Review: Poker Face, "The End of the Road" | Season 2, Episode 12

“You gave me a reason to live.”

Just as it is true that the formula of a crime procedural can become predictable, so too can a reviewer of the procedural become somewhat familiar. A couple weeks ago, when “The Big Pump” aired, I was pleased and surprised to get name-checked in a review of the same episode over at The A.V. Club by Noel Murray. Noel noted how I like to recommend episodes of Columbo when I review episodes of Poker Face, largely because this show has been nakedly obvious about the creative debt it owes to Peter Falk’s exploits back in the 1970s.

But just as the last couple episodes of Poker Face have attempted to upend its formula, I figure I might as well do the same this week.1 Not only am I taking the recommendation out of the Stray Observations, I’m not even going to recommend an episode of Columbo this week. Technically, it’s not even a recommendation as much as an allusion, but an apt one, nonetheless. See, about a third of the way through “The End of the Road,” I was thinking of the season-one finale of the BBC show Sherlock. If you haven’t seen the show, a) you should (at least the first season), and b) let me briefly explain why I was thinking of “The Great Game.”

Although the Steven Moffat-created update of the Sherlock Holmes stories is proudly modern, it does hit a lot of familiar beats. Sherlock (then played by Benedict Cumberbatch, in the role that helped vault him into stardom) is mercurial: he’s half-crazy, he’s incredibly intelligent, and of course, he has his good friend Watson. As played by Martin Freeman, this John Watson is far from the avuncular comic-relief figure of the old-school Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone, but still not as sharp as Sherlock even as he deals with PTSD from his time in the Iraq War. In “The Great Game,” we finally meet the yang to Sherlock’s yin: James Moriarty.

If you do recall “The Great Game,” you recall that the tense final scene—set at night at a deserted gym—allows Sherlock to meet Moriarty for the first time. And for a brief moment, Sherlock thinks the mysterious Moriarty is none other than…John Watson. Now, within the confines of Sherlock, Watson is exactly who we expect Watson to be; he’s not actually Moriarty, but has been rigged up to explosives and is being told to speak to Sherlock as if he is Moriarty. But Moriarty is someone else entirely (and played by Andrew Scott, quite well). Moffat faking out the audience is maybe a cheap trick, but listen…you would be a bit surprised if Sherlock’s best friend was actually his worst enemy, right?