Natasha Lyonne playing the character of a supernaturally gifted slightly eccentric woman in trouble with the law is always thoroughly entertaining, and after Netflix’s Russian Doll, the crime comedy-drama series on Peacock, Poker Face, bears testimony to this very fact. In this outlandish and exaggerated crime comedy, we follow the bizarre life of Charlie Cale, a woman who can always tell if someone is lying, after she gets into some serious trouble with her employers. With Poker Face season 2 right around the corner, now is a good time to look back at the events from season 1 and how Charlie’s journey in the new iteration might still be affected by her decisions in the past.
Spoiler Alert
Why does Charlie get into trouble with her employers?
Poker Face begins with the account of Natalie, a worker at the esteemed Frost Hotel & Casino, where she stumbles across a horrific secret on the personal laptop of a regular client while cleaning his room. Kazimir Caine, a billionaire industrialist, often stays at the hotel and gambles at the casino, but he is definitely a shady character, judging by the video that Natalie saw on his laptop, which is later revealed to have shown the sexual exploitation of children. In an effort to expose the man’s crimes to the world, Natalie bravely takes a photo of the laptop screen, risking her own safety, and reports the matter straight to her boss, Cliff LeGrand, who works as the head of security. Cliff is also shocked by the revelation, and he takes Natalie to his boss, Sterling Frost Jr., the current manager of the establishment following the retirement of his father.
But contrary to what Natalie had thought, her bosses do not care about exposing the rich client, both because Caine brings them a lot of business and also because Sterling has a specific plan in the works regarding taking him for all he’s worth. Therefore, Sterling ruthlessly orders his trusted henchman, Cliff, to drive to Natalie’s home and kill her and her rowdy husband, Jerry, and also ensure to delete the photo from her phone to hide the evidence. Since Jerry had barged into the casino and had created a scene in a drunken state only a day earlier, the corrupt bosses decided to make it seem like Natalie had been killed by her husband, who then took his own life. During the incident the previous night, Jerry had waved his gun around, and Cliff had taken it away from his possession, and he now commits the murders with the same gun to make it appear like an instance of domestic violence.
Around the time that Natalie had made the shocking discovery and informed her bosses about it, Sterling Frost Jr. had been busy making a plan to teach Caine a lesson and also steal a significant sum of money from him. Caine had been recently hosting private gambling sessions in his suite instead of spending money at the casino, which was hurting the establishment’s business, but Sterling could not say anything to the man because of his stature. Sterling now wanted to plant a mole inside Caine’s private gambling sessions, who would easily win all his money and prove to him that the casino was a safer place to gamble. This is where the protagonist, Charlie Cale, came into the picture, for despite being an ordinary cocktail waitress at the casino, she has a supernatural power of always knowing when people are lying.
Charlie used to once use this extraordinary power of hers to gamble and win large amounts of money for herself until she ran across Sterling Frost Sr., who exposed her secret and got her blacklisted from the world of gambling. The man, a businessman with a lot of wealth and influence in the region, then offered the job of a waitress to Charlie at his hotel, which she had no choice but to take up, in order to earn a livelihood. Years later, when the businessman has been replaced by his son at present, Sterling Jr. plans on taking Charlie’s help to steal (technically win) money from Caine. Although Charlie agrees to the deal at first, she is absolutely shocked by the death of her best friend, Natalie, and she eventually uncovers the secret as well, using her power of lie detection and also by uncovering the security camera footage.
Thus, Charlie confronts her bosses, Cliff and Sterling Jr., also revealing that she had informed Caine of the plan that had been made against him, following which the businessman had already left. Realizing that his hotel has suddenly lost an important client and that other rich gamblers like Caine will also avoid his casino at all costs, Sterling Frost Jr. takes his own life out of shame and frustration. This matter is reported to his father by Cliff, and Charlie soon receives a call from Sterling Sr. The aggrieved and angered businessman orders the protagonist to surrender herself to him and warns her that she cannot run or hide from him. Yet, Charlie Cale packs up her bags and drives away from Atlantic City, setting out on an adventure across the United States of America, simply to evade her vengeful employers.
How does Cliff finally find Charlie?
Over the next 8 episodes, Charlie travels to various towns across the country and solves murder mysteries using her supernatural ability, while also managing to stay out of legal trouble. She avoids using a phone or her bank cards since all of it would make her trackable, and instead keeps looking for odd jobs and part-time employment to make ends meet. Charlie’s plan goes pretty well until she is in a snowy mountain town in Colorado, where she is accidentally hit by a speeding car, and the driver then attempts to kill her in order to cover up his crime. Although Charlie manages to survive the ordeal, she is left severely injured and has to be admitted to a hospital. This is where Cliff finally finds her, after having followed her trail for over a year.
Despite feeling that the absconding Charlie should be left alone, Cliff is ordered by Sterling Sr. to keep following the woman, and so he has no option but to stay on her trail. He first finds a trace of Charlie when she uses her card at an ATM, but is then falsely led to LA by the store clerk who had been helped by the protagonist. More than 2 months into the search, Cliff is informed of Charlie’s presence in a small town in Texas, but by the time he reaches the place, she has already made her escape. Although he comes very close to catching her after a video of her at a music festival goes viral, Charlie manages to flee once again, and for the rest of the year, she always stays a step ahead of Cliff, much to his frustration.
However, after the incident in Colorado, the local news agencies report the death of a woman named Charlie Cale, and Cliff immediately reaches town to investigate the matter. In reality, Charlie’s new friend, Morty, who happened to be a kleptomaniac, had stolen her wallet right before being killed, and so when the police found Morty’s body, they identified her as Charlie since the protagonist’s ID was found on her. Meanwhile, Charlie was admitted to the hospital as a Jane Doe, and she rejoiced at the fact that she would finally not have to worry about her employers. But the situation was not so simple, as Cliff immediately took a look at the dead body of Morty, figured out that she was not Charlie, and asked the authorities to take him to the hospital. Here, he identifies the real Charlie and waits for her treatment to conclude, as per the orders of Sterling Sr., and finally nabs her when she walks out of the hospital some two months later.
How does Charlie get caught in the feud between the Frosts and the Hasps?
Charlie is dragged back to Atlantic City by Cliff, seemingly upon the orders of Sterling Frost Sr., but there is actually a different conspiracy in the works. As it turns out, Cliff absolutely hates working for Sterling Sr., and his feelings might have been spurred by his year-long journey running around the country, like a lapdog of the Frost family. The Frost Hotel & Casino is actually owned by an even more powerful business and crime family, named the Hasps, and its matriarch, Beatrix Hasp, is also the head of the Five Families, which is the crime syndicate running every business in Atlantic City. For some years now, the Hasps had been feeling that Sterling Frost Sr. was not exactly abiding by their orders and instructions, because of which they had wanted to tighten their leash on him.
Beatrix Hasp had been secretly in talks with Sterling Jr. before the latter’s death, apparently to strike some deal behind Sterling Sr.’s back, but it had obviously fallen through after the suicide. With Sterling Sr. back in control of the establishment, there was no way for Beatrix to execute her plan, and so she had come up with a different scheme. Beatrix wanted Cliff to kill Sterling Sr. but also did not want any provable connections between her family and the crime, and so was in search of a drifter who could have the murder officially pinned on them. Thus, Cliff found Charlie to be the most ideal candidate for such a position, and soon the protagonist was caught in a feud between the two families.
Charlie is made to sit for a personal meeting with Sterling Sr., in which the latter tells her to help him out in a particular case, revealing that he had not been looking for her to seek revenge for his son’s death. He has been called by Beatrix Hasp to a meeting with the Five Families, and so he wants Charlie to accompany him and read everyone’s lies at the place. Charlie agrees to help, both because she is promised that she will be allowed to leave the casino after the mission and also because she is genuinely drawn to this life of crime and danger. Sterling Sr. had brought with him a name tag for Charlie as a gift to her, but Cliff had already replaced this with a handgun hidden inside a box.
As soon as Charlie pulls the gun out from the box, Cliff cuts the power in the entire casino with the help of a remote he was carrying in his pocket and shoots Sterling Sr. dead in the few seconds of darkness. Cliff uses the same handgun that he had earlier handed to Charlie in the car and then replaces the gun from the box with the same, essentially ensuring that Charlie’s prints are found on the murder weapon. Thus, the protagonist is soon pursued by the law, as the high-profile murder of the businessman immediately gets the FBI involved.
Is Cliff finally arrested for his crimes?
Although Charlie is in a lot of trouble, she still manages to hatch a plan of escape at the last minute, despite feeling that Cliff can help her out, since she does not still know that the head of security was the one who had technically sold her out. Charlie visits Cliff on his boat, and the latter uses this chance to inform the FBI of her location, hoping to see her arrested. But while on the boat, Charlie finds a pack of glowing poker chips among Cliff’s belongings and suddenly realizes that it was he who had committed the murder. Since Cliff needed to shoot his target in the dark, he had used a glowing chip as a reference for the shots, as Sterling Sr. had a habit of always fidgeting with a poker chip whenever he sat down to make a deal. Although the pack of chips is technically evidence in the case, it cannot be used to prove Cliff as the murderer because there are no other clues to support it. Therefore, Charlie cannot prove the truth to police, but she can at least escape by swimming away from the boat.
However, when the FBI officers arrive at Cliff’s boat, it is revealed that they are actually here to arrest the man on charges of the murders of Natalie and Jerry. Charlie had befriended an FBI officer named Luca Clark during her adventures and had given him all the evidence he had found after the murder of her best friend. The FBI had carried out an investigation into the matter and had finally found a link to the head of security at Frost Hotel & Casino. Thus, Cliff LeGrand is arrested by the FBI at the end of Poker Face season 1, and it is not likely that we will get to see him in the new season.
Does Charlie agree to work for the Hasp family?
Poker Face season 1 ends with Charlie returning to Atlantic City secretly, still managing to avoid the law, although she meets with Luca at a diner. It is evident that the FBI agent remains friends with the protagonist, and he can be expected to keep helping her in the next season. Charlie finally receives a call from Beatrix Hasp, who now wants to make use of her superpower of identifying lies. Beatrix wants to establish her stronghold over the other members of the Five Families, and having Charlie by her side will obviously boost her chances. But Charlie is not someone who can be convinced so easily, and the protagonist neither accepts nor turns down the offer to work for the Hasp family. It is also true that she is easily intrigued by situations that involve a fair deal of criminal danger, and so it is highly possible that she will ultimately end up working for the Hasps in the new season. Moreover, her association with the Hasp family will bring in new situations of crime and comedy, which will be worth looking forward to in Poker Face season 2.
