Holy shit, this episode was amazing. I have no problem declaring 'Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose' to be the absolute best episode of The X-Files I've seen so far. The dialogue, especially the banter between Mulder and Scully (or really anyone and Scully) is enjoyable and often hilarious.
While being a humorous episode at times, this episode also very seriously deals with issues of mortality and fate, which are clearly important in this series, since there's already been quite a lot of death and threats thereof, especially where Scully is concerned.
There's a fantastic role reversal in this episode, and a great callback to 'Beyond the Sea'. In that, Mulder believed, or at least insisted, that Boggs was not psychic, and that he was just messing with Scully, who, having just suffered the loss of her father, was willing to grasp at any hope she might see him or hear his voice again, or know whether he really approved of her career choice. (We also get a more direct callback to that episode when Mulder has Clyde Bruckman try to gain insight from a scrap of Mulder's New York Knicks t-shirt, only Mulder tells him it's not.)
And here, too, Mulder is the presumed skeptic again, and Scully the believer. The popular psychic (a.k.a. fraud) known as The Stupendous Yappi accuses Mulder of giving of negative skeptical energy, which is disrupting his vision. (And it's kind of hilarious.)
Naturally, though, later in the episode, Mulder is clearly shown to believe in Bruckman's abilities, and Scully is back to disbelieving, and she still can't help but ask Bruckman how she will die, and he gives the most cryptic and unsettling response to any question yet: "You don't."
I wonder if this means Scully is immortal, or that Bruckman is simply lying. It's clear from the way the show presented his character that it's not the third option, which is simply that he's not psychic. I believe it's possible he saw something so horrifying in her future that he couldn't bear to tell her the truth. It's obviously no stretch to believe Scully would assume he was lying either way since she truly doesn't believe he's psychic, but if he told her of that gruesome outcome, while she would certainly dismiss it on scientific grounds, she might always wonder. And who knows how that would affect the way she chose to live her life. This way, she can casually dismiss the notion of immortality without really thinking too hard about it. Her inevitable death will remain a surprise.
Which leads to the other philosophical matter in the episode: fate. I quote Angel: "If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do." This is essentially the opposite of Mulder's response to Bruckman's rejection of his 'gift'. If you know how you're going to die, and know that nothing you do can prevent it or even anyone else's death from occurring, there is no point to doing anything. If history is already written, why bother?
It's a good question, and it's why we shouldn't know when and how we'll die. We'd only go messing it up anyway - in fact, if fiction is any guide, the efforts we took to avoid our own deaths would invariably lead us right to them. Whereas even if it's already written, but we don't know, we still maintain the illusion of control over our lives. It may all be pre-determined, but since we aren't made aware of it, we can live our lives freely.
Clyde Bruckman didn't get that choice.
I'm pretty sure we have actual free will, at least at a macroscopic, psychological level. Perhaps at a sub-atomic level, everything is purely deterministic, but there are so many particles in our bodies at any given time, we can't possibly determine what thoughts, states of consciousness, or mortality a particular arrangement of them will generate. Even if we could predict the state of trillions of trillions of particles to begin with, we still wouldn't be able to derive meaning from it, which would still allow us to believe we were in control of our own destinies.
And Bruckman gets into that to some degree, with his discussions of what is essentially the Butterfly Effect, talking about how everything leads to something else, and how many different things have to converge for a particular event to occur. He doesn't believe in coincidence, only fate. Only a pre-programmed series of events to lead up to the future that he believes he can already see, leading to his rather bleak outlook on existence.
But we get our seemingly random coin flip for a seat on a doomed airplane. Bruckman is right - what are the odds it would have even come down to that in the first place? If you knew in advance, like Bruckman's lost client now does, that you would die in a car accident on a particular road, wouldn't you just avoid driving on it? Would you be able to? Or, in your attempt to avoid it, would a detour or another crash lead you right to it, making your demise again inevitable?
Either way, we're led to some seriously haunting and chilling scenes, one involving Bruckman's foretelling of Mulder's death at the hands of ... wait, I just realised the murderer is never named in this episode. OK, I already gave this one a 10 out of 10, can I make that go to 11? That's fucking brilliant.
Anyway, he describes, and we're shown Mulder being attacked in the kitchen, and apparently having his throat slit. But the last fortune teller foreshadows the ending when he tells the man his "confusion is soon to come to an abrupt end with the arrival of a woman. A blonde or a brunette. Maybe a redhead." Cut to the red-haired Scully. Obviously a coincidence from the point of view of the fortune teller - after all, there's little risk in predicting that someone's hair will be blonde, brunette or red. Maybe he should have thrown in green for good measure, just in case. But from the show's perspective, it's not a coincidence at all, and the mention of the redhead is obviously very deliberate.
Because when Mulder's presumed death scene repeats itself in real time, he manages to escape death or serious injury by that very coincidence - Scully takes a wrong turn and ends up in the kitchen via the service elevator and is able to kill the murderer before he can harm Mulder. It turns out that Bruckman was wrong, specifically because he failed to account for that coincidence, or simply did not see it. So perhaps the future is not written in stone.
Clyde Bruckman's future is, though. I suppose if you get a vision of yourself committing suicide in the future, that would be fairly disturbing, and maybe more likely unchangeable. But Bruckman's vision of himself and Scully did actually come true. She's in bed with him, gently holding his hand and there are tears streaming down his face. He was right. Scully is seriously unnerved.
Maybe she really is immortal.
Geographical aside: I'm pretty sure the lake in which they found the body was the same lake used for Reiden Lake in Fringe. Maybe there's only one lake in the Vancouver area that's used for filming. For the past 20 years.
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