not to complain abt a thing every pokemon fan and their mom has complained about but man i just realized another reason why not putting the battle frontier in oras was a failure of a decision- because the next game, sumo, and its postgame kinda hinges on you already knowing who anabel is, and i think a good chunk of the fandom either didnt know or didnt recognize her at all because the last time she appeared was in the deep postgame a game that had come out nearly a decade before. so having the battle frontier, or at least the frontier brains, in oras would have reminded the audience and told new fans who anabel was and given us a reason to care about her

The X-Files: Squeeze review

(Warning: this review contains spoilers for the episode Squeeze.)

Squeeze continues The X-Files' early run of strong episodes that ably define what to expect from the show on a weekly basis. The Pilot gives us our first contribution to the series' long, twisted mythology. Deep Throat gives us the first of what I call "witness" episodes, stories in which Mulder and Scully bear witness to events they're ultimately unable to thwart or change. Squeeze gives us our first true "monster of the week" and our first true character-centric episode, effectively finalizing our introduction to the series. Squeeze is also our introduction to writing team Glen Morgan and James Wong, and their vision of The X-Files as a quasi-anthology series driven by genre homage and visceral body horror. Finally, Squeeze establishes Morgan and Wong's powerful push/pull dynamic with series creator with Chris Carter. Their willingness to prod the foundations of Carter's work, question his assumptions and explore his implications, is the core of one of the most fascinating working relationships in television history.

If Chris Carter's early work on the series is defined by his encyclopedic knowledge of UFO and conspiracy lore, Morgan and Wong's work is defined by pop-cultural pastiche. The two create tightly structured riffs on popular media, while always keeping their attention to character in sharp focus. In this case they primarily draw inspiration from Dan Curtis' 1973 film The Night Strangler and Stephen King's 1986 novel It. King gets a shout-out right from the jump as the teaser begins with a man walking into an office building, unaware he's being watched by a yellow-eyed man in a nearby storm drain. The dim lighting and slow truck-in make for an extremely creepy image, one of the best of the episode. The intruder sneaks into the building through the elevator shaft, and uses the ventilation system to reach his target's office. He unscrews the air conditioning grate from the inside, kills the man, and leaves the way he came. Cue opening credits. Just like that, we're off to the races. It's a fascinating teaser, challenging our expectations and presenting us with a delightful, X-Filesy twist on the locked room mystery.

The first act begins as Scully has lunch with Tom Colton, a former classmate at the FBI Academy. It's really a brilliant scene. Colton is a remarkably catty careerist, played with slimy zeal by a young Donal Logue, and each seemingly friendly exchange drips discomfort and venom. He's as contemptuous of those above him as those below, and he fully expects Scully to participate in the backbiting. When he turns his withering attention to Mulder and the X-Files, Scully defends her partner and asks if he really views her work with such disrespect. He defers, but bristles at her objection, angry and unwilling to meet her eye. It turns out he actually brought Scully to lunch in order to ask for help, he's just physically incapable of displaying even a modicum of decency or respect. He's been assigned what's seemingly a serial murder case, three men murdered and their livers removed by hand, the teaser being the last of the three. Even more confounding, none of the crime scenes have any identifiable entry points. Scully picks up that Colton is really asking for Mulder's insight. Colton confirms, careful to frame it as a favor he's granting Mulder in order to protect his own ego. He also suggests Scully's assistance on this investigation could be her ticket out of the X-Files by saying she won't have to be "Mrs. Spooky" anymore, leaving Scully to ask herself what she's looking for long-term.

Scully brings the offer to Mulder, who acts offended Colton wouldn't approach him, but really he's having a powerful reaction to the thought of losing her. He still accompanies her to the crime scene, where he immediately begins antagonizing Colton. He leans hard into his spooky reputation, spouting off-the-cuff nonsense about the importance of liver consumption to extraterrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system. It's another example of Mulder using sarcasm to cope with the animus over his tattered reputation, and it's humorous just how hard Colton bites on the obvious bait. Scully is understandably uncomfortable with the dick measuring going on in front of her, and has no tolerance for it. When they actually start looking around the scene, Mulder notices the ventilation grate and understands it could be a possible point of entry for the killer. In another of his patented intuitive leaps, Mulder dusts the grate and lifts a ten inch long print, much to Colton's chagrin.

Mulder takes the print back to the basement office, confirming its similarity to elongated prints lifted by police during two separate murder sprees, one in 1963 and one in 1933. This is another callback to The Night Strangler and It, both of which center around multiple sets of murders occurring decades apart. Since the earlier sprees contained five murders each, he tells Scully to expect two more. She's angry at first, tired of Mulder jumping to the conclusion of extraterrestrial activity with every case they work. He confirms he was only teasing Colton at the crime scene, and doesn't actually see any evidence of extraterrestrial activity in this case. Something else is happening here, and though the exchange is a little obvious it's important to signal to the audience not to expect aliens in every episode. Scully then decides to play ball in Mulder's old court, and tries her hand at building a profile. She follows sound technique, treating it like a mundane investigation, though the creepy fingerprint weighs on her mind.

She presents her profile to Colton and his team the next day. After a few gratuitous jabs at Mulder the team accepts the profile, Colton even stares at her with a discomfiting mixture of envy and sexual attraction while she reads it. Central to her profile is the idea the killer will return to the scene of previous crimes, so she organizes a stakeout of the three crime scenes.

Mulder joins her but doesn't take the stakeout, or her profile, very seriously. He views the perpetrator as a master B&E artist, driven more by the thrill of entry than the murder, and won't bother to return to a puzzle he's already cracked. This casual condescension will become a staple of Mulder's character going forward. Despite his radical ability to assume other points of view and his insistence on broadening the horizon of investigative theory, once he personally decides on something his mind is made up; he doesn't have much consideration for other possibilities or viewpoints. Scully's profile is quickly proven accurate, however, when they discover a man in a duct, emerging backward as if being defecated from the bowels of the building.

The man they apprehended is a young animal control officer named Eugene Victor Tooms, played perfectly by veteran character actor Doug Hutchison with only the barest hint of personality and a stare somehow both vacant and predatory. He passes a polygraph test but does get flustered when asked, at Mulder's insistence, questions referencing the murders in '63 and '33. These questions are poorly received by Colton and the rest of the team, and Mulder gets dressed down by the agent in charge. His excitement over Tooms' response is dashed, and he's clearly wounded by his ideas being dismissed.

Scully asks why he'd pursue his theory so overtly in front of the other agents and Mulder cracks an evasive joke about his desire to mess with people's heads outweighing "the millstone of humiliation." Scully sees through this and, despite some trepidation, asks why he's been so territorial. It's a great moment, with Scully trying to frame the question in a way that won't offend him then immediately turning away to downplay her discomfort. Mulder responds intimately and honestly, gently touching her necklace to keep her from turning away. He tells her how much her respect means to him and that he'd understand if she wanted to move on from the X-Files. He recognizes and treasures her talent, insight, and potential. This plaintive honesty stands in sharp contrast to Colton's sneering mendacity, and this is what wins Scully over.

Tooms is released with an apology, and he immediately sets out to commit another murder. He stalks a man home, deciding to enter through the chimney. We finally see Tooms' abilities firsthand, as his arms stretch and his joints pop out of place to fit inside. Meanwhile, the target goes about his evening, putting things away and going to light his fireplace. This gives us an inkling of hope, hoping he'll light it in time to smoke Tooms out. It's a good, tense sequence, reminiscent of Hitchcock with it's cross-cutting, misdirection, and use of color. Unfortunately it ends in tragedy: the guy is too late, Tooms is already inside. The scene ends with Tooms awkwardly grabbing the guy in slow-motion, kind of a lame way to pay off a good sequence.

Mulder and Scully visit the new crime scene. Mulder can't help himself and needles Colton yet again, who threatens to have them removed. Scully doesn't stand for this, reminding them they're here to find justice for the victim. It's another great Scully beat, showing that though she's sided with Mulder personally and professionally, she still has no time or interest in their schoolyard antics. They lift more elongated fingerprints and find a small object missing from the mantle. After leaving the crime scene they struggle to turn up any significant documentation on Tooms, so they decide to visit Frank Briggs, a detective who investigated the previous two sets of murders. Briggs is old now, living in a retirement home, but he's still haunted by the case, counting the days until someone calls about these new murders. Briggs sees Tooms as the human embodiment of mankind's potential for evil, comparing the murders to the Bosnian genocide and other atrocities. He produces a scrapbook with photographs proving Tooms hasn't aged since 1933, and directs the Agents to Tooms' old address: 66 Exeter Street. The conversation with Briggs is a weird scene that doesn't quite work. The exposition, at least, is intriguing. It's at once clarifying and elusive, building up to that ominously poetic address, 66 Exeter Street. Otherwise, it's a mess. Mulder vacillates between childlike interest in Briggs' grim story and quiet objection to his characterization of Tooms as a monster. Actor Henry Beckman does the best he can with the material, but Morgan and Wong just haven't really rooted the possibility that Tooms is the human manifestation of evil in the story. This could be another shoutout to It, where the titular villain's evil affects the mood and prejudices of an entire community.

Mulder and Scully go to Tooms' now condemned apartment complex. It's a creepy, well-lit sequence, culminating in the iconic image of Mulder and Scully walking into his apartment, a shot immortalized in the opening credits. They poke around, considering the possibility that Tooms sustains his youth by consuming human livers. This is another reference to The Night Strangler, in this case the film's villain Dr. Richard Malcolm.

The Agents soon make a gruesome discovery. They find an odd nest, constructed by Tooms out of newspaper and an odd, brownish-yellow adhesive. Mulder reaches out to touch it, rubbing the liquid between his fingers before Scully realizes it's bile. Mulder is disgusted, and makes a classic joke about how to get it off his fingers without betraying his calm exterior. This will be the first of many times Mulder instinctively reaches out to touch something gross, and it's a good example of Morgan and Wong's penchant for picking up on an aspect of a previous episode (in this case Mulder's imprudent excursion into the Ellens Air Force Base in Deep Throat) and running with it. The Agents also find the missing trophies from the previous murders. They decide to put the apartment under surveillance but not before Tooms, hiding in the rafters, snags Scully's necklace, suggesting he's found his fifth victim.

Colton goes behind Scully's back and calls the surveillance off in an effort to ingratiate himself to his superiors. When Scully objects to this Colton's mask finally slips, and he treats her with the same venomous contempt he's already spit at everybody else. Scully leaves him to his empty careerism and heads home. She gets home, runs herself a bath, and a huge drop of bile drops from the ceiling, landing on her hand. Tooms has broken in. Gillian Anderson's horrified gasp at this disgusting violation is a great little moment, one of my favorites in the episode. Mulder, meanwhile, heads to 66 Exeter Street, surprised to find the surveillance detail is gone. He finds Scully's necklace among the trophies Tooms took from his other victims, and races to her house. Now it's Scully's inaugural turn as damsel, except when Mulder gets there he really only acts as a diversion long enough to give Scully a chance to jump into action as well. The agents ultimately apprehend Tooms together, Scully handcuffing him to the tub while Mulder trains a gun on him. It's an effective sequence, ending with Tooms cuffed to the tub, jerking around like a cornered animal before relaxing, realizing he's caught, while Scully catches her breath against the window.

We have a few more quick scenes: one with Detective Briggs reading about Bosnian war crimes before seeing a headline about Tooms' apprehension, and crying in relief. We then move to Tooms in his cell, creating a new nest. Mulder and Scully watch him build, and have a conversation about the inability of society to find true security, and how the presence of anomalies like Tooms in the world undermines our conception of what it means to be safe. The conversation is a little heavy-handed, though these capstone conversations will become a regular feature to lend closure to subject matter that inherently resists it. They will improve as the show goes on. Sure enough, the episode ends with Tooms grinning at the realization that his cell door has a food slot. Even our most secure institutions are unprepared for a creature like him.

And there you have it. Squeeze is another solid early episode, introducing us to several more long-running narrative and thematic elements of the series. We're introduced to Glen Morgan and James Wong and their willingness to question Chris Carter's assumptions and test his foundations. We get our first outright horror episode, and our first classic villain. Tooms is a fascinating creation, beautifully realized by Doug Hutchison. He's a tangle of predatory urges, almost totally devoid of humanity, and he's constantly associated with the body: his excretion of bile, his sweaty skin, his consumption of liver, he's even introduced in a visual metaphor for a bowel movement. Seeing him onscreen is almost a tactile experience, reminiscent of the bracing somatic filmmaking of Gaspar Noe. Squeeze is definitely flawed. It isn't as scary as it could have been, probably due to the infamous behind the scenes issues with episode director Harry Longstreet. Longstreet didn't even make an attempt to shoot a piece of horror (perhaps indicative of how unthinkable horror on tv was in 1993), which resulted in his removal and significant last-minute reshoots directed by Morgan and Wong. Squeeze still has a strong story, however, exploring why Scully would continue to work with Mulder despite their disagreements. It shades in their character dynamic immensely, adding several aspects to Mulder and Scully that will become baked into the premise going forward. It also does a great job defining Mulder and Scully's relation to the FBI in general, not just shady arbiters of conspiracy like the Cigarette Smoking Man. It's also the first episode to be character-centric, rather than focusing on narrative or thematic exploration like the Pilot and Deep Throat. This episode essentially acts as the finale of a three-part pilot, completing the pitch of what The X-Files can be.