The X Files - Squeeze

Doug Hutchison can sure give you the willies, can’t he? Sheesh, those eyes! Just piercing and often so yellow, Hutchison’s Eugene Tooms gives you the creeps because he makes the skin crawl. The casting is so damn good, he was brought back because of the impression he left behind. To be able to stretch your body and contort it into the smallest of crawlspaces, elongate his fingers (leaving a long fingerprint Mulder seizes upon when no others seem curious about because of their “closed minds”) and extend himself when need-be; Tooms is certainly a monster Mulder rightfully considers a “human genetic mutant” who reaches back to perhaps 1933 and 1963 where five murders had been committed each year, the livers removed from the bodies of the victims’ along with keepsakes. Tied to a certain building, Mulder’s investigation reaches his hideout, as him and Scully find a “hibernation area”, made with newspaper and (it seems) bile! Eyeing Scully (of course), Tooms collects a necklace and targets her as the next victim. Opposing Mulder is an opportunistic agent Tom Colton (Donal Logue), who blatantly mocks him openly about his “spooky” reputation. By the third episode, Squeeze, Scully has become an advocate and friend to Mulder. It is clear she is fond of him and has built a rapport. Tom, quite frankly, is a prick. Logue is all about this kind of narcissistic know-it-all with a mouth that asserts his position, seeing a climb up the higher ranks of the Victim Crimes Unit. He’s always a damn good asshole. When Scully tells him she hopes he falls off that ladder he’s climbing, I reckon many will agree with her.

Colton is actually interested in Scully joining him, not necessarily Mulder. But Mulder is a brilliant profiler and serial killers are his specialty. So Colton isn’t against his “tagging along” until he offers a strange (and correct) theory involving Tooms being nearly 100 years old, mentioning his old killing grounds during a polygraph he passes (the two questions he fails on, when asked about his age and old killing grounds). Soon Mulder is accessing old news reels and soon locating an old homicide detective, retired but still following the cases never solved, although he knows it is Tooms and just can’t solidify his evidence into something that will convict the psychopath. Henry Beckman’s Frank Briggs speaks on how it feels to be at the crime scenes, opining how Tooms is like a manifestation of the cruelest of human evil. Colton eventually wants Mulder “off his lawn” and Scully soon joins her partner, realizing that despite the mockery and ridicule “Spooky” is a damn good agent. And Mulder indeed not only comes to help Scully handcuff Tooms but they successfully (for a time anyway) rid the outside world of another creep who hides in the shadows threatening to mutilate folks. Mulder even halts Tooms from securing his fifth victim in 1993. Colton didn’t do that, nor did his superior, Agent Fuller (Kevin McNulty). They were too busy holding the doors shut of their closed minds.

In the credits, the agents go into the lair