Poker Face S2E1: The Game Is a Foot
When we last saw Charlie Cale, she had gotten out of trouble with mobbed-up casino boss Sterling Frost, only to get into deeper trouble with even more mobbed-up casino boss Beatrix Hasp. This left Charlie — an excitable slacker with the uncanny ability to tell if someone’s lying — no choice but to go back on the run, solving mysteries as she goes.
It’s a killer formula for a show, and executed at an extremely high level by show creator/episode director Rian Johnson and star Natasha Lyonne. But while last season’s ending raised the stakes for Charlie, this season begins in firmly familiar territory — we’re privy to the details of a murder, and the fun is in watching Charlie figure out what we already know.
So we meet Amber (Cynthia Erivo), who’s making mediocre sculptures and waiting hand and foot on her high-maintenance, disapproving, and very wealthy mother (Jasmine Guy). A mother who loudly announces she’s amending her will, “to reward those who didn’t disappoint [me] in life.” She may as well have a sign around her neck saying “murder me for my money.”
And a lesser show would promptly kill off the mother, make Amber the prime suspect, and keep you guessing as to who actually did it. But this isn’t a lesser show. So it throws us several curveballs in a row. Mom dies of natural causes. And she cuts Amber and her three less-disappointing sisters out of the will entirely, leaving everything to a woman named Felicity Price.
Felicity is also played by Cynthia Erivo, and appears to be Amber’s long-lost twin. Until we meet the other three sisters (also Erivo) and realize she’s their long-lost quintuplet. And one of them, naturally, is friends with Charlie Cale. So when someone turns up dead and missing a leg, the game is, well, a foot.
And once again, a lesser show wouldn’t wait more than a quarter of its running time to show us its star, but Poker Face is confident enough to draw us into the mystery, and only let us catch up with Charlie 17 minutes into the episode. She’s working as a parking lot attendant, waxing philosophical to a disinterested coworker, until two of Beatrix Hasp’s hitmen come after her. She gets the same treatment at a haunted hayride, an apple orchard. (Thankfully the hit men are Star Wars stormtrooper-quality marksmen and make their entrance with all the subtlety of pro wrestlers.)
Charlie’s orchard coworker is Delia, one of the quintuplets, who hasn’t yet learned of her mother’s death. She expositions a little more of the family history — the four sisters (why Felicity was separated isn’t clear) were child actors all sharing the lead role on a show called Kid Cop Nights. (Amber was the least talented of the bunch, earning the nickname Hamber) Mom pitted them against each other, and kept all the money for themselves. Delia (DeeDee) started drinking to deal with the stress and then got sober. Bibi and CeeCee reinvented themselves as a shallow club DJ and pretentious lit professor with a phony French accent.
Which means Erivo has a blast playing five different sisters, and one sister using her limited acting skills to impersonate the others as Charlie’s scrutiny intensifies. (And the quintuplet thing is a good excuse for Charlie to accidentally tip off the killer to her abilities, because she doesn’t realize which one she’s talking to). And, of course, Charlie is eventually able to call bullshit on the killer and piece together how they did it.
It’s a very fun re-introduction to the show that does everything Poker Face does well. The pace stays breezy even as the show gives appropriate weight to murder, alcoholism, and family dysfunction, and Lyonne remains magnetic in the role. The first season only had one flaw — we only got ten episodes. This year we get twelve. We’re so excited we actually paid money for Peacock.
Stray bullets:
• Jasmine Guy is best known for playing a catty campus socialite in classic 80s college sitcom A Different World, and she’s lost none of her bite in the intervening years.
• Playing different people with different personalities is the entire job of an actor, but it’s somehow always more impressive when they do it several times in the same episode of TV.
• If three of the sisters are nicknamed Bibi, CeeCee, and DeeDee, where did Amber fit into that? And why doesn’t Felicity start with an E? This is the kind of completely insignificant thing that keeps a TV reviewer up nights.
• Frequent Rian Johnson collaborator Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets a shout-out as Kid Cop’s first love.
• The reveal that lets Charlie put the pieces together (and ties into the episode title) is kind of dumb.
• Someday mother will die and I’ll get the money
• In a move designed specifically to make TV reviewers’ lives difficult, Peacock released the first three episodes of the season simultaneously. We’ll post reviews as fast as we can, but it may take a week or two to get caught up.
