"Jim Wong ... was a big help, too. A lot of the stage directions point toward farce, but Jim told me to play against that and just let the situation play out. The Forrest Gump scene was difficult, too. When I prepared it and did it the first time, I was almost Shakespearean in my approach. Jim made me toss it off more, and it worked fine". Chris Owens, who was cast as the Young Smoking Man, spent considerable time studying how Davis smokes cigarettes to make sure that he would smoke them the same way, thereby preserving continuity. Owens would reprise his role as a young version of The Smoking Man again in the episode "Demons", and he would also play Jeffrey Spender (the son of The Smoking Man) in subsequent seasons. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson feature primarily through voice recordings in the opening sequence. The episode was the first in the series where Mulder does not make a physical appearance; Scully appears only in archival footage from "Pilot". While it was not the intention of the show's writers to give the lead actors "a week off", this effectively came to passa turn of events with which Duchovny was very pleased. Tom Braidwood appears briefly on screen in the episode's final scene, but is otherwise restricted to voiceover; Bruce Harwood also makes a brief voice cameo in the opening scene. Jerry Hardin reprises his role as Deep Throat, who is named as "Ronald" for the only time in the series' original run; the episode "This" later confirmed his name as Ronald Pakula. Reception "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" premiered on the Fox network on November 17, 1996. This episode earned a Nielsen rating of 10.7, with a 15 share, meaning that roughly 10.7 percent of all television-equipped households, and 15 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode. It was viewed by 17.09 million viewers. James Wong earned the show's first ever Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for this episode, although he later lost to NYPD Blue Mark Tinker. Few viewers picked up on the notion that the events of this episode were not necessarily reliable. Story editor Frank Spotnitz said "In the closing scene Frohike tells Mulder and Scully that the whole story was something he read in a crummy magazine. A lot of people didn't pick up on