Poker Face (season 2) ★★★½
Charlie Cale is an efficient grasp. Natasha Lyonne’s unintended detective, a Las Vegas on line casino employee on the run from a vengeful crime boss who retains discovering herself adjoining to a suspicious mortality, has a cheery persona, a sardonic sense of humour and an admirably optimistic outlook for somebody so death-adjacent. “Introspection makes me queasy,” Charlie declares early on on this homicide thriller’s second season, and the present is so hardy and purposeful – clues! bizarre idiosyncrasies! wild visitor stars! – that she’s inconceivable to fault.
Natasha Lyonne as unintended detective Charlie Cale in Poker Face.
Created by Knives Out filmmaker Rian Johnson, who once more leads the director’s roster this season, Poker Face was the shot within the arm the procedural format wanted.
As soon as Charlie was on the run, these self-contained episodes did Columbo proud: viewers get to see the seed of murder planted within the killer’s head earlier than the deed is carried out and lined, with Charlie because the unlikely unofficial investigator. Blessed and cursed with the flexibility to inform if another person’s phrases are lies, Charlie utilized a surreptitious repair.
That’s a “howcatchem”, versus the standard whodunit, and that spin extends to the second season, which picks up the place the primary ended, with Charlie hospitalised as Cliff (Benjamin Bratt), the fixer pursuing her, closes in.
Cynthia Erivo (proper) as two of the sextuplets and Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale in Poker Face.
As goofy as Poker Face might be, it has a pointy existential undertone and an understanding of working-class realities. Charlie’s actions are tied to seasonal jobs and cash-in-hand gigs – she bonds with the kinds of characters who normally have not more than a line in most modern American reveals.
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It might have been straightforward for this new instalment to duplicate the pluses of its predecessor, but when something Poker Face is messing with Charlie’s motivations and simply how a lot a single episode can embody. Among the outcomes sound like informal dares made good: can Wicked star Cynthia Erivo play a number of sisters in an outrageous episode? That’s the gas for the season debut, with Erivo consuming up the contradictory characters and twisted humour. There’s a mansion worthy of Poirot, however Belgium’s best by no means handled a hipster DJ and Looney Tunes identification theft.
