The X Files - Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man

 I can kill you whenever I please...but not today. - Cigarette-Smoking Man

So there was a bit of talk on the X-Files subReddit about whether or not we feel anything for "Hunt" by episode's end. I dropped a comment that I still detested him, finding him to be a monster. I have always considered him more of an outside source of power, though, he has to orchestrate his way around true figures of power. Look at how Well-Manicured Man and other Syndicate members often treat him...you wouldn't think he walked into a room and demanded Buffalo never win a Super Bowl, determined the outcome of the "Miracle Olympic Hockey Game" between USA and the Russians in 1980, talked down to J. Edgar Hoover and took charge of the assassination of MLK, Jr., and coordinated the assassination of JFK by manipulating Oswalt into being where he needed to be in order to be caught and implicated as the murderer. I have always felt he accumulated what power he has by conducting his affairs through cunning and crafty measures, perhaps his greatest issue underestimating Mulder while always undermining him wherever possible. Like at the end when he doesn't shoot Frohike when he had him dead to rites, CSM too often failed to take that shot on Mulder, though he would frustrate the young agent any chance he could. CSM feared Mulder as a martyr while constantly orchestrating roadblocks towards evidence that penetrated his lair of protections, using the government and military in any way he could.

But do I believe CSM was such a figurehead in altering US history through the murders of JFK and MLK, Jr.? No, I do not. To be honest, I don't even think the scene with Deep Throat and CSM is accurate. Did CSM avoid shooting an alien just so Deep Throat would have to do it as hit lit another cigarette? I do know that Deep Throat was seriously disturbed and upset after seeing an alien killed and that was a key event in his assistance to Mulder during the first season of X-Files. But do I believe CSM couldn't kill that alien if he needed to? No, I think he could do so without a single hesitancy. 

I think the entire episode has unreliable narration. What Frohike dictates and CSM listens to from an abandoned warehouse loft-- and the story CSM types away for years on his typewriter in a lonely room all by himself -- as Mulder's voice pops up to tell us he's in the building (the headquarters of the Lone Gunmen, whose surveillance block technology is no match for what CSM has available) what he has learned, I'm not even sure "Hunt" was ever a Captain in the Army, has a Communist spy father who was executed or even a mother that died of cancer. Hell, for all I know, CSM had a good upbringing but was bullied as a kid and decided to use that as motivation to climb through government back channels in order to secure whatever power he does have. Was "Hunt" with Bill Mulder in the Army and taken to a room where a General Francis, among other high level government figures, prepared him for a role in their covert section of the military to carry out the assassination of JFK for the Bay of Pigs fuckup and near nuclear annihilation? I question if "Hunt" was ever officially in the military or found his way into his area of dark government through whatever sketchy path was available to him.

I do think he had a story and everything you see was published in some trash magazine - Roman e Clef - altered in ways by the publisher to make CSM's story more outlandish than it already was. I do think CSM sat on a bench and was the antithesis of Forrest Gump's own view of how life is like a box of chocolates. I think this whole episode's historical flashbacks are pure fantasy. But this episode is a hell of a ride and it is tailored to quite a mysterious character always working around the edges of the series, puppeteering wherever he can, sending tripwires into Mulder's cause and inflicting harm towards Scully as well. 4/5