A SERIAL KILLER WHO RIPS HIS VICTIMS' LIVERS OUT WITH HIS BARE HANDS ALERTS MULDER AND
SCULLY TO A CRIME SPREE STRETCHING BACK TO THE TURN OF THE CENTURY.
Scully is called in on a locked-room murder mystery by an old FBI Academy classmate who
resents Mulder's intrusion into his case, but Mulder's discovery of a strangely distorted
fingerprint links the case to other similar cases dating back generations. Scully, working
from a psychological profile of the killer, stakes out the crime scene and catches Eugene
Victor Tooms crawling out of an air duct. A lie detector test seems to clear him, however,
and Tooms is released -- despite Mulder's insistence that Tooms is a 100-year-old serial
killer. Their research, plus an interview with a retired detective, convinces Mulder that
Tooms is a mutant, a cannibal who can hibernate for 30 years at a time and distort his
body to crawl through tiny spaces. Another murder is committed, again inside a locked and
shuttered house, and this time Scully and Mulder go hunting Tooms. They find a deserted
apartment building, a strange nest in the basement and a collection of trophies, but no
Tooms. Scully, only half convinced, returns home unaware that Tooms has targeted her for
his final victim, and Mulder must race to save his partner from being eaten alive.
NOTES
The first appearance of one of the all-time classic bad
guys, Tooms. I haven't watched this one recently, but I do remember how creepy he was and
the scene at the end where he's licking the paper sent chills up my spine.
QUOTES
Colton: "So how are you doing? Have you had any close
encounters of the third kind?"
Scully: "Is that what everyone thinks I do?"
Colton: "No, of course not. But you do work with Spooky Mulder."
Scully: "Mulder's ideas maybe a bit out there but he is a great agent."
Colton: "So Mulder, what do you think? Does this look like the work of little
green men?"
Mulder: "Grey."
Colton: "Excuse me?"
Mulder: "Grey. You said green men. The Reticulan skin tone is actually grey.
They're notorious for their extraction of terrestrial human livers. Due to iron depletion
in the Reticulan galaxy."
Colton: "You can't be serious."
Mulder: "Do you have any idea what liver and onions go for on Reticula?"
Scully: "Genetics might explain the patterns. It also might explain the
sociopathic attitudes and behaviors. It begins with one family member, who raises an
offspring, who raises the next child..."
I thought [computers] would be a universally applicable idea, like a book is. But I didn't think it would develop as fast as I did, because I didn't envision we'd be able to get as many parts on a chip as we finally got. The transistor came along unexpectedly. It all happened much faster than we expected. J. Presper Eckert, co-inventor of ENIAC, speaking in 1991