So it turns out Maleeni really was amazing, wasn't he? I loved the long con in this episode, though I guessed just before Mulder did that LaBonge was in on the con.
I enjoy close up magic. Misdirection and sleight of hand are the best kind of trickery because they're so simple and yet so easy to fall for. I remember once seeing Penn and Teller perform a series of cup and ball tricks with clear plastic cups. I figured it would be easy to follow and all their secrets would be revealed. Nope. Not a chance. I still lost track of the ball.
Of course, a huge piece of misdirection in the form of stealing $1.8 million and framing someone for it in order to steal significantly more money isn't exactly close up magic or sleight of hand. But it's certainly as deceptive. And it's deceptive not just in terms of misleading the characters in the show, but the viewers, too.
Before I talk more about the actual plot of the episode, I want to bring up something I've noticed in the series in general. It turns out that some episodes have a tendency to tread water until they reach some critical point where a major factor is revealed that leads Mulder and Scully (or the audience) to crack the case. And if that build up is written well enough, we don't even notice what's going on, or that the episode hasn't really gone anywhere.
The way this is often remedied is with good banter between Mulder and Scully. And in 'The Amazing Maleeni', it plays perfectly into the idea of misdirection. Because this episode did take a little while to get moving, but that didn't really detract from it like in say, 'Rush', where Mulder and Scully were barely involved at all. In this episode, the downtime was filled with some routine investigative scenes, along with some really awesome conversations between them and Mulder doing coin tricks for Scully, which actually managed to impress her.
This is what the series is built on, and I think a lot of the cases don't - or shouldn't - really have to take up 45 minutes all by themselves, so the more time we get to watch these two incredible characters interact and play off each other, the better. And the episodes that lack these kinds of conversations often suffer for it.
Anyway.
I did think that maybe they could have had something more interesting planned than an EFT heist, but since there was really no investigation of that, and Mulder ostensibly stopped it by confiscating the tools they would have needed to pull it off, I think it doesn't really matter. It just seems a little anticlimactic when you consider just how good these two guys were at what they were doing. Well, they did get their revenge - or rather, LaBonge's revenge - against Alvarez.
And even that was kind of glossed over a little bit. The main focus really was the con itself, and we still fell for it.
I also like that despite his deception within his act, Maleeni, a.k.a. Pinchbeck, was an honest person who refused to cheat at cards and was kind of appalled at Scully's suggestion that he could. To be honest, I was kind of surprised it was Scully who suggested it, though the site I'm using for the scripts mentions the previous episode, 'Orison', in referencing the guilty look Scully gives when he calls her on it. So maybe she's still feeling like maybe someone else is in control.
But I'd have expected that from Mulder. He'd totally ask why an expert at manipulating a deck of cards couldn't cheat at poker. Or the Lone Gunmen, because they could have used some tips in 'Three of a Kind'. Actually, there's been rather a lot of poker lately, hasn't there?
I checked out the credits on this one, too, because I wondered if they used actors who were also skilled illusionists or if all the tricks they showed were manipulated using cheap camera trickery. It turns out that no, the actors really are primarily stage magicians. Ricky Jay (Pinchbeck) and Jonathan Levit (LaBonge) are both magicians, which leads me to believe that all the tricks shown in the episode were actually performed for the camera rather than faked. And that's a good thing.
And it also means that Mulder and Scully's reactions to them may well be David Duchovny's and Gillian Anderson's to some degree, because some of those tricks were pretty impressive.
The only thing we're still not quite sure of is how Maleeni managed to turn his head 360 degrees, or even give the appearance of doing it while keeping his body perfectly still. Or how LaBonge snatched Mulder's and Scully's badges, because that's not just misdirection so much as being so quick they didn't notice. ('Rush'?) Otherwise, most of the tricks are pretty straightforward.
I'm somewhat curious about how easy or hard it is to turn one's hand 360 degrees like Scully did at the end, but I don't want to hurt myself. I'm just going to assume I wouldn't be able to without breaking something.
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