The X- Files

After having re-watched a host of American TV shows, my televisual marathon has brought me back to one of my favourites from the 1990's. The one that stars messers Duchovny and Anderson. I had forgotten just how good the writing was on the show. It kicked off with the pilot episode, which was as good as any pilot I have watched. But the outstanding story of the first four episodes is the one called Squeeze.

It is set in Baltimore and features a truly gross theme. About a mutant who hibernates, then after thirty years sleep, he wakes up and goes on a killing spree. Extracting the livers of the poor people he kills. He then eats his victims livers. Now this is truly as gruesome a storyline as you can get, not Silence of the Lambs gruesome, but certainly a 6 on the barf factor scale. But the bad guy that Mulder and Scully are chasing is also genetically freaky. He can contort his body so he can navigate air-conditioning units and chimnies etc. The bad bastard the heroes are chasing is Eugene Victor Toombs played by Doug Hutchinson, who has played strange characters in other series as well. There was an episode of CSI where he stalks Nick Stokes. Hutchinson was excellent in the roll of the mutant.

Doug Hutchinson as Toombs.

But not only is the story well written and acted it is made even more chilling by the excellent music written by Mark Snow. He captures brilliantly the mood of the episode. I must have watched the episode at least a dozen times but it hasn't lost any of the suspense that I remember from when it was first aired. It is also visually very good especially when Toombs is stalking his prey, the victim stays in colour and the background goes grayscale. Also Toombs's eyes goes this horrible luminescent yellow green colour. Which just makes him seem all the more weird. But in Xfiles lore he achieved his own status as one of the best baddies the heroes chase and has a return episode before the first season had finished. The only characters I can think of who reappear in season 1 are Cigarette Smoking Man and Deep Throat.

Then something I had also forgotten about the Xfiles is the child at the end of the credits who says I made this. But that doesn't have any bearing on how good this story was. It was also the first episode in which the story isn't about chasing little green men, and that the very thing they were chasing was slightly more down to earth. In writing this I have just reminded myslef about another one of those more down to earth charaters who is just as un-nerving as Toombs, Donnie Pfaster who stalked women so he could wash their hair. Perhaps I will give him a blog all his own at a later date. Probably will be after I have watched that particular episode.