulder (in addition to arranging for having her husband killed). When Scully was diagnosed with cancer that season Mulder considered selling his soul to save her life but Skinner decided to do so. In Zero Sum we saw the price he had to pay but there was no sign Smoking Man would give in. Critically that was William B. Davis's last appearance in Season 4 and during the season finale when we were led to believe Mulder had killed himself, he didn't appear.

During Redux we got the first signs that making Smoking Man wasn't as in touch with the conspiracy as he thought. He was unaware of the fact Mulder's apartment had been under surveillance and he refused to accept that Mulder had killed himself. When he made an attempt to infiltrate the DOD, Smoking Man allowed him to escape.

In Redux II Smoking Man showed up at Scully's hospital bed. At that point Mulder's faith in everything he ever believed about aliens was shattered and he was facing the fact Scully was about to die. At that moment, like the Devil he was, Smoking Man offered him everything he could have wanted.

He showed her a chip that was the implant that could very well reverse Scully's cancer. She'd had an implant removed back in Season 3 and it was made clear directly in Nisei that doing so would lead to her death from it. This was hope. Then he offered Mulder the one thing he'd looked his whole life for: Samantha.

Like almost everything else about this part of the show it makes no sense either at the time or in retrospect. The Samantha we meet looks exactly like the clone of her we met back in Season 2 but there's no reason to assume that was from Samantha Mulder. This Samantha tells Mulder that Smoking Man has raised her as his own child and that she's avoided Fox her whole live because she reminds her of her greatest trauma again. Then she disappears into the night.

Like Darth Vader CSM offers Mulder the chance to quit the FBI and work for him. At the time Mulder is suspected for murder and other criminal charges Mulder considers the deal during a long dark night but eventually decides not to.

During this period one of the Elders has had an assassin trailing both Mulder and Smoking Man. At the climax of the episode we have a magnificent scene in which Mulder is testifying before the FBI about the horrors done to both him and Scully, while Scully is being read her last rites. We follow Smoking Man to Mulder's apartment. Just as Mulder identifies the mole in the Syndicate for the FBI subcommittee, a shot rings out and Smoking Man takes a bullet in the chest. We see an image of him on the floor of Mulder's apartment, reaching for a picture of Fox and Samantha.

It's a magnificent scene, that emulates The Godfather and much of the work of Scorsese. And it was the perfect way to wrap things up for the Smoking Man…if Carter had stuck to it. But one minute later he completely undid it and in  a very real sense set up the circumstances that, for me at least, caused me never to trust The X-Files completely again when it came to the mythology.

And I was far from alone. In his review of the episode in Wanting to Believe Sherman makes it clear just how badly Carter failed.

"It's a measure at this stage of how little we can trust the series that when it tells us something it may even itself believe to be the truth, we know it will only reverse it later if it needs to spin out the story still further. If this episode really did show the Cigarette-Smoking Man's demise all well and good…But we're now so conditioned to disbelieve any statement on the show the moment is rid of all power – and, true to form, no body is found so we know he'll show up again sooner or later. In which case, why bother with a subplot in the first place? By the end of Season Five, the Cigarette Smoking Man will be back working for the Syndicate as if nothing has taken place, so (it) looks like a substantial waste of time in retrospect."

And indeed it is. We've already seen the Syndicate be more than willing to kill of people in considers traitors and stick to it and we'll actually see it happen quite a few more times before the Syndicate meets its demise.  But Carter didn't even bother with a reason for doing so.  There's no real difference in how the Syndicate functions in the episodes we see without him during Season Five then there have been before and honestly not much of a difference when he starts to run it again.

When it's finally revealed he's alive and living in a mountain cabin somewhere at nineteen I was completely nonplussed. When the season finale they brought Krycek back in not to assassinate him but to bring him out of the cold with no more explanation then they had for killing him off. The scene when he returned was almost embarrassing – it was like these old men were acting as if he'd been on vacation in Bermuda for the last six months rather than the fact they'd try to kill him. Even this would have been forgivable had Carter been willing to have this episode be the final season and then go into movies but of course Fox wanted to have it both ways. Kind of like how Carter seemed inclined to do things with the Smoking Man come to think of it.

There were a lot of other reason I lost faith in the mythology after that (not that it was ever strong to begin with) and indeed The X-Files began its creative decline not long after.  (That's not a direct correlation with the mythology but that's a story for another article.) The biggest problem was I think viewers had essentially undone the only other character since the Pilot after four seasons of making him grow. Before Redux II, William B. Davis had done much to make Smoking Man both a figure of evil but human in many ways – his relationship to the Mulder family, his struggles in the pecking order, the fact that for all his apparent villainy he was ordinary. Once he came back from the dead, he was no different than Freddy Krueger or Jason Vorhees or even the monsters of the week they thought every time they weren't trying to uncover government conspiracies. He was a symbol of evil and if you're a symbol then you stop being a character.

And sure enough they made sure that he managed to walk away from his fellow Syndicate just before the aliens set them all on fire. Then he was given a terminal diagnosis from brain surgery. Then in what we thought was the series finale in 2000 he was in a wheelchair, smoking through his neck and then pushed down a flight of stairs.

Even by that point the mythology had moved so far past what it had been that Smoking Man himself was an anachronism. But nevertheless Carter kept bringing him back and killing him off over and over, never bothering to explain how he kept surviving cancer, being pushed down a flight of stairs with cancer and then being blown to smithereens in what we thought was the series finale in 2002.

Fortunately by that time I was a huge fan of Buffy and Angel which were more than willing to kill of its characters (living or undead) and commit to it. (Mostly.) It did help matters that we were dealing with vampires and ghosts and that dreams would bring us visions of the dead on a regular basis.  Joss Whedon basically stuck by his own rules in a way Carter never did.

And during the 21^st century all dramas, and especially supernatural shows, basically play fair with us. If a character came back from the dead in Lost it was because of a flashback or some image of the island and when it seemed John Locke had come back from the dead, it scared the hell out of the people on the island because none of them had seen it happen before. (Spoiler: they were right to be.) For all the body counts of Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, rare was the occasion in either show that a character who was killed off came back to the land of the living. (I never watched either so maybe I'm wrong on some of these.) Cylons could resurrect on Battlestar Galactica when a member of the fleet was killed they stayed dead and it hurt all the more.

As to the other side when it comes to thrillers involving paranoia TV shows have played that fair.  With the exception of Tony Almeida none of the people who died during Jack Bauer's very bad days ever came back on the next one and it made them hurt all the more when they happened.  When a regular died on Homeland or The Americans it was always done and  often so quickly it shocked those left behind. And into Season 5 of Slow Horses none of the characters who die in Slough House or the threats they fight have returned for a second round.

There is still talk of bringing another version of The X-Files back with Ryan Coogler attached but it's been two years since I heard of that. If it happens I have a bit of advice going forward. If you create an evil organization and you kill off the villain, keep them dead.  And maybe have them visit Smoking Man's grave. Hopefully he died of lung cancer by now like he should have thirty years ago.  (By the way, that's canon too.)