By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Normally, we consider network notes as a form of creative interference, a way for some stifling leaders to play with our favorite shows and reduce the creative vision of showrunner. However, X-Files is rather unique in the history of television for the number of network notes which ended up improving infinity with infinity. For example, it was a Fox note that led to the favored episode of “tooms” fans introducing the character of Walter Skinner and by being talked about for the first time.
Walter Skinner and the smoked man with cigarettes
Given what extent they are part of the narrative DNA of the show, it is almost impossible to imagine the X-Files Without Walter Skinner or the smoked man with cigarettes. But while the CSM had hidden during the first season of the show, Skinner appeared only in “Tooms”. He has become a recurring character from season 2 and showrunner Chris Carter I saw Fox’s studio note to return to the plot script as “an opportunity to present the character of Walter Skinner”.
Fox wanted the “tooms” to be an episode that brought the attention of viewers to the plot script, and Carter conforms by adding both Walter Skinner and the smoking cigarette to key scenes throughout the episode. In most of these scenes, Skinner speaks in Mulder of the dangers of continuous research on Eugene Tooms while CSM is simply hiding in the background. At the end, Skinner asks the other man if he believes that Scully’s report on Mulder’s final confrontation with Tooms (the one where the latter is killed by an armed escalator), and CSM simply responds with “of course I”.
While “Tooms” was the first episode to present Walter Skinner, it was not the first episode to present the Smoking Man cigarette, which made its original appearance in X-Files‘Very first episode. However, the “tooms” were the first time that we have heard this reclusive character speaking, and the producers at the time joked by saying that they did not even know that actor William B. Davis (whose character had to stand in search of threats) could speak. Once he read for his lines, however, they were very satisfied with what his gallor voice brought to the show.
By the way, while no one disputes that the “tooms” are the first episode in which Walter Skinner appears, some fans argue if it was the first time that the man of the cigarette has spoken. This is because the actor of CSM, William Davis, appears as a CIA agent speaking in the previous episode of season 1 “Young at Heart”. The Fandom is generally divided on the fact that it is the CSM imitating someone (something we know that he has done before) or if Davis, which was above all a glorified supplement in the first season, simply played a different role.
As X-Files Fans know it, it is almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Walter Skinner and the man of smoking for the rest of the series. But if they had not obtained such a positive reaction from fans after the “tooms”, none of them could become major actors. This means that we could simply have to have some of the greatest episodes and future stories of the series involving these characters in Fox, and all because the network has slowly reminded the Showrunner Chris Carter to focus on its current plot scenario in the middle of his growing love for the monster stories of the week.
