Poker Face Season 2 Finale Twist Caps Off A Season Of Experimentation

This article contains spoilers for "Poker Face" season 2.

The season 2 finale of "Poker Face" is titled "The End of the Road," but one can only hope that this won't be our last ride with spunky lie detector detective Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne). As of this writing, "Poker Face" hasn't been renewed yet for a third season. We're crossing our fingers here at /Film, though, because "Poker Face" season 2 was just as delightful a ride as season 1. 

"Poker Face" streams on Peacock, but it's purposefully made like classical, pre-streaming TV. Charlie is the only constant character as the series follows her solving a different murder each week in a new location. Like in "Columbo," the first act of each episode shows the killing play out in detail, and in the remaining acts, Charlie comes in and solves it.

Part of the show's hook is its guest stars (such as Cynthia Erivo playing several identical sisters, one the killer and one the victim, in the season 2 premiere), and part of it is how it runs with the simplicity of its premise. There's no meta angle to "Poker Face," and its simplicity is one reason why it can be a great comfort watch. Yet the weekly release schedule of "Poker Face" also means it's not supposed to be binged; each episode satisfies all on its own.

In many ways, discourse on television has now flipped from where it was 10-15 years ago, during the "golden age" of TV when streaming was taking off. Once, we praised television that rejected episodic formulas. But now that more and more shows feel like long meandering movies and episodic storytelling is a fading art, many people are longing for a firmer line between film and television again. "Poker Face" may rope in some movie star guests, but in its plotting, it stays firmly on the television side. 

The show has an inherent challenge built into its structure: If it follows the exact same beats too many times, the storytelling could get stale. Throughout the 12-episode run of "Poker Face" season 2, you can feel how its formula risks falling into a rut — and how the creators are experimenting to make sure that doesn't happen.

Again, most of the "Poker Face" episodes this season stick to the formula. The aforementioned premiere "The Game Is a Foot," "Last Looks," and "One Last Job" are episodes that execute it well. But in others, it started to wear, like in the back-to-back middling punch of "The Taste of Human Blood" and "Hometown Hero." When the murder plot within the structure is weak, it winds up reflecting back poorly on the "Poker Face" formula.

But at the midpoint of "Poker Face" season 2 — namely the sixth episode "Sloppy Joseph" — the show started zagging where usually it would zig. This particular episode didn't break up the typical "Poker Face" structure, but rather used a nontypical setting — specifically, a private school. The killer is the deranged Type-A elementary student Stephanie (Eva Jade Halford). After one of the other students in the class, Elijah (Callum Vinson), beats her at a spelling bee, Stephanie decides that she will murder ... his confidence. So at a talent show, she tricks Elijah, who is supposed to perform a magic trick in whicih he makes the class hamster disappear, into accidentally killing the hamster. So yeah, all Charlie has to investigate this episode is the murder of a class pet. But the low stakes don't seem trivial; the show's usual comedy is just turned up another ten percent or so, and the episode offsets Stephanie's minor crime by making her one of Charlie's most conniving foes yet.

Episode 8, "The Sleazy Georgian," is when "Poker Face" breaks protocol and delivers one of the season's best episodes. The cold open features Regina (Melanie Lynskey), a charity worker, sitting down for coffee at a New York hotel bar and meeting charming stranger Guy (John Cho). Regina is hungry for a little excitement in her life and seems to find it when Guy, working a too-good-to-be-true money exchange scheme, is shot and Regina escapes with his briefcase. 

Clearly the episode is going to be about Charlie sniffing out Regina, right? At first, the episode seems to be building up another of its go-to plot beats with Charlie befriending the victim, when she meets Guy in that same hotel bar. Then the episode swerves: Guy is a con artist, and Regina (who has since died by suicide after losing the money she was carrying for her job) was the mark. The opening was a con on the viewers, too. Just like Regina, we made assumptions without fully thinking them through. Part of the con, Guy explains, is reeling in the mark to get them to trust you, which is exactly what "Poker Face" did in its 17 previous episodes. We expect we know how the show's murders play out, and "The Sleazy Georgian" banks that trust to pull off its twist. By design, "Poker Face" usually doesn't have twists about the identities of its killers, so when Guy "dies" and Regina runs, we think that's all she wrote.

An episodic series like "Poker Face" has to acclimate the audience to its formula before you can deviate from it. In the same way, "The Sleazy Georgian" briefs the audience on how a con works, just before the series starts executing a much longer one to be fulfilled in the season finale.

"Poker Face" is an "on the road" series in the vein of "Kung Fu," "The A-Team," "The Incredible Hulk," "The Fugitive," etc. Charlie, a drifter, travels all across the United States and encounters different murders in different towns. But after "The Sleazy Georgian," she doesn't leave the Big Apple like you'd expect. Instead, she settles in and the next episodes leading to the finale take place in NYC.

In episode 9, "A New Lease on Death," Charlie crosses paths with Alex (Patti Harrison) at a New York coffee shop and they become friends. In the next episode, "The Big Pump," Alex helps Charlie crack a mystery at their local gym and bring the killer to justice. Since "Poker Face" and Charlie have planted their roots in the city, is there room for another recurring character, a sidekick, a Watson to Charlie's Sherlock?

Nope, because the season finale blows that up. In episode 11, "Day of the Iguana," an assassin wearing a latex mask disguise (Justin Theroux) frames Alex for the episode's murder. The victim (Haley Joel Osment) is the son of flipped mob boss Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman), who Charlie helped back in season 2 episode 3, "Whack-A-Mole."

While Charlie is out to prove Alex's innocence and save her from mob hitmen, the FBI realize this is the work of the Iguana, a ruthless assassin and master of disguise. The Iguana is trying to find Hasp, who's disappeared into witness protection, and has devised a complex scheme to get Charlie to do the hard work of finding Hasp so the Iguana can simply follow Charlie to the target and take Hasp out.

In "The End of the Road," "Poker Face" season 2 pulls its final twist. The previous assassin wasn't actually the Iguana, just another pawn of the real Iguana: Alex. Charlie only pieces that together once Hasp is already dead. "Alex" had heard of Charlie's reputation and wanted to see if she could fool Charlie's BS detector; turns out she's the only one to ever do it. As the episode itself spells out, Alex isn't Charlie's Watson, she's her Moriarty. 

The episode even includes flashbacks to the previous three episodes to recontextualize Alex's scenes with her true intentions. These sorts of exposition denouements are common in whodunnits, but "Poker Face" is usually not that kind of murder mystery show. If someone is a killer, we usually already know it by the time they meet Charlie. Maybe in another detective show we would've suspected Alex, but not this one. "Poker Face" is a show without twists about the killer's identities, so this surprise became both a structural twist and a plot-based one.

"Poker Face" season 2 ends with Charlie on the run from the FBI, who hold her responsible for Hasp's death. This might annoy fans who thought the overarching story of Charlie running from the mob was the biggest problem with "Poker Face" season 1, but it puts our heroine back on the road with (Peacock willing) more mysteries ahead. If "Poker Face" returns, and as the writers hopefully keep experimenting, we'll know not all murders on this show are what they initially appear.

"Poker Face" is streaming on Peacock.