Poker Face Recap: Ashes to Ashes

Poker Face
Last Looks
Season 2 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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Can we take a moment to celebrate Natasha Lyonne? I know we celebrate her fairly often — the phrase “Can we take a moment to celebrate Natasha Lyonne?” itself is something I say at least once a week — but the second episode of Poker Face’s sophomore season is a testament to her range and her idiosyncrasies. As Charlie, she gets to show shades of the character we’ve rarely seen before, but Lyonne’s stamp is all over “Last Looks” as its director and co-writer. Who else but her would include repeated references to the 1980 Dennis Hopper film Out of the Blue and its cult star, Linda Manz?

The episode opens with a distinctly ’70s vibe as we enter a funeral home and watch a man bludgeon his wife with a fireplace poker. That’s not the murder Charlie needs to solve — it’s a pivotal scene in a movie that’s being filmed. And yes, it’s a period piece set in 1973, which explains the aesthetic Lyonne embraces for those early moments. The real people to keep an eye on here are Fred (Giancarlo Esposito, cursed to play endless variations of not-nice people), who has begrudgingly loaned out his very real funeral home to this production, and Fred’s wife, Greta (Katie Holmes), who is tired of the mortuary lifestyle and finds herself drawn to the thrill of moviemaking. Fred is humorless, reminding Greta of their mission: “Real people grieving real death, that’s what our lives are about.” Greta, meanwhile, has one foot out the door, as evidenced by the fact that she forgets to tell the Hoppenstammers, a colorful biker family, that their matriarch’s funeral has been rescheduled as a result of the filming. 

After Fred gives Greta another speech about how they are caretakers of a “temple to the dignity of death,” she decides she can’t take it anymore and says she wants a divorce. One of the movie’s makeup artists has offered to help her find work in Miami, and she needs out from this “depressing haunted shithole.” Fred, who is a fourth-generation funeral director, doesn’t see a path for either of them outside of the death-centric lives they’re leading. “There is no out,” he says ominously. But there may be an option beyond divorce — it’s just not one Greta will like much. Watching the murder scene being filmed upstairs plants homicidal ideas in Fred’s head. No matter how much blood spatter hits the wall every time the man strikes his wife, a reset makes it all look like new. And when the crew wraps at 7 a.m. the next morning, they’ll strike the set dressing and scrub everything down. Convenient! 

That night, Greta arrives home late and sloshed, unwilling to hear Fred’s apologies or even to discuss staying put. She’s made up her mind, and that’s even clearer when she texts Fred a photo of her packed bags. While Greta’s in the shower doing a lively rendition of “Ring My Bell” — go off, Katie Holmes — Fred moves the suitcases downstairs, placing them right where the murder scene takes place. Once Greta hits her mark, he comes up behind her and bashes her head in with a fireplace poker. The blood spatter matches what’s already on the wall (again, convenient!) and he drops the bloody poker next to the other bloody pokers. Disposing of the body isn’t hard — this is a funeral parlor! Fred cremates Greta and presses her remains into a record that plays Santo & Johnny’s 1959 classic “Sleep Walk.” When the crew arrives on schedule and begins dismantling the set (and the evidence of Greta’s murder) the next morning, it looks like Fred has committed the perfect crime. 

Of course, it often looks like that until Charlie Cale arrives. When we catch up with her, she’s lounging on the beach in a funky Hawaiian shirt and sipping soda out of a novelty drinking hat. She also has a semi-captive audience in a young child who’s sort of listening as she explains that it’s been three months since she last heard anything from Beatrix Hasp or the five families, and she’s on a self-improvement kick, switching out her cigarettes for a cotton-candy-flavored vape. But the thing about vapes is that they need batteries, which sends Charlie on a fateful errand to Publix (the site of so many fateful errands) and into the path of Tommy (Kevin Corrigan). He’s got an eye on her 1969 Plymouth Barracuda, the perfect car to use as set dressing in the 1973-set period piece he’s working on. Soon enough, Charlie is at the funeral home, and when the actor playing a corpse comes down with COVID, Charlie gets a new cash-paying gig. With fake stitches across her throat, she hangs out in an open coffin vaping as the movie’s climactic fight happens behind her. Apparently the director doesn’t mind the cotton candy smoke wafting up from a supposedly dead body. 

Everywhere she goes, Charlie seems to make friends. Here, she unfortunately bonds with soon-to-be-murdered Greta, who tells her that she went to cosmetology school to work with living people, but ended up falling into painting makeup on dead bodies when she met Fred. In the worst meet-cute of all time, he cremated her parents after the car accident that left her orphaned as a very naïve 25-year-old. They’ve been together ever since. Charlie also kind of bonds with Fred because she’s the only one on the crew who seems genuinely interested in his life’s work. Fred excitedly tells her about all the breakthroughs in crematory science. It’s a common misconception that dead bodies are turned into ash; in fact, a person’s remains are ground-up bone fragments that only look like ash, and they can be infused into just about anything: stained glass, cufflinks, fireworks, and, yes, records. Greta doesn’t want to be a record, though. As she tells Charlie on their drunken night out — when she’s taking a break from flirting with Tommy, that is — Fred has already picked out a song, “Sleep Walk,” to press her remains into. “It’s like I’m already dead,” she says before launching into a tirade about “Sleep Walk,” slide guitar, and cultural appropriation. When Charlie and Greta part back at the house, Charlie’s already agreed to pick her up the next morning to take her to Miami. 

For reasons we already know, Greta isn’t there when Charlie arrives. Although Fred tells Charlie that Greta has left him, her suspicions are piqued when she spots him dancing to “Sleep Walk.” She decides to confront him at the Hoppenstammer funeral — he’s asking the family if Mama Banshee has anything with a battery on her person because batteries will explode in the furnace, something to keep in mind — and Fred repeats the same story. “She said she wanted to leave with the film crew and she did,” he insists to Charlie, and he’s not lying. Because you can infuse remains into all sorts of things, that doesn’t exactly put Charlie’s mind at ease. She connects with the crew at a new location, where Tommy confirms that no one has seen Greta all day. She was drunkenly blowing up Tommy’s phone the night before, but his texts to Greta since this morning have gone unanswered. Meanwhile, Charlie consults with Paige from set dec, who confirms that the team cleaned up the grisly mess at the house earlier that day. Are they sure the blood was fake? Still unsettled, Charlie and Tommy decide to head back to the death house to do some snooping. 

It’s not long before Charlie spots something. While hiding from Fred in the coffin on the murder scene set, she sees a drop of blood on the lightbulb directly above her, and that’s enough to confront Fred. While he says it must be movie blood that the crew neglected to clean properly, Charlie notes that she was in the coffin all day yesterday and knows there was silk cloth covering the lights. “This movie shoot gave you the perfect cover to stop her, to keep her here forever trapped inside of a song that you got to choose,” she challenges him. “Am I getting warmer?” I love Charlie when she’s being this aggressive — she obviously really liked Greta, and she’s reasonably pissed! But before she can get Fred to say to her face that he didn’t kill his wife, Tommy bursts in, having just received a Miami beach selfie from Greta. I also love Charlie in “aw, jeez” apology mode as she tries to console a crying Fred. She really feels like she got this one wrong. When he leaves her alone in his office, though, she hears Greta’s “Ring My Bell” ringtone and finds her phone in a desk drawer. Just as Charlie discovers the beach selfie is from 2022, Fred comes up behind her and knocks her out. 

The final act of the episode is masterfully done, starting with Charlie waking up inside a coffin and set to be burned alive in the furnace. Lyonne plays a level of panicked desperation we’ve never seen from Charlie before, and the scene is genuinely terrifying. Charlie escapes just in time, but Fred is poised to attack. As director, Lyonne turns this into a thrilling horror sequence — and then a slow-motion action-movie set piece, once Charlie remembers the rule about batteries in the furnace and tosses her vape in. The ensuing cotton candy-scented explosion knocks both Charlie and Fred back, but when she tries to drag him out of the burning house, he refuses to budge. All of his loved ones have had their remains infused into the items surrounding him. Now consumed in flames, they’re ashes after all. Fred sits calmly upstairs while everything burns around him, and the allusion to Hitchcock’s Rebecca must be intentional. (That movie, however, didn’t culminate in fireworks made out of dead people.)

Charlie is mildly singed but still kicking. She heads back to her car and lights up a cigarette — her vape is toast, and hey, she’s earned this. It’s not Beatrix’s goons who attack this time, but Beatrix Hasp herself, emerging from the backseat with a gun to Charlie’s head. This is the first we’ve seen of Rhea Perlman on the show, though her unmistakable voice has already made quite an impression. “You know better than that, Charlie Cale,” Beatrix says of the cigarette. “Those things’ll kill ya.” So will guns, of course, but it doesn’t look like she’s going to shoot Charlie right away. After all, they have unfinished business to take care of. 

Just One More Thing

• The PAs talking about why the film is set in 1973 is a fun acknowledgment of Charlie’s old-school sleuthing style. As one explains to the other, “​​iPhones and DNA and stuff make it way too easy to solve murders.” 

• Giancarlo Esposito is always great as the bad guy, but I was also impressed with Katie Holmes, who makes Greta feel like a real person and adds a lot of pathos to the line, “Life among the dead, what kind of life is that?” It clearly resonates with Charlie. 

• My one note about Holmes is that her teeth are distractingly white, which frankly doesn’t seem right for the character. Bring back actors with normal person teeth! I realize I am losing this battle. 

• I appreciated Charlie getting subtly political in her beach monologue. “I see my Hunter S. Thompson references are lost on you and that’s a shame,” she tells the young boy. “That’s why we need to keep books in Florida libraries.” 

• Charlie’s esoteric references are one of the most consistent joys of Poker Face. I’ve never seen Out of the Blue, but I know it’s a movie that Lyonne is passionate about. She and Chloë Sevigny (her real-life friend and a murderer last season) actually organized a crowdfund to restore the film.