Spoilers
“The Sleazy Georgian”
I loved this episode. I loved it because it was different than any other Poker Face episode. It started out as always, showing the crime before Charlie gets involved. This crime is a money drop gone wrong, with Shauna from Yellowjackets involved with John Cho. It seemed as if the whole thing was going down in a bad way with a couple of dead bodies.
It was pretty clear that there was some con going on, but I thought that it might have been a con gone wrong and that John Cho, who was playing a man named Guy, had actually bit the big one.
However, we go to Charlie meeting Guy in a hotel bar at breakfast time, just like Shauna did. In every other Poker Face episodes ever, this would be before the crime we see in the cold open, but this time, it was after. Guy was trying to set up Charlie for the con, and, of course, failing miserably because of her lie detector skill.
Guy introduced Charlie to his crew and they all kind of bonded… to a point where they wanted to have Charlie join them in a con. She wanted to think about it.
When she came back the next day, she had discovered that Shauna (Ok, not Shauna… Melanie Lynskey, who plays Shauna is playing Regina in this episode) had killed herself after the con.
In an attempt to get the money Regina had lost (which came from an orphan fund) back, Charlie agreed to join the con.
At this point, the show flipped things around again and I really liked the results. I have to say, I really thought this was Guy trying to prove that he could get away with lying to Charlie. That was not it.
I love the fact that Charlie is shown to be smarter than anyone else, even if she does not seem to be. She has so much common sense and does not just rely on her ability to tell when someone is lying. She set up a con to con the con, and got him in the end. The character of Charlie is also so original and unlikely looking of a protagonist who gets by with her smarts. I love how she is really not your typical hero.
This was a lot of fun and I thought the fact that they broke the format even more than ever before was an awesome thing.
I think in the second season, the writers tried harder to be weird than they did on the mysteries. Sometimes it worked for me, such as with this episode, sometimes it didn’t.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’d like an actual mystery once. Maybe with a whole bunch of people lying at once. I know the idea is it is Columbo-like, but a Knives Out-like mystery with Charlie could be fun for a change.
LikeLiked by 1 person