Reception
"Tooms" premiered on the Fox network on April 22, 1994, and was first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Two on February 16, 1995. This episode earned a Nielsen rating of 8.6, with a 15 share, meaning that roughly 8.6 percent of all television-equipped households, and 15 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode. It was viewed by 8.1 million households.
In a retrospective of the first season in Entertainment Weekly, "Tooms" was rated an A, with the Hutchison's appearance being noted as "another sublimely slimy performance", whilst Pileggi's performance was said to have an "engagingly steely presence". Zack Handlen, writing for The A.V. Club, called the episode "a richly rewarding one", finding the interaction between the characters of Mulder and Scully to have been a highlight of the episode. However, Handlen felt that some of the episode's plot development was ultimately needless, and found the motives of several characters to have been unexplained and baffling. Matt Haigh, writing for Den of Geek, felt that the plot thread of Tooms framing Mulder for assault "never really amounts to much", though he felt that the episode showed Tooms to be a creepier villain than his previous appearance in "Squeeze". Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated the episode four-and-a-half stars out of five, finding it to be a better instalment than "Squeeze". Shearman felt that the episode featured very little plotting, consisting simply of "a series of set pieces", but considered its wit and character development to adequately compensate for this.
The character of Eugene Tooms has also attracted positive criticism. Author Neil Gaiman listed the character of Eugene Tooms as one of his favourite monsters in a guest column for Entertainment Weekly's 1000th issue; whilst UGO Networks listed the character as one of their "Best TV Serial Killers", describing Hutchison's acting as "uber-creepy". Writing for Den of Geek, John Moore listed Eugene Tooms as his "Top 10 X-Files Baddies", noting that the popularity of both "Squeeze" and "Tooms" proved to be "largely responsible for shifting the emphasis of the show" away from dwelling solely on alien conspiracy-based mythology episodes.
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