YOUTUBE:[]
PLOT:[]
The episode opens in Liv's bed, where she and Major enjoy the afterglow of fooling around, both talking themselves into "this is good enough that sex won't be an issue."
She tells Major that she has to be careful, because it isn't easy to live with someone whose personality changes every time she eats. Major tells her that he can take it to be with her.
Cut to a hotel; the maid walks past a magician in the hallway, and then enters a room to clean it. After a few moments, she screams and runs out. Inside, a man in goth makeup is dead on the ground with a playing card in his throat.
When Liv and Ravi arrive, there's a terrible smell in the room. Clive tells them that there were no signs of forced entry. The victim was a magician, there for a convention called PrestoFest. He has a recording in his bag about how he had defeated death.
They question the maid, who says nobody had come and gone from the room that she saw, but she had heard an argument in the room.
Ravi calls Clive and Liv to the other room, where he had found a dead fish in the garbage can, with a note that said "Here's a gift for your fellow magicians, enjoy the decay."
After eating "Sid Wicked's" brain, Liv is almost immediately doing card tricks. Ravi is loving the experience.
Clive shows Liv the security tapes from the hotel: nobody except hotel staff came and went during the time Wicked was staying there. Ravi figures that the murder itself is a magic trick.
The next morning, Ravi gets up and goes downstairs to find Peyton dancing in her boxers. When the two start to talk, Ravi wants advice about his relationship issues, but Peyton starts using the blender to avoid the conversation. Major comes in and says Liv has been a bit odd, but Ravi says it's the brain and it will pass. Major has a few follow-up questions about the brains, and seems nervous.
At the morgue, Liv is doing Tarot cards over the body. Blaine comes to see her, saying that the missing men the FBI are investigating are zombies. He wants her help stopping whoever is killing zombies.
Liv is reluctant to help him, but he pushes. He wants to find out what Bozzio is learning, so that they can stay ahead of the investigation's curve.
When Ravi comes back, Blaine leaves and Liv tells Ravi the situation.
In interrogation, Sid's lovely assistant denies killing him, saying that everyone hated him. She suggests checking out his many online feuds with other magicians, including some whose best tricks he had "hacked" on YouTube.
Back at the morgue, Ravi agrees to do it. He can't come on their next interview, though, because he's got a date.
At home, Steph has set up a (late) Guy Fawkes Day celebration -- it's a bit crazy, and Ravi is clearly uncomfortable. He sucks down a beer.
At Houdina's magic show, Liv is "hacking" the tricks to Clive when Houdina calls her up to volunteer. The trick? She throws cards and uses tempered-metal edges to cut things. During the trick, Liv has a vision of Houdina in a wedding dress, throwing her engagement ring at Sid. Liv lifts the card before she leaves the stage and finds out the card that killed Sid is missing from Houdina's deck.
After she "vanishes" during her act, the pair follow her to her hotel room. She downplays her relationship with Sid, saying the engagement was a long time ago and they broke up becuase he got too into the whole goth/death thing. She believes he faked his death, no matter what Liv says.
That night, Liv finds out Clive has a date with Bozzio. Liv and Blaine are staking out Bozzio's house so they can break in and see what paperwork Clive has. Instead, though, Clive and Bozzio decide to stay in and fool around and the two have to come back the next day.
In the morning, Steph comes in to wake up Ravi, who just can't take her level of enthusiasm and breaks it off with her. She storms out.
The next morning, Liv breaks into Bozzio's apartment while she's at the gym. The pair start digging through the files. They don't find anything too revelatory, but before they go, Bozzio gets a delivery from the FBI test lab, indicating that the brain from Suzuki's fridge has been tested and it's human. Liv says they can't let Bozzio get it, but she thinks she can forge a replacement to reduce suspicion.
At the convention, Babineaux is having nothing but luck at three-card monte. Clive and Liv go question another magician about the death; he says that his feud with Sid started when Wicked used to be his opening act and gave him a terrible blurb for his autobiography. It, too, used the word "decay," and the magician admits that he did in fact send the dead fish, but that he has an alibi for the day of the death: a pretty girl approached him to fool around in the bathroom.
Liv and Clive don't believe the guy's story, but can't prove anything.
At home, Liv ruminates on the meaning of life and death in front of a vase of wilting flowers. Major is trying to keep it positive. Liv reveals that the missing rich people are zombies. She worries she could be next, and when he says he promises he won't let that happen, she says that's not something he can promise.
At the mortuary, Blaine is playing the organ and singing when Peyton comes to let him know that Boss might have an idea of who the DA's source was. The two talk a bit, and flirt a bit.
At the morgue, Liv is doctoring the FBI findings while Ravi reads mean tweets directed at Sid. They find that a local comedy duo whose star is on the rise -- Smoak and Meers -- had a recent beef with Sid in which he threatened to "hack" their most famous trick.
Liv and Clive go and interrupt the two filming a cable special, asking about Sid. They say their alibi is that they were watching the Houdina show, and that she had "disappeared" at the end and not come back. They think maybe she was the one who killed him, but when they go, she explains her trick and gives them some advice: If a trick is done well, the answer is right in front of you.
Armed with that bit of wisdom, they realize the killer had to be the maid -- the only person they know for sure was in there with the dead body. They head to the hotel to look for her, but not only hasn't she been back to work in a while, but she was an undocumented immigrant, so they have no contact information or address.
Liv sees some writing on a white board and says the maid is still in the hotel. Clive, Liv and the maid's supervisor head to the convention floor. Liv excuses herself briefly, while Clive finds Smoak and Meers and places Meers under arrest.
Liv brings a dining cart into the room, and reveals that Meers was in fact a woman -- the maid -- and that she had taken the job specifically in order to kill Syd.
Liv pulls the table cloth off the dining cart, revealing the pretty girl who had lured the older magician into the bathroom, destroying his alibi to set him up.
At Bozzio's apartment, Liv drops the freshly-doctored paperwork into her mail slot, but a black woman in a jacket is watching the building from afar.
At home, Peyton and Ravi have a brief, awkward encounter. Ravi makes a move on her, but she says she kind of met somebody. The two part ways for the night.
At Bozzio's, the woman from earlier comes to the door and nervously hovers over the doorbell. In the bedroom, Clive is frustrated by the fact that it's just a cow's brain and not something he can use to further his investigation. Outside, the woman doesn't ring the bell, but leaves a large, padded envelope marked "occupant" on the doorstep.
Major comes home to find Liv doing a seance with a Ouija board, something that puts him off enough that he goes up to bed instead of stopping to talk to her. She hears him pass and calls out to him but he's already gone.
WHO'S WHO:[]
CHARACTERS | ITEMS | PLACES | GROUPS | EASTER EGGS |
---|---|---|---|---|
OLIVIA MOORE | ||||
DR. RAVI CHAKRABARTI | ||||
DETECTIVE CLIVE BABINAUX | ||||
MAJOR LILYWHITE | ||||
PEYTON CHARLES | ||||
SMOAK | ||||
IRINA | ||||
DALE BOZZIE | ||||
ANGEL | ||||
THE MAGNIFICENT MAGNUS | ||||
MYSTERY WOMAN | ||||
SYD WICKED | ||||
STEPH | ||||
DIRECTOR | ||||
DESTINY | ||||
HANNAH | ||||
TEENAGE MAGICAN | ||||
OFFICER WATTS | ||||
PRESTOFEST STAFF | ||||