Season 1, Episode 5 — ‘Lucky Charms’ – TVLine

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The Irrational Recap: Alec's Church-Bombing Investigation Suffers a Terrible Setback"/> <meta class="swiftype" name="body" data-type="text" content="A city founded on poor choices, backed by inauspicious odds? Sounds like a goldmine of irrational choices! Yep, this week, Alec & Co. are heading to Las Vegas.

In this week’s The Irrational, a former student’s gaming woes lure the professor and his team — which now includes sister Kylie on the payroll — to investigate a potential cheating scam at a Sin City poker tournament. But while they’re gone, Marisa makes important headway on the church-bombing case… only to see it vanish before her eyes in the hour’s final moments.

Read on for the highlights of “Lucky Charms.”

ANTE UP | In Las Vegas, at a big poker tournament called Royal Flush Rumble, a guy named Ethan Steele (played by Curtis Lum, Siren) wins a huge hand, telling his opponent, “Just got lucky I guess.”

Kylie and Alec are at the office when the phone rings: It’s Camille Lawson (Jocelyn Hudon, When Hope Calls), the opponent who got trounced in the tournament, and she happens to be a former student of Alec’s. She thinks that the guy who beat her is cheating, and she wants Alec to come to Las Vegas to see if her suspicions are correct. He points out that surely there are security teams there to deal with all of this, but she’s insistent. “Camille, how much trouble are you in?” he asks, concerned. “Enough to call you,” she says, sounding a little scared. We soon learn that she owes a lot of money to a shady guy with a gun.

Alec brings Kylie, Rizwan and Phoebe with him to Sin City. Phoebe tells Rizwan that Camille was Alec’s former head research assistant, or “Phoebe before Phoebe,” as Riz puts it. But she abandoned the program about 18 months ago and headed out to Nevada.

CAMILLE’S IN DEEP | After Camille points Ethan out, Alec approaches him at a bar and pretends to be a giant fan who’s also a book publisher. The professor’s deep, insightful strategy for trying to figure out if Ethan is cheating seems to be… uh, just ask him how he wins. Ethan says his secret is a mermaid keyring that he found and that has become his lucky token. Alec doubts that, so he has Kylie essentially pickpocket it from the guy. But Ethan still wins.

Alec is trying to get Camille to tell him exactly why she HAS to win this tournament when they go to her room… and the shady guy with a gun (and his friend) are waiting for them. They’re loan sharks, and she owes them $2 million. With a little smooth talking from Alec, the sharks agree not to take any collateral in lieu of late payment, but they do add an additional five percent onto her bill and give her a looming new deadline. After they leave, Alec firmly insists that she tell him what’s really going on.

“Everything was going fine until I played Ethan in a cash game two weeks ago,” she says. “Something about his game that night was different… he had an edge.” His success threw her, and her game suffered. She spent all of her money and then wound up taking cash from the sharks. Now, she’s on the verge of being in deep debt, and her mother might lose the house Camille bought for her.

ANOTHER LUCKY STREAK? | Alec and Kylie bring their suspicions about Ethan to the tournament organizer; soon after, Ethan drops out of the competition, allowing Camille to advance. Alec and Kylie — as well as the loan sharks — observe from afar as another player beats Camille in the same way Ethan did.

Alec theorizes that someone is getting help from behind the scenes, so he and Kylie start chatting up the crew. But as Alec heads backstage to talk with the assistant director, the sharks grab him and inform him that he’s now Camille’s collateral. “You’re not going to professor your way out of this one,” the lead shark growls… but then Alec does just that as he sweet-talks them into helping him find Ethan. Alec reasons that figuring out how the game is rigged is a much better use of their collective time — and much more likely to recoup their money than breaking his legs would be — and they reluctantly agree.

HOW THE SCAM WORKS | The sharks’ pursuit of Ethan chases him up a billboard, literally, so they bring Alec out to talk the guy down. When he’s back on the ground, he confesses that he got a text from an anonymous number saying there was a guaranteed way for him to win. He agreed to an 80/20 split with his mysterious benefactor, who provided him with a device he’d wear in his shoe which would pulse different numbers of times to instruct him how to proceed in the game.

“It’s almost offensive how basic the mechanics are,” Kylie says. Alec thinks Camille’s new opponent, Hank, is using the same type of device, run by the same people. So he enlists Camille, Rizwan, Phoebe and Kylie in an elaborate ruse to smoke out what’s really going on. Well, no, that’s making it sound too cool. Kylie messes with the signal to the device, leaving Hank wondering why it won’t stop buzzing under his toes. And they pass out iced coffees to those watching to see who drinks theirs most aggressively, which some silly theory says will indicate who’s the most surprised by how the game unfolds — it ain’t exactly Ocean’s Eleven. Like, if you saw me on a Monday morning going to town on my usual gigantic iced macchiato, you’d think I was the criminal mastermind at hand here. SOME PEOPLE JUST REALLY LIKE COFFEE, OK?

That said, Alec his team watch the tournament advisor witness what’s going on and suck down her iced coffee with gusto. The only other person we’ve met so far is guilty? YOU DON’T SAY! Camille wins the tournament, to her loan sharks’ great delight. Mom can keep her house! Immediately after, the FBI wants to talk to the organizer. Busted!

A NEW LEAD | Jace gets irritated with Marisa when her fervor for solving the church bombing takes precedent over a newer case they’re working on together. Her latest break: The drycleaner’s daughter told her that the shop never owned a van, just an SUV, so the van that drove away from the crime scene that night must’ve had a fake logo on it. (Side bar: Seriously? It’s taken us five episodes to find out this very simple piece of information that could’ve been gleaned weeks ago off an initial phone call with the woman?) So Marisa brings in the logo designer for questioning.

The guy is a jerk who doesn’t want to help, but when Marisa hints that she knows he does custom (fake) vehicle wraps for various illegal businesses, and threatens to send him to jail so long “you will never see your kids again,” he changes his mind. He suddenly remembers a “scruffy white dude” with a messy tattoo of the number eight on his hand, looking to duplicate the dry cleaners’ brand.

Jace later swings by Marisa’s office to apologize for getting testy with her earlier. “I’m not gonna lie: When it comes to Alec, it’s still hard for me to know where I stand.” She reassures him that he’s the one she wants to be with, then they discuss the new intel she has on the bombing. He suggests that maybe the eight tattoo is actually an infinity sign, a hallmark of the New Apostles fundamentalist movement. By process of elimination, they hone in on a New Apostles member who was living about 15 miles from the church at the time of the bombing.

She calls Alec with the news that she thinks they’ve found a key figure in the bombing — the guy who faked the logo confirms it’s him — and Alec plans to meet her at the suspect’s house. But when he gets there, the place is roped off with police tape: The suspect killed himself a few hours before Marisa and Jace arrived. “He was our best chance at finding out the truth,” Alec says, crestfallen. “Now, he’s gone.”