-Essential Episode- “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” – Season 3 Ep. 4

Scully: There’s something you haven’t explained. Can you see your own end?

Clyde Bruckman: I see our end. We end up in bed together. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t mean to offend you or scare you, but not here, not this bed. I just mean I see us quite clearly in bed together. You’re holding my hand very tenderly, and you’re looking at me with such compassion and I feel – tears are streaming down my face – I feel so grateful because it’s just a very special moment neither of us will ever forget.

Scully: Mr. Bruckman, there are hits and there are misses. And then there are misses.

Clyde Bruckman: I just call them as I see them.

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Mulder: If coincidences are just coincidences, why do they feel so contrived?

Written by: Darin Morgan

Directed by: David Nutter

Original Air Date: October 13th, 1995

Principal Setting: St. Paul, Minnesota

Episode Summary:

Scully and Mulder are brought onto the case of a series of murders all involving psychics of some sort. The victims range from a tea leaf reader, tarot card reader and a palm reader and brings on the suspicion that the killer has a vendetta on people who predict the future. He himself though somehow has disassociated himself from the murders and claims someone is controlling him to kill.

The local police bring on a celebrity TV psychic, the Great Yappi, that they hope can help them solve the case, but Mulder thinks he’s a scam from the start. Then they meet Clyde Bruckman, an insurance salesman who claims to have genuine psychic abilities. While Scully of course is skeptical, Mulder discovers that Bruckman can not see someone’s full future, but only how they will die. With the help of Bruckman, he leads them to the killer’s location and helps save their lives, although what he’s struggling with the most is knowing his own demise.

Personal Commentary:

Not only does this episode have the best guest appearance performance (Peter Boyle as the hilarious yet tragic Clyde Bruckman), it also has a more philosophical theme – mainly dealing with whether our lives are determined by free will or predestination.

It also examines two outlooks that people have, those that feel everything externally affects the way they behave and those that feel their behaviors are determined internally (e.g. if you get stuck in traffic on your way to work do you blame the traffic itself for making you late or do you blame yourself for not getting up on time).  Bruckman knows how people will meet their fate, but he doesn’t do anything to save them because he believes the future can’t be changed. The killer believes he is a puppet that is controlling him to kill, however Bruckman quickly tells him he kills becauses he’s a crazy psychopath. He’s completely surprised, and relieved by this label due to not ever taking ownership of his actions.

So much to unpack in this episode that you might  have to watch it a few times to get the full meaning. You could write an entire philosophical essay on all the plot themes in just this one episode. It’s both hilarious and tragic, and you’ll find it on every X-File fan’s top 10 favorite episode lists for good reason.

Another great insight that I heard on Kumail Nanjiani’s “The X-Files Files Podcast” (Listen Here, is that Clyde Bruckman is on the complete opposite spectrum of Mulder in knowing the truth. Where Mulder thinks knowing the full truth will bring him complete satisfaction, in contrast we see the great burden and toll it takes on Bruckman knowing each person’s fate. Knowing the full truth of our future doesn’t bring us fulfillment. He said it best in A Few Good Men when Jack Nicholson’s character shouts, “You can’t handle the truth!”.

Episode Grade: A+

Featured Video:

Conversation with Chris Carter with his glorious, curly mullet:

Fun Facts:

• Clyde Bruckman is going through evidence trying to get psychic visions, and when he is holding a blue piece of cloth he says, “I got it! This is yours. This is from your New York Knicks t-shirt!”. It’s a great call back from Beyond the Sea where Luther Lee Boggs gets a psychic vision from a similar blue piece of cloth, and after Mulder says “I tore this off my New York Knicks t-shirt. It has nothing to do with the crime.”
• There is a scene where Clyde Bruckman is playing cards with Scully. The camera briefly shows his cards – the two black aces and the ace of hearts, and the two black eights. That hand is a variation on the so-called Dead Man’s Hand that Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he was shot in the back of the head in 1876 while playing poker. Four of the five cards in Hickok’s hand were the two black aces and the two black eights.
• Scully’s “Queequeg,” her adopted Pomeranian dog, is named for the tattoo’d, harpooner in “Moby Dick.”
• Pay close attention when Scully scans the crowds at the murder scenes. The killer appears in the crowd each time, except when the police are investigating the final psychic murder. In that scene, Scully is holding the tarot card picturing the bellhop as she pulls aside the curtain to scan the crowd, so even though the killer is absent, he is still represented in the shot.

Faces You May Recognize:

• The talented Peter Boyle is famous for playing The Monster in Young Frankenstein, Wizard in Taxi Driver, and Raymond’s hilarious father, Frank Barone, in Everybody Loves Raymond. He actually landed the role on that show from the amazing performance he gave in this episode.