1x04 Rest in Metal

[8.4/10] Rian Johnson and company were already playing with house money. But if you want me to like your show, casting Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle in a prominent role is a good way to put a thumb on the scales!

But Johnson and writer Christine Boylan didn’t need to include the frontman for one of my (and Johnson’s) favorite bands to make “Rest in Metal” sing, because it may be the best episode of Poker Face yet, purely on its own merits.

Given that the structure of the show means Poker Face is less a murder mystery series and more of a “Charlie pieces the clues together” series, what matters most is the culprits and victims of the week. Why did they do it? What motivated them to take such drastic action.

What I like about this one is that the motive this week is an outsized version of something understandable. (To be clear, not for murder, but to be upset.) Ruby Riot and her band have one hit, a hit that's haunted them for ages with their inability to replicate it. On a practical level, they need the money. Their drummer wrote the song and gets all the royalties. Ruby’s working at an ersatz home depot. Al is going through a divorce. And Eskie is moving back with his mom and trying to get a legal certification. So when some dope of Craigslist wanders in to drum on their tour and unveils a surefire hit, there’s a pragmatic need for all of them to use it to get paid, which adds up as a motive.

What I like even better, though, is their emotional need. The three of them can feel histry repeating, with a drummer penning their hit and walking away with all of the profits. Ruby wants to avoid that with every fiber of her being. More to the point, as highlighted by director Tiffany Johnson’s creative production choices, Ruby wants to replicate that “seeing the face of God” feeling she got when they did “Staplehead”, they’re one hit. As much as they want the fortune and fame of another ride at the top, they’re also just chasing the high.

In a strange way, “Rest in Metal” plays a bit like Milos Forman’s Amadeus, with Ruby representing the “Queen of Mediocrities” who sees this guileless metalhead idiot creating by accident the salvation that she’s been chasing for decades. The episode takes time before the murder happens to show how sullen and desperate Doxxxocology has become, which makes their choice to murder this poor dope sad and terrible, but also comprehensible, which is what good stories about bad actions are made of.

But this is also a great Charlie episode. I wasn’t sure how they were going to fit her into this one, but I’m continually impressed about how Poker Face is able to do the first act without the show’s protagonist, only to reveal in the second act that she was there all along. I don’t know if it’s sustainable, or if over time it’s going to start to feel contrived or tedious. But for now, it’s a delight each time.

The setup that Charlie was one of the day laborers at the hardware store where Ruby works, wrangled into becoming her roadie, is a nice choice to lay down some plausibility. The fact that Charlie is the titular “Merch Girl” who the band writes a song about in the first act is cute, as is the fact that the staple thrown at them during their hit comes off her very own merch table.

More to the point though, I like her friendship with Gavin, the brain fried drummer-for-hire along for the ride. As my wife pointed out, this isn’t all that different from Charlie taking in the dog in the last episode. Gavin’s a dummy, but he’s completely without malice. Just a good-natured, somewhat messy kid who’s simply happy to be here. These stories wouldn’t work if you didn’t buy Charlie finding a quick bond with the ultimate victims, and the nature of Gavin’s silly but earnest dopery, and Charlie’s empathy toward other lost souls, makes this one click. Hell, we even get a brief moment of depth for him, about how music makes “the bad stuff go away,” that gives the kid a bit of pathos, and makes it extra sad when he becomes Doxxxology’s sacrificial lamb.

Beyond the strong character work, the little touches put this one over the top. There’s poetry to the face that the band uses Gavin’s peculiar amp setup to electrocute him. And again, the show plays fair with the mystery, setting up Gavin’s polaroid camera and footwork videos, not to mention Al’s posture-based gripes, ahead of time to give Charlie the evidence to piece together what really happened. It’s also nice that they setup a camaraderie between Charlie and Deuteronomy, the band’s other (ultimately fired) roadie, so he can explain the peculiarity of the amp situation. This is a sound mystery, which helps a lot.

But there’s a lot of other lovely little touches here that are just clever or fun. For one thing, I got a big kick out of John Hodgman as the pleated khaki drug-seeker who everyone assumes is a narc, but who turns out to be just an unusually white bread metal fan. For another, I appreciate the foreshadowing that the band Doxxxicology is opening for likes to do viral “pranks”, which Charlie gets inadvertently wrapped up in, exposing her to Cliff. (And their ensuing chase scene through the concert is nice.) The little things really enhance this one.

What I love most, though, is the throughline of Gavin being a “magpie”, as Charlie puts it. (Another Mountain Goats reference?) He doesn’t come up with anything wholly original. He simply sews together bits and pieces of what he’s heard and seen. (Which, in fairness, isn’t drastically different than how all artists create.) Charlie identifies that ahead of time. So after his death, it gives her a fantastic Keyser Soze moment when she’s able to use the detritus he left in her cars to trace the lyrics of Ruby’s new hit, and realize he wrote it. It’s such a clockwork little event.

The capper, though, is that it’s ultimately what dooms the band. I should have known better in a Rian Johnson production, but I’d assumed that Gavin annoying the rest of the band by laughing along to Benson in the back of the tour bus was just an amusing bit of texture. The fact that it telegraphs the fact that he stole the riff for “Sucker Punch” from the show’s theme, which scuttles Doxxxicology’s big comeback, is a beautiful bit of poetic comeuppance. And there’s grand irony in the fact that Ruby and company worked so hard to steal something that was already stolen, and it being their downfall.

I also like the variety here that for once, Charlie’s bullshit detection skills aren't really the cinch. When she confronts Ruby, Ruby admits it straight out, but brushes it off as simply doing what was necessary and preventing Charlie from being able to go anywhere with it. This isn’t some baroque conspiracy. Ruby’s upfront and open-eyed about this, which makes her scarier but weirdly more admirable than some of our other murderers this season (relatively speaking, of course). She doesn’t try to deflect or lie. (Which, uh, doesn’t excuse the murder.) It makes her a more interesting, or at least varied culprit, than some we’ve seen so far.

And for a second, I thought they were going to get away with it! Honestly, I hope that at some point, for all Charlie’s guile and intelligence, the practicality of her circumstances mean she’s not able to bring the bad guys to justice. I thought that's what this was, which would be a nicely bittersweet way to end a story like this one. But once more though, the script delivers a nice doozy, with the “Murder Muffin”-style podcaster Charlie ran into at the co-working space becoming the source of public exposure for Ruby and company’s misdeeds. Again, I thought Charlie riffing with a murder-solving podcaster was just a fun, wry bit, but the way it circles back to being plot-relevant is masterful.

Overall, this was an outstanding episode, that showed off one of the show’s more creative and poetic mystery-solving routines, embedded in one of its most interesting character setups so far. And the fact that it includes one of the best singer-songwriters of all time in the mix makes for a wonderful bonus.