From the start, Poker Face has had a slippery relationship with its own premise. I’m not talking about the “human lie detector solves crimes” part of the show. I’m talking about the idea that Poker Face is meant to be a throwback to breezy, low-stakes, case-of-the-week TV mysteries like Columbo and Murder, She Wrote. Season one had a running subplot about gangsters trying to chase down Charlie. And even though season two quickly tossed that storyline aside, there has still been a fair amount of continuity between these episodes, as Charlie keeps getting increasingly bummed out over her inability to avoid murderers.
And you know what? Good for Rian Johnson, Natasha Lyonne, Tony Tost (this season), Nora and Lilla Zuckerman (last season), and the rest of the Poker Face writers and producers for being flexible enough to let their series find its own balance between the episodic and the serialized. As welcome as it has been to see a high-quality show present new, complete stories each week, Poker Face is—somewhat perversely—usually at its best when the tension gets raised and Charlie’s history becomes plot-relevant.
That’s certainly the case with this season’s penultimate episode, the excellent “Day Of The Iguana,” which brings back a couple of characters who always seem to turn up whenever Charlie’s own story is about to get crazier: the FBI agent Luca Clark and Beatrix Hasp, a former mob boss turned government witness. Also, for the third episode in a row, Charlie is palling around with Alex, who—much to Charlie’s chagrin—is accused of a murder she didn’t commit.
Similar to the season-two premiere, “Day Of The Iguana” has an ace guest star playing both a victim and a killer. In the opening scene, we see Justin Theroux as Todd “Mr. T” Telachi, a high-school teacher who has been invited to the upper-crust Long Island wedding of one of his former students: an ultra bro-y MLM mogul named Kirby Kowalczyk (Haley Joel Osment), whose main product is the energy drink “Ballzilla.” Mr. T gets a knock on his door from someone claiming to be his assigned chauffeur. But that driver turns out to be the notorious hired killer “the Iguana,” who strangles the teacher, liquefies the corpse, and then uses Mission: Impossible-level masks and appliqués to impersonate Mr. T.
So, from then on, the Iguana is played by…Justin Theroux.
That opening scene is a stunner: sick, strange, surprising. And what follows is one of this season’s twistier and more unpredictable plots, the details of which are woven together so subtly that viewers may be one step behind throughout.
Here’s the gist of it. The Iguana is impersonating Mr. T because no one would suspect the teacher, a fumbling goofball who was only invited to the wedding because he used to crack Kirby up in class by removing his glass eye and imitating Peter Falk. (Funnily enough, Kirby and his buddies have never seen Columbo.) As for the Iguana’s target? It’s Kirby! And why? Because he’s secretly the son of Beatrix Hasp, and the other mob bosses want to flush her out of witness protection to take their revenge.
The Hasp connection explains why Luca is at the wedding. As part of her deal with the FBI, Beatrix asked for agents to livestream the ceremony for her. Luca is joined by two other agents, Darville (Lili Taylor) and Milligan (played by Lyonne’s old Orange Is The New Black pal Taylor Schilling), both of whom think he has lucked into all of his recent promotions. Luca—who knows he has Charlie to thank for his many wins with the agency—quietly agrees with them.
Charlie being at this wedding is more of a coincidence. Alex is trying to start a new business, providing fresh-shucked oysters to fancy events. (The name? Yippee Ki-Yay Oystershucker.) She convinces Charlie to join her after mentioning how much they’ll be paid for this one reception. And Charlie’s presence—and Luca’s, for that matter—proves fortuitous, because when Alex is found standing over a dead Kirby with a bloody oyster-shucker in her hand, shouting, “I didn’t do it,” Charlie knows she’s telling the truth, which means that Luca knows it too. (Darville and Milligan? Less convinced.)
“Day Of The Iguana” is a very funny episode—so much so that I’m going to have to consign most of the best lines to stray observations. And it features multiple kinds of terrible people. Sure, the Iguana is a ruthless assassin, but he’s not the one serving wedding guests a signature cocktail made of vodka, botanicals, and Ballzilla. (“Tastes like balls,” the Iguana says.) It doesn’t speak well of Kirby either that he resents his mother not because she abandoned him at birth or because she used to run a murderous, exploitative criminal organization, but because she wouldn’t use her connections to help him sell his swill.
Still, it’s uncool of the Iguana to agree to pin the murder on a patsy for double his fee. Alas, Alex proves to be a too-convenient puppet, since she keeps ducking out to a boat dock to pull more of her oyster supply out of the water. This makes the Iguana’s plan easy and clear: Kill Kirby (by stabbing him through the eye with a shucker!) and stow his corpse in a boa. Then when Alex inevitably returns, she gets framed.
The episode ends on a cliffhanger, as Charlie helps Alex escape from the FBI. Alex is freaking out that the mafia is after her (Charlie: “Several mafias, actually…it’s kind of a national consortium”), so Charlie uses Beatrix Hasp’s super-private fake Instagram account to piece together the clues to where the Witness Protection Program has stashed her. The ladies end up heading to Indiana to ask for Bea’s help. But as Luca back on Long Island quickly realizes, if the Iguana let Charlie and Alex get away, it’s probably because the Iguana intends to follow them to Hasp’s doorstep.
But who actually is the Iguana? We never actually see his (or her?) face. It seems highly unlikely, given the nature of this show, that the killer is someone entirely new to Charlie’s orbit. Could it be Good Buddy? An unaccounted for Kazinsky sibling? Some rogue from season one or two who’s neither dead nor in jail?
I haven’t watched the finale yet, so I’m just making these guesses idly. No spoilers here. But I am definitely curious—nay, excited—to see how this all ends next week.
Stray observations
- • This week’s episode was directed by Ti West, a horror auteur best known of late for his X/Pearl/MaXXXine trilogy. I’m going to give West some credit for playing up the body-horror elements here, from the liquefaction of Mr. T to the way the Iguana, in his T disguise, can’t keep his fake glass eye from glitching.
- • Kirby’s fiancee Vanessa (Emma Pfitzer Price) tries her best to curb his bro impulses. When Kirby and his buddies start shouting “Mr T! Mr T!” after the glass-eye trick, she rushes in to remind him, “What did we say about chanting?”
- • One of Kirby’s employees tries to explain to Charlie why their business is not a pyramid scheme, calling it “a triangular selling system, which is totally legal in 32 states.” (Charlie helpfully suggests that it’s…Euclidean?)
- • After Alex gives Charlie a detailed tutorial on the various oyster types they’re offering at the wedding, Charlie just wings it with the guests, saying, “These are, uh, deepwater horizon….”
- • Charlie takes frequent breaks during her oyster-schlepping shift. When Alex mentions she just took a break not that long ago, Charlie says, “That was, like, a drinking break; this is gonna be more of a vape thing. I might…I might do a little drinking.”
- • Alex’s oyster business requires her and Charlie to wear old-timey nautical-themed uniforms, which means when Charlie flees from the FBI, the agency’s dispatcher sends out this radio message: “All units be on the lookout for a woman in her thirties, red hair, dressed like Steamboat Willie.”
- • For someone who has been off the grid for much of her adult life, Charlie has adjusted quickly to the highs and lows of smartphone apps and social media. She’s annoyed to find that even though she’s the only follower of Beatrix Hasp’s cooking-themed private Instagram account—“AlwaysBeaBaking”—Hasp doesn’t follow her back. Also, following that account is really messing up her “algo.” Mere seconds after looking at Hasp’s page, “Half my feed is now baking videos.”
- • Mark this down as possible finale foreshadowing: Charlie’s Barracuda is starting to sputter.
