1x06 Exit Stage Death

[7.9/10] Another good episode. The opening segment does a good job of setting up questions of who the victim will be. Will it be Kathleen, the grand dame, with her trap door? Will it be Michael, her network T.V. counterpart, who has a heart condition? Will it be Rebecca, their millennial co-star with a conspicuous peanut allergy? Or will it be Ava, Michael’s wife and presumable sugar mama, whose death would lead to a payday?

The show plays nicely coy as to how things will go down. It isn’t obvious when or how the murder will happen. And I love the twist here, where it seems like Kathleen and Michael have had enough of one another and are trying to take each other out after a career’s worth of believable grievances with one another, but in reality, they’re in cahoots and trying to eliminate Ava so they can share in her “she-trade” fortune.

It’s good mystery craftsmanship, keeping the audience guessing and coming up with surprises so that savvy mystery watchers still have to stay on their toes after half a season’s worth of stories.

Granted, some convenience does come into play. In addition for everything else to go write with their dry ice/trap door/falling light plan, they had to know Ava would try to reach Michael via that particular route and that the fall would kill her, neither of which are guarantees. Still, it’s the kind of gimme I’ll grant the show given how well this little vignette of faded stars who seemingly hate each other but are actually willing to kill to be together works.

That may actually be my favorite little wrinkle to this one. Normally what gets Charlie on the case is recognizing that someone’s spewing “bullshit.” What I like is that, for once, it’s her recognizing that someone is telling an odd truth, namely that Kathleen and Michael love one another. It’s a small thing, but enough to mix up Poker Face’s formula in a nice way.

Plus, god help me, as a recovering theater kid, it’s just fun to see Poker Face skewering the stage. The show pokes gentle fun at regional theater. (And its Hamilton spoof is a delight.) The little bits from tech rehearsals to backstage drama to equally admiring and skeptical members of the crew is well-observed. I love the set piece where Charlie strives hard to convey the danger that everyone’s in without veering into the play’s sightlines. And I died laughing when she gives up the ghost, physically intrudes on the screen, and decides to become the titular “Ghost of Pensacola” within the play as a fig leaf.

I also really enjoy the way this episode continues the trend of Charlie getting involved in these things not because she’s just determined to solve a murder, but because she ends up gravitating toward good people and wants to exonerate or absolve them of the crime. Chris McKinney, the actor who plays Phil the stage manager, does a stellar job of seeming like the approachable member of the crew who helps Charlie out, and the poor man who tortures himself over allowing something terrible to happen on his stage, when in fact it was skullduggery by the play’s stars. You get the sense of the show building up a cadre of allies for Charlie, and my hope (if not expectation) is that they will come out of the woodwork to return the favor in her hour of need.

That said, you can only go to the “secret recording” method of incrimination so many times before it starts to feel a tad cheap, even though Charlie’s attempt to turn one of Kathleen’s spare wigs into a cheap facsimile of her dog to hide the device was a solid chuckle. But I guess I can give Poker Face a little leeway to repeat the trope since Michael and Kathleen used the same mics to “accidentally” broadcast their “feud” to the hearing impaired earlier in the episode.

The best part of this one though, comes at the end. I love the idea that despite the whole play being a setup for the crime, Kathleen at least really does want to step back into the spotlight, and is willing to risk giving up their “hard-earned” fortune for another chance at it. You get the sense that once upon a time, she and Michael actually cared, and in the years since their goofy network procedural, they’ve ossified.

But when they realize they’ve been made and there’s nothing left to do...they give the performances of a lifetime. I’m impressed at how well Ellen Barkin and Tim Meadows do at giving self-consciously bad performances in-character at Kathleen and Michael’s rehearsals and overblown acting in the one-night-only staging. But when they’re about to go down for murder, they tap into something real, a truth that Charlie can recognize within the performance (a neat use of her talents), that inadvertently sees them delivering the tour de force Kathleen was faux-aspiring too. There’s poetry in that, and it sends a twisty, deadly, funny episode on a well-earned note of beauty and melancholy.