The X-Files – “Squeeze” (S1E3, 1993) Review
9/10
A businessman in a locked office on an upper floor. The ventilation grille moves. He’s killed and his liver is removed, and there’s no point of entry anywhere in the building.
The 9 is for an hour that solves the problem of how to build a series around a premise that can’t resolve. The mythology can’t pay off weekly and a self-contained monster can, and this episode establishes the shape every later one copied.
I’d show this episode to anybody who wants to know why the show mattered. It’s small, mean and frightening, and Tooms is more unsettling than anything the conspiracy episodes ever threw at Mulder. I like a monster who doesn’t explain himself, and this one never says a word more than he has to.
Eugene Tooms is also the best monster the show produced, in its third episode, and nothing in nine seasons improved on him.
It Invented the Format
The first two episodes are conspiracy material. This one is a case with a beginning, a middle and an end, and it’s the template for roughly two thirds of the series.
The structure is exact. A killing with an impossible element, a local investigation that won’t accept the impossible element, an antagonist identified early, and a confrontation that resolves the case without resolving anything larger.
That separation is why the series ran for nine years. A show that’s only mythology has to advance it every week and eventually can’t, and a show that alternates can keep the mythology unresolved indefinitely while still delivering complete hours. Almost every procedural with a supernatural element since has used this arrangement. Buffy, Supernatural, Fringe and a dozen others are running the same split, and it was worked out here in week three.
Morgan and Wong wrote it, and they wrote a considerable proportion of the best hours across the first two seasons. The episode is a demonstration of what a writing pair can establish when they’re given an early slot and no supervision.
A long work with an unresolvable central mystery needs a second structure that completes. Readers need something to close or they stop trusting that anything will. Alternate. One thread advances forever and the other finishes every time.
The self-contained unit has to be complete. If it depends on the larger mystery for meaning, you haven’t solved the problem.
This is the standard answer for serial fiction and it’s available to novelists as well. A series with an ongoing question needs each book to answer a different one.
Tooms
Doug Hutchison plays a man who appears to be in his thirties, has been alive since at least 1903, hibernates for thirty years at a time, and kills five people in each waking period.
The rule set is simple and completely consistent. He can compress his body, he needs five livers, he builds a nest from newspaper and bile, and he sleeps for three decades. The episode claims nothing else and explains nothing.
That restraint is the reason he works. There’s no origin, no explanation of what he is, and no scene where anybody speculates usefully about it. That means the character stays a fact instead of becoming a mythology.
The performance is largely stillness and eyes. Tooms barely speaks, the polygraph sequence is almost entirely a face reacting to questions, and Hutchison plays somebody who has spent ninety years not being noticed.
The polygraph is also the episode’s best structural joke. He passes it, because the questions are about things he hasn’t done in this cycle, and the machine that’s supposed to settle the matter confirms exactly the wrong thing. The polygraph is my favorite scene in the hour. Hutchison barely moves, the machine calmly clears him, and I get a little cold watching the one tool meant to settle things confirm exactly the wrong answer.
The Horror Is Architectural
The episode’s central idea is that nowhere is sealed, and it works because it’s about buildings instead of about a creature.
A locked office. A chimney. A ventilation duct. A letterbox. The episode systematically shows that every space the audience considers secure has an opening in it, and it uses real domestic architecture to do it.
The letterbox shot is the one everybody remembers. A woman in her own home, doors locked, and a pair of eyes appearing in the mail slot of her front door. That image requires no effects at all and it’s the most frightening thing in the first season.
That letterbox shot disturbs me every bit as much as any expensive horror effect of the decade. Two eyes in a mail slot, and I’m checking my own front door. The nest sequence is the other one. A cramped space under a staircase, lined with newspaper and something else, containing trophies taken from each victim across ninety years, and the episode simply lets the camera look at it.
The bile is the detail that makes it. Nobody in the episode explains what the nest is made of, a forensic technician identifies the substance and stops there, and the audience is left with a fact and no interpretation of it.
The strongest horror premise makes an ordinary object unsafe. A letterbox, a vent, a gap under a door, all of which the reader has in their own home. Generic monsters are forgotten and specific violations of familiar space aren’t.
Demonstrate the rule in multiple locations. One impossible entry is a trick and four establishes a principle the reader now applies to every room in the story.
Let the camera rest on the evidence. The nest works because nobody explains it and the audience assembles ninety years from a pile of objects.
Mulder and Scully
This is the episode where the partnership becomes the show, because it’s the first time Scully is the point of view instead of the skeptic.
The structure puts her with a former colleague who’s running the case conventionally, treats Mulder as a joke, and offers her a way back to a normal career. She chooses the other thing, and the episode is careful that she chooses it on evidence instead of on loyalty. Gillian Anderson is doing the harder work throughout. Scully has to be intelligent, professionally credible, and consistently wrong about the specific case, and the performance has to keep the first two intact while the second happens weekly. The dynamic that made the series work is established in this hour. Mulder is right about the impossible and wrong about people, Scully is right about people and wrong about the impossible, and both are competent.
Donal Logue plays the former colleague and the part is sharply written. Colton isn’t stupid, is ambitious in a normal way, and his contempt for Mulder is entirely reasonable from where he’s standing. That’s what makes Scully’s choice a real one. I like Colton more than the episode needs me to. He’s sensible and ambitious and a little smug, and since he’s right about almost everything, Scully turning down his offer costs her something real.
A skeptic who’s stupid is useless. Make them right about everything except the one thing, and the disagreement stays live for years. The failure mode is a character who exists to be corrected, and readers stop respecting them and then stop respecting the protagonist for tolerating them. Give the doubter a way out. Scully is offered a normal career in this episode. That means staying is a decision she has to keep making.
Split the competences. Two characters who are each right about half the world produce disagreement without either being diminished.
The Ending
Tooms is caught, is committed, and the last shot is him in a cell looking at a food slot in the door.
That’s the correct ending, and I think it’s the bravest choice in the episode. It declines to kill the monster. The case gets resolved and the thing stays alive and contained, and that ending makes a different promise from a conclusion. I spend those last seconds waiting for him to move.
He returns later in the season, in an episode that’s nearly as good, and the return works because this one didn’t close him off. Almost every later monster on the show was killed or dispersed, and Tooms is the only one who got a second hour.
That second episode also establishes the cost of his release, since a court accepts a psychiatric assessment and lets him go. The series is consistent across nine years that institutions are the problem and that the monsters themselves are only ever a symptom of something that the institutions in question declined to handle properly the first time.
The final image is also a joke and a threat at once. A man who can fit through any opening, in a locked room, looking at an opening.
Containment is a better ending than destruction when you might want the character again. It also leaves the reader with an unease that a death removes. The requirement is that the containment must look adequate and be visibly not. End on the antagonist instead of the protagonists. A last image of the threat, alive and thinking, carries further than a scene of anybody recovering.
A closing image that’s at the same time a joke and a threat is worth a great deal. It rewards the attentive reader without excluding anybody.
Should you watch The X-Files: Squeeze?
Yes, and watch it before any of the mythology. It’s a 9 because it invented the format two thirds of the series ran on and gave the show its best monster in week three, and I can’t think of a later monster-of-the-week hour that scared me more. The rules nobody explains and those eyes in the letterbox do more with no effects budget than expensive television usually manages.
