Part of the fun of Poker Face is watching the series tease out the limitations and implications of Charlie’s ability to separate bull-truth from bullshit. In the pilot episode, we learned her gift can work over video recording; in “The Stall,†we find out that it doesn’t work over sound waves alone. Charlie’s been driving through the Lone Star State long enough to have listened to every talk-radio show on the air, from a QAnon-friendly The Blaze rip-off hosted with a thick Texas accent to a knitting circle led by a kindly old auntie. And yet she has no inkling that the station is really a one-man show. The universal host of these programs (and more) is a young Black college theater major who doesn’t believe the MAGA hate he’s spewing and likely doesn’t know a knitting noodle from a crochet hook either. On this episode, actor Shane Paul McGhie plays a shock-jock emcee called Hanky T. Pickins, the host of a groovy jazz hour, and Austin, a talented, bored radio producer in the land Friday Night Lights forgot.
By this point in the series, the formula is clear. First, we learn about the crime; then it’s revealed how Charlie, a person seemingly unconnected to the scene, fits into the picture; then we watch her untangle the central mystery bit by bit. At some point, I suppose, it will begin to bother me that so many people in her orbit end up dead, but so far I can swallow the morbid coincidence. “The Stall†kicks off with a false confession. George and Taffy Boyle (Larry Brown and Lil Rel Howery) are brothers who run a successful barbecue joint, but pitmaster George has recently had a crisis of faith. He thinks meat is murder and animals love vegans. Taffy is talentless in the kitchen but has a nose for business. When we meet him, he’s bloviating on the phone about some big beef-rub deal he’s inking with McCormick (the spice people) and ignoring warnings that he’s borrowed money from the wrong people (Dallas people).
Needless to say, Taffy despairs to hear that George is quitting, not least because he doesn’t have the cash to buy his brother out. It’s also clear that while George has been cooking brisket, Taffy’s been cooking the books. To secure the beef-rub deal and keep the business intact, Taffy kills his brother in a multipart, multi-hour, multiplayer scheme that involves drugging him to sleep with Ambien; locking him in his trailer from the outside but making it look locked from the inside; and finally suffocating him with the exhaust of a meat smoker, which he rigs through a hose and into the trailer window. Anyone watching will see a suicide most ironic: a remorseful man killed by the very thing he spent his life killing. Taffy even has the perfect alibi. He commits the murder while he’s supposedly “live†on his BBQ&A radio hour, but really he has subbed in a prerecorded answer to a question planted by George’s wife, Mandy, who’s also unprepared to kiss the sausage money good-bye. It’s so tidy that it’s hard to imagine what can go wrong … until Taffy bludgeons a stray dog who interrupts the caper. In the world of TV morality, a man can get away with fratricide but never animal abuse.
It’s a full 15 minutes before we see Charlie, who is accosted a couple days prior to George’s death at a local gas station by the same stray dog; the mutt jumps into her car and refuses to leave. (Can animals lie? Can Charlie tell if animals are lying?) The dog turns out to be pretty Trumpy, as far as dogs go. The only thing that can soothe the mutt’s incessant yapping are the dulcet tones of Hanky T. Pickins. Well, that and barbecue. He begs to be let out at Boyle’s, where he swiftly helps himself from diners’ plates. Taffy demands Charlie pay for the damage, but George steps in to play good cop. He says Charlie can work it off in the pit. It’s not a terribly convincing meet-cute, nor is it distracting. One challenge the series faces is finding ways to explain why a woman on the run for her life pulls over to the side of the road so often. It can’t be because Charlie’s interested in the crime itself, as so far she’s made her stops well before any crime occurs. In episode two, her car broke down — fair enough, that happens. Now the series is getting more creative: Charlie is doing in-lieu time on behalf of a racist puppy.
Regardless, it’s nice to see George alive again and his mind yet unbothered by veganism. His instructions to Charlie take the form of a love letter to barbecue. It’s like a symphony of simple flavor, he tells her. (The putrid cinnamon floss Taffy puts on every table? That’s more like a blow horn — a harsh, discordant end to a beautiful meal.) George loves meat. He even cooks the tongues using pecan wood so that every part of the beast is honored. So committed to this place is he that he spends his nights alone in a trailer on the property while Mandy (Danielle MacDonald) sleeps separately at their house in town. To help George bear the solitude, Charlie gives him some DVDs she thinks he’ll like. Like Babe, a movie about the complex relationship between a pig and a farmer. And Charlotte’s Web, a movie about the complex relationship between a pig and a spider. And Okja, a Bong Joon Ho action movie about the complex relationship between a genetically altered super-pig and a young girl. The movies wreck George’s carnivorous mind and send him praying to the PETA gods, which means Charlie isn’t just solving this week’s murder. She inadvertently caused it.
The suicide cover story unravels speedily for Charlie. When Taffy calls the pit staff together to say the best way to honor George’s life is to keep Boyles BBQ open, she knows he’s bullshitting. Still, people lie for all kinds of reasons and she attributes this one to the bottom line. She’s about to kick rocks when she runs across that MAGA dog again, this time bleeding from the head where Taffy struck him. Charlie takes the bad dog to a vet, who confirms that actually he’s a “bad dog with some jackal in him†and extracts a piece of wood from his wound. What kind of wood? Pecan, Charlie will soon suss, the very wood George uses for tongue and tongue alone up by his personal trailer. What’s more? One of MAGA dog’s weird jackal teeth is in the smoker.
So Charlie does her thing, which is to say, she loiters and asks weird questions until the killer confronts her, at which point she immediately and without much guile tells him all of her suspicions. She confides in Taffy that she believes the assault on MAGA pup and George’s death are more than tragic — they’re mysteriously connected. Then she tells Mandy she believes Taffy did it, even confiding her superpower to her enemy because Charlie really can’t smell a conspiracy.
What distinguishes this mystery from “The Night Shift†is that there’s a team working against Charlie as hard as she’s working to nail down the truth. Taffy informs her that from this point forward she’s considered a trespasser on Boyle BBQ land and trespassers will be dealt with in true Texas fashion. (The fashion is a gun.) Being known to her adversary also adds an element of fun to the chase. It’s tickling to watch Mandy, who knows about Charlie’s internal lie detector, try to maintain her innocence by carefully avoiding mistruths.
In the end, Taffy’s alibi unravels faster than a speeding train. His prerecorded answer on his BBQ&A broadcast lacks the sound of the horn from the cargo train that travels through town every hour. It should have passed in the middle of his show, but there’s no audible blare of the horn in the interview. Personally, I believe the more compelling evidence of Taffy’s guilt is that Taffy and Mandy immediately rammed through that lucrative McCormick deal when they should have been distracted by mourning, but that’s for a DA to decide.
Charlie, it must be said, is developing a knack for this work, even evolving into a more enterprising sleuth. In the absence of glaring evidence of “malfeasance†on “The Stall,†for example, she invents some. It’s when she heads to the radio station to grab a copy of the BBQ&A show from the night George died that Charlie learns everything she’s heard on AM broadcasts has been a lie — it’s all Austin nearly all the time. Luckily for Charlie, Austin is restless enough at his day job that he agrees to impersonate Taffy to lure Mandy into a confession, which they tape over the phone and broadcast over the radio. Put a bow on it.
And because Rian Johnson never leaves a single hair out of place, even the MAGA dog gets a happy ending. He’s rehoused with the only man who could ever subdue the savage beast — Hanky T. Pickins. Ultimately, I interpret this episode, which doesn’t address Poker Face’s larger plot with the goons out to get Charlie, as another Johnson allegory for animal rights. Those who had a hand in the peddling of meat, even George on the edge of his epiphany, cannot go unpunished. All God’s creatures great and small (and even part jackal) deserve dignity.