Página PrincipalInternal dating: The teaser is set September 16 1995. Mulder and Scully investigate from September 19-22 1995.
Three days later, another fortune teller's eyes and entrails have been found in her apartment, the latest of a string of similar murders. At the crime scene, the police talk amongst themselves about the "unorthodox" help they've called in - "very spooky", they say of the mysterious man they've summoned. Mulder then makes his appearance and the camera lingers on him, dramatically. "Who the Hell are you?" Detective Cline, the officer in charge asks him. Mulder introduces himself and Scully, but the police have forgotten they're coming. Mulder thinks the killer is using the entrails in an attempt to see his future, as people sometimes used to believe you could do.
With a great amount of media fuss, the Stupendous Yappi arrives and starts a wonderful performance of finding out about the killer by psychic means. His statements are singularly general, but the detectives write them down avidly, while Mulder and Scully exchange a look. Suddenly Yappi stops, saying someone is emitting negative energy which blocks his vision. He looks searchingly at Scully, before focusing on Mulder and telling him to leave the room. Mulder assures him he's a believer in psychic ability. "So you say with your mouth," Yappi says, "but your thoughts tell me the truth." "Can't take you anywhere," Scully mutters to him as he's thrown out.
Yappi leaves, telling Mulder that "Sceptics like you make me sick," as he passes him at the door. Mulder is allowed back in and tells the police that Yappi is talking nonsense, making his predictions so vague as to be meaningless. Cline confidently reads out the description given by Yappi, seemingly oblivious to how vague it is ("a white male, 17-34, with or without a beard, maybe has a tattoo, who's impotent.") "May as well go home, Mulder. This case is as good as solved," Scully mutters.
Bruckman tries to sell insurance to a young couple. Staring into space, he tells them that in two years time the young man will be killed very gruesomely so will desperately need insurance. "Mister, you really need to work on your closing technique," the man says.
Bruckman arrives home, getting a quick flash of his own face in plastic when he picks up a lettuce in a plastic bag. He collects the garbage from his elderly neighbour, who, confused, hands him her lighter instead. When he touches it he gets a flash of her little dog eating at her body. "You have enough dog food?" he asks her, anxiously. He takes the garbage down to the dumpster, where he finds the body of the fortune teller seen being killed in the teaser.
Police and public gather at the crime scene, and the killer mingles with the crowd. Cline sees the discovery of the body in a Dumpster as proof of Yappi's abilities, as he'd said the body was dumped somewhere. "Ooh I just got a chill down my spine," Mulder says. He and Scully talk to Bruckman and find out he knows certain facts about the death that he shouldn't know.
Mulder takes Bruckman to the fortune teller's room and tells him a woman was killed here by the same killer as killed the woman he found. "I didn't do it," Bruckman says, but Mulder says he's not under suspicion. "But I do harbour a suspicion that you can see things about this crime - things that we can't see," he says. Bruckman, suspiciously, asks to see their badges again. "I don't blame you, Mr Bruckman," Scully mutters. Bruckman peers at Mulder's ID. "I'm supposed to believe that's a real name?" he asks. He again protests that there's no way he can know anything, but then he sees the blood on the floor, freezes for a while, then rushes out to be sick.
Scully thinks Bruckman's performing the same routine as Yappi, though in a different style. "So now you're psychic?" she asks him, when Mulder says that "something" is telling him Bruckman's for real. When Bruckman returns, looking shaken, he says that the killer sees himself as a puppet, controlled by forces outside his control. He can see into the killer's mind, but can't see what he looks like. He muses about the events and decisions that shape people's life, but again freezes, seeing one of the fortune teller's dolls with a bloody and horrible face. Picking up the doll, he tells them the body will be found in a certain lake, near the "fat little white Nazi stormtrooper." He then excuses himself, saying he's seen too much death for one evening.
The lake is searched and the body found, and once again the killer mingles with the crowd. Mulder points to a propane tank and asks Scully if it looks like a fat little white Nazi stormtrooper. She talks about the natural propensity to see meaningful images in random patterns. When pressed, she admits that he's right, but thinks that only proofs her point. Mulder still asserts that Bruckman's psychic. "Maybe he's just lucky," Scully smiles.
Mulder visits Bruckman, who looks weary. "I won't help you. Please leave," he says. He admits to having the gift, but says he wishes he didn't have it. "Most people, myself included, would be envious," Mulder says. Bruckman asks him if he wants to know how he's going to die. "Yes," Mulder says, looking shaken. "Yes, I would." "No you don't," Bruckman tells him. He says there's nothing he can do to stop the murders, and the future is written anyway. "If the future is written why bother to do anything?" Mulder asks. "Now you're catching on," Bruckman says. Mulder repeats that they should do everything they can to stop the killer. Bruckman gives a long explanation of why interfering with the time line could change history and resort on all sorts of paradoxes. "So when do we start?" he says, at the end.
Mulder gives Bruckman all sorts of objects from the crime scene, asking him to say what he sees in them. Bruckman is still truculent, giving him useless information like "it's ugly," but Mulder seems more like an enthusiastic schoolboy, awed by his talent. By the time Scully arrives, Mulder has grown disillusioned, telling her Bruckman can only predict people's deaths - nothing else. In a sly reference to Beyond the Sea, Bruckman interrupts to say the piece of cloth he's holding comes from Mulder's New York Knicks T-shirt (which is doesn't). Scully then gives Bruckman a key chain taken from the dead woman's body. It has an insignia on it, belonging to the company run by a man called Claude Duckenfield. Bruckman says the man's been murdered.
Led by Bruckman, Mulder and Scully drive to the place where he says Duckenfield's body is to be found. From the back of the car Mulder interrogates him about the methods by which he receives the information, and Bruckman gets irritated by his frequent and enthusiastic questions. "I just know," he says. "How do you know?" Mulder persists. "I don't know!" he shouts. He then moderates his voice and speaks casually. "You know, there are worse ways to go but I can't think of a more undignified one than auto-erotic asphyxiation," he says. "Why are you telling me that?" Mulder asks. "Bruckman shrugs. "Look. Forget I mentioned it. It's none of my business."
They arrive at the spot where the body should be. As the walk through the woods, Bruckman explains how the death of the Big Bopper gave him his powers. The Big Bopper got a seat on Buddy Holly's plane by flipping a coin, and was thus killed only by a string of chance events. He grew so obsessed with thinking this that he became able to see the chain of events that lead to future deaths. Scully says that, even if she was the sort of person to believe this sort of thing, she would never believe this story. Despite all his powers, however, they can't find the body. When they prepare to leave they find their car stuck in the mud. Trying to push it out gives Mulder a nice splattering of mud all over his legs, but also reveals a body beneath the car.
The only evidence found on the body is a fibre. Scully wants to send it to the lab, but Mulder insists that Bruckman see what he can get from it first. "I'm desperate for some insurance," Mulder tells him. Bruckman takes the fibre and tells him the killer will kill more people before he's done. "I've seen some of things he's seen," he says. Mulder asks what the killer's seen, and Bruckman tells him the killer sees him, Mulder, tracking him through a kitchen. As Mulder steps in a pie and looks down at his feet, the killer, who has a knife, creep up and.... "Coconut cream," Bruckman says, reflectively, "or is it lemon meringue?" Even Scully looks anxious by now. "please continue," Mulder urges him impatiently, and Bruckman does. "As you're looking down, he comes up with a knife and.... banana cream!" Mulder again asks what happens next, but Bruckman says the vision has gone. "The visions of a madman," he says, although we have seen that he saw the killer slashing Mulder's throat. He then tells them he got a letter from the killer. "I know that you know," the killer writes, saying he will kill him, but only after he tells him why he's doing this. They decide to take Bruckman into protective custody, even though Bruckman says he will be dead before they catch the killer, no matter what they do.
The killer visits a tarot card reader, who tells him a woman will soon end his confusion. The last card is death, and the killer says it's meant for the tarot card reader, not for him.
September 21. Clyde Bruckman is in a hotel room, guarded by Scully. Scully is working slowly through background checks, saying this is what detective work is really about - hard work not visions. Later, Bruckman tells her he sees them in bed together. She's holding his hand and looking at him with compassion, while he's crying, feeling grateful. "It's just a very special moment neither of us will ever forget." Scully tries to suppress laughter, saying "there are hits and there are misses, then there are misses." "I just call em when I see em," he says. Later still, she's just finished telling him the plot of Moby Dick, when Mulder knocks at the door. "Still you're not the least bit curious?" he asks her, as she stands up to answer the door. "All right," she says, "so how do I die?" "You don't," Bruckman says, smugly.
The lab results show that the fibre found on the body were Chantilly lace, the name of a Big Bopper song mentioned earlier by Bruckman. "It's a coincidence," Scully says, firmly.
In Bruckman's hotel room, Mulder is on night duty, lying on the bed reading while cracking sunflower seeds. "I'm waiting for you to ask me another of those psychic ability questions," Bruckman says. Not heeding the tone of his voice, Mulder proceeds to ask him another question. He's had prophetic dreams himself, he says, and wonders if Bruckman does too. Bruckman, after receiving assurance that Mulder's not a Freudian, relates his recurring dream in which he decomposes in a field of flowers. "Well, good night," he says, after the pleasant bedtime story, turning off the light.
Next morning, Mulder is tousled and weary. "I just didn't sleep well," he says. Scully tells him about the tarot reader's death, and says Detective Havez will guard Bruckman while they go to the crime scene. Mulder says he's losing patience with Bruckman, who never gives anything useful. Scully, on the other hand, is warming to him, saying his belief that he can see the future has taken the joy from his life.
Havez anxiously asks Bruckman if he's going to die of lung cancer. "Thank God!" he sighs, when Bruckman shakes his head. He borrows Bruckman's lighter to light another cigarette, then goes to the bathroom. When Bruckman takes the lighter back he gasps with horror. The bellhop (the killer) comes in just then, and the two of them stare at each other in recognition. They talk together calmly about the unlikelihood of this meeting, then the killer asks Bruckman why he does the things he does. "Because you're a homicidal maniac," Bruckman says, and the killer, looking as if a light's come on in his head, says this explains everything. He then moves to kill Bruckman, but Bruckman says "you don't kill me now." the killer kills Havez instead.
There are lots of clues at the scene of the tarot card's murder. "This case is now just about good old-fashioned forensic police work," Cline says, dismissing the need for psychics or even hunches. Just then Scully finds another strand of fibre and works out, in a hunch, that the killer's the bellhop at the hotel. "How the Hell did she know that?" Cline asks. "Women's intuition," Mulder says.
At the hotel, Scully finds Havez's body but no sign of Bruckman. Mulder catches sight of the killer and chases him through the kitchen, just as Bruckman described. Remembering Bruckman's warnings, he turns round, but is still attacked and cut on the hand. Just as the killer is about to kill him, Scully comes in and shoots. "Hey! That's not the way it's supposed to happen," the killer says, as he falls down dead.
Mulder and Scully go to Bruckman's house. His neighbour's dog is tied in the corridor, with a letter asking Scully if she'll have him as his owner is dead (and half-eaten as well!) Inside Bruckman'S apartment they find Bruckman lying on the bed, dead from an overdose. His face is encased in plastic and tears of condensation run down his face. As in his vision, Scully sadly holds his hand.
At home, Scully, cuddling the dog, watches television on her couch. The Stupendous Yappi appears on an advert, urging viewers to pick up their phones and call him. She picks up her phone, and throws it at the television.
For the record, the dog reappears in War of the Coprophages, and Quagmire. Other Darin Morgan episodes are Humbug, War of the Coprophages and Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'.
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