Poker Face returned to the small screen with a second season last week, and we got three new episodes of the show. We learned that Charlie was on the run from Beatrix’s henchmen and saw her efforts to escape their clutches bring her to the quintuplets, Amber, Delia, Cece, Bebe, and Felicity. After solving the murder of Felicity and putting a stop to the scam that Amber was running, Charlie moved on to another case, which involved the murder of Greta at the hands of her husband, Fred. She barely made it out of there alive, only to be caught in the middle of an FBI operation being run by Luca to catch Beatrix and a counter-FBI operation being run by Beatrix to weed out the rat on her team. Eventually, Charlie found out that Beatrix’s husband, Jeffrey, was the rat, and Luca’s friend and colleague, Danny, was the mole in the FBI who was helping Beatrix all along. When all this was revealed, Jeffrey was killed by Danny (via Luca), and the corrupt agent was arrested. Luca put Beatrix in witness protection and requested that she call off the hit that she had put on Charlie, and Beatrix obliged. The fourth episode of Poker Face shows Charlie tasting freedom after a long time… in Florida of all places. So, let’s talk about it.
Spoiler Alert
Lamont Kills Gator Joe
Episode 4 of Poker Face Season 2 opens with Officer Fran Lamont being invited to the 2019 Florida Panhandle Cop Awards, also known as the Flopa Copas, because of her outstanding work. Although she is reluctant to attend, after some subtle persuasion from her boss, Chief Hal Pendleton, Lamont agrees to go for it. Okay, here’s a negligible little detail. The 2019 Flopa Copas are being hosted by Matt Passmore as himself. Right before watching this episode, I had finished binge-watching the entire Saw franchise. Guess who is in Jigsaw, the eighth installment of the series? That’s right! Matt Passmore. Coincidence? Yeah, I think so, but I found it to be interesting enoug to share it with you all. So, there it is. Anyway, getting back to the plot, Lamont doesn’t win the “cop of the year” award, as that’s bagged by Officer Joseph Pilson. Since Lamont didn’t even want to come to the ceremony in the first place, she isn’t all that perturbed by Pilson’s win. However, after losing to him for 6 years running, Lamont is visibly flustered by the fact that Pilson has gone from being a nobody with a baby alligator (named Daisy) strapped to his chest to a Tiger King-esque social media icon called Gater Joe whose mascot is Daisy. Lamont thinks that the 2025 Flopa Copas is finally going to reward her for her work, but a small visit backstage where all the trophies are kept crushes all her hopes as Pilson’s name is written all over it.
While moping about it in the green room, Lamont finds out that Pilson has brought Daisy to the awards too, where she has been kept in her cage, alongside all the products that he sells. So, Lamont concocts a plan to humiliate Joseph by mixing his reptile laxative into his energy drinks. She consults with Rusty, an officer who is somewhat of an expert in narcotics and chemicals, so that the dosage is right. However, since she makes a mistake while reading Rusty’s note, she puts way too much laxative in Joseph’s drink and ends up killing him. Hence, she has to concoct yet another plan to remove any trace of the fact that she has essentially murdered Gator Joe. She frees Daisy and lures her, with the help of Oreos (Daisy’s favorite, and also some neat product placement), to the bathroom where Joseph’s dead body is. Given how Daisy isn’t a man-eater, and she probably recognizes Joseph’s smell as well, she doesn’t gobble him up. Therefore, Lamont steals a packet of drugs from Rusty’s podium and sprinkles it on Daisy’s nose, thereby causing her to go stir-crazy and eat up Joseph, crumbs and all. The cops attending the Flopa Copas discover the bloodthirsty alligator in the bathroom and think that Daisy is the guilty party, not Lamont.
Charlie Wants to Save Daisy
As is customary in Poker Face, the episode turns back the clock a few days to reveal how Charlie factors into this mess. Given how she isn’t on the run anymore, she picks a random spot on the map and decides to head there. Before doing so, she uses the police radio that’s fitted into her Plymouth Barracuda now and gets in touch with a stranger who has tuned into her frequency while quoting Out of the Blue (the 1980 movie). The fellow Dennis Hopper fan (who is apparently voiced by the great Steve Buscemi) gives Charlie some advice on how to live life, which motivates her to seek sanctuary at a farm for gators that’s run by Hutch. When Hutch isn’t feeding chickens to alligators, he is busy conducting heists to save animals from the people who are illegally keeping them as pets. His latest target is, of course, Gator Joe, and he intends to rescue Daisy while she is at the 2025 Flopa Copas. Hutch, Charlie, and the rest of their team dress up as waiters and infiltrate the event. Well, only Charlie goes in while the rest just wait in the van.
Anyway, once she locates Daisy in the green room, she identifies a major problem: the cage that she is in doesn’t have wheels; hence, it’s impossible to transport her whilst she is in that contraption. As Charlie tries to figure out how she is going to pull off this reptile heist, Lamont barges in there, which prompts Charlie to get the hell out of there and wait until the green room is empty again. Hutch tells Charlie to use Oreos to lure Daisy out of the building and into his van. By the time Charlie procures the cookies and gets back to the green room, she finds out that someone (we know it’s Lamont) has already used Oreos to lure her into the bathroom and unleashed her on Gator Joe, thereby making it a crime scene. The cops present there intend to kill Daisy. Hutch has decided to abort the mission because he thinks that once a gator has tasted human blood, it’s a liability and not worth rescuing. Since Charlie had bonded with Daisy, prior to her escape, by gazing into her eyes, she wants to ensure that justice prevails and Daisy isn’t executed for a crime that Charlie believes she hasn’t committed. And on that note, Charlie begins her private investigation into the matter.
Charlie Catches Lamont Red-Handed
At the end of Poker Face Season 2, episode 4, Lamont finds out that the glasses that Joseph wore all the time and was wearing at the time of his death have a camera in them and are constantly recording everything into their memory card, to a cloud server, or to Joseph’s phone. Which means that there’s videographic evidence of everything from Lamont finding Joseph’s dead body to her coaxing Daisy into eating Joseph. Where are these glasses? In Daisy’s stomach. So, Lamont has to save Daisy from all the trigger-happy cops at the convention that want to avenge Joseph, take her to a secure location, and kill her before she poops out the glasses, which have all the incriminating footage on them. Now, Lamont and Charlie’s missions temporarily align because they want to get Daisy away from all those police officers, with the only difference being that Charlie doesn’t want to kill Daisy, and they work together to get the massive alligator into Lamont’s car and drive away. Of course, Charlie doesn’t know about the glasses or anything. Hence, she assumes that Lamont is helping her free Daisy out of the goodness of her heart. However, during the drive to the nearby lake, Charlie starts conversing with Lamont and realizes that she is piling up one lie upon another. When she finds out that Lamont has actually brought the alligator out there to put a bullet in it, she puts two and two together and solves the mystery of how Lamont accidentally poisoned Gator Joe, then turned Daisy into a man-eater with the help of drugs, and why she wants to get rid of Daisy. But before doing so, Charlie urges Lamont to look into Daisy’s eyes, which, surprisingly enough, convinces her to submit the footage from the glasses to Chief Hal and face the punishment for her crimes.
That said, Hal thinks that the whole thing is not big enough of a deal for him to send Lamont to jail because freak incidents like these keep happening in Florida all the time. Lamont can’t accept that free pass. So, she hangs up her boots and joins Hutch’s animal farm, where she takes care of the gators. As for Charlie, she hits the road again after catching a glimpse of the man-eating Daisy rushing towards her. While the credits roll, we see footage from Joseph’s TikTok, where he talks about having too many sponsorships, his estranged personal relationships, and his love for Daisy, thereby showing that although Gater Joe is dead, his legacy lives on through his videos. Other than that, what was the point of this whole episode, you ask? Well, based on Lamont’s final act, I think Poker Face is showing us how police officers should act after committing a crime instead of using some loophole to avoid facing the consequences of one’s actions. I mean, there are so many cops out there who are responsible for extrajudicial violence and custodial death. Do any of them even admit that they’ve erred, that they are worse than the criminals they are supposed to arrest, and that they deserve to be punished? They either get a slap on the wrist or a pat on their back for acting out of line. If we had more cops like Lamont, who can realize that they are flawed and don’t deserve to be in charge of implementing the law of the land, then maybe the world would’ve been a better place. Anyway, those are just my thoughts on episode 4 of Poker Face Season 2. What are your opinions on the same? Let me know in the comments section below.
