Banana Cream Pie

S3 E4: Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose

The X-Files, 1993.

Some episodes of The X-Files are about aliens. Some are about government conspiracies. And some are about an old man who sells insurance, knows exactly when you’ll die, and keeps getting upstaged by a psychic with a publicist.

This is that last one.

We open in Minnesota, where the weather is bleak and the mystics are dying. Fortune tellers are being murdered in increasingly ornate ways. Eyes gouged out. Entrails inspected. The entrails thing is called anthropomancy, which sounds like a Morrissey album and is no less unpleasant. Mulder and Scully are called in, because this is technically a federal crime now, and also because no local department wants to deal with The Stupendous Yappi, a preening psychic with more eyebrow choreography than a silent film villain.

Mulder is unimpressed. Yappi senses “negative energy.” The eyebrows arch in protest.

Enter Clyde Bruckman.

He’s an insurance salesman. He’s depressed. He knows when you’re going to die. He also accidentally finds a corpse in a dumpster while trying to throw out a head of bad lettuce. Relatable.

Eventually, Bruckman is roped into the investigation because his knowledge of murder scenes is either supernatural or extremely suspicious. He offers a string of visions that are helpful in the way a cryptic uncle is helpful at trivia night. (“The body is by the white Nazi stormtrooper. You’ll know it when you see it.”)

But then he has a vision. Of Mulder. In a kitchen. Investigating a noise. Stepping in a pie.

“Banana cream! Definitely banana cream.”

Mulder, agent of the FBI, seeker of truth, champion of the unknown, is prophesied to be murdered while ankle-deep in dessert.

This is the episode’s sense of humor: cosmic, precise, and frosted.

But the real emotional core of the episode is Bruckman’s relationship with Scully. She doesn’t believe in psychics. She doesn’t believe in fate. But she kind of believes in him. They play poker. They bond over doilies. They sit together in a hotel room, and he quietly tells her how he sees their end: in bed, hand in hand, with her crying softly over his dying body.

It’s not romantic. It’s not sexual. It’s something gentler. Sadder. More tender than this show usually allows.

When she asks how she dies, Bruckman replies: “You don’t.” The line is delivered so quietly you might miss it. But it echoes. Even now, decades later, it still feels like a secret whispered into the fabric of the show.

The killer, who we will call Puppet because that’s what he calls himself, is also having visions. He kills people because he thinks he’s supposed to. He seeks out fortune tellers to ask why. This is less a plot than a tragic loop: a murderer who wants answers from people who charge by the crystal ball.

Eventually, he ends up face-to-face with Clyde Bruckman. And what does Bruckman say, this reluctant prophet, this weary seer of all things?

“You do the things you do because you’re a homicidal maniac.”

Even the most mystical visions of death can be explained by psychology and blunt force common sense.

The pie vision, of course, comes true. Mulder steps in banana cream. He does not die, thanks to Scully and a well-timed bullet. But Clyde Bruckman’s final repose has already been arranged. He takes his own life, as predicted, offscreen. He leaves a note. He leaves a dog. He leaves Scully holding his hand, just as he said she would.

The last shot is Scully on the couch, alone, watching Laurel and Hardy. The screen flickers. A fake psychic hawks a hotline number. The future, he says, is only a phone call away.

Make it! Banana Cream Pie by Smitten Kitchen.