Review: Poker Face, "Last Looks" | Season 2, Episode 2

“I don’t understand ‘out.’ There is no ‘out.’”

I perked up when I saw that Natasha Lyonne directed and co-wrote “Last Looks,” the second of three episodes of Poker Face premiering this week on Peacock. She and co-writer Alice Ju last collaborated on “The Orpheus Syndrome,” which co-starred Nick Nolte and Cherry Jones, and was an absolute high point of the first season. It’s not as if I expected “Last Looks” to replicate that episode’s ultra-hangout vibes and its ode to practical special effects, but the combination of these two women behind the camera raised my interest beyond being excited to watch this show.

In part because the episode is perhaps a bit too short (“The Game is A Foot” is the longest of the three available to stream now at just 55 minutes, and…well, we’ll talk about the length of the third episode in tomorrow’s review), and in part because of how it ends, “Last Looks” is maybe a bit weaker than I would have wanted. Where “The Game Is A Foot” reminded us that Charlie Cale can only get so comfy in her current environs, “Last Looks” allows her a bit more time to stretch her metaphorical sea legs. Once she gets acclimated to the murder of the week, we learn that Charlie is in Florida and has seen neither hide nor hair of Beatrix Hasp’s men for three months. As we will learn by the conclusion, though, there’s a reason for that. For now, Charlie is happy enough, first glimpsed chatting away on the beach with some alcoholic headwear.

But as was the case in episodes like “The Orpheus Syndrome,” the death of the week in “Last Looks” hits a little harder for Charlie. Not every murder in Poker Face can befall someone who Charlie has not only met but befriended, but when that happens, her ire is raised exponentially. I should note that while this episode is not in praise of special effects, it too is a bit of a cinematic throwback. Charlie’s Barracuda is enlisted to appear in the background of a movie filming at a funeral home, whose overly officious owner, Fred Finch (Giancarlo Esposito), is pushed to murder his younger wife Greta (Katie Holmes) when she decides to leave him and head to Miami with our heroine.