Poker Face Season 2 Episodes 1-3
"The Game Is a Foot" / "Last Looks" / "Whack-A-Mole"
Writer: Laura Deeley / Alice Ju & Natasha Lyonne / Wyatt Cain
Director: Rian Johnson / Natasha Lyonne / Miguel Arteta
Cast: Natasha Lyonne, Cynthia Erivo, Jin Ha, Giancarlo Esposito, Kevin Corrigan, Katie Holmes, Rhea Perlman, John Mulaney, Richard Kind, Simon Helberg
Two genres are having a moment right now: murder mysteries and anthologies. And Rian Johnson has just about perfected the recipe for blending them into something sharp, stylish, and endlessly satisfying. Take Cynthia Erivo playing a set of pentuplets, Giancarlo Esposito brooding as a funeral director, and John Mulaney downing half & half like it's moonshine and you're pretty much there. But the real secret ingredient is Natasha Lyonne, whose gravel-voiced charisma and lie-detecting instincts hold Poker Face together.
The show aired its first three episodes on Peacock, and while I was initially a little disappointed to see them dump that many episodes at once, Johnson et team do deliver a rather satisfying three episode arc that sets up the rest of the season.
This is a show that knows exactly what it is. First, it's funny. But second, it's Natasha Lyonne getting the opportunity to mix it up with various guest stars while she solves a murder. It's the howcatchem style that Columbo made famous but with a modern twist. It's just as much throwback as it is reinvention. And Lyonne's the perfect person to ride shotgun with as she travels the country, her bullshit detector finely tuned.
Seeing Quintuple
Episode 1 of the new season kicks off with an acting flex as Cynthia Erivo plays five different characters across a single hour. I'll admit, I was one of the skeptics who fell for the “Cynthia Erivo is polarizing” discourse when she was cast as Elphaba in Wicked. It wasn't out of malice, just unfamiliarity. While I loved Ariana Grande in the film, Erivo ended up being the part that stayed with me the longest. Still, when she first appeared in Poker Face, I had my doubts. Could she pull off this many characters in one go?
Turns out: yes. Absolutely yes.
Erivo ends up playing a full house of twins ranging from entitled brat to cool hipster to British DJ, each performance distinct enough to make you forget you're watching the same actor five times over. At the center of it all is Amber, the most tightly wound of the bunch, who's been caring for her cruel, overbearing mother Norma. When Norma dies, Amber discovers she's been left out of the will entirely and everything is going to Felicity, an estranged twin sister.
Amber's response? What any crafty killer does on Poker Face. They overreact and kill someone! She kills Felicity and fakes her own death which works fine until she realizes her long lost sister had a prosthetic leg. She sets her on the train track to make it look like that's how she lost her leg. Easy peasy.
Enter: Charlie Cale. She bonds with Didi (another twin) while working her third job of the episode (after being at a parking attendant and a haunted house). Turns out Didi was on Kid Cop Nights along with her other Kazinsky sisters (how else are you going to film that many episodes with a child actor?!). With a 10th of what she earned on the show, she could own the orchard they're working on. So when she finds out Norma, her mom, died, she hopes that Amber will give her some of the money in the will. Charlie drives her to make the attempt.
When they get there, Charlie thinks things seem off. She catches “Felicity” in a lie and then slowly uncovers the mystery, mostly due to connecting the real Felicity's foot-themed artwork. Charlie stages a confrontation in front of the other siblings. She drops an award the twins won for their work on Kid Cop Nights directly onto “Felicity's” supposedly prosthetic leg and when it bleeds, the truth comes out.
It's a fun episode and while I think Erivo's work is great, I think they overdo it a tad with the number of twins she played. They really could have just left it at two or three and the whole episode still works.
All That Remains
This episode, Charlie is working at a funeral home that's been temporarily transformed into a film set. She makes friends with Greta (Katie Holmes), the funeral director's wife, who's feeling increasingly suffocated by her crumbling marriage and the oppressive gloom of the home she shares with her emotionally distant husband, Fred (Giancarlo Esposito). Greta opens up to Charlie, sharing her dreams of escape and a fresh start. They make plans to leave together.
But the next morning, Greta is gone.
Fred claims she left with the crew and Charlie believes it because, well, it's a statement that's technically true. Fred put Greta's ashes in an urn prop and it left with the movie. As Charlie pokes around, she notices a bloodied lightbulb, a missing protective cloth from the film shoot, and the unnerving revelation that Greta's ashes may have been pressed into that very vinyl after learning earlier in the episode that Fred can put “remains” into just about anything.
This detail gives us the episode's most poetic and most chilling moment. After murdering Greta, Fred has her ashes pressed into a vinyl record of what he believes is their love song. To him, it's a twisted gesture of devotion, a way to immortalize their relationship and quite literally hold onto her forever. But there's a devastating irony: the song he chooses is one Greta hated. Earlier in the episode, she tells Charlie she could never stand it and that it always made her feel trapped, like she was playing a role in someone else's fantasy.
Fred's gesture, then, isn't romantic. It's controlling. It's his final act of dominance: silencing her, containing her, and forcing her into a symbol of a marriage that was already dead long before he lit the match. The vinyl becomes a haunting metaphor. It's not just for Greta's literal erasure, but for Fred's inability to see the woman he claimed to love as anything other than a character in his delusion. It's beautiful, tragic, and deeply grotesque, all in one spin of the record.
There's also a brilliant bit of misdirection earlier on. When Fred uses the incinerator to dispose of Greta's body, he throws away the electric toothbrush she had packed because, as it turns out, you can't put metal in the kiln. The things you learn on TV! Naturally, I assumed that would be the clue Charlie uncovered to solve the case. But the show, as always, stays one step ahead. Instead, it circles back to Charlie's decision to quit smoking and start vaping. When Fred corners her, she tosses the vape into the incinerator, triggering an explosion that sets the house on fire. Charlie tries to save Fred, but he chooses to stay behind and burn with the house, listening to the record.
The highlight of the episode is Katie Holmes and so it's a bit of a tragedy that she never really gets to do more. The background characters also feel a tad undercooked this episode, servicing plot more than character. But that's probably okay for the middle episode of this trilogy.
Moles, Rats and Snakes, Oh My
I love that this episode picks up the thread from Season 1, continuing the storyline with Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman) and Agent Luca (Simon Helberg). Just as we're getting used to the episodic anthology format, the show drives us towards a longer term story. Much like how Poker Face has served both anthology and murder mystery and has been a throwback and a modern creation, this episode blends long-form storytelling with the tight, self-contained structure that's made the series so compelling.
Charlie is forcibly recruited by mob boss Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman) to help uncover a mole in her crew. Beatrix, under pressure from the FBI and the Five Families, needs Charlie's lie-detecting skills to root out the traitor. Charlie is introduced to the crew at a shady motel and poses as a forgery expert.
While Beatrix grows increasingly paranoid, Charlie quietly investigates. Turns out there's a rat in the mob and a mole in the FBI. It's very fun to have the roles played by Richard Kind and John Mulaney considering their time together on Everybody's Live. The backstabbing comes to a head at a set-up at the airport that goes wrong when Jeffrey (Kind) is shot by Luca (Simon Helberg) who thinks he was shooting blanks and Charlie is held hostage on the plan. Realizing Danny (Mulaney) is the true threat, Charlie teams up with Luca to disarm him, using a callback shoelace trick she suggested she'd use on Beatrix earlier in the episode, to gain the upper hand. After Danny is exposed, Beatrix agrees to testify and calls off the hit on Charlie.
Everyone here is doing pretty great work. Mulaney as a bumbling FBI agent who's secretly a mole, Kind as a mob husband who wants to be doing anything but mafia stuff and Perlman returning as the matriarch of the mob family. It's all pretty excellent stuff.
The three-episode arc of Charlie being on the run from Beatrix worked perfectly. It gave the season a strong thematic spine while still allowing each episode to be its own eccentric murder mystery. By the end of Episode 3, the show hits a natural reset: the hit is called off, Beatrix is out of the picture (for now), and Charlie is back on the road, not just fleeing danger but choosing her own direction. It's a smart structural move, as they can go anywhere they want from here.
So wherever Charlie Cale heads next, I'll be right there beside her.
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