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Poker Face Stacks the Deck
By discarding some old story lines and going all in on the guest-star baddies, season two proves this series can play the long game.
The evidence adds up: Over the 10 of 12 episodes provided to critics for review, human lie detector Charlie gets outsmarted by an elementary-schooler who’s like a cross between Wednesday Addams and Damien Thorn, experiences spiritual nirvana while gazing into the eyes of a captive gator, and more than once resembles the insouciant, constantly snacking Bugs Bunny. But that season had a couple of issues that this round of Poker Face smartly sloughs off: an overarching story line involving Charlie’s cards-playing past that sometimes felt like a drag on the series’ forward momentum, an overreliance on law enforcement as a storytelling tool. The slapstick visuals of Charlie chomping into a giant turkey leg and vaping in a coffin; the twistiness of dialogue like “You want me to rat on my mole, like a snake?”; the joys of an episode-long homage to the perfection that is Michael Mann’s Heat and another that winks at the real-estate-related bloodshed of Only Murders in the Building.
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