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The case appears to be a cut-and-dry serial killer chase, but it is dampened by the circumstances. Besides the locked-door mystery at the center of the four murders in the spree, each of the victims had their livers removed. This is enough for Scully to bring in Mulder, a known expert FBI profiler who is not averse to the odd extra job. The odder the better. After an initial badgering from the head agent on the case, Fox concludes the murders look like the job of the Reticulans, who are “notorious for their extraction of human terrestrial livers due to the iron depletion in the Reticulum galaxy.”
When Colter scoffs at the sarcasm, Mulder asks the agent to consider “what liver and onions go for on Reticulum.” Add some fava beans, and wash it down with a nice chianti, and it is an absolute delicacy to Silence of the Lambs’ Hannibal Lecter. The X-Files creator Chris Carter, however, was inspired by another serial killer while enjoying a plate of foie gras: Richard Ramirez, who terrorized L.A. in the mid-1980s. Known as “the Night Stalker,” he snuck through windows without leaving a mark on the windowsills.
Tooms leaves marks, elongated fingerprints that put him at crime scenes going all the way back to 1903, when the art of fingerprint interpretation was in its infancy, and an abominable liver retraction was committed. Murder reports from 1933 and 1963 also note impossible points of entrance or exit. Tooms is initially caught climbing up an air duct at a crime scene under surveillance. This appears to answer the locked-door mystery. The suspect gets into the enclosed spaces by contorting his body to fit through vents, under doors, between window cracks, and up the pipes and into the toilet.
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It would be tempting to call most of Tooms’ encounters to be nail-biting, but when you consider he makes his way through sewers, and lives in a bile-based cocoon, you might want to wash a few fingers clean before chomping down. Tooms is one of the most frightening of all the series’ abominations, and also one of its most disgusting. So much so, when Fox first touches the suspected serial killer’s nest, made of newspapers and rancid bile, the seasoned agent can’t wipe his hands off fast enough to keep his cool, outer exterior in check. When Tooms rips the livers out of people, he doesn’t use surgical tools. He tears them open with his hands and gnaws with his teeth. Even on his animal control day job, he licks his fingers after bagging roadkill.
It’s no wonder Detective Frank Briggs (Henry Beckman), who investigated the liver-eating mutant back in 1963, can barely stomach the stench of ancient abnormality. “When I first heard about the death camps in 1945, I remembered Powhatan Mill,” Briggs tells the agents about a horrific location while filling them in on Tooms’ past unsolved crimes. “When I see the Kurds and the Bosnians, that room is there, I tell you. It’s like all the horrible acts that humans are capable of somehow gave birth to some kind of human monster.”
The X-Files births one monster a week, unless they are watching the skies. They delivered Flukeman, a Jersey Devil, a ravenous conjoined twin, The Great Mutato, and other sideshow attractions, but none quite match the oddity living at 66 Exeter Street, in Maryland.
