The famous magic act of Madison and Clark is soon to be no more. The former, Paul Madison, has decided he's learned all of the latter, Eric Clark's, tricks and is going solo. Eric, one of Mark's patients and friends, invites him and the Community Hospital gang to watch the performance at the Magic, topped off with an escape act where Madison is handcuffed and put upside down in a tank of water. After the trick's six minutes, Madison has disappeared. This is only in the spiritual sense, however. He is physically still very much in the tank and very much dead.
Suspicion falls on Eric with the belief he switched the handcuff keys. Mark figures someone else in the club switched the key while Eric was doing his pre-show meditation, and sets off to find them before Eric's free life is made to pull a Houdini...
"Murder With Mirrors" displays symptoms of the following tropes:
- Absolute Cleavage: Cleopatra Quinlan wears a gilded dress for her upcoming show showing off a lot of her chest.Mark: I can tell ya one thing; no-one's gonna be watching your hands.
- Asshole Victim: Paul Madison was a jerk who stole the tricks of his friends and mentors.
- Bait-and-Switch: When Madison's act first begins, we see him on stage with a knife in his chest before he falls down on stage. It appears this is him being murdered, until he pops back up and tells the audience they can't always trust what they see.
- Bluffing the Murderer: When he has his epiphany, Mark announces his plan to re-create the trick, with the exact same props and Cleo standing in for the victim. It appears he's decided she's the killer and wants to give her A Taste of Their Own Medicine by putting her into the same situation as Madison... but the real killer, David, is in love with Cleo, and exposes himself when he panics and tries to halt the trick early.
- Chekhov's Gun: Mark mentions early on that he hasn't seen Steve for a while. Jack vaguely remembers it has something to do with work while Delores thinks it's really about a girlfriend. As Jack and Amanda tail Mike to his payoff, he appears at the spot with cops... as the janitor we have been seeing around the Magic Mansion.
- Chekhov's Gunman: As mentioned above, the Magic Mansion janitor, AKA Steve.
- Drowning Pit: The trick that does Madison in has his feet chained up and his wrists handcuffed, where he is then suspended upside down in a tank of water and left covered for six minutes. It's an impressive escape act when it hasn't been sabotaged.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Throughout the episode, Mark has been treating a patient with a pain in his right shoulder, and eventually figures out that the issue was really in the man's gallbladder. When he thinks out loud how the real trouble was somewhere else, he figures out the killer used misdirection in the murder method, and it was the handcuffs that were switched around, not the key.
