I’ll be honest: As soon as I realized that this week’s Poker Face was going to be about cons and double-crosses, I started trying to out-guess it. And while I got most of the way there, I never got all the way. I kept anticipating one more twist. But I’m actually glad it never came, because what doesn’t happen in “The Sleazy Georgian” gives the episode a sting.
“The Sleazy Georgian” is a fantastic title, by the way. It’s reminiscent of the excellent David Mamet movie The Spanish Prisoner, which—along with Mamet’s House Of Games—is a clear influence here. The screenwriter Megan Amram and the director Mimi Cave work craftily with this shabby realm of bar-dwelling liars, waiting patiently in the shadows for the chance to fleece some sheep.
The title also refers to a particularly old-fashioned big con, which we see play out in full in the opening sequence. John Cho plays Guy, who sits in a New York City hotel bar in the early morning, sipping good whiskey, chatting with strangers, and pretending not to be distracted by all the folks who keep walking up to his table and handing him packets of cash, which he quietly slips into a duffle bag. When we first meet him, he’s flirting with Regina “Reggie” Galvary (Melanie Lynskey), who becomes curious about all the duffle activity. The hook is baited.
Guy—going by the name of Alec—explains that he used to be a travel agent for the ultra-wealthy, until he met a client who was the king of a small country within the nation of Georgia. Now exiled in the U.S., the deposed king relies on Guy to convert his Georgian currency into dollars, at a rate highly favorable to the American. Guy claims that all the people handing him envelopes are buying into the biggest exchange he’s ever made. Reggie—who just so happens to have $20,000 on her, as the treasurer for the National Orphan Fund—wants in on the action. The bait is taken.
The cast and creative team put just the right amount of English on the opener, peppering in witty dialogue and layering in atmospheric scene-setting. When Reggie raises an eyebrow at Guy drinking whiskey in the a.m., he jokes that it “helps take the edge off my job as a bus driver” and suggests there are no rules in hotel bars. (“Like international waters.”) Bit by bit, he wins Reggie over, especially when he starts talking about making “the biggest, craziest leap” in his money-exchange business. Reggie—who says, “I don’t even know what a leap would look like in my life”—joins him for the swap, seeming extra excited when he says it’s happening in his room. (“Your room here?” she asks, with hungry eyes.)
From there, the con proceeds more or less according to the script. Guy makes sure Reggie knows he has a gun, and when a burly man walks through the door and shoots Guy, Reggie takes Guy’s gun and shoots the burly man. She then flees with the bag of money, which she believes also contains her own $20k. But Guy has already swapped the bag. He’s not dead. Nor is the intruder, who is actually Guy’s henchman, Manny (Joel Marsh Garland). The guns were loaded with blanks.
We don’t find out all this as it happens, although if you’ve seen a con movie before, you can probably guess that Guy is alive. (The possibility that Reggie killed Manny remains higher, until we see him in the bar a few scenes later.) The pieces start to come together when Charlie shows up in the story.
When Charlie appears, it’s like a replay of the first scene with Reggie. She wanders into the hotel bar in the morning to kill some time, where she begins her own flirty banter with Guy (again going by the name Alec). She jokes about how “morning beer makes the day a little less clear,” then she shows Guy one of her best tricks for getting a free breakfast at hotels: using coupons from other hotels, because no one ever really checks. (“I got these eggs from a hotel in Beaverton, Oregon.”)
We don’t know at first whether what we’re seeing takes place before or after the Reggie caper. Manny being around suggests we are seeing a circle back, in the usual Poker Face fashion, and that maybe Charlie was part of fleecing Reggie, in the background the whole time. It gradually becomes clear though that Charlie doesn’t like Guy enough to help him out with anything—and especially not a con job that involves a nice, orphan-helping lady.
Thanks to her superpower, Charlie knows right away that Guy’s lying about everything: his name, his job, the Georgian, all of it. She sticks around though because she likes Guy’s crew—especially Manny, whom Guy bullies mercilessly. (When Manny cheerfully calls himself Guy’s “consigliere,” Guy bristles and says he can call himself that “when you can spell it.”) She also likes getting under Guy’s skin. Fancying himself as some kind of gentleman rogue, Guy presumes to speak authoritatively about human psychology and behavior in ways that make Charlie scoff. He talks a lot about “tells”—which Charlie thinks are bullshit—and he insists that everyone he hoodwinks is a greedy louse at heart. (Charlie: “You’re like the Dexter of con men?”)
Then Charlie finds out that the crew’s last mark was Reggie, who threw herself off a bridge after fleeing what she assumed was the scene of a double murder—and without the huge stack of money she was supposed to deposit into the orphan fund. Charlie’s righteous ire begins to build as Guy insists that Reggie would’ve kept the money if the bags hadn’t been swapped. Charlies says that there’s “an old-timey con term” for Guy’s exploitative nature and self-righteous excuses: “shitty.”
It’s at this point in the episode where my predictive skills failed me. Something about Charlie showing up after the crime for a change—coupled with Manny off-handedly commenting that Guy had never met his spouse—made me think that Reggie might still be alive and that she, Charlie, and Manny had hatched a big sting.
I was off-base, but by just a bit. Charlie and Manny do run a sting on Guy with Manny’s spouse, but it’s Manny’s husband, Robin (Brendan Sexton III). Robin poses as a mob-connected gambling addict named Sketch, who claims to have access to $400,000. Charlie works the same con on Guy that Guy has worked on all his marks, ending with multiple gunshots and Guy fleeing with a satchel—which, he soon learns, is actually filled with Charlie’s many hotel breakfast coupons.
The point of this whole charade isn’t just to steal Guy’s money (which is actually Reggie’s money and which Charlie deposits into the bank for the orphans at the episode’s end). The point is to discredit his whole smug, cynical worldview. Guy claims to have inviolable rules for how to run a con; but he breaks them all because of the promise of $400K from a man named Sketch. It didn’t take much to push Guy from being a bloodsucker to just an ordinary sucker.
And sure, it’s a bummer that Reggie didn’t fake her own death, lay low, and then come back for revenge. But I think this story is ultimately stronger for having that note of tragedy. This is becoming a recurring theme this season. Charlie isn’t just hopping from place to place each week. She’s moving from genre to genre—and yet no matter where she goes or what she tries, she eventually stumbles across a corpse.
It’s having an effect on her, too. When Charlie first arrives at the bar, she says she’s “drinking for two” (gesturing skyward, she says it’s “me and the lord”) and talks about the albatross she can’t shed. There’s no direct reference made to the trauma she endured in last week’s episode, but the implication is clear: Charlie’s many ghosts are starting to spook her.
Stray observations
- • Our deep-cut needle drop this week is Bobbie Gentry’s “Seasons Come, Seasons Go,” a melancholy folk-country number that captures this episode’s blue mood perfectly.
- • When Reggie decides to be a little naughty and have a morning cocktail, she settles on a Bloody Mary because “that makes sense.” I love that.
- • I also love the contrast between Guy’s motley band of crooks and the smiling faces of everyday folks in the giant photos on the outside of a nearby bank. Two different worlds.
- • Guy’s crew includes Gene (played by the hip-hop hype man GaTa), who describes himself as “the accountant…like in the Ben Affleck movie.” (Charlie, excitedly nodding: “Right, Good Will Hunting.”) The crew also has an intern, Cliff (Veronika Slowikowska), who is about to leave for her dream job…as an NBC page.
- • Garland and Sexton are such a treat to watch as Manny and Robin. Both are old Lyonne associates. Garland was a regular on Orange Is The New Black; Sexton recurred on Russian Doll. (Sexton was also a part of the same ’90s indie-film scene that spawned Lyonne.)
- • I save my final note to talk about Cho, who—like Sam Richardson last week—is perfect in a part that requires him to be equal parts charming and pathetic. Poker Face has been rapidly leaving its Columbo-esque origins behind, but the one aspect of that show that it is holding fast to is employing wonderful actors to play complicated creeps.
