"Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" is the seventh episode of the fourth season of the science fiction television series The X-Files.

"Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" earned a Nielsen household rating of 10.7, being watched by 17.09 million people in its initial broadcast.

The show centers on FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files.

In this episode, Lone Gunman Melvin Frohike (Tom Braidwood) finds a tell-tale magazine story supposedly revealing the history of The Smoking Man (William B. Davis).

The Smoking Man, armed with a sniper rifle and surveillance equipment, spies on a meeting between Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, and the Lone Gunmen.

Frohike claims to have discovered information about the Smoking Man's mysterious past, stating that his father was an executed communist spy and that his mother died of lung cancer, causing him to be raised in various Midwest orphanages.

It is revealed that the Smoking Man was already involved in Bay of Pigs Invasion and the assassinations of Patrice Lumumba and Rafael Trujillo.

The assassination is motivated by Kennedy's "mishandling" of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis and because he was turning away from the Cold War and seeking a negotiated peace with the Soviet Union.

After hearing Martin Luther King Jr. give a speech arguing that "communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real," the Smoking Man meets with a group of men, including J. Edgar Hoover.

Unlike most of the men present, the Smoking Man admires King, but believes that his opposition to the Vietnam War might convince African Americans to object to fighting, causing the United States to lose.

In 1991, the Smoking Man meets with subordinates, discussing his orchestration of the Anita Hill controversy and the Rodney King trial, as well as the Buffalo Bills' loss at the Super Bowl.

Later, while at home, the Smoking Man receives an urgent phone call from Deep Throat, who meets him near the site of a UFO wreck.

Deep Throat and the Smoking Man reminisce about the multiple times they changed the course of history "from the shadows," without any public recognition.

Deep Throat persuades the Smoking Man that the alien must be killed, pursuant to a UNSC resolution stipulating that any signatory nation that comes into possession of an E.B.E.

Returning to the present year, Frohike tells Mulder and Scully that the account he told them is based on a purportedly fictional story he read in a magazine to which he subscribes.

[3] The Smoking Man's ambition to be a novelist was based on CIA intelligence officer E. Howard Hunt, who was also a prolific author of fiction.

[3]Producer J.P. Finn coordinated the sequence in which The Smoking Man assassinates John F. Kennedy; it was filmed in a Vancouver location that looked somewhat like Dealey Plaza.

The SS-100-X mock-up featured in this episode was created by vehicle coordinator Nigel Habgood, using a heavily modified Lincoln Continental.

While it was not the intention of the show's writers to give the lead actors "a week off", this effectively came to pass—a turn of events with which Duchovny was very pleased.

[5] James Wong earned the show's first ever Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for this episode,[6] although he later lost to NYPD Blue's Mark Tinker.

[9] He ultimately gave the episode an "A" and wrote, "'Musings' is great because it transforms CSM from a living ghost into the walking dead—still horrifying, still dangerous, but pitiable just the same".

Furthermore, Shearman wrote positively of the ambiguousness of the episode's authenticity, noting that "the answers that the viewers are craving are handed out here on such a large plate, you can only take them as a delicious parody.