By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
The X-Files is a show with many memorable villains, including freakish creatures like Eugene Tooms and the Flukeman. However, the show’s biggest villain has been the Cigarette Smoking Man, the mysterious government figure behind all of Mulder and Scully’s biggest setbacks. He becomes a more prominent Big Bad throughout the show, and his typical look (suit and a pack of Morley cigarettes) is so iconic that most fans have never noticed him hiding in plain sight in the Season 1 episode “Young At Heart.”
The CIA Agent
This is the episode where Mulder gets dragged back into an old case when a supposedly dead convict he helped bust years ago is seemingly back from the dead. It turns out that he’s very much alive but now suffers from progeria, a disease which causes advanced aging. It’s a fantastic premise that hides an otherwise fantastic cameo: near the end of “Young At Heart,” the CIA agent interrogating Mulder’s old foe is played by none other than William B. Davis, the actor who plays the Cigarette Smoking Man.
That brings us to the obvious question: is the CIA agent in “Young At Heart” intended to actually be the Cigarette Smoking Man? To this day, that answer is unclear.
That nicotine-loving character made his first appearance in the pilot episodes of The X-Files and didn’t officially speak until “Tooms.” This was the late Season 1 episode that brought back Eugene Tooms, the rubbery monster man who previously debuted in the series’ first Monster of the Week episode. CSM spoke for the first time in “Tooms,” but if that was really him in “Young At Heart,” then he actually spoke onscreen far earlier than most fans realize in a season where he was mostly completely silent.
The Cigarette Smoking Man
Part of the Cigarette Smoking Man’s gimmick in Season 1 is that he mostly stood around looking menacing while Deputy Director Skinner spoke to Mulder and Scully. This created an air of both uncertainty and menace. Nobody knew exactly what his deal was, but he seemed to have power–a lot of power–over our heroes’ high-powered FBI boss. He finally spoke in “Tooms” when Skinner asked whether he believed the wild report Mulder and Scully had filed about Eugene Tooms, prompting the Cigarette Smoking Man to smoothly reply “Of course I do.”
However, in “Young At Heart,” William B. Davis appears as a CIA agent, and his first words are “Where are they?” and “Can you hear me?” The context of this is that he is interrogating the episode’s dying villain, a man who had stolen research that might eventually help scientists reverse the aging process altogether. The original research was government-sponsored, but this mysterious agent’s attempt to get the information before the villain dies ends in failure.
Later episodes of The X-Files confirm that the Cigarette Smoking Man has had many aliases over the years, so it makes perfect sense that he would pose as a CIA agent in “Young At Heart.” The research the agent was after could have changed the entire world, and it might have even helped our favorite shadowy government operatives in their private resistance against the aliens. For these reasons and more, some fans have long speculated that this agent is secretly our favorite Morley maniac in disguise.
Interestingly, The X-Files never really explains whether the CIA operative in “Young At Heart” is really the Cigarette Smoking Man, and neither Chris Carter nor anyone else involved in production has confirmed or denied it. As for us, though, we’re believers in the popular fan theory connecting these two characters. Or at least, as Fox Mulder’s poster so memorably declares, we want to believe.
