Rewatch Extra: 3x04 Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose
Both Darin Morgan and Peter Boyle won the Emmy for this. Deservedly so.
I love when I love the teaser! This happens so rarely, especially now, when I’m watching episodes I’ve seen a ridiculous number of times.
“What the hell is Lalapalazzo?”
“So what do they say about the entrails?” “Yuck.”
The fake-out is great, when Cline and Havez are talking about Yappi, but we think it’s Mulder. “Who the hell are you?” It’s cute, but it also emphasizes the obscurity Mulder and Scully toil in, with a lack of respect. The Minneapolis PD forgot they even called the FBI. I’m reminded of a quote I once read from Duchovny, where he was talking about how frustrating it became for him in later seasons, when Mulder and Scully were actually shown respect and listened to. Something to the effect of, “No one listens to Scully! Everyone laughs at Mulder!”
Remember the good old days, when they went back and forth with words like anthropomancy and prognosticator and tasseographer? And read books and talked about them? Hot nerds are the best.
I bet Mulder tries to read her tea leaves, and I absolutely mean that literally, not euphemistically. Seriously, you know he tries to entertain and impress her with all of his arcane knowledge, kind of like the appearance of the Great Muldini and his quarter trick.
Yappi’s weird groupies are awesome! Apart from his sidekick, the blonde Robert Palmer girl, there’s a little person and a guy in a beret.
The Great Eyebrow Off of '95
“I can’t take you anywhere.” I love it when Scully gets all sassy with him. I bet he likes it too, especially when she says things in a vaguely suggestive way, as she does here.
The little “pling!” in the score when Yappi reads Mulder’s thought is amazing.
When Mulder’s breaking down Yappi’s performance, Scully crosses to stand next to him as she backs up his argument.
“Now, if you don't mind, I have to get an A.P.B. out on a white male, age seventeen to thirty-four, with or without a beard, maybe a tattoo... who's impotent. Let's go.” This is in the running for the funniest line of the whole series. He's just so serious when he says it! Especially the determined, "Let's go."
“It's kind of creepy, isn't it? The Stupendous Yappi said the first victim's body would be dumped somewhere, then we find it in a dumpster.” “Oooh, I just got a chill down my spine.”
Scully’s sideways look when Mulder says he thinks Bruckman can see things is priceless. I bet she practices all of her different skeptical looks in the mirror on the weekends.
“I’m supposed to believe that’s a real name?” Poor Mulder. Although a part of me loves when people make fun of his name on the show, because it kind of feels like the other writers poking fun at Chris Carter for choosing such a preposterous name. Still, he couldn’t be named anything else, could he?
Now look at her disgusted look when Mulder says “pinch me.”
“Oh, so now you’re psychic?” Seriously, Scully took her sass vitamins this morning! She’s on a roll and I love it!
“Sometimes it just seems that everyone’s having sex except for me.” And us, if you can believe that.
"Mr. Bruckman, you possess an ability that not only has staggering implications upon physics and human consciousness, but it's one which most people, myself included, would be envious of. Yet you seem to treat it with disdain." You know, people act like Mulder will believe in anything just because, but he's really something of a St. Thomas, you know? He would absolutely need to stick his hand in those wounds. Just hearing from Bruckman what the gift is like isn't enough. He believes he'd want to possess it. He has to stick his fingers in things, he walks into that pool of light to be abducted himself. He doesn't hesitate when Bruckman asks if he wants to know how he dies. Knowing is more important than self-preservation. He's constantly striving, reaching, wanting. Seriously, from a screenwriting standpoint, Mulder's a dream, because he's just one big walking ball of want with no clue about what he needs.
“Do you want to know how you're going to die?” “Yes, I would.” “No, you don’t.” NO SHIT.
"How can I see the future if it didn't already exist?"
"If the future is written, then why bother to do anything?"
"Now you're catching on."
"Well, you see, that's another reason I can't help you catch this guy. I might adversely affect the fate of the future. I mean, his next victim might be the mother of the daughter whose son invents the time machine. Then the son goes back in time and changes world history and then Columbus never discovers America, man never lands on the moon, the U.S. never invades Grenada. Or something less significant... resulting in the fact that my father never meets my mother and consequently, I'm never born. When do we start?"
Why don't you believe me and my triangle eyes? Mulder, it's me, your skeptical lady partner.
I love it when we see through the door and Mulder has his head down on the table while Bruckman holds the fabric to his head. He's totally exhausted when his experiment isn’t very fascinating.
I have a crush on Duchovny’s delivery when he inhales sharply like Bruckman got it right, then says “Miss.”
Uranus Unlimited. I bet the boys at 1013 all had a good laugh about that.
I love how Mulder sticks his head up in the front seat, nagging Bruckman about his gift. I hate to break hearts, but can you imagine the Mulder-Scully family on a car trip? Because you know William would’ve turned out just like this, all inquisitive, asking a million questions while Mulder told him weird stories about the local folklore of wherever they were driving. Scully would be kind of ready to jump out of the car, but then would be compelled to jump in and correct Mulder and give William the scientific explanation.
I guess “autoerotic asphyxiation” is often believed to be a reference to Mulder’s mode of death, but since we’ve already seen Bruckman’s head in a plastic bag, I think he’s just fucking with Mulder for being annoying. Still, you know Scully’s like, let me save you from that fate, Mulder, by taking the auto out of autoerotic!
Ooh, look at this great shot of them walking in the woods.
"I guess you run into a lot of dead bodies in your line of work."
"You get used to it."
"I never have. I'm not sure you're supposed to."
I love the question of whether or not someone who works with death should allow him or herself to become desensitized to it. You have to, in some way, or else you wouldn’t be able to exist day to day, get your work done. But I think Scully is able to strike a balance, while Bruckman, ultimately, isn't. He can't live with these unbidden images. From "Little Green Men": "What this man imagined... his dreams, who he loved, saw, heard, remembered... what he feared... somehow it’s... all locked inside this small mass of tissue and fluid." Her work with Mulder sort of prevents her from becoming completely detached from the fact that the bodies she works on were once people.
They're twins!
Look, Mulder's doing that thing where he's talking to someone else but looking at Scully.
"Don't you have crime labs that analyze these things for you?" “Yes. Yes, we do.” I love how Scully says that line, and it’s what Zellie and I were talking about the other day, how Mulder's always ready to use his fingers and tastebuds in lieu of a lab.
When Bruckman is telling the story of what the Puppet sees, Scully actually jumps up when it seems like Mulder is going to be hurt. In the story.
“P.S. Say hi to the FBI.” “Hi.”
I love when Scully gets kind of smug about her job when Bruckman asks what she's doing. "Studying background checks. This is what detective work is really like. We can't come up with suspects by having visions." Bruckman: "Jealous?"
Scully’s small talk go-to is Moby Dick.
“There are hits and there are misses. And then there are misses.” She’s really kind to him, I guess because she feels like his “gift” would be awful to have. And yet at the end, she can’t resist, she asks him how she dies: “You don’t.” Is she immortal? Does it just reference her not dying of cancer? Is Bruckman being sweet because he knows it would haunt anyone, knowing that?
“Chantilly lace?” “You know what I like.” Look at how damn cute they are!
“If coincidences are just coincidences, then why do they feel so contrived?”
"Well, I've had dreams in my life where I had a vision and then later on, I've seen that vision in reality and then... and as a psychic, have you ever had prophetic dreams like that?" Hi, "Paper Hearts." Only there, Mulder attempts to do what Bruckman can't or won't: use his "vision" to, if not prevent something, then to bring justice to the murdered girls and their families.
Scully says that she thinks Bruckman has sucked all the joy out of his life "by thinking he can see the future." Which reminds me of what Jose Chung writes about Mulder: "As for her partner, Reynard Muldrake, that ticking timebomb of insanity...his quest into the unknown has so warped his psyche, one shudders to think how he receives pleasures from life."
“You do the things you do because you’re a homicidal maniac.” And he's so happy and amazed when Bruckman tells him this. The guy who plays the Puppet is really great.
I like the busy wallpaper and red carpet in the hallway.
It’s kind of awesome that we only see Havez's cigarette when Scully finds him dead, and not the actual body. It's a really simple and effective choice.
Mulder through the round window. A lovely shot.
What a stupid looking dog.
The Stupendous Yappi commercial is pretty amazing, especially this part, when she passes the guy and then gives the camera a knowing smile.
I started thinking a lot about the idea of fate versus free will that runs through this episode, and through the series as a whole. Oddly, I feel like Scully is generally more of a believer in fate than Mulder. You'd think Mulder would be all over something mystical like fate, but it's not so.
-The Field Where I Died: "Even if I knew for certain, I wouldn't change a day."
-The Truth: "It's what made me follow you ... why I'd do it all over again."
-all things: "What if there was only one choice and all the other ones were wrong? And there were signs along the way to pay attention to."
I wonder if this doesn't have a lot to do with her faith. Yes, we see her struggle with her faith, but she was raised a Catholic, in a presumably somewhat religious household, which means that she is certainly familiar with the idea that God works in mysterious ways, that everything happens for a reason, even if we don't understand it. I don't think Mulder can grasp the concept of allowing a greater power, whether it be God or nature, just that--greater power, without question. In "Quagmire," Scully says to him, "You're so consumed by your personal vengeance against life, whether it be its inherent cruelties or mysteries, everything takes on a warped significance to fit your megalomaniacal cosmology. It's just...the truth or a white whale? What difference does it make? I mean, both obsessions are impossible to capture, and trying to do so will only leave you dead along with everyone else you bring with you." Scully wouldn't change a day because she trusts that, even though terrible things have happened, this is what's supposed to be. You cannot avoid sadness, even though you don't understand it. I think that's why "Doggett and Skinner the Protectors" is such an annoying theme to me, because the Scully we know gets that life isn't all peaches and cream. She doesn't need to be protected from the bad things in life because she's long ago made peace with their existence.
Mulder, on the other hand, seems to view life as an endlessly unfolding Choose Your Own Adventure book, where you have to aggressively look forward and choose and make the world bend to your will. And that makes sense. The event that most shaped him was Samantha's abduction. As a child, how could he not endlessly replay that, trying to figure out what it was that he could've done differently to save her? In "Monday," he's essentially given the ability to do this, to keep trying until he gets it right. Scully asks him what makes him think that "if you did rewind it and start over again that it wouldn't end up exactly the same way?" He can't accept that, the idea that all of his work might be done in vain, for any given outcome to be the same no matter what he did. It's not necessarily about self-importance, but rather about giving his life and his work meaning.