The 9pm ET/PT, 8pm CT/MT Fox series is a dark "dramady" about FBI agents "Fox Mulder," played by David Duchovny, and "Dana Scully," played by Gillian Anderson, who pursue the FBI's "X- Files" dealing with unexplained events, usually revolving around an ongoing storyline about a conspiracy with extraterrestrials.

On the April 16 episode, the FBI is protecting the research chief of the "Morley Tobacco Company," a doctor who is scheduled to appear before a federal grand jury the next day to disclose some evil committed by the company. During the night he's found dead in his bathroom with much of the flesh on his face eaten away. Company executives are uncooperative in the investigation, refusing to say what the doctor planned to tell the grand jury, hiding behind a lawyer's protection of "corporate secrets" and "employee confidentiality." [Of course when a reporter protects his sources, this is deemed to be proper under the First Amendment...]

Scully determines the company doctor died from "hypoxia, the inability to transfer oxygen from the lungs to the blood stream" as his airways were destroyed. Acting on a hunch from Mulder about tobacco beetles found near the body, Scully goes to an entomologist who finds that the DNA of the bugs has been altered. [by eating the altered plant? DNA transfer doesn't work that way] She explains: "It is 'pretty widely known that tobacco companies have been pouring money into that kind of researc'h, changing the tobacco plant itself in order to make it hardier, give it less nicotine, more nicotine, 'make it naturally menthol flavored'. You name it."

Scully's boss, Assistant FBI Director Skinner, asks: "A form of what, super-tobacco?" Scully responds: "Which possibly could have created super bugs. I guess the real question is could they have become dangerous to humans?" [So viewers got a double shot of Political Correctness - anti tobacco AND anti- geneticaly-engineered plants]

Opening up the chest of a second man who died the same way, Scully discovers his lungs are full of tobacco beetle larvae which pupated from eggs. Soon, Mulder is infected and starts coughing up blood. Doctors try to suction out the eggs, but it's a doomed battle. Scully comes up with a theory for how the eggs got into his lungs, telling Skinner: "I'm thinking he inhaled them. Well, the tobacco beetle lives out its life cycle on or around the tobacco plant. That's where it lays its eggs. If those genetically altered beatles that we found did that, then maybe the eggs survived the processing into cigarettes." [And burning and the filter, too!]

Skinner: "And been carried into Mulder's lungs as smoke?" Scully: "Right, like spores or pollen 'somehow' small enough to be airborne." [unlike the original, unmutated beetles' eggs]

Confronted by an angry Skinner, the tobacco company's chief executive, "Dr. Voss," comes clean and explains they were trying to "genetically engineer a safer cigarette," but three of four test subjects [humans, not animals?] died, which is what the doctor who died was to reveal in his testimony. The FBI agents learn that Mulder had met the fourth subject, who was somehow immune, but who had smoked in Mulder's presence.

In the dramatic conclusion, Skinner finds the man in the tobacco company lab and shoots him when he lights up one of the altered cigarettes. Mulder is saved when Scully realizes that a heavy dose of nicotine is the antidote as the fourth test subject only survived because he was a "four pack a day smoker, far heavier than any of the focus group members who died. You know nicotine is extremely poisonous. It's actually one of the oldest known insecticides."

The show ends with Mulder now confessing an attraction to smoking. Holding up a cigarette box with a color scheme similar to Marlboro, Mulder tells Scully: "I bought these on the way to work" An exasperated Scully: "You're not going to start smoking?" Mulder: " 'They' say the addiction is stronger than heroin."

Mulder tosses the cigarette pack into the trash can, but as the camera fades he's looking longingly downward at it.

Ah, the irresistible pull of nicotine-spiked cigarettes produced by greedy tobacco companies. In this case, the entertainment media followed the lead of the news media in targeting a foil. -- Brent Baker

[Elaborative comments by Terry Niksch]