was "an absolute disaster." Manners reportedly asked series creator Chris Carter to film a leopard for the fourth act rather than house cats, saying "I begged Carter 'Please let's revisit the leopard in the teaser because I'm never going to make these cats scary.'" "Teso Dos Bichos" was strongly disliked by the cast and crew of The X-Files, including both David Duchovny and Kim Manners. Manners found the story uninteresting because "pussycats are not scary." He later made T-shirts and gave them to the cast and crew that read "Teso Dos Bichos Survivor." The episode earned two distinctive nicknames courtesy of Manners: The first, "Second Salmon," referred to the number of re-writes the episode went through. Every time an episode was re-written, the color of the script changed accordingly; "Teso Dos Bichos" went through so many re-writes that the cast eventually received a second round of salmon colored copies. The second nickname, again, courtesy of Manners, was "Teso Dos Bitches." Broadcast and reception "Teso Dos Bichos" premiered on the Fox network on March 8, 1996. This episode earned a Nielsen rating of 10.7, with an 18 share, meaning that roughly 10.7 percent of all television-equipped households, and 18 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode. It was viewed by 17.38 million viewers. The episode received negative reviews from critics. A writer from Entertainment Weekly gave "Teso Dos Bichos" a C, and sardonically wrote, "No es bueno!" Reviewer Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club gave the episode a C− and criticized the laziness of the writing, saying, "Maybe I'm missing something here. There could be some subtext in, um, yeah, I got nothing. The dead rats in the toilet were freaky, right? And they did kill that dog off, so that's hardcore. Really, though, I'm just too disappointed to say much else. This is paint-by-numbers at its most tedious, and while it's nice to have evident proof of how far the show has come since it started, that doesn't make it any easier to sit through." Critical Myth's John Keegan gave the episode a scathing review, only awarding it 1/10. He criticized the seriousness of the plot and wrote, "Overall, this has to be one of the worst episodes of the series. In nearly every possible way, the episode fails to live up to the usual expectations. Perhaps aware of how silly the whole thing sounds, the