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'Do you believe them?'
'Of course I do.'
Title: Tooms
Season: One (1994)
Duration: 44m
Written by: Glen Morgan and James Wong
Directed by: David Nutter
Rating: ****
Maybe with a lesser actor than Doug Hutchinson then Eugene Victor Tooms wouldn't be such a memorable creation. Originally appearing in the third episode Squeeze (which is equally as good, but doesn't feature a scene where Tooms tries to break into a house via a toilet, making the track title highly apt) Tooms was the first – and one of the very few – one-shot villains to get a return bout. Hutchinson's underplayed, laconic Tooms is a mutant liver eater via the route of Norman Bates, and it's almost something of a shame that he's killed in his second appearance.
Still within the infancy of the series, both Tooms episodes feature some notably poor sound dubbing in areas and are more low-key than what followed. However, the increase in confidence and chemistry between the leads 18 episodes on is striking, and the production of the series would continue to improve, even if it did stray further and further away from its initial template. The episode was also greatly significant in introducing two new regular characters to the series: Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi), who would go on to appear in 79 further episodes and both movies; and William B Davis's ''Cigarette Smoking Man'', who was reprised from the pilot, here getting his first line of dialogue. (Confusingly Davis played what appears to be a different Agent in the season one episode Young At Heart).
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