3x04: Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose

‘…how do I die?’ ‘You don’t.’

The smile on Bruckman’s face as he delivers that good news to Scully has been, for me, one of the emotional high points of the show. And the look on Scully’s face when she finds Bruckman in bed at the last, his prediction for them come true, is another.

I won’t bore you by recapping the episode with intermittent gushing about what a good writer Darin Morgan is. You know that already, or else (like most people, like normal people) you don’t care. Instead I’ll try to focus on the ways in which it’s just another X-File — and its uneasy fit with a show that’s all about uneasy fits.

‘Final Repose’ is a lot quieter and less laugh-out-loud funny than ‘Jose Chung’s,’ so I’d seen this episode once a few years ago but had never revisited it; it doesn’t bear piecemeal viewing. It’s a tone poem. (The differences make both episodes seem all the more impressive.)

And that tone is, again, melancholy and lonely, which makes sense given the curious smallness of the world of The X-Files, its horror at our terminal atomization — though to his credit Darin Morgan worked in a somewhat different emotional register from the show’s other writers, far less abstract. While ‘Humbug’ brings a small community vividly to life and feels like a balm, ‘Final Repose’ seems to happen in one poor lonely guy’s head. It’s unbearably sad, even with all the funny lines — many of them from Scully, whose sarcastic defensiveness only deepens her characterization hint hint aspiring screenwriters hint hint.

Remember the end of the second Matrix film, the scene with the Architect? Yeah, the old guy in the white suit who talked a bit like an X-Files character. (You probably hated it, or just joined in the laughing and pointing. I loved it.) The Architect tells Neo that there’ve been other messiahs in the history of the Matrix, but he differs from them in one odd respect:

‘It is interesting, reading your reactions. Your five predecessors were, by design, based on a similar predication — a contingent affirmation that was meant to create a profound attachment to the rest of your species, facilitating the function of the One. While the others experienced this in a very general way, your experience is far more specific — vis-a-vis love.’

Morgan’s episodes feel a little like that, to me: weird cloudbursts of merely human emotion at the center of a compelling but at times abstract storyworld.

Yet the emotional heaviness of Morgan’s work isn’t unprecedented on The X-Files — it’s just that he’s better at grounding the show’s thoroughgoing sadness in the onscreen experiences of the characters than any other writer on the show. Plus, he was allowed to play at the fringes of the story rather than directly addressing the steadily accumulating ‘mythology.’ (His one UFO episode, ‘Jose Chung’s,’ has a bit of Mothman Prophecies vibe to it, not least in its ultraterrestrial ambivalence about its central plotwise mystery, and it bears on the mytharc thematically without interfacing with backstory at all.) ‘Paper Clip’ deals with oceanic feelings — they just belong to the culture rather than the characters — and if the daddy-chose-Samantha revelation falls weirdly flat in execution, well, for the 167 hours a week you’re not watching the show the dialogue falls away and the choice, the recurrent symbol, remains and resonates.

The show’s ‘cool’ comes partly from its brainy detachment, its celebration of thinking as such. The heroes are intellectuals, and however heated they might temporarily get, they exist in/for a storyworld where the ‘shining city on a hill’ is built on a lake of blood and resistance is romantically futile. The emotional high points of the series thus far have always been thwarted, muted, and most of our heroes’ investigations have been incomplete or unsuccessful. That’s not dramatic inertness, it’s the thematic core of the show. Think of the doctor in ‘Fallen Angel,’ heroically standing up to The Man and likely, when the camera turns off, to be punished for it; and of course, think of Max Fenig, dangling on strings, unable to understand that his nightmares are real, his ‘disease’ — the thing that makes him broken — was put there by…Them. This is a show about defeat and respite, not victory. (Small wonder that fans love Skinner’s kiss-off to Cancer Man in ‘Paper Clip’ so much; it’s one of the show’s few fist-pumping outright wins so far.)

‘Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,’ like Morgan’s other episodes (FYI, I won’t be watching the cockroach one), responds to the atomization and isolation of the storyworld in purely personal terms, while (more or less) echoing outward. The freaks in ‘Humbug’ tell a story about community and marginality, but basically the episode is about those people and their specific private lives. ‘Bruckman’s’ evokes plenty of other stories about doomed foreknowledge, but it’s so effective because (hint hint aspiring screenwriters hint hint) given the way humans are wired up, evocative details that don’t quite fit a scheme usually do more to deepen the work than finicky thematic arrangements. (Paging Wes Anderson…)

Y’know, the ‘sloppiness’ of the mytharc doesn’t bug me at all. I’d love to see a version of this show where everything Adds Up, but what would it add up to? A tighter plot. A bigger punch at the end. But I guarantee that a more focused version of the ‘mythology’ (just think of the contradiction in those terms!) would lose its quality of dark implication, of haunting. ‘Humbug’ is full of weird echoes of another time, a lost America; it’s practically historical fiction, or a time-travel story. Same with ‘Jose Chung’s,’ with the agents and the Men in Black as high-modern armies invading a Lynchian premodern small town. ‘Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose’ is less connected to the overall context of the series than those other two — it’s less about a Time or Spirit or Way of Living than it is about a guy in a somewhat abstract setting whose emotions are rendered with the utmost clarity.

One of the main points of the ‘mythology,’ one of the main reasons for the show’s existence for heaven’s sake(!), is that the unease that surrounds the UFO abduction stories extends, too, into other dark corners of modern life. I can already see, from just a couple of seasons in, that the mytharc is never gonna ‘add up,’ and that that’s perfectly fine, because the story that’s being told is about hauntings, visions, unresolved tension (ahem), uncertainty…if you think (as I do) that the show is saying something more important than ‘Here we are having a great time watching TV and wondering what will happen next’ (paging the creators/writers of Lost…), then it makes sense to ask whether its deep subject, its abiding interest, is best served by a neat-and-tidy wrapup.

Or, for that matter, by a conventional ‘supersmart police track down Bad Things’ approach. I’ve lately been making the mistake of reading pop criticism of the show — ‘recaps,’ alas — and have been seeing complaints that Mulder and Scully sometimes have nothing to do in an investigation; they come into a bizarre situation, powerless to change things, and bear witness to Weird happenings.

If you think this is a cop show with aliens and ghosts, then I can see how that would bug you. On cop shows, cops catch criminals. That’s the genre contract.

But what if belongs to a different genre, centered on a different sort of questing hero, with a totally different relationship to the fantastic events it depicts?

As with The Sopranos and The Wire, I find myself wondering how such an unconventional show could survive having such a convention-hungry audience. We know how David Chase dealt with fans’ juvenile demands (parodying their bloodthirst with a deflating sixth season that violated every narrative convention within reach), and I remember well how David Simon was pissed on by critics who seemed to have forgotten what show they were watching.

I’m wondering, too, why I ever thought a serial story about unpardonable sin and unbreakable codes and unfathomable cosmicism would have a simple ending — or middle.

Maybe ‘Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,’ a perfectly formed hour of television, fits less easily with this imperfectly formed show than I used to think. And reading about Morgan’s ultimate fate on the show (he left for other work, was booked to write a comeback episode, and with three days left before prep, he flaked), I find that I’m not surprised, not even a little bit.