In the tooms

And James Wong, Tooms is released from a Baltimore sanitorium because his psychologist is convinced of his innocence. Tooms breaks into Mulder’s apartment and frames him for assault, leading Mulder’s boss to order him to leave Tooms alone. Mulder and Scully worry that if they don’t catch Tooms he will hibernate and reemerge in 2023. Mulder and Scully fret about a distant future where Eugene Tooms would return. The special agents are able to find other evidence linking Tooms to the murders and, breaking direct orders, track Tooms back to a shopping mall. Mulder finds Tooms’ new “nest” below an escalator. While being pursued by Tooms, Mulder turns the escalator on and traps and kills him. Ostensibly, Tooms is dead. After being trapped by an escalator in “Tooms”, we never see the character again, though the show goes on for eleven seasons (and then some). However, this would hardly be the first time that a character that appeared to be dead wasn’t actually dead. Because the character of Tooms hibernates for 30 years after completing 5 murders and consuming the liver of his victims, there would be no reason for Mulder and Scully (or anyone else) to know that Tooms isn’t dead until 2023. Will Tooms come back in 2023?Doug Hutchinson said he based his performance as Eugene Victor Tooms on Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). To be clear, Tooms’ death occurs off-screen. The only reason we think he is dead is because Mulder and Scully think he is dead. This is based on Mulder’s assumption that he couldn’t have survived in the small space Mulder himself just crawled out of, and the appearance of a large amount of blood on the escalator. Tooms’ death is dubious because the entire plot of the two episodes featuring his character is that he has abnormalities in his skeletal and muscular system that allow him to stretch and fit in small spaces. It is entirely possible that Tooms used his special ability to survive getting crushed by the escalator. The blood on the escalator could have

One of the scariest monsters created by the sci-fi television series The X-Files is the character of Eugene Victor Tooms (Doug Hutchison), a mutant serial killer introduced in the third episode, “Squeeze”. This episode originated the show’s “monster of the week” format which see FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) investigating a monster or villain in an episode that stands on its own, as opposed to episodes that advance the show’s meta plot of an alien invasion and government coverup. The plot of “Squeeze” originated from a conversation between writers Glen Morgan and James Wong about whether they could fit inside a ventilation shaft in their office.Eugene Victor Tooms (Doug Hutchison) gains access to his victims by stretching and squeezing his body through small spaces like air vents. “Squeeze” sees Mulder and Scully investigating a serial killer in Baltimore who removes the liver of his victims. Mulder discovers the murders are similar in nature to crimes that occurred in 1933 and 1963. While staking out one of the crime scenes, Mulder and Scully catch a man named Eugene Victor Tooms in the building’s air vents, giving investigators a clue as to how the killer gained access to the victims. While Tooms is released for a lack of evidence, Mulder is certain he has a paranormal ability to stretch and squeeze his body through small spaces and is responsible for murders dating back to 1903. By consuming the liver of his victims, Mulder believes Tooms is able to hibernate for 30 years before he reemerges, hungry for more. Mulder and Scully find photos from the 1933 murders which depict Tooms, who has not aged though 60 years have passed. They then find Tooms’ “nest” in an apartment building’s crawlspace which includes trophies from past victims. That night Tooms breaks into Scully’s apartment through an air vent. Mulder arrives and Tooms is arrested and institutionalized. Is Tooms dead?Unlike other “monster of the week” villains, Eugene Victor Tooms makes a second appearance on The X-Files. In the first season’s twenty-first episode, “Tooms”, also written by Glen Morgan

His lectures to Scully and, later, Mulder, are far more reasonable than anything we've seen either character get from their superiors before, but the Cigarette Smoking Man is always watching to make sure that reasonable-ness never turns into honest support. It's a struggle that only really becomes clear in later seasons, but even from the start, it seems like Skinner at least has some of his soul left.Back at the trial, Mulder takes the stand and makes the inadvisable attempt of laying out the entire Tooms' history, hundred year old murders and all, before the judge. It's a painful moment, given that there's no chance in hell anyone's going to believe him, but it's also a defining one; as Mulder later tells Scully, it doesn't matter if they listened, so long as he got what really happened on the record. Much of the episode revolves around the unusual techniques that have the government spooks so unhappy, from Mulder's one-man surveillance of Tooms post-release, to Scully's trusting the hunch of an old cop in order to link Tooms to his earlier crimes (a link which, now that I think about it, was ultimately unnecessary given Eugene's eventual fate), and at the heart of those techniques is Mulder's simple, quixotic assertion that the Truth trumps all. Everything else–career, regulations, sleep–comes second. So Tooms gets his release. As Mulder is well aware, he's nearing his hibernation state; he just needs to make one more kill before he can hole up someplace dark for the next thirty years. While Scully and Briggs dig up an old chemical plant looking for the body of one of Toooms' victims that was never found, Mulder follows Tooms around, harassing him at his day job and preventing him from getting access to his prey. Eventually, Tooms holes up

But it does buy Tooms enough time to make his kill, the poor, trusting Dr. Monte, and then hightail it to 66 Exeter Street, his former home.That home was torn down, though, and a new, much shinier one erected in its place. (This is where the timing comes in: when Mulder and Scully visited the same site in "Squeeze," it was a derelict building on its way to being condemned. So since then, the old place has to have been torn down and the new place put up in its stead. How long would that take? A year? Less?) Mulder and Scully are onto to Tooms' game at this point, and track him to a maintenance shaft under an escalator on the new building's main floor. Mulder goes in alone, and is nearly gunked to death for his troubles; but with Scully's help, he wriggles free at the last minute, turns on the escalator, and for once, an X-Files monster comes to a definitive (and definitively nasty) end.Good, Bad, or Ugly: GoodStray Observations:—I'm baffled by Dr. Monte's motives here. Even if he believed Tooms was innocent, the character is so relentlessly creepy to be around that his continued interested–especially coming from someone who exudes that level of smarm–is bizarre. —Nice that the first two potential victims Tooms spots are both wearing bright blue overcoats.—Man, was Tooms really trying to come up through the toilet?—The episode ends with Mulder telling Scully that a change is coming. We'll get to that when we pick up season two in a couple weeks.—Speaking of—next week, the end of season one!

That slot, and even going so far as to stretch his arm through it and across the outside of the door to his cell, as if making preparations for escape. But it turns out he needn't bother; due to the kind efforts of the vaguely sleazy hospital psychiatrist Dr. Monte (future Wire drug smuggler Paul Ben-Victor), Tooms is up for release. After all, they could never connect any of the murders to him, and his invasion of Scully's home? Well, just chalk that up to misplaced aggression. Besides, despite the protestations of one well-dressed but exceedingly paranoid F.B.I. agent, there's no proof whatsoever that there's anything unusual about Mr. Tooms. He's just a little–different. A little quieter. A little more feral.Here's a first: a continuity heavy episode that doesn't rest largely on the series' central mythology. It's rare enough that X-Files has a recurring villain that doesn't work for the government or tie in with the alien invasion, but this episode even brings back Detective Briggs, the elderly detective who provided Mulder and Scully with background info in "Squeeze." While some time has definitely passed between the two eps (just how much time is a question I'll get to in a moment), the connective tissue between the two really works to make them feel like one big story, and a richly rewarding one at that. Of course, "Tooms" isn't completely myth-free. While Mulder is sweating through Tooms' release hearing, Scully is getting reprimanded for her and her partner's somewhat unorthodox crime solving methods (methods that have resulted in an impressive 75 percent resolution rate). The reprimand comes from no less than the Assistant Director of the Bureau himself, Walter Skinner, in his first appearance on the show. As played by Mitch Pileggi, Skinner is a man of continually divided loyalties;