When it comes to Alex’s big turnabout, the biggest question was how she could end up being the Iguana, given that we saw her interacting with an “Iguana” last week? The answer is that the hired killer played by Justin Theroux was never the Iguana. He was some other top-shelf hitman, hired by Alex. She set him up, right down to telling him by phone to pick a patsy to pin the murder on—and then putting herself in position to be the perfect patsy. Alex executes a similarly nifty maneuver in the finale, as she and Charlie are speeding toward Beatrix Hasp. They stop off at a truck stop diner, where Alex finds someone who looks enough like Theroux that she can fool Charlie into thinking that “the Iguana” is still after them. Alex surprises this nobody in the bathroom, mentions oysters, slashes his hand so that he’ll have a wound just like the hitman’s, then flees the diner with Charlie while the wounded man runs after them, hollering, “Hey, oyster girl!” The point is to play on Charlie’s paranoia, pushing her more quickly to their destination.
Alex makes a couple of mistakes, though: one noticeable, one less so. She gets away with saying “I see it” when FBI Agent Luca Clark texts photos of the Iguana’s disguise and Charlie idly asks, “What kind of a psycho recognizes pieces of a prosthetic face?” But she stumbles when Charlie asks for a piece of gum before she walks up to Hasp’s door. Alex hands her a stick of Big Red. When they first played “two truths and a lie” together, Alex said she was deathly allergic to cinnamon, and Charlie registered that claim as “true.” If her “honest” friend could lie about that, undetected, well. Alex realizes her mistake before Charlie does, and slips out of the car and sneaks into Hasp’s home before Charlie can catch her. As Charlie slowly approaches the house, she finds dead FBI agents around the perimeter, and Hasp inside with a bullet through the center of her skull. Charlie shouts out, “Okay Skink, cut the shit, I know who you are!”
Part of what makes Alex work as a nemesis is how much fun Patti Harrison seems to have having delivering her villain backstory. Once her ruse is exposed, Alex comes clean to Charlie about her career as an international assassin and how she got so numb to all of her success that she was borderline suicidal. Then Alex heard about Charlie: A juicy mob target fabled for her lie-detecting abilities. The challenge was too much for Alex to resist. Her triumph was immensely satisfying. “Lying to you, I felt like an Olympic athlete,” she explains. “Lying to you was like great sex. I assume. I don’t really do physical pleasure.”
I also think that what makes this episode one of season two’s absolute best—especially when paired with last week’s—is that Alex’s malevolent presence helps clarify some things about Charlie’s recent personal journey. Alex says Charlie is easy to manipulate because she’s “a compulsive do-gooder… a sucker for the world’s victims.” Charlie, stung, gets defensive, and perhaps in the process realizes what she’s been trying to learn about herself for months: “I think I just like people.” Unfortunately, Charlie comes to this conclusion right as Alex is about to blow up her whole life. As they speed away in Charlie’s Barracuda, dodging the FBI by heading down a closed access road toward a cliff above Grand Canyon Canyon (an Indiana canyon named for the Grand Canyon), the two of them play “two truths and a lie” again.
Here are the stakes: If Alex wins, there’s no point to either of them going on living; but if Charlie wins, life will still hold some kind of purposeful challenge for Alex. So she claims she once had a dog named Puddles (true), that she’s double-jointed (true), and that no matter who wins this game, she’s still going to drive the car off the cliff (bullshit). Ah, but remember how I said last week to take note of Charlie’s sputtering “piece of shit” car? After Alex acknowledges that she wasn’t planning to pull a Thelma & Louise, the Barracuda’s brakes fail, and the car goes zooming off into the deep chasm of the Grand Canyon Canyon. The image freezes. The screen reads: “TO BE CONTINUED.”
This brings me to the other big reason I loved this finale: all of the little funky stylistic touches, presumably overseen by the episode’s director, Natasha Lyonne, in collaboration with credited screenwriter Laura Deeley and the rest of the PF team. We get grainy 1970s-style freeze-frames multiple times, including during the scene at the diner, where Charlie is on the lookout for an Iguana in disguise. (She fixates on men with suspiciously long beards and one child in clown makeup.) When Charlie’s walking through Hasp’s house, we get cool overhead shots that move through walls, like something out of a Scorsese or De Palma movie. And then after the “TO BE CONTINUED”—a cheeky audience fake-out as well as a nod to those Quinn Martin TV shows that acknowledged act-breaks with on-screen text—the scene rewinds so that we can see Charlie jumping out of the car.
Is Alex still in the car when it crashes in Grand Canyon Canyon (which, we are told, is more of a gorge)? Well, the FBI doesn’t find her body. And after a genuinely emotional scene with Luca, in which he gives Charlie a head start to escape his colleagues, Charlie’s gone too. And so this season ends, with Charlie realizing she still has faith in people despite their many, many lies (and murders), but with her also back on the run, now a fugitive from the FBI. In the last scene, she rescues a little dog and then flags down a trucker—played by Steve Earle—who tells her he’s headed to Wichita.
I hope Peacock is about to announce a season three, because Toto, it looks like we’re going to Kansas.
Stray observations
- •Patti Harrison is a trans actress and comedian, and even though Alex is never presented as trans in any overt way, I do wonder if anyone will be bothered by a trans woman playing a character who turns out to be a killer and—perhaps more concerningly—an adept liar. It didn’t bother me, and it presumably didn’t bother Harrison, but I will be curious to hear if there are other perspectives.
- •Did anyone else expect to see Steve Buscemi sitting behind the wheel of the big rig?
- •Frequent Poker Face director Adam Arkin appears in the Iguana origin story as the CEO she murders in an underground arctic safe house, after she wrestles with and kills a polar bear. (In that same flashback, we also see that Alex has a polar bear rug in her apartment.)
- •A nice, spooky touch: As Charlie is finding the dead bodies outside Hasp’s house, we hear the sound of children playing elsewhere in this serene suburban Indiana neighborhood.
- •When Charlie jokes with the truck stop diner waitress that she could use a couple of Xanax, the waitress tells her that there’s a guy in the parking lot running a BOGO deal.
- •What do Poker Face and The Bear have in common? Both shows end their latest seasons with their main protagonist giving up on quitting cigarettes.
- •And that’s a wrap on this Poker Face season! I really enjoyed being back on a weekly TV review beat for The A.V. Club for the first time in a few years. If you haven’t done so already, I recommend looking back through these reviews and clicking some of the links I’ve scattered throughout all of them. I tried to take advantage of my long institutional memory to share some classic AVC pieces: interviews, reviews, essays, primers, and more. Check them out if you like!
