“The X-Files: My Struggle III” plays like a redacted memo read aloud—part prophecy, part confession, part threat. It splices personal stakes (Mulder and Scully’s lost son) into a grand design of engineered pandemics, mind-war experiments, and an information ecosystem where truth and forgery trade masks. The Cigarette Smoking Man stands at the center like an architect of biopower, a composite of every three-letter agency with a matchbook for a conscience. What the episode does best is collapse distance: between rumor and program, between myth and lab bench, between a family’s crisis and a world-scale culling. In its universe, conspiracies aren’t accidents; they’re policy with good PR.
Scully’s visions arrive like a scrambled emergency broadcast—2018 on the calendar, but tomorrow in the bloodstream. She sees a pathogen coming, the kind that doesn’t just sicken bodies; it rewrites the social contract. It feels like television whispering headlines before the headlines, not holy text, but a script with better sources.
Then the smoke rolls in. He is not merely CIA or NSA; he’s the overlap of their Venn diagrams—the off-budget board that never adjourns. The Cigarette Smoking Man is moral ambiguity in human form, a curator of necessary evils who deletes “good guys” from the story and calls it editing.
Whispers trace back to pre-Cold War basements where minds were test tubes. LSD. Hypnosis. Behavior scripts. “Defense research” became the on-ramp to something stranger—subjects who didn’t just think differently, but became different. Powers as side effects; side effects as weapons.
Mulder makes up his mind: to stop a god, kill a man. But this man is wired into the nation’s nervous system. He reads messages before they’re sent and hears phone calls in the click between rings. Worse, his endgame echoes Mulder’s worst nightmares—population triage masked as destiny.
The rumor that curdles everything: a pandemic by design. Not as verified history, but as the episode’s bleak thesis—fiction mirroring later anxieties too neatly for comfort. In 2018 its script toys with “fake news”; soon after, deepfakes and AI bend reality into a hall of mirrors where forensics becomes a daily habit.
He styles himself a cleaner Unabomber: an eco-purist with a lab instead of a cabin. Where the bomber mailed shrapnel, this patriarch mails a microbe. Different tool, same arithmetic—fewer people, more “balance,” a garden trimmed with a scythe.
The episode also cracks open the vault of perennial fever dreams: the Smoking Man bragging in the shadows about stage-managed history—moon landings under studio lights, cinema as confession (The Shining’s wallpaper, Capricorn One’s plot) turned into plausible deniability. Maybe he didn’t do it. Maybe he only wants the world to believe he could.
Meanwhile, 2019 hums off-budget: a secret space plan sketched on whiteboards. Tech titans aim for colonies; ambition is cheap, orbit isn’t. Rockets go up, but gravity—financial, political, physical—keeps its veto pen.
Mulder and Scully stop chasing theories and start chasing blood. Their son becomes the keystone—perhaps patient zero, perhaps the cure. In this paranoid math, one kid’s veins may hold the one antibody the architects didn’t plan for.
What once sounded like late-night talk radio—alien DNA braided with human—creeps toward the lab. CRISPR turns editing into a verb you can conjugate. Pigs grow human organs on grant proposals. Chimeras step out of myth and onto the ethics board agenda. The line between the show’s nightmare and the lab’s Tuesday gets thin as a hair trapped under a Petri dish.
“My Struggle III” doesn’t just catalog conspiracies; it diagrams a system—self-funding, self-sealing, personnel optional. Elections change letterhead; the program survives. And in that system, truth isn’t “out there.” It’s under classification, burned to ash, or walking around in the body of a child the future is trying to steal.