Poker Face: Time of the Monkey

February 2, 2023 10:33 AM - Season 1, Episode 5

Working at a retirement home, Charlie makes friends with two rebellious old ladies who may have taken matters into their own hands.
posted by ellieBOA (38 comments total)

Absolutely LOVED this episode. What a delight!
posted by miss-lapin at 11:31 AM on February 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

Everything about it was so good, but Lyonne's line-reading of "I'm a cusper, you fucking psycho!" was so perfect.

It was directed by horror director Lucky McKee, who I'm not a particular fan of, but I think he did a good job at raising the tension, especially at the end. The fight was savage!

Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson were amazing here.

I like the moment of attraction between Charlie and Simon Helberg's Luka. I think he may show up again and I welcome it.
posted by edencosmic at 2:47 PM on February 2, 2023 [9 favorites]

This was my favorite episode so far. Also, the Ngozi Family track they played is super dope.
posted by snofoam at 5:39 PM on February 2, 2023 [13 favorites]

Did no one else think this episode was garbage? From the bad dialog to the shitty fight scene, bad bad bad. Why would the main character be in any position to judge these women for their pasts? Why would she ever work with the FBI? It makes no sense and totally destroys and good will I had toward the character.

“I’m not really about helping the man.”
Really??? Just bad. So bad.

I was hoping that this would be one of those episodes that she winds up, if not helping, then allowing the murderers to go. But no, instead they had to portray two leftists as potential child killers in order to handwave the main character’s behavior. This is almost enough to not watch more of the show.
posted by degoao at 5:58 PM on February 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think it’s hilarious that Charlie is still genuinely surprised when murderers try to murder her.
posted by Mr. Excellent at 8:05 PM on February 2, 2023 [19 favorites]

Given her predicament, an FBI agent working in witness protection seems like an incredibly useful contact. He probably has good information on staying safe while on the run. Even if he can't officially get her a new identity, he may be able to help her get new accounts unconnected to her old ones.

For that matter, why not set law enforcement after Cliff? He did murder her friend. Between that & the evidence against the Russian whale, maybe she could qualify for genuine protection.

At a minimum, in a previous episode someone said she was wanted for questioning in relation to the deaths in episode one. Could Luca get her testimony and remove that threat hanging over her head?

I know the showrunners want to maintain this premise for a while yet, but within the story, there was no reason for her to ignore this opportunity.
posted by cheshyre at 8:42 PM on February 2, 2023 [6 favorites]

> I was hoping that this would be one of those episodes that she winds up, if not helping, then allowing the murderers to go. But no, instead they had to portray two leftists as potential child killers in order to handwave the main character’s behavior.

Charlie runs her mouth in an overly trusting way with multiple people in every single episode, and in every episode one of those people is actually the villian. Usually we know more than Charlie does about where she's making a judgement error. In this case, we didn't. Part of the interesting thing about this series (at least to me) is figuring out where the writers are going to twist the knife.

I think the justification for their murder of Gabriel was treated with some sympathy, and it was made pretty clear IMO that Charlie would have stayed on Joyce and Irene's side if their original crime had been conspiring to murder adults in power like Nixon. But killing children is beyond the pale no matter who their parents are, and the murder of Betty further cemented that Joyce and Irene hew to that Manson reference.
posted by desuetude at 8:50 PM on February 2, 2023 [19 favorites]

Charlie runs her mouth in an overly trusting way with multiple people in every single episode, and in every episode one of those people is actually the villian.

This is one of the things that makes Charlie really charming for me. Despite her gift, she's trusting and genuinely likes people. For me, it's difficult to imagine not becoming cynical, but that's one thing she absolutely isn't even after stumbling upon murderers multiple times.

I do think the FBI thing will come up again, but I'm not surprised Charlie wouldn't be in a rush to trust an FBI agent who neglected to check if the nursing home had any previous associates of the man he was supposed to protect. Kinda a major oversight.
posted by miss-lapin at 10:30 PM on February 2, 2023 [14 favorites]

Yeah she just assumed they were "love and peace" hippies wrongfully imprisoned due to fascist hegemony rather than "burn it all down" hippies building bombs to kill teenagers. Honest mistake, not even that uncommon. Speaking as a kid whose parent went to Berkeley in the 70s and who therefore idolized radicals of that era as a youngster, I completely COMPLETELY loved this episode. I'm a little younger than Charlie but it's so easy to assume every old hippie you meet was some harmless, cool, ahead-of-their-time leftist who just got in trouble for some drugs/"the Man can't handle the truths we're speaking"/wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time reasons, but there was in fact a scary and violent strain in that politics too and some of the hippies who were in jail for a long time really did belong there. I loved that this episode showed Charlie making the assumptions any Xennial would make about some cool, funny, interesting old ladies only to be proven wrong.

That said, god I loved Joyce and Irene! I loved their gleeful flouting of every retirement home social norm and how much Betty loathed them. And loved the as-I-understand-it-accurate portrayal of all the weird sex people get up to in retirement homes. Absolutely delightful olds all around riiiight up until they started doing murders.

I love so much that Charlie can't stop herself from presenting her case to the murderer when she figures out how she's going to prove someone did a murder. It's the most charming complete failure to read the room. She's just so pleased with herself!

I feel like there's got to be an episode this season where there isn't actually a murder and she gets it wrong. Right?? My money's on episode 7.
posted by potrzebie at 10:53 PM on February 2, 2023 [20 favorites]

I very much enjoyed the whiplash moral shifts.

Getting FBI guy's card confirmed my suspicion that the last episode of the series is basically going to be a face-off with the gang boss from episode 1, featuring a character from each of the other episodes (my guess so far: Marge, Murder Girl, FBI Guy, DJ with Fascist Asshole Dog). The Fugitive angle is cute and definitely on-point but also the element that's likely to get old quickest, so if they can get out of it that would be cool. On the other hand, if not, that's also cool as long as there's more of it.

In fact, given that the universe in general and Rian Johnson in particular have fulfilled my request for a Columbo reboot with Natasha Lyonne, may I put in a further request for a show where she basically just talks to people. Like going around getting into conversations without any need for a plot. That would be delightful.
posted by Grangousier at 1:42 AM on February 3, 2023 [13 favorites]

the shitty fight scene,

I mean, it's a normal middle-aged woman up against two women in their 70's? One of whom is in a wheelchair? What were you expecting? The part where Charlie gets bonked on the head with a bedpan should've clued us all in that they were going for "slapstick" more than "superhero."

Charlie is still genuinely surprised when murderers try to murder her.

Charlie runs her mouth in an overly trusting way with multiple people in every single episode, and in every episode one of those people is actually the villian.

Definitely true, and definitely part of the charm, but she is learning - she had the Plan B in place of shorting out the wrist monitors to get an emergency response just in case Irene & Joyce didn't go quietly.


Maybe I forgot something from previous episodes about Charlie getting fake ID, but my only problem with this was kind of the basic set up? Like I don't think even low level janitorial staff at a fairly ritzy retirement home is a "cash under the table no questions asked" kind of job? Meaning mob guys should have shown up pretty darn quick.
posted by soundguy99 at 8:15 AM on February 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

I find the mob showing up X time after making electronic contact a bit of a stretch itself, more of a stretch than someone getting a service job under the table. Retirement homes are infamously sleazy and shady businesses anyway.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:25 AM on February 3, 2023

Also: Blues Run the Game - No one outside the counter-culture have heard of it, as far as I can tell, and I only know of it because I know people who were in the counter-culture (in London), and saw Jackson C. Frank at Les Cousins, etc.

Really, really clever choice of tune is what I mean.
posted by Grangousier at 1:38 PM on February 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Re: Blues Run the Game – I'm outside the counter-culture but even I got as close as "huh that Nick Drake song sounds weird here"
posted by nicwolff at 3:37 PM on February 3, 2023

The story I heard was that Jackson C Frank blew into town and played at all the clubs - Les Cousins, the Troubadour (in Earls Court), Bunjies and so forth - and he had a huge impact on the players in those clubs. One of those was was my friend Dave Russell, who told me about it, and another was Nick Drake. The reason it might sound like Nick Drake is that he influenced Nick Drake, and Blues Run the Game was his hit (not a sales hit, or a radio hit, but the song that always wowed the audiences). Blues Run the Game is a very deep cut.
posted by Grangousier at 3:57 PM on February 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

In the present day, Vancouver finally caught up with a fake nurse who worked mostly at hospitals in provincial health systems. After this article it turned out that she had been employed for many years before, in other parts of the country, as a fake nurse. With similar behaviour.

The "leftist old ladies" are rotten and unrepentant people. Sure, they might be fun but.

Was waiting for when Charlie would confront Joyce and Irene about their bs - she was onto them since the diarrhea scene, but only starts putting it together after fake nephew.

I like fake nephew.

But - yes - maybe this puts limits on Charlie being able to detect a lie if the liar knows what they are saying is a lie? But J&I confirms what fake nephew alleges.

The fight was hilarious, and just-plausibly realistic while played for laughs.
posted by porpoise at 7:12 PM on February 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson were clearly having so much fun in this episode!
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 9:55 PM on February 3, 2023 [11 favorites]

Anyone trying to take this show seriously or run any logic by it is going to have a bad time. It's purposefully silly. It balances comedy and drama and surrealism.

It has a lot of in-jokes and cliches. On purpose. It's a reflection of the 70s to 90s whodunits, with a twist. The mob showing up after X hours is set up in episode two with Marge saying she was tracked 4 hours after she used her card. So she went off-grid and cash only. So when Charlie uses her card, she sets a timer for 4 hours. And then in episode four when she goes viral on accident she asks "When was that posted?" The answer "About 4 hours ago!" And boom, there he is. Silly! I blurt-laughed It's impossible for the guy to even travel that far in 4 hours!

I LOVE this show. And I loved this episode. As said above, we normally know all the ins and outs of what happened and then we swap to her finding it out. In this one, we didn't know the full story but think we do, because of that formula. And that was a really nice change of pace. I really loved everyone in this. Full of a lot of fun acting, just for the sake of having fun. Even a fight scene with old ladies! Fantastic. 10/10
posted by Crystalinne at 12:12 AM on February 4, 2023 [15 favorites]

Blues Run the Game is a very deep cut.

Huh! I wouldn't have guessed that because I grew up with the Simon and Garfunkel cover, but looking into that I see that it was previously unreleased before the 1997 box set. My reaction to it basically went

a) oh this song
b) not Simon and Garfunkel
c) I wonder if this is one of those 1960s songs that half of everybody did a cover of at some point
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:13 AM on February 4, 2023

I love the things that make this show like Columbo, but I also love the things that make it not like Columbo.

I have to grant that making Columbo in 2023 is hard. Like, there were about six episodes of Columbo per “season” because they were all TV-movie length, so they made only one every month. That’s such a weird format for a TV show that Columbo is pretty much the only example that’s still in the public consciousness.

So I love that we spend like 20 minutes per episode of Poker Face getting to know this murderer and how they’re setting up this outrageously elaborate murder. And then we find out that Charlie has been there the whole time, sometimes just out of frame. And then… we've got only 25 minutes with Charlie, because these aren't 90-minute-long episodes like Columbo. It's bittersweet. If they were longer, we wouldn't get as many of them.

The upside of it is that some of these murders are so silly that, like, it really does not take a Lt. Columbo, or even a human lie detector, to suss them out. So if it really did take Charlie 45 minutes to put the pieces together, you'd wonder if she was being willfully dense. And, in fact, it's a bit discouraging to watch her make naïve decisions over and over (let me confront another murderer without a plan B if things go sideways!). I understand that if she doesn't, we don't get an awesome Judith/S. Epatha/Natasha fight scene, but it's still hard to suspend the disbelief. She acts like someone who knows they're wearing Plot Armor.

On the other hand, I've been heartened by the writers' ability to spring some final-scene surprises. The format is so relentless that you start to notice the setups — like, when someone mentions for no seeming reason that the train comes through town every day like clockwork, you can yell “Chekhov's train!” and mark off a square on your bingo card. But Columbo was so great at sneaking things past you and having the lieutenant execute a flourish that took you completely by surprise. (Suitable for Framing might be the earliest example.) Here, the surprises are different, but no less satisfying: I loved the Benson payoff from episode 4 and the bored-DJ-voice-impersonator payoff from episode 3.

I think they could've tightened up the scripts a bit, but honestly I don't care much. It's not like Columbo was making high art when they brought Jack Cassidy back to play the murderer for the third time. The schemes will certainly get more contrived in subsequent seasons, but I don't think it'll matter much as long as there are new guest stars to show up, play against type, chew scenery, and have fun. And the one and only rule of episodic TV is that you do not mention last week's episode, because that's the best way to keep a silly premise going.
posted by savetheclocktower at 1:01 AM on February 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

Also, I knew the odds were slim, but I was hoping for one scene with both S. Epatha Merkerson and Benjamin Bratt so that there could be a miniature Law & Order reunion.
posted by savetheclocktower at 1:02 AM on February 4, 2023 [9 favorites]

SEXUAL ZAPPING
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 3:42 AM on February 4, 2023 [9 favorites]

And in today's installment of "Shut up and take my money," we have: ANYTHING where Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson can co-star as whatever they damn well please! They were (ARE) fantastic.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 3:44 AM on February 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

But - yes - maybe this puts limits on Charlie being able to detect a lie if the liar knows what they are saying is a lie?

I mean, I think that's always been pretty clear? She can tell when someone else is bullshitting, in other words, telling a lie about something they know to be untrue. And Charlie is well aware that people do that all the time, every day. It makes total sense that all the little white lies people tell around her should be completely unremarkable to her. In the moment it made sense she would have accepted the lie outside the bathroom to be totally unremarkable, since nothing else unusual was going on.
posted by Pryde at 1:51 PM on February 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

It was telegraphed pretty early on when the two of them were describing Gaaaabriel the love god/leader except the writers copped out an made him an activist with a conscience vs a pig, sorry, undercover cop in true 70s fashion. I guess they couldn’t get him to the Home otherwise, it would’ve been an unbelievable coincidence. But climbing up the trellis and crawling in and out of windows…rigging a bomb in a random golf cart?? okay best not to look at it too closely. I did like Charlie’s back up plan.

I’ll stick with the previous (metal band murder) episode as my favorite.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 4:31 PM on February 4, 2023

But climbing up the trellis and crawling in and out of windows…

This part was over-the-top ridiculous, but also so hilarious that it worked. (Also, I loved that she was wearing an outfit designed to camouflage her against the trellis. 😄)
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 5:29 PM on February 4, 2023 [18 favorites]

Three victims out of seven are Charlie’s fault. She’s still under .500.
posted by Etrigan at 6:23 PM on February 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

She does the Columbo hand on the forehead “just one thing I don’t understand” thing in this one.
posted by Windopaene at 2:13 PM on February 7, 2023 [12 favorites]

may I put in a further request for a show where she basically just talks to people. Like going around getting into conversations without any need for a plot.

She would be perfect for a fictionalized adaptation of Starlee Kine's Mystery Show podcast!
posted by rikschell at 6:50 PM on February 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

I loved Betty's emu hat. "I was buying a hat like a normal person."

I thought the "this time the murderers are sympathetic, psych, psychopaths!" twist worked fine. This is a show where you give your guest stars some scenery to chew, like a good host. And obviously murdering teenagers would be bad, but the fact that their plot was to blow up the model UN is hilarious, A+++.

I also appreciated that the ladies who like murder shows are referred to as "the Fletchers."
posted by the primroses were over at 6:51 PM on February 9, 2023 [16 favorites]

The format is so relentless that you start to notice the setups — like, when someone mentions for no seeming reason that the train comes through town every day like clockwork, you can yell “Chekhov's train!” and mark off a square on your bingo card.

My favorite low-key hand-tip in this ep was one of Judith Light's character Irene's first lines, making a crack that "the blonde did it" in the fjord-based mystery show the Fletchers are watching. Irene herself has dark dyed hair with gray roots, but in the flashbacks she is blonde.
posted by lampoil at 4:55 PM on February 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

Anyone trying to take this show seriously or run any logic by it is going to have a bad time. It's purposefully silly. It balances comedy and drama and surrealism.

Yeah I feel like even if you knew absolutely nothing about the people making this show and their intent the crappy 70's primetime network tv titles are a dead giveaway that they are not going to be making something you should be taking seriously. Watch a few episodes of Loveboat or the Rockford Files to grok the silly/serious/plausible/implausible stew these sorts of shows used to be.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:27 PM on February 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

This is one of the things that makes Charlie really charming for me. Despite her gift, she's trusting and genuinely likes people. For me, it's difficult to imagine not becoming cynical, but that's one thing she absolutely isn't even after stumbling upon murderers multiple times.

Hard agree. It seems so counter-intuitive that someone who's got a sixth sense for bullshit would be like that; one would expect them to become jaded soon, lose faith in humanity, etc. But thinking about it a bit, Charly's reaction makes a lot of sense too - precisely because she's so uniquely positioned to be aware how much people are lying all the time, she doesn't seem terribly judgmental about it; her gift seems to give her a certain empathy for human frailty instead. People lie, even the best of us, for the pettiest reasons, and most of the time it's not to cover up some nefarious plot. People lie, mostly to protect themselves, because they are only too keenly aware of their own vulnerability. Knowing what people feel the need to lie about also means knowing what they feel insecure about, and that might plausibly increase rather than lessen your compassion.
posted by sohalt at 1:11 PM on February 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I wonder if "sexual zapping" was a deep reference to But I'm a Cheerleader or merely coincidence.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 5:45 PM on March 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

I thought the "this time the murderers are sympathetic, psych, psychopaths!" twist worked fine.

Actually the thing I liked best about it is that those women were fucking awful. Nasty, abusive, unpleasant people who made everyone's lives around them a little worse. But hey, they were funny and charismatic and we (and Charlie) are primed to think that's great! They're so cool! And so when it turned out that no, they were just nasty people who were willing to do anything to anyone in their way, it made me flash back hard to the way they treated the poor orderly who was never at any point doing anything other than his job, and being more patient about it than I would have been. It was a solid twist, imo.
posted by restless_nomad at 12:56 PM on July 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

(And they loved each other. A writer friend of mine often points out that you can make anybody sympathetic if you can show them loving something.)
posted by restless_nomad at 1:22 PM on July 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

So I came back to this show after a very long break, since the episodes were released in chunks, right? The first four came out and then there was a bit of a wait before this one came out, and I forgot to watch it until now.

As a result of my long break, I totally forgot about Charlie's bullshit detector! And it seemed like in this episode it completely didn't matter - verging on almost breaking their own rules on the bullshit detector here because Charlie couldn't tell that the two ladies hated Gabriel all the while they were talking about how much they loved him. Also her bullshit detector wasn't triggered when the other lady is announcing loudly that Irene has diarrhea, and Charlie was right there walking past. You know? And the bit at the zoo where she calls bullshit on their excuse to miss the monkey show was extremely transparently a lie, so transparent that, as I said, it didn't help to remind me to Charlie's "gift".

I get that it's supposed to be, like, technically fine because the dialogue was constructed in a clever way, or maybe because Charlie wasn't looking in her direction when she told the lie about the diarrhea, but this all just puts one too many limitations on Charlie's bullshit detector. I hope they make better use of this device soon.
posted by MiraK at 8:55 AM on March 2

I thought she did twig to the diarrhea thing but thought it was one of the millions of meaningless lies she hears all the time.
posted by restless_nomad at 3:37 PM on March 2 [2 favorites]