There are powerful people using their power to reshape the world to their will. There must be a hidden hand orchestrating all this misfortune.Ĭonspiracy theories suggest that there is some ordering principle at work, some secret force that is driving the world in a particular direction. Environmental devastation, disease, terrorism, war and economic uncertainties are the order of the day. The dawn of the twenty-first century should be a world advancing towards utopia. But why is there more disorder, instability, uncertainty and chaos? Someone must be responsible for this, the conspiracy theory argues. The further society advances, the more sophisticated its technologies become, the more rational, orderly, safe and peaceful it should become, we would like to believe. Conspiracy theories create order from chaos, as Barna Donovan argues in Conspiracy Films: History was not the result of large impersonal social forces acting on a societal level beyond the control of individual actors instead, history was the result of powerful men meeting in dimly-lit rooms to decide the fate of the world. The implication was that all of history was a tangled web, but one tied together by a few crucial strings. JFK helped to reignite public speculation about the assassination, while Nixon even suggested that Richard Nixon had met with some of the parties involved. Oliver Stone captured the mood quite effectively with his two presidential-themed films of the decade. The X-Files was perhaps the most high-profile example, but American pop culture was positively fascinated with the idea of murky figures and dark figures lurking on the edge of history. Indeed, the conspiracy narrative had become a booming industry by the mid-nineties, in the wake of the Cold War. Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man is largely a story mocking the show’s conspiratorial mindset, playing with the logical conclusions of this sort of approach. Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space” was primarily a story about how “the truth” may not be out there, at least not in an objectively verifiable form. Speaking of Darin Morgan, Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man plays like a companion piece to Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space.” Both stories play with the show’s over-arching conspiracy storyline and themes, reducing The X-Files to something of a cruel joke. Much like Darin Morgan’s scripts, each of the four fourth-season scripts by Morgan and Wong served to add another feather to the show’s bow. It could be argued that the biggest problem with the later seasons of The X-Files was a reluctance to experiment or to push the show in these sorts of strange directions.
This sort of experimentation keeps a show young and fresh. Darin Morgan had spent most of his time on the writing staff figuring out what he could and couldn’t do with The X-Files. It is worth pausing to note that trying to “break” the show is not necessarily a bad thing. For any flaws they may have, none of the scripts are Teliko or Unrequited. Ask a random bunch of fans for their opinions on these four episodes, and you’ll undoubtedly end up with a very diverse (and very strong) opinions about them. It is no wonder that their episodes for the fourth season are divisive among fans. They wanted to push The X-Files outside its comfort zone, moving in bold directions, stretching it to the limit of what the show could do. There is a sense that Morgan and Wong were trying to “break” the show in their final year on staff.
With great power, comes great loneliness… Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man and Never Again just make it explicit. There was an anger underpinning Home and a sadness running through The Field Where I Died, both suggesting that the two could not slot back into the writing staff The X-Files after having spent a year running Space: Above and Beyond – despite what Fox might have wanted. To be fair, this was already heavily implied with their first two scripts for the season. In many ways, Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man makes it quite clear that Morgan and Wong are largely finished with The X-Files. This is James Wong’s first credit as director, although he had done some second-unit stuff on Space: Above and Beyond, first stepping behind the camera at the last minute to provide a “hero shot” for Dark Side of the Sun. However, in practice, it is still a very close collaboration between the duo – Wong was heavily involved in planning the script, while Morgan was heavily involved in production. This time, Morgan is writing the script solo while Wong directs. Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man is the third fourth-season episode from the creative team of Glen Morgan and James Wong.