Fingore / Live-Action TV

• 1000 Ways to Die: In "Bot-ily Harm", a college-age dude rigs a robot with spinning blades to start up by detecting motion with infrared sensors. While working on another robot, he accidentally drops a screw. The robot sees it while the creator bends down for the screw.
  • In USSR-Dead, a would-be Russian mobster gets this done to him with sulphuric acid so he won't leave fingerprints. Then he and the dudes who did it end up drinking the acid by accident.
  • In another case, a Yakuza boss performs a sort-of Yubitsume on a karaoke singer and then swallows it whole. One of his henchmen tries the Heimlich maneuver and does it incorrectly, killing the boss.
  • And in yet another case, a bad actor with a criminal record tampers with his gun to kill the dude who got the leading role in a B-movie over him. The gun was so over-charged that, when fired, it blew the guy's hand off alongside firing a piece of metal into his thigh and cutting a large artery, killing him.
• 24:
  • During Day 6, Jack infiltrates the Russian Consulate to interrogate Anatoly Markov, who's working with a terrorist. When Markov refuses to talk, Jack cuts his pinkie finger off with a cigar cutter.
  • Henry Taylor, the husband of the president in the seventh season gets a finger cut off after being captured by the terrorist of the moment. The terrorist threatens to continue cutting them off one-by-one, but when the president doesn't give in, he decides she's not going to break and orders him killed, but he gets rescued (though not before getting shot.)
  • In 24: Live Another Day, we get two counts. First, the Big Bad chops off the finger of her own daughter to manipulate the daughter's husband, who was having second thoughts, despite the daughter being loyal (until not too long after that; this is about when we, and the rest of the characters, realize just how Ax-Crazy she is.) Later, Jack smashes the fingers of The Mole because only when The Mole was transferred from a holding cell to the infirmary could he put his actual plan into action. In general, this miniseries averts the show's usual Torture Always Works philosophy and everyone, including Jack, has to get a bit smarter.
• All the damn time in Alias:
  • A woman is kidnapped and gets a power sander used on her hands to get her to cooperate. "The Box, Part 2", Arvin Sloane allows Jack Bristow to cut off his finger with a wire cutter so he could turn off a security system that required a fingerprint scan.
  • Sloane gets mailed his wife's finger to prove she's still alive.
  • The Derevko sisters have a disturbing tendency toward this. In "A Dark Turn", Irina stabs a bad guy in Bangkok through the hand with the knife he was using to play five-finger filet. In "Crossings", Katya takes metal chopsticks used for galbi in Koreatown and stabs another bad guy, though both hands this time.
• In Moody's Point, the Show Within a Show from The Amanda Show, Moody's father gets his toe chopped off by an anchor that Moody's friend brought over. Like everything in the series (which is an overdramatic parody of Teen Drama series), it's Played for Laughs. His toe ends up lost and due to the cliffhanger, it never is shown if he retrieves it. When Moody tries to donate one of her toes, it's revealed she is not her father's biological daughter. She was Switched at Birth.
  • In
• Arrested Development: GOB temporarily loses two of his fingers while performing a magic trick with Buster and a sword. "Handle first, handle firstMY FINGERS!"
• One episode of The A-Team mentioned as a torture method shoving bamboo under someone's fingernails.
• Band of Brothers: in the episode "Carentan" an American machine gunner is horrified when enemy fire takes off several of his fingers.
• Banshee:
  • In the pilot, the real Sheriff Lucas Hood gets shot through the hand, at the base of the fingers, which contributes to his death.
  • In a later first season episode, Fake Lucas gets into a brawl with MMA fighter Damien Sanchez while attempting to arrest him for rape and aggravated assault. Towards the end of the fight, Lucas tricks him into breaking his fingers with a punch to his elbow, then ends the fight by ripping Sanchez's fingers out of their sockets to the point of tearing the skin between the middle and ring fingers.
• In Battlestar Galactica, a Freud-wannabe Cylon prisoner notes that all of the first phalanges on Starbuck's right hand have a clean break right in the middle, and muses on the significance. We learn later that is was her mother, who put her hand in a door jamb and slammed the door, as punishment for a harmless prank. Ouch.
  • In the second episode of the prequel series Caprica, when the technician Drew is about to fix a damaged facial feature on Cylon-Zoe, she chops off his middle fingertip on his left hand, causing it to bleed profusely. Eight episodes later, Drew is shown to have a splint on the finger.
• Better Things: Duke's friend Pepper gets a fingertip cut off when Duke accidentally slams her finger in the car door.
• Series / Between: Ronnie Creeker cuts off a dead woman's finger to get her valuable ring.
• The first episode of Black Mirror has the kidnapper cut off the hostage's finger and then mail it to the press, complete with a lovely video of him doing it. In a twist, though, it turns out to be the kidnapper's finger.
• In Blade: The Series, Blade's sidekick gets captured and has his fingernails ripped out one by one by Krista, who's secretly a good guy but has no choice but to play along. When Marcus orders her to move on to breaking his fingers, she instead breaks her own fingers (she's a vampire with a Healing Factor), while the sidekick pretends to scream in pain.
• Boardwalk Empire:
  • Black gangster Chalky White finds his driver lynched one night. He tries to find out who did it, starting of course with the local KKK boys. With the help of some Dirty Cops, Chalky has one of the leaders brought into an interrogation room, where he explains how his father was a self-taught carpenter who was lynched by the Klan after doing work for a white man, even showing him his daddy tools. Sometime later Chalky exits the room, confident that the Klan had nothing to do with it. When asked why, he responds that after a certain point if a man is still telling the same story, he has to be telling the truth, and Chalky and the Klan leader reached that point 10 minutes ago. Chalky then holds up a severed finger with a Klan ring still around it, and wonders if the man will want the ring back or if doing that would just be pouring salt in the wound.
  • Owen Sleater tracks down an old enemy and garrotes him in a bathroom. The man manages to get a few fingers up before the ligature tightens, but Owen just pulls hard enough to make the wire cut right through them.
• In the original Bourne Identity miniseries, the Swiss assassins, upon capturing Bourne, slam his fingers in a car door just because.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • "Becoming Part 2": Angel breaks Giles' fingers while trying to get information out of him about how to wake Acathla.
  • "Doppelgangland": a vampire version of Willow was using finger breaking to recruit a gang of vampires.
    Evil Willow: Who do you work for?
    Vampire: I'm not tellin' you nothin'!
    [she breaks one of his fingers; he screams]
    Evil Willow: Who do you work for?
    Vampire: Wilkins, the mayor.
    [she breaks another of his fingers; he screams]
    Evil Willow: Who do you work for?
    Vampire: You.
• Chopped is a fast-paced timed competitive cooking show frequently has contestants disregarding safety for speed and isn't shy about showing the consequences. Serving blood-contaminated food to the judges is a sure way to get chopped, so all contestants go into the kitchen knowing where the gloves are — if you cut yourself, you slap on a glove and keep going.
• In Crocodile Hunter, Steve was always injuring his hands and fingers working with crocodiles and other wildlife.
  • When Steve was feeding Graham, one of the meanest crocodiles at Australia Zoo, the crocodile bit down on his hand. He only managed to get himself free by essentially body-slamming Graham's head. Had he not done this soon, Graham would have either "death rolled", which would have ripped his hand off, or tried to eat more of him.
  • In an episode of the spinoff The Crocodile Hunter Diaries, Steve and his team were dispatched to relocate a large number of very large, aggressive crocodiles in a relatively short amount of time. One crocodile lashed out during release, injuring Steve's finger. He at first thought it was just dislocated and yanked on his finger to try and put it back in place, the finger making cracking sounds that will set your teeth on edge, only for him to then realize that it was actually broken. Since the team still had a lot of crocodiles to deal with and there was no time to get to a hospital for what Steve considered to be a minor inconvenience, he just had the broken finger taped to a nearby one and went on his merry way. And that's not even the worst thing that happened in that episode!
• CSI: NY: Danny and Adam are taken hostage by drug dealers. Danny gets several of his fingers stomped on and broken during the ordeal.
• In the pilot of Daybreak, Josh attempts to cut off the middle finger of a Jerkass golf member with his katana when he flips him the bird, but miscalculates the swing and lodges the sword into his hand instead.
• In the Deadliest Catch Season 9 finale, a deckhand on one of the other boats in the crab fleet (one not normally featured on the show; the vessel's name was blurred out and never spoken aloud in the final cut) got a hand caught in the boat's bait grinder (a machine designed to grind blocks of frozen fish into pulp). Once he'd been medivac'd to a clinic, a very brief shot of the injury itself and a longer shot of the X-ray were shown. It was... not pretty.
• In Dead Like Me, George accidentally gets her middle finger sliced off in the shredder at work. She immediately reattaches it, though — it's her Reaper-speed-healing.
• An episode of Deadwood includes Swearengen getting his finger cut off by a rock hammer.
• On Dexter, we see the Trinity Killer calmly take his teenage son's finger and bend it back until it breaks as punishment for smashing up his car.
• Doc Martin accidentally distracts a cook using a spiral meat slicer that causes said took to cut off part of his index finger. And then everyone in the kitchen had to find said fingertip. Amazing that the doc didn't pass out.
• Doctor Who:
  • In the serial "Attack of the Cyberman", the mercenary Lyton has his hands crushed to bloody pulps by a Cyberman.
  • "Revelation of the Daleks" has Davros' one remaining hand blown off on-screen.
  • "Can You Hear Me?": Played With. Zellin's ability to remove his fingers doesn't cause him any pain, but is nevertheless extremely unsettling to witness.
• In the Doom Patrol (2019) episode "Finger Patrol", Cliff's efforts to stop a pair of carjackers alone results in him accidentally severing the finger of the one who isn't chased away. He then decides to hold onto the finger so it can be used in Niles Caulder's plan of enabling Cliff's robot body to experience the sense of touch again.
• Dracula (2020):
  • In both episodes 1 and 2, the first signs to Jonathan and Agatha that Dracula is causing their bodies to decay is the fact that their fingernails fall off.
  • In Episode 3, a scientist at the Harker foundation sticks her finger in Dracula's mouth when she unearths his casket on the ocean floor, believing him to be dead. Unsurprisingly, he bites her finger off, and this is what revives him from his century long coma.
  • In the same episode, Dracula does his usual "dispose of undead victim in a box" trick. When the poor slob manages to stick a few fingers out, Dracula cuts them off (off screen) to slam the lid shut again.
• Endeavour: In "Girl", the post office robbers cut off two of the postmaster's fingers to force him to open the safe. And then it turns out he did it himself to establish an alibi.
• It is revealed near the end of an episode of The Equalizer that the real reward on two rapists is from the victim's father, who is understandably vengeful since they cut her fingers off during the attack.
• On ER, Mark Greene gets beat up in the men's room by an unknown assailant. The last thing the guy does is break two of Mark's fingers.
• The Family: Clements tells Jane to cut his thumbs off so he can escape the shackles he's in, but she can't go through with it completely.
• The first episode of Farscape's third season featured Scorpius torturing Grunchlk by implanting him with a mind control device and forcing him to bite off his own fingers.
• In FlashForward (2009) Simon Campos sacrifices one of his own fingers (as we later learn) to conceal the fact that he knows his kidnappers and is, however reluctantly, in cahoots with them.
• Friends: In the third episode Phoebe opens a can of soda and finds a severed thumb floating inside "like a tiny little hitchhiker". She responds with a mild "huh" but the rest of the gang are extremely grossed out and refuse to look at it. The audience is spared the sight of it, but the episode is titled "The One With The Thumb".
• Game of Thrones:
  • Davos lost the fingertips of one hand as punishment for his crimes and keeps them around his neck as a Creepy Souvenir.
  • One of Ramsay Snow's favorite games is flaying his prisoners' fingers until they beg him to amputate.
  • Although the show never elaborates, Qhorin is called "Halfhand" for a reason.
  • Grey Wind bites off two of the Greatjon's fingers. Best behave yourself in front of Lord of Winterfell. The Greatjon is more impressed than anything.
• In the first season of House of the Dragon, King Viserys Targaryen loses two of his fingers to necrosis after a small cut made on the Iron Throne. It soon upgrades to a loss of his entire arm after a few more years.
• Gotham: In "Beasts of Prey", Cobblepot has a guitar player's fingers cut off in order to persuade him to abandon his interest in a particular girl.
• The Handmaid's Tale: As punishment for publicly reading from the Bible before the council as part of her plea that they let girls do this, Serena loses a finger.
• In Harrow, the figure who dumps Quinn's body into the river uses a bone cutter to cut off the finger bearing his wedding ring before throwing the body overboard
• Heroes:
  • In the first episode, Claire accidentally has her fingers transformed into a bloody mess after sticking her hand into a garbage disposal unit trying to retrieve a ring. This is just one of many really stupid things we see her doing to show off her healing powers to the audience.
  • In the second season, her biological father Nathan ends up with glass shards embedded in his fist after smashing a mirror during his Rage Against the Reflection.
  • In the last episode, Emma is forced to play the cello. It even shows blood drops flowing down the strings.
• In an early episode of Highlander: The Series, a croupier loses a large sum of a casino's money, and one of the owner's Mooks gives him five days to repay the money, breaking one of his fingers each day.
• Holocaust: Karl gets both his hands broken while in Thesienstadt by the guards for secretly drawing the real conditions of the camps (which the SS had kept from the visiting Red Cross).
• Interview with the Vampire (2022):
  • "Is My Very Nature That of a Devil": Lampshaded by Jonah Macon when he recounts to Louis de Pointe du Lac that he had witnessed his co-worker lose three digits in a workplace accident.
    Jonah: A gunpowder mill in Delaware. Fella working next to me blew off three fingers. I saw enough
  • "Like Angels Put in Hell by God": Lestat de Lioncourt has his mistress Antoinette Brown cut off a finger to fake her death, as Claudia and Louis demanded her demise in exchange for Lestat being allowed to come home.
• In the second episode of The IT Crowd, Jen wears a pair of high-heel shoes intended for someone several sizes smaller. When she finally gets them off, her toes are completely mangled. It's Played for Laughs.
• Jekyll:
  • Tom Jackman's alter-ego celebrates his first proper evening alive by beating the crap out of a man who'd humiliated Jackman earlier. Though most of it's offscreen, we do get to see him break all the fingers on the guy's right hand with a single stomp.
  • Hyde also cuts off Doctor Gilligan's thumb and uses it to get past a thumbprint scanner.
• Justified: In "Cottonmouth", Mags Bennett breaks her son Cooper's fingers with a ballpeen hammer after his idiocy attracts the attention of the law.
• On Lost, Sawyer gets the bamboo shoots under the fingernails treatment when Sayid tortures him for information.
• The Man in the High Castle: Kotomichi instructs Kido to remove the last knuckle of one pinky finger before he'll let him into the Yakuza. Kido does so with nothing more than a slight grunt. This is a real Yakuza practice called yubitsume, usually done when a subordinate member has to make penance for some wrong they did to their superior. Here the viewer doesn't see the actual finger removal.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Daredevil:
    • In "Regrets Only", the upset "Yakuza" boss is shown inspecting a box with fingers in it just before he tells his American associate Stan Gibson how upset he is with him. A moment later, it's subverted with Gibson's bodyguards, who are shown tying pieces of string around their pinky fingers in clear anticipation of having them cut off for failing their duties. The boss simply has them both shot in the back of the head instead.
    • Stick makes his introduction cutting off a Yakuza gangster's hand while trying to get information on the Black Sky, then decapitates him once he has the information he knows.
    • In "The Dark at the End of the Tunnel", the Hand tortures Stick by having tiny bamboo sticks being inserted under his fingernails very slowly.
    • At the start of season 3, one of the men Fisk hires for an attempt on Rostam Kazemi is identifiable by Matt due to having a missing finger.
  • Jessica Jones:
    • Kilgrave made a woman play her cello nonstop, until she made a mistake, at which point he made her injure her hands. All of her fingers are wrapped in bandages.
    • Clemons ends up skinning part of his right hand near where the thumb attaches to the palm while Kilgrave is escaping the CDC compound.
  • Iron Fist: In "Felling Tree with Roots," Madame Gao sends two of her enforcers, Alexi and Vando, to punish Harold Meachum for failing to inform her that Danny Rand was also the legendary Iron Fist, sworn enemy of The Hand. Alexi explains that Madame Gao is willing to forgive foolishness, but not without punishment. He points to Vando, who owed Gao two of his fingers and his tongue after he screwed up. After killing the two enforcers, Harold cuts his own left pinkie off to keep up appearances. When Ward sees it, Harold claims he had a kitchen accident. When Harold resurrects again after being killed by Ward, the amputated finger grows back.
• On US MasterChef Season 4, Jessie forgets to use the hand guard with her mandoline (vegetable slicer) and cuts off the tip of her finger. She is made to sit out the rest of the challenge for safety, but continues to coach her team from the sidelines. They win the challenge (the other team serves undercooked chicken).
• Masters of Horror:
  • In "Cigarette Burns", Henri reveals that he was the original projectionist at the bloody premiere of La Fin Absolue du Monde. When he tried to stop the film all his fingers on his left hand fused together.
  • In "Imprint", the prostitute Komomo is tortured by the madam by getting needles shoved underneath her nails.
  • In "Pelts", Shanna's hand gets crushed by an elevator.
• As a series about a Serial-Killer Killer, The Method really blindsides you when in a resolution of a case, the already-apprehended killer's wife, upon learning where her husband got her all the jewelry, tries to cut off her fingers to remove a ring she fails to tear off normally when she starts discarding her husband's gifts.
• Midnight Caller: The mobster Ricky Roses has hated Nick Clemente ever since Nick cut his thumb off.
• The first episode of TLC's Mostly True Stories: Urban Legends Revealed, hosted by Natasha Henstridge (now available here), examines the plausibility of a story in which a pet dog (not one trained to guard the house) bites off and nearly chokes on three of a burglar's fingers, among other myths.
• Mouse: Ba-reum cut off Chi-guk's finger.
• In Mr. Robot, Cisco gets a needle that gets broken stabbed into his finger for displeasing his superiors in the Dark Army.
• MythBusters tackled a myth of a guy severing his thumb while improperly handling an S&W .500 magnum revolver (specifically, by laying his thumb alongside the cylinder gap). It was confirmed.
• NCIS:
  • In an episode, Gibbs is grazed by a bullet that results in some rather graphic damage. He still manages to shoot the bad guy through Lee.
  • In another episode, a corpse is found with evidence of torture, including removed fingernails.
• Monk: In "Mr. Monk Goes to the Office", a man's hand is slammed in his car door to prevent him from playing in the company's bowling tournament.
• New Tricks: In "Trust Me", Jack slams an ex-copper's hand in an oven door and holds the door shut to get him to talk.
• In Orphan Black, Vic gets a hand mutilated by a paper cutter when he is unable to produce the cocaine Sarah ran off with.
• An episode of the 80s TV show The Paradise Club had a rock star's manager trying to cash in on the insurance policy on said rock star's fingers. Averted, but not before we see Bruce Dickinson (for it is he) with his right hand wedged in a fire door and a thug readying to shoulder-charge it.
• In the Person of Interest episode "The Crossing" Fusco is captured by the Dirty Cop organization HR and tortured by breaking the fingers of one hand one by one. Fusco manages to keep his wits about him and exploits it: He breaks his own thumb, slides his bad hand free of the handcuffs, and attacks his torturer.
• Princess Agents: Yan Xun cuts off his own finger to save Chu Qiao.
• In Prison Break, Mahone tortures Wyatt by sticking long needles in his fingers and periodically shocking him so he doesn't pass out from the pain.
• On Rome Pullo enlists the help of his teenage boss Octavian (later to be the emperor Augustus) in finding out whether Vorenus's brother-in-law cuckolded him. When they have the guy cornered and he's not talking quickly enough, Octavian tells Pullo to "torture him."
  Pullo: Juno's cunt, you're salty. And I was worried about bringing you along.
  Octavian: Go on, then.
  Pullo: I've never actually tortured anyone. I don't know how.
  Octavian: You don't know how?
  Pullo: They have specialists!
  Octavian: Why not cut off his thumbs?
  Pullo: Good enough. It's a start.
• On Scrubs Turk messes up in surgery and now a concert pianist no longer has full use of his fingers, basically ruining his life.
• The final episode of The Singing Detective has the main character attacked by two of his minor characters for not giving them names (it's a weird story). They start to pry apart his hands, which are permanently clenched into fists due to his arthritis.
• In the Smallville episode "Spell", the evil witch Isobel puts a curse on Lex Luthor to make him play the piano indefinitely. When Clark visits him the next morning, not only is Lex practically half-dead from thirst and exhaustion, his fingers are bleeding. Clark breaks the spell by knocking the piano away.
• Sons of Anarchy's second season had the return of an accountant mook who had a compulsion to stick his hands down his pants. Apparently, the Chinese gang he was being forced to work for didn't appreciate that, and in-between seasons realized he only needed two fingers to type.
• In the second episode of Squid Game, Ali gets in a fight with his boss because he hasn't been paying him. The fight ends with Ali accidentally pushing his boss into a machine that crushes his fingers.
• Supernatural:
  • Shapeshifter shed their nails allongside skin and hair when they're shedding an old form to don a new one, something we see up close in the monster's debut episode.
  • Sam gets his fingernail pulled out in a Christmas Episode.
  • Castiel cuts off at least two of Pestilence's fingers to get at his ring.
  • Two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse get separated from their power rings by their fingers getting cut off.
  • In "A Little Slice of Kevin", Crowley ends up cutting one of Kevin's fingers off to finally break him. It's later indicated that Castiel's Healing Hands reattached the finger.
  • In "Bad Boys": Bully, meet lawnmower.
  • In "Thin Lizzie", Len removes his own thumb in order to escape from being handcuffed. He's a little disturbed by how non-squick he felt about it due to him being The Soulless.
  • In "Gimme Shelter", a contraption cuts off Valerie Jones's fingers at three hour intervals. Castiel's Healing Hands reattach them later on.
• One episode of Taggart showed a gangster shove a young baker's hand in a pie making machine, amputating all his fingers.
• The Tales from the Crypt episode "Cutting Cards" features two compulsive gamblers who hate each other, after a failed Russian Roulette they decide to play "Chop Poker" for each losing hand the loser would get a finger chopped off with a meat cleaver, we see that by the end they have each lost all their limbs.
• Channel 4 gangster Mini Series Top Boy featured two underlings sent to remove a specific finger from a rival with a pair of garden secateurs. In the heat of the moment they screw up and take the wrong one, so decide they'd better take the right one as well, just to be on the safe side.
• In the first episode of Treadstone, Soviet operative Petra loses one of her fingers in a fight with the escaping Treadstone operative.
• Troy: Fall of a City: During his fight with Achilles, Hector is defeated when the former strikes at his sword hand, cutting off his fingers in doing so.
• In True Blood, Jane Bodehouse (under the influence of Maryann) cuts off her own finger like some sort of a sacrifice... offering... thing. She gets it sewn back on once it wears off, though.
• The Umbrella Academy (2019): A thrown blade slices off two of Diego's fingers in "Marigold". He gets them back when the timeline is reset.
• In The Walking Dead (2010), the Governor bites off two of Merle's fingers in a fight. Also, then the remaining members of Terminus try to sneak up on Rick's group in a church, Gareth tries to negotiate with Rick so that they can live together in peace. Rick responds by shooting off two of his fingers. A massacre follows.
• In the Westworld episode "The Bicameral Mind", Armistice bites off the tip of a technician's finger and shoves it into their mouth.
• On The Wire, Rabid Cop Officer Walker decides to break two of the fingers of juvenile car thief Donut for giving him more paperwork to clock in.
• The X-Files:
  • In "Leonard Betts", Betts is a Monster of the Week with impressive regenerative powers. When he's handcuffed to a car handle, he tears off his own thumb. He will soon grow a new one, but it was obviously extremely painful.
  • In "The Pine Bluff Variant", Mulder gets a finger deliberately broken by someone questioning him. (Averting Hollywood Healing, he's shown with the hand still obviously injured for at least one subsequent episode, and the interval between episodes on this show is usually somewhat indeterminate.)
  • And then there is Donnie Pfaster, the necrophiliac. It's hard to describe just how creepy he is and how scary his initial episode "Irresistible" is — oddly because it inverts the show's formula in that there really isn't a paranormal aspect to it. He's just socially awkward enough to come off as unassuming, but not quite charming. He lures his victims to his apartment (except Scully, then he goes the kidnapping route), where he makes them bathe before he kills them and cuts off their fingers to keep in his freezer. Yikes.
• In "Bear Down" from Yellowjackets, Travis Martinez tries to dig up the corpse of his father Bill in order to secure a ring that belonged to his grandfather to give to his little brother, Javi. He's unable to complete the job, so Natalie does it instead, but has to cut off the finger the ring is on to do so.

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