Essential X-Files: Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose
This is the fourth episode in my rewatch of the eight X-Files episodes that Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz have called essential viewing for the movie: the Pilot, Beyond the Sea, The Host, Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, Memento Mori, Post Modern Prometheus, Bad Blood, and Milagro.
The plot set-up: There’s a serial killer targeting fortunetellers. Through their investigation, Mulder and Scully meet Clyde Bruckman, a man whose single psychic talent is knowing how people will die.
Teaser: One of the most entertaining sequences of the series. The Stupendous Yappi, a psychic called in by the cops, berates Mulder for being a nonbeliever. The actor who plays Yappi, Jaap Broeker, also worked as a David Duchovny stand-in on the show.
Notables:
- This episode is written by Darin Morgan, the man inside the Flukeman suit in “The Host.”
- Peter Boyle won an Emmy for his portrayal of Clyde Bruckman.
- Scully gets the little dog Queequeg in this episode. Growing up in a navy family, Scully called her father “Ahab” and he called her “Starbuck.” Queequeg meets his unfortunate end via a water monster, the alligator (or Big Blue) of “Quagmire.”
- Quick reference back to the psychic case of “Beyond the Sea,” another one of the essential episodes. Mulder hands Clyde Bruckman a scrap of blue fabric. Bruckman says it’s a scrap off of Mulder’s NY Knicks t-shirt. This is a trick Mulder used on Luther Lee Boggs to prove that Boggs was faking his psychic abilities.
- Clyde Bruckman casually mentions to Mulder that dying by autoerotic asphyxiation is not a very dignified way to go. He doesn’t say specifically that this is Mulder’s end but since Mulder’s penchant for porn is well known to fans, this little tidbit has provided much entertainment through the years.
Connections to the movie?
- When Scully finally breaks down and asks Bruckman how she will die, he smiles at her and says, “You don’t.” This is the episode that turned Scully into the Blessed Saint Scully the Enigmatic (all in jest of course). Is she an agent of fate or higher power? She saves Mulder by accidentally getting into the wrong elevator. And later on, in the episode “Tithonus,” this eventuality is revisited when someone else looks at death in her place. He dies, and it seems like she missed her destined time.
- Clyde Bruckman says he developed his ability when the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, and Buddy Holly died in a plane crash. Although Bruckman mostly talks about the Big Bopper, the stories say that it was actually Ritchie Valens who won his seat on the ill-fated plane by a coin flip. Bruckman became fascinated with thinking about all the things that had to happen in a life for death to come down to a single coin flip. Mulder speaks a similar idea in the episode “All Things.” There, the idea was that all their choices and life details led Mulder and Scully to that very moment, together.