Poker Face S2E3: Whack-a-Mole
So, Beatrix Hasp. A year has passed since the vengeful crime lord’s original threat to kill Charlie Cale (over the phone, at the end of last season’s finale). Over the course of that year, Hasp’s organization has crumbled, and she blames Charlie. She’s on the run from her rivals, and at the end of last episode she appeared in the back of Charlie’s Barracuda, gun to Charlie’s head. Beatrix has a rat in her crew, and needs Charlie’s help to know who to trust.
They stop for gas and snacks (with Charlie handcuffed to the steering wheel), and Hasp has a brief exchange with a fellow customer (John Mulaney), who passes her a note: Safe House Not Safe. Besides rival mobsters, the FBI (in the person of Luca Clark, who’s come to Charlie’s aid in previous episodes) is also closing in on Beatrix and what’s left of her gang.
So we don’t go to a safe house. Beatrix is holed up in a motel room, with her chummy husband Jeffrey (the always-delightful Richard Kind), who knows she’s a crime lord, but doesn’t care much about all that mafia stuff. He’s busy trying to make panini with the hotel iron.
Beatrix introduces Charlie as a “cobbler”, mafia slang for someone who forges Beatrix’s getaway documents. (In fact, there’s a lot of inspired silliness about mafia code words and which animal means what. “You want me to rat on my mole like a snake?”)
And yes, there’s both a rat and a mole. Someone in Beatrix’s organization is working with the Feds, and someone in the Feds is on her payroll, like The Departed made up entirely of wisecracking character actors.
But first, Charlie has to face down three of Hasp’s cold-blooded killers and determine if any of them are lying. Then she gets dragged along as part of Hasp’s plan to flee the country. That plan goes awry, naturally. Someone ends up dead, naturally. But the episode takes time to show us the trick of how the rat, the mole, the cobbler, and the bullshit she detects all fit together, before finally delivering us the dead body of the week.
It’s all too good to spoil, and it’s hard to get into any part of the plot without unravelling the whole thing. So we’ll give a lot of small notes, and then after the notes, talk about the episode’s ending and its broad implications for the series. If you’re catching up on season two and don’t want spoilers, just stop reading after the bullet points.
Stray bullets
• At 41 minutes, this is the shortest episode of Poker Face so far, and yet there’s so much plot, character, and comedy crammed into that runtime. It’s a swiss watch of writing by Wyatt Cain, who wrote two episodes last season, and the episode after this one.
• Mulaney is very open about his limited acting skills, but he comports himself well here, convincingly hiding a shitheel — just barely — under his chipper persona. That being said, he’s still a minnow swimming with sharks, standing next to Kind, Perlman, and Lyonne.
• Mulaney’s character is named Daniel, but Hasp only knows him by his very convincing alias, Maverick McTitacuddy. He drinks milk because of a stress-induced ulcer, (and at one point a whole glass of half-and-half), and episode director Miguel Arteta displays a keen understanding of how unsettling it is to just watch someone chugging down milk.
• Rhea Perlman and Natasha Lyonne have terrific chemistry as two outspoken, strongly-regional-acccented forces of nature. No one should ever remake Cheers, but if you were going to, you could do worse than casting Lyonne as Carla Tortelli.
• Luca describes Charlie as, “Genial, inquisitive, voice like a rusty clarinet.” Daniel calls her a “red-headed alleycat.”
• There are worse things than getting a bunch of beloved character actors together and letting them bounce off of each other. It’s always one of the pleasures of watching this show, and never more so than this week. Every show on television could do worse than to give Richard Kind a few minutes to putter around talking about food.
• So many perfect jokes in this one. Well after Beatrix introduces Charlie as a “cobbler”, we get a flashback where Jeffrey gets excited because Beatrix is bringing home some cobbler for dessert. “It’s my favorite!”
• There’s also a delightful runner about Steven Sondheim, clearly a favorite of series creator Rian Johnson. (Sondheim and Lyonne share a brief cameo scene in Glass Onion.)
• The fact that it’s been a year since Beatrix first threatened Charlie means she’s been on the run for quite a while with only two previous murders, which is a pretty good record for Charlie Cale.
Spoiler Alert:
This all shakes out with Charlie saving Hasp from the mole, Hasp getting immunity in exchange for turning in the mole, and forgiving Charlie. (We’re still not going to spoil who the mole is, just watch the episode.)
Which means, for the first time since episode one, no one’s after Charlie. It’s a bold choice to handle what’s normally season-finale material in episode 3, and it shifts the premise of the show ever so slightly if Charlie isn’t on the run from anyone.
But as we discussed at the end of last season, running might be all she knows how to do. And as last season’s finale showed, she doesn’t actually have anywhere to go or anyone to go home too. So we end with her picking a spot on the map and driving off to her next adventure. But it remains to be seen how the lack of an overarching threat (or overarching storyline) affects the tone going forward. The last episode of the season is ominously titled “The End of the Road,” so we suspect some kind of change in Charlie Cale’s lifestyle is due, whether the series continues after this season or not.
