🎬 #176 An Amazing TV Villain.

I recently listened to a podcast with The X Files creator and show runner Chris Carter being interviewed by Rick Rubin. It’s a great listen. It reminded me of just how many great ideas the show spawned. One of which to this day is still one of my favourite ideas brought to life in the character Eugene Tooms. A serial killer, whose unique mutation makes him able to slip through impossibly small gaps, so that he can harvest the livers of his victims as fuel to hibernate for the next 30 years. A rare two episodes was dedicated to him and remains today - one of the series’ fan favourites.

Happy choosing, happy viewing,

Bry

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THE X FILES: SEASON 1 EPISODE 3 [SQUEEZE]

1993 Dir Harry Longstreet
Writers Glen Morgan and James Wong
43 mins

If you watched The X‑Files in the ‘90s, chances are this is the one that made you sleep with the lights on.

Squeeze introduces Eugene Victor Tooms — a soft‑spoken, sunken‑eyed man who emerges every 30 years to murder five people and eat their livers. Tooms can stretch and squeeze himself through spaces no one investigating the murders would ever even consider imaginable for a human to get through [except Mulder]: air vents, chimneys, drains. And yet what’s even scarier than his body is his calmness — the way he eyes people with casual hunger.

Watching it now, you see how much this episode shaped the series. It’s a clean, efficient procedural wrapped in gothic horror. Mulder’s weirdness collides with Scully’s skepticism. And for the first time, you get the sense that the FBI really doesn’t want these two looking under certain rocks. It’s also my favourite kind of concept - something extraordinary but plausible within the confines of the world already established. It’s not overly fantastical - the logic feels routed in extreme biology and in the possibility of mutated genetics and the special abilities that might arise from things we yet understand.

The production design is great too — dim Baltimore streets, fluorescent‑lit offices, and the yellowed nest of newspaper Tooms sleeps in. Low‑budget but effective. This episode if the first not written by Chris Carter and the first monster of the week style episode the would punctuate the series.

* Available to stream on HULU in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK.

Fact: Actor Doug Hutchinson who played Tooms, based his portrayal on Hopkins’ Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs - a huge influence on the show overall.

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THE X FILES: SEASON 1 EPISODE 21 [TOOMS]

1994 Dir David Nutter
Writers Glen Morgan and James Wong
45 mins

Tooms brings Eugene back, this time “rehabilitated” and set free into the world. Watching the authorities stamp his release papers — despite what we already know — is one of the show’s great tragedies.

This episode expands the mythology just enough: introducing Walter Skinner [the first time we see him in the series] and giving the Cigarette Smoking Man more of a smoky presence in the corner. But it never loses sight of its star - the monster of the week.

Tooms builds a new nest. He stalks new victims. And Mulder and Scully are just as powerless — and just as determined — as before.

Together, Squeeze and Tooms are like a two‑part urban legend about something that lives under the city and remembers where you sleep. They’re lean, eerie, and still unsettling thirty years on.

* Available to stream on HULU in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK.

Fact: The first time Cigarette smoking man has any lines on screen.