Does anyone remember the Rob Reiner movieNorth?It starred a teenage Elijah Wood, cost millions to make, and was so bad that even I, a child at the time, believed viewing it to be a waste of my time, which, as a child, was worth nothing. (Spoilers ahead for the movieNorth,or at least what I remember of it.) Wood plays North, a kid who divorces his neglectful parents and travels the U.S. shopping for new ones. But they all suck, I guess, because all parents suck a little, so he ends up going home. That premise is terrible, but it gets even worse. It was all actually a dream. He never traversed the country. He never left the fucking mall.
I remember feeling so empty. No, deceived. I wasn’t even watching the bad movie I thought I had been watching. I was watching some different bad movie.
Now,Poker Faceis notNorth.Poker Faceis a good, fun show, and putting Janicza Bravo (Zola) in the director’s chair for the finale was a good, fun choice. But when we find out that Charlie was not on the run for her life but — unbeknownst to her — on the run from a lucrative business opportunity,Northimmediately sprang forth from the recesses of my bewildered mind. All these weeks, we’ve not been watching the show we thought we were watching — the one about a woman so good to the bone she can’t help herself, she’s compelled to right wrongs at great risk to her personal safety. For example, if henchman Cliff had just nabbed Charlie after the Doxxology show inepisode four,she might already be rich. It was all a dream. No, a fake nightmare. And while each episode ofPoker Facebuilt its own internal suspense, this big reveal left me feeling a little hollow.
Of course, Charlie wasn’t wrong tothinkher life was in jeopardy. At the beginning of the season finale, “The Hook,” the show runs back to the episode one phone call from Sterling Senior that kicked off this chase. And Senior — a perfectly cast Ron Perlman despite looking nothing like a man who would have sired Adrien Brody — really does growl for vengeance in the aftermath of his son’s death: “And when I do kill you, you’re going to thank me.” (Sidenote: Ron Perlman is a national treasure; possibly the single most under-utilized American actor who can credibly call another adult “kid”andpull off a bolo tie.) Anyway, I guess Senior’s murderous resolve waned the more he learned about Junior’s plan to betray him in favor of his business rivals, information he gleaned from the bug he planted in his own son’s office. Senior’s need to find Charlie remained, but his intentions for her changed.
In the end, rooting her out takes Sterling & Co. one long, hard year. And as taxing as it was for Charlie — she calls finally getting tagged at the Denver Hospital “a relief, in a sick way” — it was even more mentally erosive for B. Bratt’s Cliff. So when Sterling tells him to camp out for two additional months while she heals up from her stab wounds, it’s the last straw. Maybe he loved Sterling Senior once, but Cliff’s grown to despise his boss. The day he finds Chuck is the same day he gets in bed with the improbably named Beatrix Hasp, the aforementioned owner of a rival casino, not to mention the head of a rival crime syndicate called The Five Families. Sterling will never sell his Nevada business to Hasp as his son intended, so Hasp — voiced by Rhea Perlman (no relation) — needs Cliff to kill Sterling.
Still in disguise as Sterling’s loyal soldier, Cliff retrieves Charlie from the hospital on discharge day and drives hers all the way to beautiful Atlantic City, New Jersey, which just so happens to be her hometown. I’ve long sensed Charlie was a Jersey girl, but a Jersey Shore girl specifically? This is perhaps the single greatest insight Rian Johnson provided into Charlie’s frazzled psyche. The listlessness has been accounted for, as has the bad attitude that papers over a tender heart. And I can personally attest that it does not matter how long and far you roam from your home break, a Jersey girl’s hair will always look a little salty.
But I digress. This road trip is long but relatively painless. The real low points are Cliff forcing Charlie to hold the gun he used to kill Natalie (some weird mind game) and when he does a protracted dramatic interpretation of “The Hook” by Blues Traveller in the style of those embarrassingW Magazinevideos ofcelebs readingthe inane lyricsto pop songs(some weirder mind game). In AC, they go their separate ways, though not before Cliff instructs Charlie to clean herself up and put on a cute lil’ sequin number Senior picked out for her. Which brings us to ourNorthmoment.
When Charlie and Senior finally sit down together at a Hasp Casino card table, he reveals he’s no longer out for blood. There will be no hole dug for her of any depth now that he sees the full picture. Junior was a snake, about to do a shadowy deal with Beatrix behind his back. Senior even brings along the tape-recorded evidence he’s collected — a garishly anachronistic device that screams, “Pay attention to me! I will be relevant later in the story!” But conditions between the Five Families and Sterling’s Southwest Syndicate have grown more strained over time. (It’s a big story dump for a finale episode, I know — just go with it.) To diffuse tensions, Sterling’s requested a sit-down to which he’d like to bring Charlie to sniff out any bullshit. He offers her the generous rate of $500,000 per lie-detection session. If not, she’s free to drive off into the sunset in the Plymouth Barracuda he’s hauled back east for her.
Charlie opts for the cash pile behind Door No. 1 and makes sure Senior commits the arrangement to his handy tape recorder. To seal the deal, Senior hands over a purple gift box — a sentimental token intended as a gesture of goodwill between them. Inside it, he’s put her old Frost Casino employee name tag — a shitty gift, to be sure — but when Charlie reaches in, she finds the gun that killed Natalie, the one Cliff forced on her during their road trip — an even shittier gift. It’s as she raises it that the casino lights cut out, and two shots are fired. When the lights come back on moments later, Sterling is dead on his enemy’s casino floor, and we finally have our murder of the week.
It’s an easy one for the FBI team to solve. They’ve got eyewitnesses putting the gun in Charlie’s hands, they have DNA evidence in the form of Charlie’s fingerprints, and Charlie’s dripping with motive to want the mob boss dead. Luckily for our girl, the team is headed up by Luca, the fledgling federal agent who seemed destined to return to our screens since he gave Charlie his digits inepisode five.Thanks to Charlie’s tip about episode one’s Kazimir Caine, he’s a bigwig now, but not the kind who forgets the people who helped him along the way. When Charlie calls him, he tells it to her straight: Run. Like, right now. In exchange, Charlie tells him to listen tobothsides of the tape in Senior’s recorder — not just the side about their deal, but all those hours of chit-chat between Cliff and Junior. There’s got to be some shred of something on there to get her out of this mess.
In the meantime, Charlie hitches a ride out of the Hasp on a bachelorette’s party bus, eventually winding her way through the suburban streets to her sister Em’s house. As evidence of her neglect toward her family, we’re presented with the outrageous fact that she’s barely ever met her niece — Em’s daughter, Shasta. Em, played by Clea Duvall, is already upset the cops are staking out her house in the hopes Charlie might show up before Charlie actually shows up, at which point she grows more upset.
The wayward sister asks Em for the keys to their dad’s boat, the one she tells Shasta he would force them to jump off and swim to shore because, as North knows, all parents suck. Em offers a hard-to-follow explanation for why she has no interest in renewing their bond, but the gist is that Em begrudges Charlie for acting like she’s a victim when really the life of chaos is the life she’s chosen. I don’t know. It’s just not that sad to me, and Em seems fine. What’s crazy is not offering your sister a change of clothes. Charlie leaves with the boat keys in the same lil’ sequin number a dead man picked out.
It’s when Charlie arrives at the marina, and at that moment alone, that I begin to doubt whether she has the smarts to make it out of this alive. What condition did you expect to find your old man’s boat in? Of course it’s not seaworthy! So Charlie does what she always must do, in compliance with the series’ inviolable rules: She trusts the wrong person. She calls Cliff to plead her innocence, entirely unsuspecting that he may have been the person to frame her. By coincidence, he’s in the same marina, chilling on the yacht that his betrayal of Sterling Senior bought him.
By this point, we know what really went down. We know that while Charlie freshened up for her meeting with Sterling, Cliff switched out the employee name tag in the gift box for a gun thatlookedidentical to the one that killed Natalie. We know he left a blacklight poker chip on the table that Sterling, who couldn’t resist a fidget-spinner, would unconsciously pick up and start flipping through his fingers, thereby illuminating Cliff’s target even after Hasp’s people cut the casino lights. We know that the disloyal consigliere killed his don with the gun thatreallykilled Natalie, then quickly switched it out for the one Charlie (conveniently) dropped in fright.
Cliff’s got everything sewed up so tight that he invites Charlie to see his sick new watercraftandcalls the police to tell them where they can find her. Why not clean this whole thing up himself? But if they know where to find her, they know where to find him. Soon Charlie finds an open container of blacklight poker chips and realizes Cliff killed Sterling, but Luca shows up to arrest Cliff for Natalie’s murder just in time (thank you, tapes). In the melee, Charlie dives off the boat and swims for it, just like daddy taught his daughter before she divorced her family in favor of the open road.
It’s all very tidy, which is trademark Rian Johnson. He puts tidiness first, even if it means fudging the little things, like why someone as thorough as Cliff would hang onto the incriminating container of chips or why someone as ruthless as Sterling would meet Charlie on his enemy’s turf in the first place. Once in custody, Cliff flips on Beatrix Hasp, thereby clearing Charlie’s name.
In the episode’s final moments, Luca meets Charlie at the highly recognizable Ireland Corners General Store in Gardiner, New York, to drop off the ‘Cuda and tell her the good news. She’s free to join the FBI and use her lie-detection powers to fight crimes like Columbo himself, or even free to go make amends with Em. Narratively speaking, either option works. But neither, I would argue, meet Johnson’s refined standards for tidiness.
Instead, Charlie gets a phone call from Beatrix, herself on the run from the cops and feeling vengeful. And she offers Charlie a deal not unlike those that Sterlings Junior and Senior have offered her in the past. She can come in and work for the Hasps, or she can spend her life trying to outrun them. It’s not hard to guess what Charlie chooses. We close episode ten where we closedepisode one,with a woman steeling herself to stay off grid.
Personally, I like it this way.Poker Facewas billed as a “ten-part mystery series,” but the door has been left open for a little more Charlie to come. Perhaps Johnson and Natasha Lyonne will even take a page fromColumbo’s book, a show that between 1990 and 2003 put out another 14 episodes, sometimes with years between them. Maybe Charlie is a character we’ll check in on from time to time over the next decade just to prove that she’s still out there, doing good while always claiming to be the kind of person who does the least.
