Écrit par: Frank Spotnitz
Réalisé par: Thomas J. Wright
Première Diffusion: 16 Janvier 2000
DISTRIBUTION:
RÉSUMÉ: Tandis que les agents Mulder et Scully enquêtent une horrible mort inexplicable d'un magicien, ils sont entraînés dans un monde de magie et d'illusion et apprennent que, à première vue, les choses ne sont pas ce qu'elles semblent être.
LIEU: Santa Monica
DATE: Printemps 2000
At the Santa Monica pier amusement park, a magician, The Amazing Maleeni, puts on a sideshow but does fairly basic tricks and talks a lot. A heckler complains that the tricks are 100 years old and demands something big. Maleeni announces a trick to reattach a severed head and rotates his head 360 degrees. Later, when the park employee comes to his van to pay him, he finds Maleeni sitting in his van and his head rolls off his body and onto the pavement.
Mulder & Scully are at the park looking at the van. Scully is not intrigued. She thinks the trick is unrelated to the subsequent murder. Mulder thinks it is a magic trick gone wrong. A tourist videotaped the performance. On the tape the agents see the heckler. They find a soda cup seen thrown away on the tape and track him down from finger prints. His name is LeBonge and he has a criminal record for pick pocketing. He also does slight of hand and claims that Maleeni was a bad magician. LeBonge demonstrates a similar trick, rotating his hand 360 degrees, and says Maleeni had little originality or style. He also says Maleeni racked up some big gambling debts. Scully does an autopsy and is bewildered. Maleeni's head was carefully sawed off and reattached with spirit gum. But he apparently died of a heart attack and had been dead for over a month and refrigerated. LeBonge goes to a pool hall and talks to a man named Alverez, whose body is covered with tattoos. They were in prison together. LeBonge asks if he wants to get back the money Maleeni owed him and Alverez is intrigued.
At a bank, Mulder and Scully talk to a banker who looks just like Maleeni - with a cervical collar around his neck. He is Maleeni's twin brother, named Pinchback. He does a card trick for Mulder and explains that years ago he and his brother worked as a magic act. He was in a recent car accident but Mulder wonders if he was the magician who appeared at Santa Monica Pier as one last act for which his brother would always been remembered. It is revealed that Pinchback is in a wheelchair with no legs as a result of the accident. The agents go back to LeBonge for advice. He looks through Maleeni's van but does not find where the body might have been hidden. Mulder finds a gambling marker in the van. Meanwhile, Pinchback visits the bank vault and asks the guard about his gun, examining it briefly. Alverez walks in and threatens Pinchback, saying he wants him to pay his brother's gambling debt. An armored car stops along the street when the guards hear a noise. They open the back and a masked and tattooed man is there. The guard shoots but the man disappears. It was LeBonge - he had fake tattoos on his hands and cleans them off.
The agents question Alverez about the marker and he denies being involved with the murder. Mulder tells Scully he thinks they are subject to a case of misdirection. LeBonge watches them as they drive off. He places an emergency call to police then enters the pool hall where Alverez threatens him. LeBonge runs out, police arrive and arrest him. Mulder and Scully return to talk to Pinchback. Mulder pushes him out of the wheelchair - and it turns out that he does have legs. He is the magician who was afraid for his life because he owes a lot of money. He went to his brother for a loan and found him dead. He saw it as an opportunity to become someone else. He faked the car accident and his loss of legs. He is arrested but Mulder doesn't believe his explanation about why. Scully learns about the armored car robbery attempt - Pinchback was the authorizing signature that signed out the truck. In the jail cell, LeBonge is next door to Pinchback - they are obviously in league with each other and everything is going perfectly.
At the bank the next morning the vault is found empty. The security footage is blank, but from a couple of days earlier they find footage of Alverez in the bank and the guard recognizes his tattoos as the guy who was in the truck. At the pool hall, the money is found and Alverez is arrested, but he claims it's a frame-up. Mulder and Scully suspect that LeBonge and Pinchback may be working together. As they are to be released on bail the agents question them. They think that LeBonge was Maleeni's protegee and it was a setup from the beginning. Maleeni switched the bullets in the guard's gun clip to be blanks. They used escape artist techniques to get out of jail, stole the money and got back into jail. But Mulder says they will go free, because it can't be proven. Pinchback says, "The great ones always know when to leave the stage." It turns out, though, that Mulder has Pinchback's wallet, taken from the evidence room. Why have so elaborate a puzzle? Mulder says the trick was really about Electronic Funds Transfers, and an FBI agent has the authority to get into the bank EFT system. The magicians now have Mulder's badge number and thumb print from Pinchback's card trick, but the card is in the wallet, so they will not be able to steal via EFT. The final question is how did Maleeni turn his head all the way around. Scully demonstrates how she can turn her arm all the way around, as LeBonge did. Mulder is left wondering how she did it. Magic, she replies.
Un conte léger sur la magie. Un magicien qui apparaît dans l'épisode est Ricky Jay. Il est apparu dans "Mystery Men", "Tommorow Never Dies", "Boggie Nights" et "Magnolia".
Scully va performer une autre autopsie.
L’histoire ressemble quelque peu au film "The Sting". Maleeni représente le personnage que jouait Paul Newman et LaBonge est une représentation du personnage interprété par Robert Redford.
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