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S01.E05: Time of the Monkey

shantown

By shantown
in Poker Face

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shapeshifter

shapeshifter

Best episode yet. 
The setup at the beginning was a bit tighter, but with S. Epatha Merkerson and Judith Light, it could've gone on indefinitely and still would've been awesome.

I was momentarily hoping that Charlie was going to get a new identity via WitSec, but maybe in the future that will happen?
More Simon Helberg? Yes, please.

There were some definitive Columbo homage lines:

  • [CHARLIE TO JOYCE & IRENE] I gotta say . . . 
  • [CHARLIE, WHILE LIGHTING A CIGAR] Very clever, but you missed one detail . . . 

 

I am a bit fuzzy on how Charlie communicated with the FBI while she was letting Irene and Joyce know she was onto them. 
Was it just that the FBI was parked outside (spying on Joyce & Irene) and Billy The Nurse came running when the wrist monitor went off when Charlie tased herself? 
Or . . . ?

 

K. Callan as Betty would be a nominee for Best Supporting if there wasn't already so much competition just within this one episode, never mind all the others.

 

 

1 minute ago, paigow said:

Retirement homes do not run background checks? Jed discovered Charlie was a fugitive FFS...

Sorry. Who's Jed? 

BTW, the assisted living facility looked so much like where Mom stayed that I wondered if it was real and not a set, and, if so, how would they shoot it?

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SnarkShark

SnarkShark

Quote

I was momentarily hoping that Charlie was going to get a new identity via WitSec, but maybe in the future that will happen?

Charlie doesn't seem to ideally leverage her allies to her own benefit.  Last episode she had a true crime podcaster and (seemingly) never thought about leveraging that person to get her own side of her story out there.

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SnarkShark

SnarkShark

7 hours ago, paigow said:

Retirement homes do not run background checks? Jed discovered Charlie was a fugitive FFS...

Even more to swallow is the Fed knowing her full name but never running a check on her.  It was a big weakness in an otherwise great episode.

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shapeshifter

shapeshifter

(edited)
3 hours ago, Silly Angel said:

Two people cannot play a game of mah jongg! Christ on a cracker, you guys.

P.S., I love this series.

Maybe they can? https://themahjongline.com/blogs/mahjong-tales/can-you-play-mahjong-with-two-players

I never learned to play Mahjong, but I loved building houses on TV tray tables using my aunt's beautiful tiles.

But back to the show: 
When Betty said of the Mahjong game:

  • "I hate this witchy Chinese game you're playing. What are these, runes?"

I was taken aback and wasn't sure if Betty was being racist or just culturally ignorant?
I mean: Shouldn't someone working in an assisted living facility be familiar with Mahjong?

Edited by shapeshifter
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Ms Blue Jay

Ms Blue Jay

(edited)

 

37 minutes ago, shapeshifter said:

But back to the show: 
When Betty said of the Mahjong game:

  • "I hate this witchy Chinese game you're playing. What are these, runes?"

I was taken aback and wasn't sure if Betty was being racist or just culturally ignorant?

I feel like there was another culturally weird remark too, but I cannot recall it.

Edited by Ms Blue Jay
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SomeTameGazelle

SomeTameGazelle

12 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

More Simon Helberg? Yes, please.

He was lovely in this. 

I liked the way this ep changed direction. I wasn't sure based on the beginning whether Joyce and Irene were going to turn out to be justified in their crime(s) and Charlie was going to have to look the other way but ultimately it was more satisfying that they were caught.

Was there anything set up to prepare us for Irene's amazing upper body strength?

Did they tell me they were attending a chimpanzee event and then show me an orangutan?

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Cranberry

Cranberry

2 minutes ago, SomeTameGazelle said:

Did they tell me they were attending a chimpanzee event and then show me an orangutan?

Nope, when the bus was about to leave, Betty said, "We can't miss the orangutan show. She's very impressive." The big sign with her picture on it also said, "Melanie is a 4-year-old Bornean Orangutan."

Charlie called Melanie a chimpanzee a couple times, though, and a monkey six times!

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Ohiopirate02

Ohiopirate02

Just now, SomeTameGazelle said:

He was lovely in this. 

I liked the way this ep changed direction. I wasn't sure based on the beginning whether Joyce and Irene were going to turn out to be justified in their crime(s) and Charlie was going to have to look the other way but ultimately it was more satisfying that they were caught.

Was there anything set up to prepare us for Irene's amazing upper body strength?

I loved how the episode evolved as we and Charlie learned more about them.  The murder of Gabriel felt justified after learning he was responsible for them getting arrested and Irene getting shot. Then it's revealed that they were planning on blowing up a bunch of teenage overachievers, and then they kill Betty in a way that had to have caused some collateral damage.  

We do see Irene doing some arm exercises early on in the episode.

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Irlandesa

Irlandesa

(edited)

I loved everything about this episode.  It may be my favorite episode of TV this year. 

I knew I'd love it because of Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson but I couldn't have predicted how perfect they were together and had such amazing chem.  (I can't recall if they ever had scenes together as part of the L&O franchise).  But they played characters unlike how I'd ever seen them before and it was fabulous. 

It wasn't just "oh look at these legends together" but it highlighted what talented actresses they are. I agree with the post above in that I went from loving how rude they were and kind of hoping they'd get away with it to being absolutely afraid of them.  They felt extremely dangerous and menacing at the end even if the body doubles were pretty obvious. 

It was all so well done. 

The only thing I had a tough time buying is that Gabriel would need to go into witness protection after he testified.  They never mentioned that there were others who didn't go to jail or that Joyce & Irene had access to some kind of criminal underworld that had reach beyond the jail cells. 

But it wasn't just the fine performances that I thought were terrific but it had some many clever and funny moments like Joyce wearing an outfit that blended into the greenery and all the one liners "Ah like Greenland and Iceland" or the pervy older guy.  Plus, I finally realized that "The Fletchers" was a reference to Jessica Fletcher. 

This is probably an episode I could watch multiple times and keep picking up on new things to appreciate. 

 

Edited by Irlandesa
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paigow

paigow

Luca would never be assigned to Witness Protection... because he is NOT a US Marshal FFS... Has nobody watched Eraser???

However, the opportunity for Helberg to bust out his Nic Cage as Stan Goodspeed from The Rock was squandered...

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shapeshifter

shapeshifter

56 minutes ago, Irlandesa said:

I knew I'd love it because of Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson but I couldn't have predicted how perfect they were together.  (I can't recall if they ever had scenes together as part of the L&O franchise). 

One of the articles I read or heard stated that this was the first time Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson had worked together and they really connected. 
Maybe someone else can recall where this was mentioned?

 

1 hour ago, Irlandesa said:

funny moments like Joyce wearing an outfit that blended into the greenery

I loved that Irene's dress blended in with the greenery on the trellis she was scaling. She planned that, right? 😉

 

1 hour ago, SomeTameGazelle said:

Was there anything set up to prepare us for Irene's amazing upper body strength?

Irene's upper body strength did seem a little magical for her age, but using a non-power wheel chair, and her legs having lost mass gives it some plausibility.

 

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Irlandesa

Irlandesa

42 minutes ago, shapeshifter said:

One of the articles I read or heard stated that this was the first time Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson had worked together and they really connected. 
Maybe someone else can recall where this was mentioned?

There are a bunch of interviews out there.  Here's one of them that mentions their instant connection.

42 minutes ago, shapeshifter said:

She planned that, right?

Totally. 

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ItCouldBeWorse

ItCouldBeWorse

(edited)
3 hours ago, Ms Blue Jay said:

I feel like there was another culturally weird remark too, but I cannot recall it.

I think Betty called Joyce and Irene's boombox a ghetto blaster.

4 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

I mean: Shouldn't someone working in an assisted living facility be familiar with Mahjong?

I think she was just a nosy resident who helped organize the zoo trip, not an employee.  And she knows it's Mahjong, but thinks since it's Chinese in origin, it's a heathen game, hence "witchy" and "runes".

2 hours ago, SomeTameGazelle said:

Was there anything set up to prepare us for Irene's amazing upper body strength?

2 hours ago, Ohiopirate02 said:

We do see Irene doing some arm exercises early on in the episode.

Yes, when we first see Irene, she's doing sitting pushups (while Joyce is misting the pot plants).  Then she pushes herself up into her wheelchair, which is a surprise.

2 hours ago, Cranberry said:

Charlie called Melanie a chimpanzee a couple times, though, and a monkey six times!

So Charlie lacks cultural sensitivity to non-human primates.

 

Btw, Reed Birney and Judith Light just played a married couple in The Menu.  Her role is pretty subdued, his is more dramatic. 

Edited by ItCouldBeWorse
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Ohiopirate02

Ohiopirate02

Another thing I loved about this episode is the peeling back of layers on Charlie.  She's genuinely sad that Gabriel/Ben is all alone at Mossy Oaks, and she chooses to attend his funeral because she knows no one else will be there.  And then the show gives us the utterly hilarious "dick like a firehose" follow through.  Charlie unbuttoning her shirt to reveal the band tee underneath and comparing package sizes on the two pictures had me rolling.

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shapeshifter

shapeshifter

(edited)
On 2/3/2023 at 11:18 AM, paigow said:

All these old songs like Fox On The Run made me look for a connection with this episode title seeming familiar, but not at the same time... this is it.

 

"Time of the Season" by The Zombies was from 1968, so still popular when Joyce and Irene first met.
The episode title "Time of the Monkey" made me think of the "12 Monkeys" movie.

But the episode title "Time of the Monkey" is actually a reference to 2:30, when Ben's wrist monitor (on Irene's wrist) registered a flatline when Joyce tased her, which Betty spied through a window but thought was a kinky "pleasuring" activity, and which Betty blamed as the reason she "missed the monkey show, which was the whole reason that I organized the trip in the first place."

Edited by shapeshifter
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SnarkShark

SnarkShark

16 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

 

Irene's upper body strength did seem a little magical for her age, but using a non-power wheel chair, and her legs having lost mass gives it some plausibility.

 

To me, her amazing feat of climbing with only her arms was acceptable because this is a comedy.  This isn't actually an early 70s Detective show... it's kind of a pastiche of those shows.  Not a parody, because it's not mocking them, but it's still deliberately over the top.  

 

This was underplayed in the episodes Rian Johnson wrote, but the further we've gotten from the pilot, the more overt the comedy has become.  

 

A drummer exploding (last episode) is a comedy thing.  Old ladies murdering people is a comedy thing, in general at least.  The ridiculous way she committed the crime is comedy too, albeit dark comedy. 

 

They're leveraging Natasha Lyonne being funny too, even if she serves up dramatic beats too.

 

They probably could have gone more comedic with a guy like Lil' Rel a few episodes ago, but I guess wanted to go against type with him (although they still had some implied comedy in that episode over the Right Wing Dog).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Silly Angel

Silly Angel

On 2/2/2023 at 7:14 PM, shapeshifter said:

Maybe they can? https://themahjongline.com/blogs/mahjong-tales/can-you-play-mahjong-with-two-players

Yeahbut, they built all four walls. Not trying to be the mah jongg geek here, but I have spend hundreds of hours at play, and I didn't see a pusher in their game. Mah jongg is a bit like chess in that it's a war game. The "walls" are city walls and the first roll of dice determines which "wind" you play--East, West, North, or South, with East making the first discard and pickup. I guess I can see how they would play that way, but with a lot fewer discards in the center, it's harder and would take much longer. Like, Risk long.

But I'm being a nerd and getting in the weeds about this. I started out thinking they were the coolest old ladies but by the end they were genuinely terrifying, and I loved how Charlie's trajectory was ours as well. This show gets better with every episode. I pray to the network gods they will bring it back for another season.

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Black Knight

Black Knight

On 2/2/2023 at 3:29 PM, Silly Angel said:

Two people cannot play a game of mah jongg! Christ on a cracker, you guys.

No, it can be done. My mom and I would do it when we wanted to play but didn't have two other people around to make up a foursome. Basically you build the walls the same way, and face each other, and when you run out of your own wall's tiles then you move over the wall to the right to yourself. It's a longer game but also more likely to end with someone actually getting mah jongg.

This was such a great episode. Charlie's fight with Irene and Joyce killed me. Stating that she wasn't going to fight little old ladies, and being forced to go back on that because she was getting stabbed with knitting needles and such. Hee!

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susannot

susannot

Fantastic episode and exceptional acting.  I love stories about former 60s radicals in old age. At first, I thought it would be very sad, about their decline in a scuzzy nursing home.  But damn, those old ladies went out fighting until the end.

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Fiftyninth

Fiftyninth

3 hours ago, susannot said:

Fantastic episode and exceptional acting.  I love stories about former 60s radicals in old age. At first, I thought it would be very sad, about their decline in a scuzzy nursing home.  But damn, those old ladies went out fighting until the end.

Hey, now. They were ‘70s radicals, and don’t you forget it!

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arc

arc

Charlie's really gotta think smarter about these confronting-the-murderer moments, esp now that she's equipped with a (dumb)phone again instead of being totally off the grid.

Speaking of which, how and why did she get a job at Mossy Oaks? Didn't Marge from ep 2 tell her to only take gigs that paid cash? Surely this place took her SSN and does tax withholding and all that other stuff you don't want to do when you're on the run.

Besides the incredible arm strength, Joyce and Irene also managed to rig up the golf cart to explode, which seems nearly Hannibal levels of murder wizardry. How could they possibly have known Charlie would be the next person to turn the ignition on that particular golf cart? When did they even have time to do it?

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shapeshifter

shapeshifter

45 minutes ago, arc said:

Besides the incredible arm strength, Joyce and Irene also managed to rig up the golf cart to explode, which seems nearly Hannibal levels of murder wizardry. How could they possibly have known Charlie would be the next person to turn the ignition on that particular golf cart? When did they even have time to do it?

We did see Charlie driving a Chekhovian golf cart more than once, so, for narrative and comedic purposes, that's enough planning by the writers, if not by real life evil doers. 
But, yeah, the exploding golf cart was just Wylie Coyote-level comedy. 
Especially with Charlie escaping unscathed in Road Runner fashion.

Similarly, if Charlie had not been imbued with comic book hero levels of imperviousness, all that bashing with the metal bed pan would have left serious bruises, if not broken bones.

And I don't think I want to know where the knitting needle went.

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Haleth

Haleth

(edited)

Well written and well acted that we start out sympathizing with and liking the old gals.  (Who doesn't like feisty old women?  Wait, scratch that.  I'm sure we're all sick of the Brady movie ads.)  But by the end they were shown to be extremely dangerous despite their age and Irene's condition.  Charlie has to stop confronting the killers by herself.  She greatly underestimated their strength.

It's a good thing fake nephew was incompetent and didn't check into Charlie's background.

The comment below mine reminded me that I chuckled about the Fletchers watching their Scandinavian crime shows.

Edited by Haleth
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Paloma

Paloma

7 hours ago, Haleth said:

Well written and well acted that we start out sympathizing with and liking the old gals.  (Who doesn't like feisty old women? 

I had a lot of conflicting feelings about the characters. Initially I didn't really sympathize with or like them because they were so rude and mean to everyone (before we knew they were killers). But then I thought about what it would be like to be stuck in a place with boring old people when you don't belong there--to me both of the women looked too young to be in a retirement home. And then I looked up the ages of the actresses and realized that one is a year older than me (JL) and the other is 2 years younger than me (SEM)--yikes! I don't think of myself as the age of someone who would be in a retirement home, but I guess it's possible. And I might be pretty irritable if I was in that situation with the other residents we saw, and being treated like children. (Actually, I'd be irritable about that treatment even if I was a decade or more older.)

When Joyce and Irene were telling Charlie about their glory days, I was somewhat sympathetic because it reminded me of my college years in the protest era. My activism didn't go beyond marching, but two of my roommates were more radical--though not violent, as far as I know. But they lost my sympathy when their plot to bomb teenagers at the Model UN was revealed. I went to a Model UN when I was in high school, and it was dorky but certainly not deserving of terrorism (not that anyone is). If Joyce and Irene had expressed even the slightest regret about the plot (usually people gain some perspective on their poor life choices after several decades), it wouldn't have been so bad. But they really were just murderers or attempted murderers without remorse.

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shapeshifter

shapeshifter

On 2/2/2023 at 5:11 AM, AnimeMania said:

S. Epatha Merkerson as Joyce Harris, nursing home resident
Judith Light as Irene Smothers, nursing home resident
Simon Helberg as Luca
Reed Birney as Ben/Gabriel
K. Callan as Betty

Perhaps because of all the discussion in the media and in the previous episode's thread about how Poker Face is a version of Columbo, today I watched the Columbo episode "Étude in Black,"  which similarly had a bounty of name actors, including John Cassavetes as both the lead guest star and the "uncredited" director, as well as Blythe Danner and Myrna Loy (imdb.com/title/tt0068398), and, as with Natasha Lyonne here, Peter Faulk was a notable actor himself. 

With commercials, Columbo episode 2.1 "Étude in Black" ran 2 hours, with the opening murder running 37 minutes of those 2 hours until we see Columbo. Both John Cassavetes' presence on screen and the attention to details that were obvious clues for later bought a lot of good will from me as an audience member until Peter Faulk came on screen.

In "Time of the Monkey," I was mostly content with the lack of Natasha Lyonne for so long because we had S. Epatha Merkerson and Judith Light, plus K. Callan on screen, and an interesting backstory. 

The main difference between Columbo and this show seems to be that Poker Face relies more on OTT dark comedy.
Or, at least, this episode did. 

 

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paigow

paigow

O.G. Columbo was LAPD, so his perps were celebrities, politicians, executives and assorted other snotty, arrogant douchebags that looked down their noses at him. It may not have had a dark humour, but there were definitely some barbs tossed around. Come to think of it, Frasier & Niles would have been ideal perps....

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ItCouldBeWorse

ItCouldBeWorse

On 2/4/2023 at 7:16 AM, arc said:

Speaking of which, how and why did she get a job at Mossy Oaks? Didn't Marge from ep 2 tell her to only take gigs that paid cash? Surely this place took her SSN and does tax withholding and all that other stuff you don't want to do when you're on the run.

I wondered about that, too. Not so much the withholding, but about being in the nursing home records while Frost is searching for her.

 

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Paloma

Paloma

1 hour ago, Black Knight said:

Was Betty staff, or just a resident who likes to try to run things and tell people what to do? I assumed she was the latter because of her age.

At first she seemed like staff, but later in the episode there was a scene that made it look like she was just busybody resident. Maybe someone else can remember the specific scene.

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akg

akg

Based on the fact that Joyce and Irene had spent a good chunk of their lives in prison and therefore wouldn't have any savings, I'm thinking the retirement community was on the cheap end (regardless of how nice it looked) and might have been willing to pay Charlie under the table. The nurse certainly didn't seem all that dedicated (he caved awfully fast when asked to violate HIPAA).

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meep.meep

meep.meep

Enjoyed the episode.  I'm wondering why Charlie hasn't come up with a fake name to use.

In Being Human, Mitchell and George (vampire and werewolf, respectively) get jobs as hospital porters (cleaning staff) because there are always jobs available, and nobody checks their backgrounds.

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