Our girl is on the run now, and it dramatically changes Poker Face’s feel. In the series premiere, Charlie was a hapless cocktail waitress with a curious ability to read people — a mostly dormant skill that came suddenly handy when her close friend was murdered. As such, the inaugural crime she was solving was intimate. Her devotion to justice in the case was primarily emotional.
But that’s not Charlie’s MO any longer. Now, she’s racing through the Southwest in her unreliable beater, trying to stay off the grid and ahead of Cliff — the man Sterling has dispatched to avenge his son’s death. Sterling blames Charlie for his heir’s suicide in episode one, or maybe he really blames himself; ultimately, it was his decision to keep Charlie close rather than banish her from his casinos in the first place. So every time Charlie swerves off the road and into some one-horse town to solve a case or right a terrible wrong, she’s imperiling herself. Sterling Gates Sr. and his henchman get a little closer with every tap of the brakes. Why risk it?
This risk-taking behavior may be the series’ most complicated investigation so far. Charlie isn’t Columbo, a homicide cop with open cases to clear. So why does she feel compelled to use her very particular set of skills for the greater good? In episode two, the answer is specific. Marge (Hong Chau), a trucker who briefly helps Charlie on the road, ends up falsely accused of murder. Charlie helps, I guess, because she knows Marge to be a good person. Like Sir Galahad himself, she’s pure and well intentioned — almost chivalrous, really, if you can accept that sometimes a knight rides a white horse and sometimes a knight is bleeding from the abdomen in a truck-stop bathroom.
The Columbo structure remains intact here. Before we get into Charlie’s sleuthing, we witness the crime, which struck me as somehow bleaker than Natalie’s murder. Nat’s death was in service of a bad man’s craven attempt to maintain control of his tiny fiefdom. This week, we find ourselves roaming a dead-end town with three 20-somethings working dead-end jobs for company. There’s convenience-store clerk Sara (Megan Suri); Jed the mechanic (Colton Ryan); and Damian (Brandon Micheal Hall), an ex-jarhead and present-day hoagie-man who’s developed a TikTok following by joyfully creating off-menu sandwiches at Subway. Damian likes Sara. Every night on the late shift they exchange sandwiches, lotto scratch-offs, and cute banter that will never ever go anywhere. Jed likes Sara, too. He’s a creepy incel-type who drinks beer on the auto shop’s roof and watches Sara with binoculars. Sara likes Damian but thinks Jed is harmless. I think Jed is hella weird, but I don’t really want any of them to kill and/or be killed.
Alas, this dusty way station ain’t big enough for the three of them. One night, Jed invites Sara and, reluctantly, Damian to watch a meteor shower on the roof, but only Damian shows up, and he’s not there to witness a celestial event. He wants to warn Jed that he makes Sara uncomfortable, which makes Jed defensive, and I start worrying that Damian will die on the misbegotten hero’s errand. But Damian has legitimate combat training, so maybe it’s Jed who will die in that skirmish.
Instead — and this is compelling writing here — they find common ground. That desperate ache that makes Jed into a sullen stalker who may as well harass a pretty girl because who cares? Damian understands that monotony is as dangerous a force as any. He felt it himself in the service. And I think he really gets through to Jed. They have an honest-to-God, “reach across the aisle and hug your fellow man” bonding moment. Jed tells Damian he dreams of stowing away in the trunk of a car he fixes and hitching a ride to anywhere. Damian tells him that kind of dreaming can only lead to disappointment. As if to show how much Damian has disinvested in the idea of good luck, he scratches off his scratch-off to prove he shan’t care when it comes up a loser. Except it comes up a $25,000 winner. Jed pushes Damian off the roof, though it will take a tire iron to the skull to finish him. Jed pockets the scratch-off with plans to purchase another and pull a switcheroo. Damian’s lotto ticket is Jed’s ticket out of Dodge; no trunk space is required.
The last order of business is what to do with the body. Jed dumps Damian’s in the back of a Mack truck that he notices parked out of the way. It turns out to be Marge’s truck, which she parks out of the way because it’s stuffed to the gills with illegally reimported pharmaceuticals from Canada. So when she finds a body back there, she can’t exactly head to the cops. She dumps Damian at the closest place she can find: the off-hours auto shop with a “last honest mechanic in New Mexico” sign hanging outside the door. Jed, who films Marge’s caper on the shop’s security camera, is newly empowered to call in the murder he committed and pin it on Marge. It’s so neat in its own bumbling way that it should absolutely possibly work.
Except, just like last week, Charlie is already involved before the crime even happens. She’s stuck in this town because her car broke down and can’t be fixed until morning. She bought a Damian special from Subway, and it was delicious. It’s been a week since she fled the Frost Hotel, but she’s still bleeding from her bullet wound — a problem Marge, a friendly passenger on the road of life, solves with some superglue. Marge gives her advice she’ll need to outpace her enemies: no phone, no ID, no bank accounts. From now on, Charlie is the name she used to answer to. After sharing a few drinks with Marge at the diner, Charlie sleeps it off on a picnic table. By the time she wakes up, the cops have come and gone with Damian’s body and Marge in handcuffs.
I’m honestly impressed with the audacity of this show. Half the hour-long episode is devoted to the setup, which means Charlie only has 30 minutes of TV time to solve the crime, about four hours in “real” time. To pay the mechanic to fix her car, she needs to use an ATM, and Marge has warned her there are only about four hours between when you alert the digital world to your location and when your enemies close down on you.
She has a little more experience at crime-fighting this week, but Charlie still approaches it in the style of a haphazard think-aloud. Marge was admittedly a total kook, but why would she bludgeon a muscular man to death when we already know she carries a gun? Charlie’s suspicion that something is amiss is confirmed when both Sara and Jed separately tell her Damian had never won a scratch-off in all his months of playing. Sara is telling the truth, but Jed is bullshitting. It’s an intriguing distinction that points to the limits of Charlie’s superpowers. Whether a person is lying about a fact doesn’t necessarily impart its truth value.
A few clues fall quickly into place: There’s time missing from the body-shop security cameras (from when Jed disarmed them so he could enjoy the meteor shower from the roof without his boss — Cliff from Cheers — knowing); Charlie finds a beer-bottle cap — Jed’s brand — in Damian’s Subway apron; and she picks up the Hawai’i state quarter Damian borrowed from Sara to scratch his scratch-off from Jed’s roof. Like a villain who thinks he’s too cute to be caught, Jed even mentions Hawai’i when Charlie asks what he will do with the $25,000 prize he claimed earlier in the morning.
But heavily suspecting or even knowing the truth isn’t enough in Charlie’s case. She has no jurisdiction here (or anywhere). So she ends up doing the same thing she did in episode one: confronting a dangerous man with his crimes with no clear plan of what to do next. With Sterling Jr. (Adrien Brody), her bark had some bite because she’d already divulged his scheme to Kazimir. But Jed calls her bluff. Who will care that some random drifter says the lottery scratch-off he’s claiming as his winning ticket has an out-of-order serial number? She’s just a vagrant with a blue car and now, compliments of Jed, cut brakes. (For the record: This serial-number thing is what I suspected would take him down from the beginning, so I’m back to thinking I’d make a great TV detective!) It’s not just that Charlie isn’t a cop. She’s on the actual run from people rich enough to own the local cops.
This episode takes us to a darker place than the premiere, in which it was never meaningfully in doubt Adrien Brody’s crimes would come to light. But it’s like Charlie said then: It’s not that useful to know when someone lies. Everyone lies all the time for the dumbest of reasons. Just when she’s about to leave Marge to the long arm of the misguided law, though, she has an epiphany. It doesn’t have to be Charlie’s suspicions versus Jed’s word, which is to say hobo versus incel. Despite the fact that this podunk town seems below the interest threshold for CCTV, every single semi-truck that passes through is armed with a dashcam. She and Marge weren’t alone in the diner last night, and even though her four-hour doomsday clock has sounded, Charlie cannot help herself. Using her connex at the roadside diner, she takes the time to chase down the trucker whose footage would have captured the aftermath of the murder and hopefully set Marge free.
Crime solved and justice within reach, Charlie jumps in her car that looks kinda like a Pinto but isn’t (someone, please help me out in the comments) and heads out of town just as Cliff rolls in. Maybe Marge still does some time for pulling a container of contraband Oxy around the desert, but playing Lady Galahad is already helping Charlie survive. A grateful Cliff from Cheers fixes the not-Pinto’s brakes before handing back the car keys. Sometimes people lie for stupid reasons, but sometimes they do it for good. When Cliff stops at the convenience store that shares an address with the ATM Charlie used to withdraw her last 400 bucks, Sara riffs that she remembers that redhead, the one who said she was heading to Los Angeles to lose herself on the beach. Perhaps that misdirection will be enough for Charlie to get her four-hour lead back.
But revisiting Sara in the episode’s final moments contributes to the overall dreariness. Charlie is a bright and flashy thing, taking this wee town by storm and restoring it to integrity. I didn’t want Damian to die, and Jed getting nailed for the crime doesn’t fix it. Thinking about Sara handing out lotto tickets for the rest of her life is depressing. Charlie fled her life in Arizona as a hero, but this place she leaves just as miserable as she found it.
