The explanation makes everything make more sense, fits tarot reading more neatly into the Dana Scully he knows and loves. This is the same woman who learned sleight-of-hand from an uncle, only to pull it out in service of pretending to eat a bug. Treating fortune-telling as an interesting trick, rather than anything worth believing in, is right in line with the rest of her.

Maybe she believed it more as a kid, of course, but if so, something clearly changed.

"Think you still got it?" he asks, giving her an I-double-dog-dare-you kind of smile. "I want to see a tarot master at work."