The first episode in Peacock’s newest series, “Poker Face,” gave us Charlie, who has the rare gift of detecting lies and a knack for solving a mystery when it presents itself before her. Now, the genius poker player is on the road, fleeing from Cliff, the muscleman of Frost Casino. Frost Sr. has vowed to find her and kill her in the worst ways possible, so escaping is the only thing that Charlie can do at the moment, but she still manages to solve a few disconnected cases in her journey across the country while running from Frost’s henchmen. Filled with interesting adventures, each episode poses a challenge for Charlie, and despite the seemingly impossible odds, she manages to solve them in the end. Here’s what happens in “Poker Face” Episode 2.
On Route 66, a man in a greasy mechanic uniform stands outside a repair shop and stares into a shop on the other side of the road where a young woman works. And in the evenings, he sits on the rooftop of the shop and sip his beers. In a nearby Subway shop, an employee does a TikTok video about the creative ways to create sandwiches and then carries that sandwich to the grocery shop next door with the young woman. He hands over the sandwich to her and then buys a scratch card and takes a coin from a board of all the 50 states in the USA while the repair guy peers creepily at her from the other side of the store. The creepy kid, Jed, approaches the counter with a six-pack of beers and invites the woman, Sarah, and the Subway guy to watch a meteor shower from the rooftop, but they decline.
Damien, the Subway employee, puts a knife in his back pocket and follows Jed up to the roof, and asks him to stop creeping on Sarah with binoculars and making her uncomfortable. Jed quickly turns argumentative, but Damien manages to calm him down, and they start actually talking like almost friends, and Damien even mentions that the scratch cards he keeps buying are because he thinks it’s fun. It looks like they might just become friends until Damien scratches the ticket and exclaims that he’s won $25,000, and he’s ecstatic about telling Sarah all about it. This is too much for Jed, who casually pushes Damien off the roof and then climbs down to search for the ticket. Damien, however, isn’t dead, and he slashes Jed’s calf with the knife, so he immediately grabs a wrench and bludgeons Damien to death. He wraps the body in a tarp from a car and wheels it away to a truck that was standing at the side of the road, smashes the lock, and stashes the body inside.
Jed returns to the rooftop, grabs Damien’s apron, hangs it on the hook in the store, washes the blood off the knife, places it, and leaves after throwing away the gloves he wore while removing evidence. He returns to the rooftop and spots the truck driver. a woman approaches the vehicle, spots the broken lock, and drives the truck to the repair shop in an attempt to dump the body. Jed can’t believe his luck, and he turns on the CCTV that captures the footage of the driver dumping the body, and he contacts 911 to report the case.
The day before, Charlie Cale is driving down the road, fleeing from Sterling Frost Sr., when her car starts acting up, and she stores it in Jed’s uncle’s shop. The repair will cost $400, and Charlie will have to wait until the next morning to get the car. She orders a sandwich from Damien in the Subway and is washing off the blood from her shirt, thanks to Cliff, at a public restroom when the truck driver emerges from one of the stalls, and the two get talking. She takes Charlie to her truck, offers her a drink, staves the bleeding with super glue, and introduces herself as Marge. The two women quickly become friends, and Marge shows Charlie the pistol she keeps for her safety. They head to the Roadhouse, and they spend their time getting drunk, and Marge lets Charlie in on a secret: using a credit card alerts authorities, and they can show up within four hours.
Marge heads to the truck briefly, and the truck can be seen in the background, being driven away. Charlie wakes up the next morning on a bench and returns to Route 66, where she finds cops everywhere. The server from the previous night informs her that Marge has been arrested for murdering someone, and she was caught on tape by the mechanic shop’s CCTV. She withdraws money from the ATM, pays the mechanic, and talks about Damien’s murder when Jed brings up the fact that the Subway employee bought scratch cards daily but never won. Something goes off inside Charlie’s head, but she heads over to the Subway and orders a sandwich. While eating, Abe, the old repair guy, says that the car is ready.
Meanwhile, Jed heads to Sarah’s store and buys a scratch card, and while she’s not looking, he replaces it with the one he took off Damien and announces that he has won. While Charlie is driving away with her newly fixed car, she turns on the radio to hear the news about Damien’s death and how the suspect had bludgeoned him to death. This surprises Charlie because Marge kept a gun to avoid approaching people, so bludgeoning wouldn’t have been her style. She drives back to the mechanic and requests to see the footage and finds several people already hogging the cam, where Marge can be seen dragging the body. Charlie meets Sarah outside and strikes up a conversation, talking about how Damien wasn’t the type to break into a truck. They check the store’s footage, but it shows nothing, and Charlie says that she knows Jed lied when he said Damien never won the lottery. Sarah informs her that Jed, however, won that very morning—something that surprises Charlie greatly. She heads over to the Subway and finds the cap of the beer that Damien had taken from Jed the previous night in the apron pocket. Outside, she finds Jed scratching the nasty gash that Damien’s knife left on his calf, and she agrees to help with the super glue from Marge.
While Charlie takes the conversation to the murder of Damien, Jed gets uncomfortable, goes to grab a beer, and says that the previous night he was alone on the rooftop. Once again, Charlie knows that it’s a lie. She goes over to the ladder leading up to the rooftop and asks Abe to let her see the CCTV footage from the camera near the ladder. She spots two oddities – the tarp changing the position and the time skipping from 10: 30 in the night to 11:30, hinting that something fishy is going on. Charlie climbs to the rooftop, finds the coin that Damien had used, and jumps to find Jed standing behind her. She tries lying to him, saying that Sarah told her that Damien had let her know that he was coming to the rooftop, but Jed catches her lie. He then gets caught when he says for the second time that Damien bought a ticket every day but never won.
Charlie heads back to Sarah’s store, buys a few lottery tickets, and peers keenly at each, while Jed heads over to Charlie’s car and cuts the brake wire because he suspects her already. Sarah coyly approaches Jed and asks to see his ticket, and immediately grabs it and shows it to Charlie. Although Jed does snatch it back, she notices the weird thing thanks to her keen observation. She tells him that each lottery card follows a series and also adds that a man had bought a card in the morning before Jed purchased one. The card was useless anyway, but according to it, Jed’s card’s serial number would be the one after the discarded ticket. Instead, it was the one before—that’s the only clue she needs to tell him that she knows he killed Damien and took the card. Jed is unfazed and says that the cops will never believe someone like Charlie, who has so many reports on her name, and she’s forced to drive away. While driving away, Charlie learns that a radio channel is giving away prizes for sending the best original videos, so she returns to Roadhouse diner and tries locating the man whose truck was closest to the rooftop, but just then, Cliff arrives. She has to run, but she tells the people at the diner to contact the trucker, check his dash cam, and send it to the police because they’ve arrested the wrong person. Abe tells Jed that he noticed that Charlie’s car’s brake was cut, so he fixed it without informing her and then took out his hearing aid to tune out his creepy nephew’s rants. In the evening, cops arrive to arrest Jed.
‘Poker Face’ Episode 2: Ending Explained
Charlie is on the run from Cliff and Sterling Sr. because her lie-detecting skills and keen observation prowess led to the suicide of the junior Sterling and Frost Casino getting blackballed. On the highway, she finds an unlikely friend in Marge, who is arrested on charges of manslaughter, but the little discrepancies that she notices during the time she waits on Route 66 make her believe that things are not as they seem. The clues that help her point towards Jed include the coin she finds on the rooftop, the beer cap inside Damien’s apron pocket, the mismatched serial number, and, of course, Jed’s lies that Charlie detects faster than a machine. Jed, a creepy low-life who murdered Damien from his raging jealousy, did a good job covering up his tracks and, by a miraculous stroke of luck, could even get the blame on Marge. However, when he realizes that Charlie is onto him, he not only threatens her to call the cops on her instead but cuts her brake line to ensure that she suffers a car crash. Charlie was still able to get the murderer arrested, thanks to a stroke of luck in her favor. She remembered the truck that was standing opposite the mechanic shop and had the people at the diner contact the trucker, whose dash cam had captured the actual crime. Thus, Charlie was able to get justice for both Damien and Marge while not having to be the one to break the news to the cops.
Charlie had to escape because Cliff had caught up to her already, but she managed to solve a case in the brief time she had at a rest stop. Apart from the amazing detection skills and the joyride that it was to watch Natasha Lyonne play this waitress on the run, some clues just happened to fall on her lap, like the news about the contest about sending videos to the radio station or finding the man who bought the ticket in the morning. In any case, each episode is proving to be fun and entertaining as we watch this unlikely detective solve the most random cases.
