X-Files S1E3: Squeezing in the monsters

Editors' Note: On the rewatch of The X-Files, Lorrie plays the part of Sestra Amateur and Paige  serves as the resident "expert," aka Sestra Professional. 

Sestra Amateur:

“Tempted by the fruit of another. Tempted but the truth is discovered…”  What? Wrong Squeeze?  It's the name of the third X-Files episode? My bad…
 
So there’s a businessman walking through downtown Baltimore. A guy with unnatural eyes is stalking him ... from inside a sewer drain. Funky Eyes kills the businessman in his office. Not really X-File material, right? Just call the Homicide Unit. Oh, did I mention Funky Eyes somehow got into the office through a 18-inch by 6-inch air vent? That does make it more X-Filey.

Scully lunches with Agent Tom Colton, an academy classmate who can’t resist making condescending comments about her partner. Colton asks "Mrs. Spooky" to help him with the case involving the businessman. Funky Eyes also took the man’s liver, and apparently that of some poor college girl as well. She must have attended one of those non-partying schools if her liver was healthy enough for Funky Eyes. Scully meets “Spooky” -- I mean Mulder – at the businessman’s crime scene and Mulder even asks Scully, “Do you think I’m Spooky?” Duchovny, hell yeah. ... Mulder, not so much. 

Mulder does a good job of making Colton look like an ignorant tool. Our guy uncovers evidence that everyone else missed about similar previous killings and pretty quickly too, even by scripted TV standards. The good news is the elongated fingerprint on the air vent is eventually matched to five different crime scenes. The bad news is one of the crime scenes is older than Colton and the other is older than Colton’s mother. 

We learn Funky Eyes committed five murders every 30 years, beginning in 1903. Mulder admits, "I find no evidence of alien involvement." That opens the door to the show's Monster of the Week premise -- that the suspect's fingers elongate at will to about 10 inches. I’m going to assume that manipulation will not be admissible in court. Scully, of course, tries to explain the case with science and points out the liver possesses regenerative qualities. I’m not so sure about that; I eat chopped liver on a regular basis and I haven’t experienced any regeneration perks.

Scully briefs Colton’s team. They definitely give off that superior “jocks in high school” vibe. I really wanted Scully to let them have it, but she joins the stakeout to catch Funky Eyes instead. Maybe she’s the nerd who thinks it’s cool that the jocks want her to hang out with them for the day. Mulder shows up to tell Scully he thinks her profile of the suspect is wrong; the guy would not return to the scene because he’s already conquered it.

But then Sculder catch the suspect, Eugene Victor Tooms, at the scene. Mulder was wrong! OK, only a little wrong. The FBI puts Tooms through a polygraph test. He appears to pass, but only because the narrow-minded jocks – I mean FBI agents -- disregarded the questions about the murders from 1933 and 1963. 

Since he's sprung and still on a mission to kill two more people, Tooms enters a home through the chimney – and we get to see a cool and creepy special effects shot. He kills another drinker and takes a personal item as a trophy. Apparently, he took them from all of the crime scenes. It's a late-breaking, albeit important detail.
 
Scully finally stands up to Colton. You almost want to start doing the slow clapping thing that was so popular in high school movies in which the underdog stands up to the bully. Then Sculder go microfiching – I thought I invented that word but it does exist on the Internet – and locate the sheriff who suspected Tooms in 1933. Fortunately, the retired but still haunted sheriff brought his box of evidence to the retirement home and shows Sculder a picture of Tooms back then. 

Sculder go to Tooms’ old – very, very old – apartment. They enter the apartment in the scene used in the show’s opening credits. Under the apartment, the duo locates Tooms’ trophy collection and a nasty bile-filled nest that even grosses out Mulder. As they leave, Tooms snags Scully’s necklace (trophy!).  It looks like she’s going to be his last victim, at least until 2023. Hey, that’s right around the corner. As expected, Tooms attacks Scully when she goes home, but Mulder arrives to save the day. Tooms is taken away, but he’s clearly planning his exit strategy at the end of the episode.

The writers showed us not every single plot is going to revolve around alien conspiracies. There’s a definite emphasis on the “us vs. them” mentality between the X-Files duo and other respected divisions of the government. Scully is put in awkward work-related positions and you can almost see the career advancement options slipping away from her, even this early in the series. If Scully was as career-minded as Colton, she would never put up with Mulder’s crazy-but-true-theories. Instead, she looks out for Mulder like he is a younger brother being bullied. Mulder can certainly hold his own, but he doesn’t have to fight his battles alone anymore. 

I’m going to listen to some Squeeze, maybe have some "Black Coffee in Bed." I’m "Tempted."


Sestra Professional:

There's great back story to The X-Files' first Monster of the Week episode. Chris Carter had the FBI agents vs. aliens (and government) thing sketched out, but it took Glen Morgan and James Wong to open up a whole other File cabinet. As Morgan recalled at Entertainment Weekly Fan Fest in late October, the writing partners were sitting in their little cubicle trying to figure out what in the world they would write about when one of them looked up at a small vent. "What if something was in there?" That launched a great first stand-alone ep and a whole other world of possibilities for the show.

It took a while for them to show him in this episode -- a la Jaws? -- but Doug Hutchison set a high bar for the series' guest stars too, even if his character could easily wiggle his way around that bar. He's uber-creepy without any redeeming qualities, it's no wonder he could beat the polygraph test. The effect of Tooms reaching all the way down a victim's chimney is so cool, he's proverbially stretching past previous sci-fi TV barriers in the process.

"He should stick out in a crowd with 10-inch fingers": The lines in this ep also kill. Mulder was funny in the first two, but he really hits his stride in this one. "Is there any way I can get it off my fingers quickly without betraying my cool exterior?" he says, his voice almost breaking while trying to shake bile off his hand. 

Meanwhile, Scully's shoring up her end as a worthy match for Mulder. "Look, Dana, whose side are you on?" his classmate asks. "The victim's," she retorts. And now we're taking sides as well -- namely hers. 

To back that up, she even gets to make one of those wild stab-in-the-dark guesses that Mulder already specializes in. The FBI's brilliant serial killer profiler thinks Tooms wouldn't come back to the same site because he's already proven it to be accessible. Scully thinks he would return because he's frustrated with not being able to score some more livers. Scully gets to be right this time, and they catch him. (It's OK, 'cause Mulder eventually tops her anyway with his strange-but-true elongated finger print theory.

The detective who obsessively investigated the case in 1933, but wasn't allowed to in 1963, has a lot of paperwork on the crime. And although it's clunky for him to say the death camps and Kurds and Bosnians "gave birth" to a human like Tooms, he brought a lot of the emotion to his scene. He was changed by the violence he saw at the mutant's hands. Someone else thinking about the victims. Maybe he did keep the scrapbook because he was unable to shake it.

"Just listen!" Mulder implores his partner to believe his supposition that Tooms is a genetic mutation and five livers provide him sustenance so he can hibernate for 30 years at a spell. But Scully doesn't listen to guys with bile on their fingers. And I do hope he washes those before partaking of more of his trademark sunflower seeds -- making their first appearance in this ep.

We also begin the Scully-in-peril adventures in "Squeeze." Mind you, Scully in peril is different than Mulder in peril. Mulder in peril usually means he's broken into some government area he doesn't have clearance to be in. Scully in peril, by contrast, usually means the bad guy has gotten his hands on her.

But contrary to how Sestra Am put it, Scully was an important part of the wrapup. Yeah, Mulder helped by showing up, but she's the one who handcuffed the guy to ... her tub? Why does that work? 'Cause can't a guy who gets in and out of vents with ease work his way out of restraints faster than Harry Houdini? 

Anyway, Tooms is creepy to the very end, building a new nest and looking through the slot at what surely will be future freedom. And why Scully's thrilled to have documentation of the abnormalities, Mulder's looking at the bigger picture and even a moral to the story. Society protects itself with bars on windows or high-tech security systems -- and in this case, it just ain't enough. 

More kudos for the show's composer, Mark Snow. He provided the perfect score to go along with the misdeeds of Stretch Armstrong (aka Funky Eyes), actually sounding like bugs crawling all around you. It'll be a recurring -- and very effective -- piece of music.

Guest Star of the Week: With apologies to Hutchison (and because he's already been mentioned at length... get it, length?) ... Donal Logue. He looks like a baby! Scully's buddy has a case that's "out there," but he wants to use its projected outcome to work his way up the ladder. Being as he's not Mulder or Scully, he's probably going to come off as a little foolish. And he does.