Poker Face season 2 has made a bit of a change for lead character Charlie Cale. Rian Johnson now explains what it means for the series moving forward.
Caution: this article contains SPOILERS for Poker Face season 2
For those who missed the first season of Peacock’s Poker Face, the fun mystery dramedy created by Rian Johnson has an interesting setup. Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) is an irreverent card shark who possesses the uncanny ability to always know when someone is lying.
When she accidentally causes the death of the son of a noted mob boss, Charlie has to go on the run. As fate would have it, wherever she goes, Charlie somehow stumbles onto a murder or other crime and uses her lie detector skills to solve it.
A reminder of how Poker Face season 1 ended
The first season ended with Charlie getting out from under the thumb of mobster Sterling. However, that had her crossing with another mobster, Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman), who “offered” Charlie a job. Charlie chose to once more hit the road in her 1969 Barracuda.
Poker Face Season 2 premiered its first three episodes on Thursday, May 8, and the first two continued the show’s formula, with the first act showing the audience who the killer is and how they committed the murder. It then circled to Charlie getting involved in the case with the first episode showing her dodging hitmen while figuring out a murder involving four identical sisters (all played by Cynthia Erivo).
It looked like the same trend as the first season, until the third episode.
What happened between Charlie and Hasp in Poker Face season 2?
In “Whack-A-Mole,” Charlie was kidnapped by Hasp who wanted to use her lie detecting skills to uncover a mole in her organization. It ended in a bloody gunfight with the FBI that killed Hasp’s husband Jeffrey (Richard Kind).
It turns out Jeffrey was the mole, annoyed that his wife was putting the whole “running a crime family” thing ahead of their family. He reached out to Charlie’s old FBI ally Agent Luca to fake his death in this sting. However, a crooked agent (John Mulaney) swapped the blanks for real bullets, with Luca killing Jeffrey for real.
Charlie managed to bust that crooked agent and for uncovering the mole and giving up evidence, Hasp was put into witness protection. Which meant calling off the hit on Charlie and letting her go free, thus changing the course of the series.
What’s next for Poker Face?
In a long talk with Entertainment Weekly, Johnson explained that he didn’t want to repeat the same beats as the first season. The entire series is a love letter to the mystery shows of the 1970s and he wanted to get back to that vibe.
"I wanted to pull everyone's mind back to what really is supposed to drive this show, which is, in my mind: This should be a season of Columbo where you can literally say, 'I want to watch the Dick Van Dyke episode,' and you can drop in and watch it and not have to think about where it lands in the season, per se.”
However, Johnson did hint "We do still develop a light dusting of a bigger story over the course of the season." That indicates that there will be a bigger arc down the road.
New showrunner Tony Tost stated that the new direction of the show will be Charlie just traveling around as she enjoyed her life on the road. The question now is that now that she isn’t being driven by fear for her life, what kind of roots can Charlie set down and what pushes her on?
“She's trying to figure out what her life is going to look like, and what she is searching for if she's on the road. She's habituated to this lifestyle of living out of her Barracuda hopping from place to place. What does she actually like about that? What are the drawbacks about that? What might cause her to settle down a little bit or cause her to get off the road and find a more stationary existence?"
The fourth episode showed the new direction with Charlie making her way to Florida and tied to a case involving a murderous alligator. It also has a new character, trucker “Good Buddy,” who Charlie talks to on the radio (and is voiced by Steve Buscemi).
It appears the new direction is a fun one for the show. We don’t need another season of Charlie avoiding mob hitmen and on the run. Now, she has a chance to hang around a location for a while, solve a crime and then move on with a more relaxed vibe.
The joy of the show is Lyonne’s wonderful performance as Charlie with her snarky one-liners and spirit. It’s the bevy of big-name guest stars and the inventive ways we see both the killers and how Charlie busts them. There’s also the wild vibe of the show that includes a funeral director tricking a film crew into cleaning up his murder scene or a killer alligator. That dark humor adds to the mystery vibes.
Lyonne and Johnson are both promising “some big cliffhangers” for the later episodes and thus some big drama coming. So for both fans of Poker Face and newcomers, season 2 is a good jumping on point to be entertained and that’s no lie.
Poker Face season 2 streams new episodes Thursdays on Peacock.
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