“Mulder and Scully search for a humanoid killer whose savage murder sprees recur every thirty years.“

Mulder’s going to be like “Every thirty years, Scully. Every thirty years this supernatural being escapes from its supernatural prison and feasts on goats and children with propeller beanies during a full moon. Then it returns from whence it came, Scully. When I was a tiny little boy, it ate my uncle. And now I’m going to exact my revenge.”

And Scully’s going to be like “Anything could’ve eaten your uncle, Mulder. It was probably flesh-eating bacteria.”

How dare you talk about my uncle’s flesh that way, Scully.

OK, let’s get this show on the road. We’re in Baltimore, which is somewhat right outside Washington D.C., right? I don’t have it in me to check a “map”. A suited man with a briefcase, possibly a lawyer, walks down the street after a long day of helping send innocent black people to prison. He walks by a sewer with yellow eyeballs peering at him.

Oh wait, maybe this guy was going to work, because he’s going to pull a late night at the office! He walks out to the hallway to get some coffee. A creepy crawly pushes its way out of an air intake vent and kills the man when he gets back to his desk! It is unseen! It returns back through the vent! And I’m really scared!

*intro music*

I’m shaking in my boots already, friends. Hopefully this isn’t flesh-eating bacteria. Back in Washington, Scully is having quite a dignified lunch with an old colleague played by a sexy, young Donal Logue. He mocks Scully for being involved with aliens and space mutants from Ork with spooky Fox Mulder.

Grounded for Life? I’ll show you grounded for life.

Speaking of weird shit, Special Agent Donal Logue speaks about a young college woman who was found dead in her 10′ x 12′ dorm room; doors locked, everything sealed. Her body was discovered with her liver ripped out of her torso with no apparent weapon. Bare hands! Disgusting. Hannibal Lecter is loose again. And then two days ago, a lawyer man was found dead with his coffee at his desk. Hey! We know that one! His liver is gone too.

Mulder takes his reputation as “Mr. Spooky” in stride. “Mr. Spooky” is his middle name, which he legally changed in 1981! Scully discusses with him later at the crime scene about how much ridicule she gets because she works with him, and Mulder is like “lol”. Donal Logue comes into the room and Mulder further embarrasses Scully by talking about gray aliens.

During his investigation, Mulder finds a pube under a desk and an elongated finger print on the outside of the vent. Mulder’s been collecting eleongated prints, and they all look the same. He’s got one from the 1960s. He’s got one from the 1930s. He’s got a rookie card one from the 1900s. Collect them all!

The verdict? A stretchy serial killer comes out of vents every 30 years! Scully hates this malarkey. HATES IT. She’s so mad she could take a shit! She warns Mulder that this is Donal Logue’s case, so back off. This ain’t an X-File. This ain’t even a J-File. The only J in here is you. “Jerk”, that is. Burn!

Later, Scully drafts up her preliminary report and spends a great deal of her time discussing the nutritious properties of liver. The room stares at her with pity. Scully suggests targeting liver fetishists. Her theory is approved, and she is assigned to work with Donal Logue on this very normal, not at all supernatural homicide case!

Lotta empty cans in the parking lot and I’ve got me a gun fulla bullets.

In the parking garage, somebody seems to be stalking Scully during her stakeout. She draws her gun and ends up pointing right at Mulder, who barely jumps! What a scamp.

While in the parking garage, Mulder, of course, sees and hears a creature banging around the air ducts. He runs back and grabs Scully, who yells at the duct and tells them to come out with their hands up! A man emerges from the vent, and it’s Doug Hutchinson (the guy from The Green Mile who married a child in real life).

So this dude is arrested and detained for some polygraph-style questioning. His name is Eugene Tooms and he’s a creep, end of story.

Hey, marrying a 16-year is legal… in the state of, uh… *checks Wikipedia* … uhhmmmm…

When asked if he ever killed a living creature, he says yes. When asked if ever killed a human being, he says no. Mulder had the interrogator ask questions like “are you 100 years old” and “were you kicking around in 1933” and “can I see your penis?”. He answers every question correctly, which proves the validity of lie detector tests! Mulder is still not convinced! This guy is the liver-eating stretchy murderer! And he makes people mad at him by saying as such. Really mad. It’s hilarious. Scully agrees to now jump on this as an X-File with Special Agent Foxy Mulder! This is almost entirely because she is very curious about what Mulder’s “inkling” is about all this. She really wants to see his “inkling”. So, he invites her down to his secluded, windowless basement office where he is happy to show her his “inkling”.

Mulder has prints collected from Tooms. He also has the stretched prints collected from the vent, plus the other ones he’s keeping around that are decades old. He does fancy 1993 computer manipulation with Encarted ’95 and proves that they are one and the same! Scully all but says “buh” about this revelation.

These baseball cards are covered in alien ectoplasm, Scully.

We, the audience, get to see Tooms being a disgusting, wall-scaling menace. He climbs a random guy’s house and forces his way down the tight chimney. Inside the house, he fucks this guy’s shit right up. And the next day, Donal Logue is starting to really get frustrated. Another stolen liver; maybe this is some nefarious black market organ trading scheme! Or maybe it’s ghoulies and monsters.

It’s research time, kids. Mulder loves to roll up his sleeves and hit the public record microfilm archive! He discovers an old criminal record which lists a Eugene Tooms adventure from 1903, where he killed a man who lived in the apartment above him. Time to track this motherfucker before he disappears and returns in 2023! Hey, that’s coming up quick anyway. Maybe we’ll just wait again.

Mulder spends hours scanning birth certificates with his ancient-ass analog reader. Scully sits there frowning. They’re coming up short, maybe because this guy was never born or he never died or something. They do have a lead, though. They visit an old detective in a retirement home who looks like skinny George R. R. Martin. “I’ve seen murder in my day!” he says shakily, like he’ll croak any minute. He was working on the same investigation in 1933. He suspects the same guy in 1963, but by then he was rotting at his desk assignment before retirement.

This old man tells a Holocaust story and then asks Mulder to grab a box with old photos. This man is aware of Tooms, and he shows photos from 1963 where Tooms looks exactly the same. Ageless. Ready to marry a 16-year-old if she gets close enough to him.

He’s even got the same timeless bowl cut!

What’s next? Mulder and Scully investigate the old, abandoned apartment building where Tooms killed his upstairs neighbor. It reeks of who-cares-waste-of-time until Mulder finds a man-sized hole in the wall with a ladder that leads under the floorboards. The area’s walls are covered with rags and newspapers; a makeshift nest. There’s a table full of trinkets collected from murder victims. It smells bad in there. Mulder says this is where Tooms hibernates, sustaining on livers until he’s ready to wake up in three decades! Scully huffs and sighs. Mulder’s gonna hang out here for a bit, breathing in the sweet, sweet air.

Tooms is there, though. It won’t be a good scene, man. Some real shit’s gonna go down! He clandestinely grabs Scully’s necklace from around her neck as she leaves the area.

The next morning comes. Mulder had been staking out the building through the dead of night, and he arranges for two of Agent Donal Logue’s men to switch shifts. As you could possibly imagine, this throws Donal “Grounded for Life” Logue into a completely indignant tizzy! He takes it out on Scully, who is like “the Mulder gets what the Mulder wants”. He hates her now, and he also called off the stakeout.

Scully has the night off and prepares a bath in her humble abode. Mulder knows she’s going to die because he found her necklace in Tooms’ apartment! SHE’S NOT PICKING UP HER PHONE, THOUGH! DAMN IT ALL TO HELL, SCULLY! DON’T YOU WANT TO KEEP YOUR LIVER?!

So, yeah, she gets attacked in her bathroom after Tooms slithers through her air vent. Mulder breaks into the place guns a-blazin’! While Tooms is distracted, Scully handcuffs his ass to the tub. Foiled!

Later, having been rightfully defeated in an undignified manner, Tooms spends his time in his little sanitarium cell alone looking sweaty and licking newspapers. Scully has run some tests; this guy’s metabolism and muscle structure and yada yada are weird. Seems like something that should be looked into further. Oh well.

An orderly drops food off through a narrow slot in the door and walks away. Tooms looks at the narrow slot in the door with sweaty satisfaction.

Oh baby… I’m gonna fuck that slot!

Next Time on the X-Files

Season 1, Episode 4 — “Conduit”
Scully and Mulder find a downed power line on the ground in front of the Pentagon. Mulder tries to push Scully to touch it with him so they can attain the “powerful alien brain waves” needed to enter the sixth dimension and stop Commander Brrsszzt of Planet Xxxsrrxxyp.