The Prestige TV Podcast - 'Poker Face' Episode 6 Recap

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Time to "Exit Stage Death" with Jo and Rob as they take a look at the latest episode of ‘Poker Face.’ Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're lost in the darkness, look for the pod. Specifically, the Prestige TV podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network, where we're breaking down every new episode of HBO's The Last of Us. On Sunday nights, grab your battery and join Van Lathen and Charles Holmes for an instant reaction to the latest episode. Then head back to the QZ on Tuesdays for a deep dive with Joanna Robinson and Mallory Rubin. From character arcs to video game adaptation choices, story themes to needle drops, we'll parse every inch of this cordyceps-coded universe.

Watch out for mouth tendrils and follow along on. Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. They say that there are two types of men in Pensacola. Pilots and the men who keep them up in the air. And if you forget, they'll remind you. Some folks say that that's why they fly their jet so low. In fear, just to keep us in our place. I'm Joanna Robinson.

Joining Robinson, joining me today now that we have finished our first pass on our Monkey Minority Report pitch. It's Rob Mahoney. Hi Rob. It needs some punch-ups, but I think we're almost there. Do you feel like we should try it out first as dinner theater before we make a movie at a monkey minority report? I would love to see it. I feel like the animal actors might get a little unruly under those circumstances, but you got to workshop this stuff somewhere. Oh, we're not doing people, guys and suits. It's actual monkeys on a dinner theater. Well, I want a mixed cast. I want like the Muppet Christmas Carol version. of monkey minority report except actual monkeys instead of Muppins.

And who's our one human character? Oh. I mean, it's got to be Tom. But I want to see monkey, Tom. These are the dilemmas that monkey minority report puts you in. Great. Well, hopefully by the end of this season of Poker Face, we will have cracked

Monkey Minority Report. We're here to talk about episode 6 of Poker Face Exit Stage Death, written by Chris Downey and directed by Ben Sinclair. Ben Sinclair is best known for high maintenance. It does not really have like directing credits. Is a high maintenance guy. If you're a high maintenance person, you will know Ben Sinclair.

And then Chris Downey, who wrote this episode, has a wild CV. I really recommend you reading the whole thing on IMDB. He's got like a really healthy like multi-paragraph backstory on there. But he was a former criminal defense attorney turned TV writer. and started out on, like, King of Queens before creating leverage for TNT. But most pertinently, I think, was a reporter covering crime in the government

in the Gulf Coast of Florida. And that's how maybe we get that authenticity that we get for the show within a show that we have in this episode of Poker Face. We have been just sort of assuming that you guys are watching Poker Face before you listen to us, talk about it, but I have since starting at The Ringer,

realize that sometimes people just like to listen to us Rumble without watching the show. They just jump in sometimes. So, Rob, in case people aren't watching Pokerface and didn't watch episode 6, exit stage death, what happened on this episode of Pokerface? Well, first of all, watch Pokerface. Go watch it if you haven't.

But if you're going to proceed blindly anyway, in this episode, Ellen Barkin plays Kathleen, who is a seemingly desperate actress who turns to her former television co-star Michael, played by the great Tim Meadows, for a one-night-only reunion on the stage, for The Ghosts of Pensacola,

incredible show within a show concept. They reunite, they bicker constantly, and over the course of this episode, it's revealed that all of that is just staging, and what they're actually after isn't a chance to resurrect their careers, but to conveniently and defensively kill off Michael's wife, Ava, and pass it off as an accident

while claiming her fortune for them, themselves. Did we miss anything in that setup, Joe? Where's Charlie working this week, Rob? I mean, she's kind of important. But, you know, what I'm walking us up to is the first 15 minutes pre-Charlie. This is where Charlie finds herself. Yes. This is the pre-crime. We have a, we got a couple emails this week because, as you know, this is a genre show, so you can email hobbits and dragons at g-mil.com if you want to talk to us about poker face. Rob is enthusiastically nodding. And since you can't see the Zoom

call, you can only believe me and hear that heavy sigh and think, wow, Rob's really into this concept. So let's bring up a couple of things. First of all, we got an email from listener Robert, who said, who's a little confused about this idea of like why Charlie is being chased by Ron Perlman and Ron Perlman's, you know, right-hand man Benjamin Bratt enforcer. So Robert writes, I did have a question I wanted to see if you could discuss or answer. I confused my Charlie's being hunted by the big, bad casino owner. It sounds like he caught her using her gift superpower to win at casinos. Then he's making her work as a waitress at his son's casino. I don't know why he has this leverage on her and wants to kill her.

I would think that he wants to use her superpower to stop people from cheating, etc. I know she's on the run from him and Benjamin Bratt, but the reason for running is not making sense to me. I feel like it's her involvement in his son's death, but what do you think, Romoney? That certainly could have a little something to do with it. But I mean, this certainly does feel like an episode 10 question. I imagine we're going to get to the bottom of it one way or the other. But even aside from her involvement in his son's death,

maybe it's just kind of a classic crime story of Charlie knowing some things that he would rather she not know. And certainly her ability to read people and to tell who's lying and tell the truth could put him in some precarious positions and situations. I would imagine it's something to do with that in addition to, you know, murdering, or at least not murdering, but participating in some respect in the death of her son. So this is a core question the Robert had here, which is why he find out that someone has a superpower involving cheating and you own a string of casinos, do you not use this person for more

than serving cocktails in your casino? And I think that's a valid question to be asking. So it seemed like in the first episode, Charlie made it seem like he was doing her a favor, like, letting her live and letting her have this shitty job rather than, like, killing her for trying to run a con. But, yeah, that doesn't seem like,

like, the casino owner is using her to her best of abilities here. Why was she not in the fish bowl from minute one, spying the cheaters in the casino, spying people up to no good? Like, it's, I don't know, just wasted resources.

Classic mismanagement. I just have notes. I just have a few notes about this casino in apparently Laughlin Nevada. All right, we got an email from Mo who says, do you think that we'll do an episode where Charlie has a team of Curtis, Curtis is Benjamin Brad's character? All the old mysteries have an episode where enemies of our hero are forced

to work together and admit, quote-unquote, respect. Figure if Ryan and Natasha took this on, the scenario will be hilariously built, hoping it happens. So what do you think? A Curtis and Charlie collab? Do you see it in the future, Rob? Love that for a season

two arc. Yeah. But We have to also say Brat watch zero appearances this week. I know. Very tough. I'm really missing Brat. Something they said about this series as a whole, we discussed this on our first episode, is this idea that any of these, like, any of these, like, sort of intervening episodes after episode one could be shuffled in any order. So they film these episodes and, like, maybe they decide later, you know, where one goes or the other. I think we both agree that last week's episode was really, really, really.

strong. You seem to really liked this episode, but I was like a little less high. I liked it, but a little less high than I was last week. So it might be that they're alternating like strength and, you know, weakness as they go through the season, something like that. So it might be that

Brat Watch, it's not like he shows up every three episodes. But yeah, we haven't seen him since the heavy metal tour. So I missed to. Charlie, make a mistake in your employment seeking so that we get, go to the ATM so that we can see Benjamin Brat, please.

Too good at being off the grid at this point. Like, make one cell phone call. That's all it takes. Charlie's Root so far, I did want to talk about this. So we started in Laughlin, Nevada, I guess. We went to Albuquerque. We got to Houston, Texas. Then there's the metal band tour, which I couldn't exactly nail down.

There's the Massey Oaks retirement home, which apparently there is one in Georgia, but they couldn't, like, they keep it, I think, intentionally. vague. But this is Seneca Lake, New York. We're in sort of upstate New York at dinner theater. What do you think of this route that Charlie is taking through these here United States from? You know, I feel like she is throwing them off the scent. You know, if you're, if you're tracking Charlie's whereabouts and trying to figure out the line that she's tracing to some actual destination, I think you're going to confound yourself. So she's doing a great job from that respect.

I thought for a second they might be in Chicago because she's wearing a T-shirt in this episode that it says Chicago on it. But then they say that Ava Jamila Jamil's character is the richest woman in Connecticut.

So I really feel like they're in the sort of New York, Connecticut area, unless she flew out to Chicago for Ghost of Pensacola, which could be. Could be. I wouldn't want to miss that show myself. We got an email from a listener,

Jared. who says he asked chat GPT, the AI, to write a plot synopsis for Monkey Minority Report. Yes. Enjoy. The prompt he wrote was, write a film synopsis for the fictitious sequel to Minority Report, Monkey Minority Report,

in which all the characters are played by monkeys. Okay, I'm going to read this whole thing. In Monkey Minority Report, the advanced technology of pre-crime unit is threatened when a rogue group of monkeys takes over. The leader of this simian takeover, a cunning chimpanzee named Caesar, has discovered the existence of the unit's predictive abilities and is determined to use it for his own game.

As the pre-crime unit falls into chaos, a lone officer, a gorilla named Detective John Anderton, must team up with a mischievous capuchin named Agatha to stop Caesar and his monkey minions from altering the course of the future. With their intelligence and street smarts, John and Agatha navigate a world filled with swinging, vines, flying bananas, and unexpected plot twists in a race against time to save the future and restore order to the pre-crime unit.

Monkey Minority Report is a hilarious and action-packed adventure that will have you on the end of your seat as you watch these clever primates use their wits and skills to outsmart each other and save the day. Rob, any notes? Why are people trying to put us out of a job? Like, we made our interest in this property very clear. And I have to say, look, I'm already going to walk back my stance that. Tom Cruise should be the only human in this movie because

Gorilla John Anderson is something I absolutely need to see. So maybe we'll shift. Like Neil McDonough can be the one human in the cast and the rest will be either CGI or actual monkeys. But otherwise, no notes. Like I think they even got the tone right. It is a delightful romp. A zaning.

I think it's swinging minds and flying bananas and unexpected plot twists and a race against time is my favorite part of this whole thing. I also like that we're incorporating Planet of the Apes in here, right? you know, so circus will be involved one way or another in this particular project. All right, last and not least, we got an email from Matt that I really loved. It's quite long. I'm not going to read the whole thing. But Matt sort of went through some of those like filmmaking homages that we were trying to pull out from what Ryan did in episode one and two.

And noting a lot of the Tarantino stuff that's in Ep 1, but in Ep 2, that time lapse opening that we were talking about, Matt laid out some interesting points here. Matt wrote that this reminded him of Tony Scott in a behind the scenes for Domino. We talked about filming one or six frames for second to get that streak effect that mimics the effects of acid about one to two minutes in this video link

that Matt said over. And then also reminded me of Wonkar-Wi. I think the specific time lapse-related technique used is called step printing. It's where footage is shot at a lower frame rate and then those frames are duplicated to play at 24 FPS. Steph printing was also famously used in the opening of Reservoir Dogs. So there is some Tarantino in there, some Tony Scott.

Wonkar-W is a really fun idea there. And I can't believe that I didn't think of it because, like, Chunking Express, if you think about Chunking Express, great one-car-Y film. Of course. This idea of like someone working at a food service counter and someone being obsessed with someone else and like all like that's it. That's all in the mix in Chunkang Express. So I love this idea that maybe this episode two,

Poker Face was a Chunkang Express homage. I don't know. Anything you want to say about that, Rob? Look, I'm all for any intentional or unintentional Won Kar-Y homage. You know, we got this, we got everything everywhere all at once in the ether right now. Like, it's a great time to be alive as a one-car-Y fan.

Let me know when you want to do our In the Mood for Love podcast where we just break down every single minute of In The Mood for Love. Jesus Christ. Every episode will be one minute contained. It's a familiar podcast concede, but we're in it for a reason. Great. Steve Alman, our producer, said he's also in. Maybe we'll do noodle recipes while we're at it. Sounds great to me.

All right. But let's talk about this episode, television. Oh, that last. Which, when we started this coverage of Pokerface, Rob, you said the guest star that you were most excited to see was Tim Meadows. So here you got Tim Meadows, of course, S&L legend, the ladies man himself. Tim Meadows? What is your Tim One of Meadows connection and what's this appearance

everything you were hoping for? You know, it really was. And he's an absolute king and he is at the peak of his profession in one really crucial area. And that's in any over-the-top comedy, you need someone who's going to play it completely straight

as they give the ridiculous backstory and exposition bits. And I challenge anyone out there to find someone who's better at doing that than Tim Meadows, to find, like, the breakdown of how his wife got famous by starting an online brokerage for women called She Trade.

And the way he delivers it is just is peak stuff. And you can look at Pop Star, you look at Walk Hard and his performance in that movie. He's just so good at this exact, oh, of course, just so good at this exact lane. And I loved him in this. I agree. Tomato's perfect.

No notes, 10-10. Also, Ellen Barkin. Like Ellen Barkin, I feel like 100% understood the assignment of what she was meant to do here. showed up in this, like, from the jump in this incredible white ensemble that he takes a dig at right away. But she's just like, at 11, the whole episode.

Yes. Exactly where she needs to be. I love that this episode takes so many shots at actors, like fucking actors, right? I really love when actors are forced to read those lines about how insufferable actors are. But I think also, you know, something that Tim Meadows' character says to her at some point is, you know, you missed your chance to, like, play the great femme fatale or something like that. But that, of course, is something that Ellen Barka did in spades in the 80s and 90s.

You know, films like The Big Easy or Sea of Love, like, this was, like, something that she was doing. So it goes back to what we were talking about last week in terms of that idea of, like, meta-casting with, like, the actors last week. week, this idea of putting Ellen Barkin in this role is just like Chef's Kiss, perfect to me. Well, a perfect intersection, too, because not only has she played those roles, but she's a Tony award-winning actress, too. And so putting her in this very, not only are they mocking actors, but they're mocking the theater a lot, which as someone who doesn't have a lot of the time, a lot of time for the theater in general, just conceptually, I'm very into. I think that might be what worked best in this episode for me is just like, let's get the Hamilton parody in there.

Like, let's get the incredible overwrought line deliveries from these monologues in the middle of this play. I, it was delicious to me. I ate all of that stuff up. Okay, I do like the theater and, in fact, was a theater kid in high school. So, like, maybe this is where our friendship ends. But I'm with you. Like, ghosts of Pensacola is, like, overwrot Tennessee Williams by way of, like, Martin McDonough play was so, was every, like, I hope they had so much fun writing every single line of dialogue for the ghosts of Pensacola.

And I hope that Ellen Barkin amidst the dry ice had just an incredible time delivering every single monologue that she delivered in this. And of course, yes, the Hamilton Benjamin Franklin riff. It's all about the Benjamin. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Is tremendous. And, like, Charlie putting in earbuds and white noise to drown it out was tremendous. I enjoy Hamilton, but maybe even more than my enjoyment of Hamilton is every single Hamilton, you know, knock and dig that we've gotten in the last couple of years.

You and I podcasts about Fleischman is in trouble. That also had a running Hamilton dig bit through it. So, yeah. It's easy, it's an easy target. You know, it can be both aware. work of some kind of genius and a good punchline. But I have to say the theater bit that really got me in this episode was, and it was more and more every time,

Audrey Corsa plays like the third hand in this two-hand play effectively. I think she's really great. And I really hadn't been familiar with her before. But she has this one monologue they have to keep returning to where her line delivery is like, summer, felt like winter, felt like spring. And every time they got it, I was rolling. Give me more of that. Let's return to the theater in episode seven, actually.

I mean, I'm sorry that you don't like the theater because I feel like you missed your calling. And I feel like you should do like a one-man show of the glass menager or something like that with that iconic accent that you just rolled out. Thank you. That reminds me of my like really like crowd pleasing. Everyone is always clam asking me for it. Impression of Nicole Kittman and Cold Mountain. The people need your impression to Cole Kidman and Cold Mountain. Where she goes, she goes, every fable of my being longs for you to come back to Cold Mountain.

How are we so far off the rails already? We've barely talked about this episode and we've gotten to Cold Mountain. I'm sorry, but every time Ellen Barkin, like, opened her mouth, I was like, she's just doing Nicole Kitman and Cold Mountain. That's all I hear, here. This episode, just like all the episodes before it, there are just like little digs and zings and jinges and jokes that work, and especially it's like front-loaded with them. We start with, you want a gram with the shrine as she walks into Michael's house. And we see all the covers of People magazine and the Emmy and the like Critics Choice Award or whatever.

But like you want a gram with the shrine? Like, I am waiting for my opportunity to use that phrase. Do you have a shrine in your house, Rob? Can I, uh... And if you did, what would your shrine be to you? I mean, I would just, I would start aping this one. And specifically, the first piece I want is the People magazine cover with Tim Meadows, the reluctant sex symbol.

That's the one I want to start with. And then we're just going to build out the Tim Meadows shrine from there. Okay, the Meadowsverse. Yes, of course, the Meadowsverse. Okay, great. And then in building out the Meadowsverse, do you need a poster of Spooky and the Cop? Naturally. And then do you also need a poster of the ghosts of Pensacles?

I do, but I need it with the encore tape over it. I need the authentic on-the-day poster from the theater. I'm all about authenticity around here. I know this about you. And then also, do you need his white tank top from Mean Girls also? Just like sort of put in a glass case on the shrine? I'm dedicated to this now. I'm going to get you like some Cavassier.

Like, we're going to make this Meadows shrine work for you. I love this. But you want to grant with a shrine, the she trade joke that you already mentioned. Last time I said you were, oh, this time last year you were making insurance commercials with talking beavers. Like, incredible Geico joke. Like, it's just, again, they like, they don't need to go as hard as they do on some of these poker face scripts. But here we are. My question for you as you're watching this, not like, you know, again, as the state,

stated mission of the show is not to like surprise or shock you with the turn of events of the murder that you're seeing. But like, at what point did you've caught on to the fact that this was a performance within a performance within a performance that these two were in cahoots putting this together? Maybe I'm slow, but I honestly didn't. Okay. And some of that I think is the way they shot their staging of their alibi where we have a hot mic situation as they are setting up the elements for the murder in which they're kind of muttering under their breath these insults. kind of vaguely directed at each other that as we find out later, it's supposed to make it seem

like they're having an argument. I found it plausible, given the setup, that they might just be so self-absorbed. They're just kind of talking to themselves. And so until you get them staring longingly at each other in a dressing room, I was kind of on the hook. Did you pick up on it faster?

The only reason why is because this is essentially, like, later on, they're accused of just lifting a plot from Spooky in the cop, but this is also lifted directly from a really good Agatha Christie murder, which is Death on the Nile, which was made into a bad Kenneth Brana film recently, but is one of the best film adaptations of Death on Niles from like the 70s with Mia Farrow. So this idea that you have like a couple who have broken up, he's married well, they bicker passionately in front of everyone, make it clear that they.

They hate each other, but they're in cahoots to kill her and then have plausible, as you say, deniability and get, you know, grab the inheritance. Because we got to mention a pre-up in this, right? Like, he's not going to get the money any other way. They have to kill her, et cetera. So, yeah, that's the plot of death on the Nile, which I know is a favorite, like, Ryan Johnson really likes that Agatha Christie. So, like, but it's always really fun to watch people who, like, actually love each other fake fight. And so when you either rewatch this episode or once you get the reveal and then we rewind a bit to Charlie's POV and you get to watch it from that perspective, like that's fun. Fake fighting, rife with sexual tension of this long time Spooky in the Cop couple.

Actually, on the Spooky and the Cop beat, I just want to say, maybe my favorite joke is when they meet the cop backstage. Yes. And he says, Spooky and the cop is the reason he went to law enforcement. And then Tim Meadows says, I hear that a lot. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that is what he said. This is immediately following his wife's death. Right, right. Thank you.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard that. And I just, like, would really like to know what percentage of the law enforcement in our, these here United States were inspired by, like, the medium or ghost whisperer. Like, that's the analog here, right? Yeah, what is the funniest possible cop show to be inspired by? Oh, like, I don't know. Monkey Minority Report. Steve Almond notes chips.

That's a great full. Chips is a good one. Yeah. Car 54, where are you? Something like that. I don't know. Man, it's copaganda's everywhere. But spooky in the cop and just like, I don't know, the word spooky.

A beloved show, you know? Although you're taking show. shots at their writer's room saying they're just ripping off Agatha Christie for the plots of like season six episodes. But, you know, who among us when we get to season six? I mean, you're pulling from somewhere at that point. Yeah. And if you're going to copy from someone, copy from Agatha Christie, that's the way to go. So, only the best. Um, also got to talk about this, um, brief illiteracy joke. How familiar are you? How familiar are you? I know you're not a theater guy, but how familiar are you with the Leah Michelle literacy scandal?

So, Leah Michelle is the perfect example of, like, you get on Twitter one day and everyone is talking about something that Leah Michelle is involved in, and I'm like, I'm just going to back away slowly. I'm going to be honest. So I'm going to need you to take me from the top. Okay. That's me with Lena Dunham. Like, if I open Twitter and Lena Dunham's running, I'm like, today's a wash. I'll be back tomorrow.

All right. Liam Michelle, I mean, Liam Michelle has done some, like, legit dicey stuff as reported by some of her co-stars on Glees. So, like, this is different, separate from that, which is some rumors started. It's a joke, mostly, that she can't read.

And, like, she definitely probably can. But, like, it just, the strength of this meme and the way we should, there are so many TikTok videos just, like, underlay and then to the point where people have asked Leah Michelle at interviews. Has she proven it? I mean, define proof.

But if I were Leah Michelle's publicist, I'd be like, Leah, this is honestly the most inoffensive and hilarious rumor about you, so I would just like run with it and say it's funny. But she would be like, she got just really frosty about it as one might have maybe

anyway. Point being, this is clearly a a Michelle literacy show. And I'm here for it. I love that he was like, there's a section on my Wikipedia page. After literacy. And I love that. Like, okay, first of all, are you like me where if you go to someone's Wikipedia page,

sometimes you just go directly to this scandals and controversy section. Joe, you're messy. You're here for it. If you open someone's page and like you look at the list of sections and controversy is one of them, why would you go to like their childhood in like Deer Park wherever and instead go straight to controversy? This is the line between us. If I saw controversy, I would not click it. If I saw illiteracy, I absolutely would click it.

I was on the Wikipedia page and I swear we're going to get back to poker face in a second, but I was on the Wikipedia page of the actor Tom Link who was a series of regular. about the vampire slayer in later seasons. A legend. Under personal life on Tomlinx's Wikipedia page, under personal life, it just says Tom, or it either just says is gay or Tomlink is gay.

Like, that's it, period. And I was like, absolutely iconic. It's it for personal life. Is gay. Let's keep it simple. Sure, true, the basics. All right, let's talk about all the little, like, check-off's hints that we got in this episode.

What is your favorite? Is it Chekhov's nut allergy? Like, where are you with the little hints being dropped here? I mean, nut allergy might even be like too overt. Like, that one's obviously going to come back and there's going to be some kind of attempted nut murder. The one that worked best for me was when it's revealed that their whole plot was ripped off from an episode of Spooky and the Cop.

And really where they get sloppy is when they go off book and their whole conversation about like, you know, flipping the script and like continuing to try to basically murder people to cover up their crime. Like that's where I started getting really into that conceit and that parallel and that, you know, construction of like clearly these actors are going to go completely off the rails when they don't have someone literally writing the exact things they have to do and say. I love that. I love the setup for that offbook thing coming from. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound terseptide may be able to help. Zepbound is.

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Our third banana character saying she would really like a representative from the clubfoot community to be involved in the production. And then when she has her script and Ellen Barkin's like, do you need a representative from the off book community here? I'm here for all the millennial roasting. You know, like please roast us poker face,

feed us peanuts, drop us through a trap door. I want it. It, uh, we get a, I think we get another like boomer. Like the generation wars continue on poker face. They do.

This might be, okay, because I, like, Charlie, am a cusper. This might be one of those things where you're like, if you are a cusper, you're kind of just gently amused by the generational wars because you don't feel personally attacked. And if I choose to claim a generation, I like to claim Gen X just because I choose to. It's a smart move. Gen X is often left out of the generational wars. And so you can just be like, all right, here come the Gen Z, millennial boomer snide remarks and just like, ignore. Please continue to ignore Gen X. I so appreciate it.

There's also Chekhov's heart medication. That's also a key factor here. Kind of twisted, too. Like the idea of murdering your wife because she so cares about you that she would leap to your defense to get you your heart medication in a critical moment.

I mean, this is heartless stuff. This is brutal. And this is, I mean, and that's like a fun flip side of what we see. Again, in this episode that we often see from Charlie is like, one of the main reasons she gets involved in this is because stagehand Phil, who is like feeling guilty and responsible. Because of her affection for him, she's sort of questioning what all happened here. It reminds me a lot of like March. I mean, he's not arrested for this or anything like that, but there's just sort of this implication that it's his fault because also he has. had booze and his thermos, whomst among us at Seneca Lake Dinner Theater would not.

But, you know, she's trying to make him feel less guilty, sort of similarly the way that she was protective of March in episode two. So that constant, the way that Charlie S is soft-sought for humanity. So I like the way that you're talking about that was weaponized against Ava, her tenorness in this episode. Yeah, I mean, she really is saving him explicitly from guilt. There's some lines in the episode that basically Phil slash Bill is not being charged with any kind of crime

he's not being held responsible in that way it's just like this guy's gonna hang over him for the rest of his life when all Charlie wants as she makes clear is like I just want to bullshit with you out by the dumpsters and rank Christopher Nolan movies you know like we could be doing that at right this second should we be doing that right the second

second round do you want to rank Christopher Nolan movies? Yeah dark night prestige memento inception Dunkirk. Those are the five. Those are the five. Is that the order? I think it's prestige Dark Night. I love it.

I love this. I couldn't get there, but I love it. Inception Memento Dunkirk. Yeah. I'm into it. I could have seen you being like a fringe interstellar head. But I'm glad you're on this side of the line. No, I mean, I care about love and crying. and like black holes, but there we go.

Also, follow up film ranking question. The top three most truthful performances that Charlie mentions in this episode are Patrick Swayne Roadhouse, Jennifer Jason Leon, single white female, and Christian Slater in true romance. I would have gone for Patricia Arquette in true romance if it were me, but that's okay. But not Sam Elliott. in Roadhouse. That's a pretty damn truthful performance, if you ask me. Isn't that a mustache less Sam Elliott in that film?

I think it is. In my mind's eye, he always has it. So I honestly couldn't tell you. I think he's no mustache in that. I'm going to look it up. But here's my question. Is there anyone missing from this list the most truthful, you know? I mean, I feel like we can do better than Jennifer Jason Lee.

No? Wow. I mean, no, no shot. but single white female would not have made the cut for me. Yeah, no mustache, just a general scruff. He's scruffy, but there's no mustache. But I will say the hair in Roadhouse on San Luis.

It is magnificent. Incredible. He and Swayze are, like, competing for who has the better blowout in that film. Most, I mean, like, honestly, because of single white female, that makes me think of Bridget Fonda. And when I think of Bridget Fonda, I think of the incredible American remake of LaFemniquita, Point of No Return,

a film that I watched inexplicably several times when I was a child, so I'm going to add that to the list. It's got fans, you know? I've seen The Hive out there. For Point of No Return. No, for the La Femniquita remake, not for Point of No Return. All right, what else you want to say about this episode? Well, I do love, you know, just to kind of broaden out as far as the truth

in acting. Like, using that as staging for this episode is really smart and I think takes us to some pretty interesting places. And in particular, the idea that, like, Charlie is basically trying to read the truth in these performances, which are already layered within other performances, which are being staged within this theater, which are being set up as a potential alibi. I mean, it does kind of reiterate that, you know, even though Charlie can tell when people are lying, even though she has all of these detection skills, this preternatural sense, but sub-superpower

ability to tell when people are lying, if you can't tell why people are lying, it doesn't mean anything. You don't really know what's happening at all. And to that effect, in this episode, she does something she's already done a couple times, which is accidentally confess everything she knows to one of the criminals. To the killer. Again, Charlie. It's tough, but she thinks she's telling the victim, you know, you can see how she got there. I, like, every time she does it, I'm like, Charlie, can you workshop this theory with, like, someone who's not so intimately involved in the murder. Like, can you and Phil talk about it?

Also in my notes here, I have written the old dry ice in the... The old dry ice rod. And the trapdoor move. That classic of the theater. It also, I mean, this episode also reminded me a lot of, like, one of my favorite tropes, which is, like, backstage hijinks. There's a great play slash film. Noises off, which is just like all backstage hijinks all the time of like anything that can't go wrong, we'll go wrong.

The fact that like Charlie finds her way on stage after having like insert herself into the refrigerator and out the window and all this sort of stuff is like classics of that genre. But like to add that twist to an Agatha Christie murder. And then like again, as we talked about the beginning of the season, like to sit in a writer's room and have fun to be like, should we set one of these and do? dinner theater in Seneca Lake, New York. Should that be one of the settings for our episode? Like, I don't know. I would encourage more people to write to Hobbes and Dragons and Gmail.com their ideal setting and premise for a pokerface episode.

Get us your spec scripts immediately. Yeah, we'll steal all of your ideas and go straight to Hollywood with it. But I did not miss Rob saying that this was a sub-superpower and this battle will continue. Please also emails Hobbes and Dragons at Gmail.com. believe that Charlie is a super hero in this show. But yeah, I mean, like the limitations of Charlie's sub-superpower, fraternatured ability, complicated by these, the fact that she's dealing with professional actors.

Yes. Of such caliber as apparently Emmy Award winning turn on Spooky in the Cup. Is that a daytime Emmy, do we think? It's got to be. It did not seem super well. received in the broader context. Several covers of People magazine, you know what I mean? Certainly popular. You know, popular among a certain subset of the population, but... Unlikely to win an Emmy, yeah. Okay. I did love what you described in terms of Charlie having to

maneuver through the refrigerator, through the windows, like just creating this artifice of these sight lines that she cannot cross while also still trying to mitigate this crime. And it hammered home something that's become really clear for me over these last two episodes, which is this show is operating at its highest frequency for me when it is total farce with some dark edges. And if we can hit that zone repeatedly, I think I'm going to be a very happy consumer. So you're saying like when the bedpans come out, that's when you're all in. When Charlie is slapping the checks mix out of people's hands and saying she's going to return to the spirit world of Pensacola, that's.

That's where we need to be. Okay. Last but not least, I would like to say that if famed, terrifying New York Times theater critic, Frank Rich, were to ever deem anything I ever did, effective, just quote unquote effective. Yes. I too would chase that for the rest of my life. So that's how I feel about that. The poll quote being effective was the most scathing criticism of the theater community. And I'm here for it.

Again, and we'll be always. All right, anything else about this episode of Pocaface? I think we're narrowing in on the uncanny zone of social media playing a role in these episodes. Kathleen is actively driven by the fact that she's trending on Twitter. And so we are past motif. I think there's going to have to be some kind of through line here because someone is on Twitter or YouTube or Instagram, basically every episode. Every episode. Yeah, I wrote that down as well.

It's really interesting. I want to like sort of put that, maybe for next week I'll put down like all the instances and what they're doing here. But like I guess it anchors us in time. It's that conversation about like this show feeling like a throwback and feeling somewhat out of time to a certain degree. I mean like, you know, hokey dinner theater, Tennessee Williams-esque dinner theater in upstate New York, that could happen anytime. But this idea of like we're trending on Twitter, we've got to do another show. Bleak. We gotta come back around.

All right, well, I think that does it for us this week again. For this superhero show, you can email us, Hobbes and Dragas at DML.com. Your poker face pitches. Your ranking of Christopher Nolan movies. Your most truthful film performances. Your desire for us to do a podcast about every single minute of In the Mood for Love, whatever it is. Yes. Your contributions to my Meadows verse Shrine.

that I'm currently building. Please. I'll give you my address. Just send me any props you have. Any Tim Meadows Ephemora you might have. We got to put this all together. We've just got a couple more episodes left of the season. It flew by pretty quickly.

And thanks, as always, to a man deserving of his own shrine. One Stephen Allman for his production work on this episode. And we'll see you next week.