"Squeeze"

The X-Files - Season One

Aired: September 24, 1993
Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson
Written by Glen Morgan & James Wong
Directed by Harry Longstreet

One interesting feature of this show is its capacity to attempt different types of storytelling.  The first two episodes focused on setting up a standard for the larger alien/government mythology arc that would encompass the entire series.  "Squeeze" is something entirely different.  In-between the UFO chases and close encounters with the third kind, the writers would choose to branch away for a more anthologized version of the show, which would often include one-off characters with little to no impact on the core mythology.  These characters are often termed "monsters-of-the-week," due to their extrasensory and often grotesque capabilities.  Eugene Victor Tooms, who appears in this episode, would be the first in a long line of ephemeral baddies to come.

"Squeeze" is also notable for being the first script penned by Glen Morgan and James Wong, two of the show's most renowned writers who were responsible for many of the seminal, character-centric episodes that would serve as the archetype for a number of inferior replications by a number of inferior writers.  While the still-creepy "Squeeze" is certainly not their best, or even their most frightening script, it can be viewed as a harbinger of many great things to come.

So naturally this episode combines great moments of TV horror while simultaneously building on the characterization of the previous two episodes.  Tom Colton (Donal Logue), an ambitious colleague of Scully's is assigned to a case in which the livers of four victims were extracted with no discernible points of entry or exit.  Colton is happy to welcome Scully to the case, but there's no love lost for Mulder, whose loony reputation has made him a laughingstock in the Bureau.  Of course, Mulder doesn't let this stop him from taking over the case, and his scenes with Colton make for some rather hilarious dry humor.

Doug Hutchison puts in a fine performance as our very first monster, the aforementioned Tooms, a genetic mutant capable of contorting his body to fit into small spaces.  If that's not enough he's found a fountain of youth in human livers, the consumption of which having provided him the subsistence to hibernate for thirty years at a time.  While the alien mythology asks us to accept the existence of paranormal life in the world outside our own, episodes like "Squeeze" go a bit further and ask us that same question applied in the context of the commonplace and the mundane.  What is lurking inside the darkness of a sewer or behind the screws of an air vent?  There's a bit of judgment reservation required here - it's sci-fi after all - but it's interesting how the show juggles the improbable with the impossible and manages to make them both equally compelling and horrific.

Grade: A-