Plot
A man by the name of Henry Weems wins $100,000 playing poker against a mobster named Joe Cutrona, though Weems appears ignorant of the basic rules of poker. Suspecting that Weems cheated, Cutrona attempts to kill him by throwing him off the 29th story of a building. After Weems lands in an access hatch to a basement, he stands right back up and walks away, completely uninjured. Two agents in a car stationed outside witness the event and eventually tell Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who promptly take the case. Mulder initially believes the man has the ability to cure himself, but Scully thinks he may just be very lucky by landing in a pile of laundry
The agents track down Weems, a handyman at an apartment building. He refuses to testify against Cutrona. Weems has a fascination with Rube Goldberg Machines. As such, his apartment is filled with them.After meeting with Weems, Mulder agrees with Scully concluding that his luck is the X-File in question. As the agents begin to leave the complex, one of Cutrona's enforcers comes to kill Weems. However, the assassin dies in an improbable cascade of events reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg machine: after accidentally shooting a lamp that knocks over an ironing board, the gunman trips over the ironing board and ends up getting strangled in a fan. The two agents rush back up stairs and find Weems unscathed. Weems notes he was also the sole survivor of a commuter jet crash that killed 20 people in December 1989, where he was placed in Seat 13 of Flight 7: lucky numbers.
Weems picks up a lottery ticket and wins $100,000 but learns that it would take 12 months to get the money, so he throws the ticket away. A man picks the ticket out of the trash and is then hit by a truck after Weems warned him that "something bad will happen." Later, Mulder comes to question Weems again and another one of Cutrona's enforcers comes to kill Weems but his bullet ricochets off Weems' pocket knife and kills the enforcer. Weems confesses that he's been trying to find a way to get $100,000 to pay for an expensive medical treatment for the serious illness a boy in his apartment building, Richie (Shia LaBeouf), has. Weems attempts at getting the money, however, have brought him above the radar. Later, after Weems is hit by a car, it appears that Henry's lucky streak has reached its end. Cutrona kidnaps Richie's mom, Maggie, to stop Henry from testifying against him. Henry is also taken but all the mobsters are killed in a bizarre turn of events. In the end, it turns out that Cutrona is an organ donor and a perfect match for Richie, who gets the treatment.
Read more about this topic: The Goldberg Variation (The X-Files)
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—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
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—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)