Andrew Cook
The third episode of The X-Files, “Squeeze,” completes our introduction to the show. It’s our first standalone episode—termed “Monster-of-the-Week” episodes by fans—our first episode to focus on something other than extraterrestrials, and the first episode written by Glen Morgan and James Wong. Morgan and Wong set the template for standalone episodes, envisioning The X-Files as a quasi-anthology series with an emphasis on body horror and pop-culture pastiche. “Squeeze” also introduces us to their iconoclastic spirit, always prodding the foundation Chris Carter sets for the show.
The teaser begins with a man walking into an office building, unaware he’s being watched. The stalker sneaks into the building through the ventilation system, unscrewing a vent from the inside which leads to the guy’s office. He kills him and leaves the way he came.
The story proper begins with Scully out to lunch with Tom Colton, a former classmate at the Academy played by Donal Logue. He’s remarkably catty, spitting venom at everyone above and below him, making Scully uncomfortable. When he turns his contempt toward Mulder, she defends her partner, much to Colton’s chagrin. It turns out he’s been assigned the case from the teaser, can’t catch a break, and is trying to ask for her and Mulder’s help. She says she’ll run it by Mulder, and Colton suggests she can use this case to get promoted out of the X-Files. He frames it as an explicitly domestic proposition. She won’t have to be “Mrs. Spooky” anymore.
Right from the jump Morgan and Wong both draw parallels to Carter’s work on the pilot, positioning Scully as the rationalist audience’s viewpoint character, and make the episode’s deeper exploration clear. This is a story about how Scully, a young and attractive woman, navigates a male-dominated workspace. Carter smartly framed Mulder and Scully’s relationship as professional and largely platonic, now Morgan and Wong dig deeper into what that means as part of the broader workplace culture they inhabit.
Scully brings the case to Mulder, who immediately understands the subtext of Colton’s offer. He masks his fear of losing Scully with sarcasm, but his unease is obvious. His curiosity still gets the better of him, and he agrees to look into the case. They go to the scene and he antagonizes Colton, spinning some yarn about aliens from Zeta Reticuli. It’s yet another example of Mulder’s sarcasm as a coping mechanism, and the beginning of a subtle squabbling for Scully’s loyalty and affection. Scully, discomfited, gets the boys to focus and it’s then Mulder notices the grate. He intuitively sees it as an entry point nobody else would consider, and sure enough, he lifts a 10-inch fingerprint.
Mulder takes the print back to his office and confirms a similarity to prints lifted by police during previous murder sprees, one in 1963 and another in 1933. Scully, exasperated, assumes Mulder is crediting aliens with the killings, but he tells Scully (and the audience) that whatever is happening here isn’t about extraterrestrials. With this revelation, Morgan and Wong blow the show’s potential wide open. Any concerns as to the show’s longevity or the flexibility of the premise are thrown out the window. We understand now they could come across anything on a week-to-week basis.
Scully takes a page from Mulder’s erstwhile gig in Behavioral Sciences and builds a criminal profile. She tries her best to see it as a mundane crime and presents it to Colton’s team the next day. They accept it after taking a few shots at Mulder and take her advice to stake out the three previous crime scenes. Colton is barely able to contain himself.
Mulder tags along but doesn’t take the stakeout very seriously, openly questioning the value of her profile. This establishes another of Mulder’s core traits: casual condescension for viewpoints he doesn’t share. Despite his ability to assume other people’s point of view and his desire to broaden the horizon of investigative theory, when his mind is made up it’s pretty made up. Scully feels disrespected, and angry with Mulder for jeopardizing her work. Sure enough, before long they find a dirty man crawling out of a duct, as if defecated from the bowels of the building. Mulder immediately suspects he’s the guy, and has the strength to admit to Scully he was wrong and she was right.
The man is an animal control officer named Eugene Victor Tooms. He passes a polygraph test but does get flustered when Mulder asks him about the older murders. These questions are poorly received by the others and they dress Mulder down harshly. He’s clearly wounded and Scully asks why he’d take the risk with that line of questioning. He responds with an evasive quip about “the millstone of humiliation” but Scully presses him, asking with some trepidation why he’s been acting so territorial. He responds gently and honestly, admitting he’s been on edge because he’s afraid of losing her as a partner. He tells her he values her instincts and wouldn’t hold it against her if she transferred. This is a big contrast with Colton’s domestic framing and sneering contempt, not to mention the sense he only values Scully to the extent she can prove useful to him. This puts her permanently in Mulder’s corner.
Tooms is released with an apology and immediately sets out to commit another murder. We finally see his abilities firsthand, as he stretches and pops his limbs out of joint to crawl down his victim’s chimney. Mulder and Scully report to the crime scene the next day. Mulder can’t help himself and needles Colton again, prompting more refereeing from Scully. They poke around the scene, lift more elongated prints, and notice something has been taken off the mantle.
Stymied, the agents decide to visit Frank Briggs, the Baltimore detective who worked the older murders. He’s living in a retirement home now, but is still obsessed with the case. The case has so scarred him he sees Tooms as the human embodiment of mankind’s potential for evil, comparing the murders to the Bosnian genocide and other atrocities. He produces a scrapbook of evidence he’s gathered, confirming something is probably missing from the mantle at the previous crime scene because Tooms likes to collect trophies. He also directs Mulder and Scully to the address Tooms used previously: 66 Exeter Street.
They check out the now condemned address, which gives us the shot of their entrance immortalized in the opening credits. As they look around, Mulder hypothesizes that Tooms prolongs his youth by consuming human livers, and they find a nest for Tooms to hibernate in built out of newspaper and an odd, brownish-yellow adhesive. Mulder reaches out to touch it, rubbing the liquid between his fingers before Scully realizes it’s bile. This establishes what will be Mulder’s long-running instinct to touch gross stuff, and it’s a good example of Morgan and Wong’s penchant for picking up on a small aspect in a previous episode (in this case Mulder’s recklessness) and running with it. They also find the missing trophies from the previous murders. They decide to put the apartment under surveillance, but not before Tooms, hiding in the rafters, snags Scully’s necklace, suggesting he’s found his fifth victim.
Colton, like a jealous ex, goes behind their backs and calls off the stakeout. When Scully calls him on it his mask finally slips and he treats her with the disrespect he feels she actually deserves. Scully, livid, goes home and runs a bath to relax. Tooms, now positioned as the intruder, the threat women face even in their vulnerable moments, after they’ve faced the world, breaks in to kill her as Mulder learns the stakeout has been called off. He finds Scully’s necklace while checking inside, and races back to his car. Scully looks primed to take her first turn as damsel, though Mulder only serves as a distraction, giving Scully the opportunity to jump into the action. They apprehend Tooms together, Scully cuffing him to the bathtub while Mulder trains a gun on him.
In the end Tooms sits in his cell, creating a new nest while Mulder and Scully watch him. Reflecting on how this early investigation has changed the mandate of their work, they have a conversation about the inability of society to find true security, and how the presence of anomalies like Tooms undermines our conception of what it means to be safe. These capstone conversations will become a regular feature, lending a measure of closure to storytelling which naturally resists it.
And there you have it. “Squeeze” is another solid introduction to several long-running elements of the series. It’s our first character-centric episode, focusing primarily on Scully. It’s also our first outright horror episode, and it’s a pretty good one. The teaser is great, treating us to what’s essentially a locked-room mystery with an X-Files twist. It owes a great debt to Dan Curtis’ film The Night Strangler and Stephen King’s novel It, offering up a tightly structured homage to these works without ever losing sight of character.
Speaking of character, Tooms is a doozy. He’s purely predatory (fitting for a guy like Doug Hutchison, unfortunately) and almost totally devoid of humanity. He’s constantly associated with the body: his excretion of bile, his sweaty skin, his consumption of liver—he’s even introduced to Mulder and Scully in a visual metaphor for a bowel movement. Seeing him onscreen is an almost tactile experience. The mise-en-scene isn’t as scary as it could have been, probably due to infamous behind the scenes issues with director Harry Longstreet, but it still has a strong story. It’s a good exploration of why Scully would continue to work with Mulder despite their disagreements, and Mulder and Scully’s relation to the FBI in general, as opposed to just shady arbiters of conspiracy like the Smoking Man.
The X-Files has an uncommonly strong start. There’s no period of waiting for the show to come into its own, and from the start it aspires to, and achieves, more than just being a paranormal procedural. The X-Files manages to be both dense and accessible, a quality Carter and his team had a knack for from the beginning. These episodes aren’t perfect: the pilot and “Deep Throat” have some slippery plotting, and “Squeeze” can’t match the others for ambition and depth. Still, all three episodes are bold and thought-provoking, making a confident pitch for the show going forward.
