Sometimes I wonder if the Poker Face casting department is a little too good. Like, I love Sherry Cola, but I don’t know that the show needed a comic actor with her considerable skills to deliver, say, five or six lines in this season’s “Last Looks.” And in this week’s “Hometown Hero,” Ego Ngwodim is more or less wasted as a minor league baseball radio broadcaster who’s addicted to canned cheese. Gil Birmingham also barely leaves much of an impression as the team’s manager, Skip Dooley. Too often on this show, the supporting players are way overqualified.
I bring this up at the start of this recap because it’s pretty much the only complaint I have about this episode, which otherwise is craftily written by Tony Tost, sharply directed by indie-thriller legend John Dahl, and…brilliantly cast. I’m speaking here primarily about the actor playing this week’s killer, “Rocket” Russ Waddell, a former fireballing pitcher trying to salvage what’s left of his career with his rinky-dink hometown club. I didn’t catch the guest star’s name in the opening credits, and I spent much of the episode wondering where I’d seen this guy before—and why he was so perfect in this part.
The actor is Simon Rex, and the reason I recognized him is that he starred as the fast-talking, amoral, strangely lovable sleazebag in Red Rocket, one of my favorite movies of 2021 (and the film that writer-director Sean Baker made right before his Oscar-winning Anora). Rex is a great choice for this Poker Face role because he has a loose, funky energy that makes everything he says and does feel natural. I think part of the reason why I didn’t clock him right away is that he looks and acts a lot like a real-life innings-eating MLB middle reliever. (Honestly, he reminded me a lot of Charlie Morton.)
Rex’s Rocket Waddell (a reference to Rube Waddell?) finds himself making what could be his final mound appearances for the Montgomery Cheesemongers, who play in Velvety Canned Cheese Park, a stadium built decades ago by Hiram Lubinski, the inventor of Velvety Canned Cheese Substitute Spread. The whole operation is run by Hiram’s granddaughter Lucille, played by the wonderful Carol Kane (who does make an impression). Because this is the minors, decisions about whether Rocket gets to keep pitching are beyond Lucille’s control.
The murder-plot develops organically. After Rocket gets shelled yet again—thanks to a fastball that tops out around 80 mph—he learns his days in Montgomery are numbered. And when hears about fans making big money betting against the Mongers—who are close to setting a minor-league record for consecutive losses—he figures he and his teammates can also get rich off their own futility. A core group of five sell their assets, borrow from loan sharks (including “a guy named, no joke, Shady ‘The Knee-Capper’ McGee”), pool their money, and set up a parlay that will net them more than $3,000,000 to split, provided they lose enough games to beat the streak.
Alas, before the last game in the run, the major league club promotes Felix Domingo (Brandon Perea), a promising starter. When the gamblers try to sabotage Felix by dosing his Ground Rule Bubble bubblegum with hallucinogens, they inadvertently “Doc Ellis” him, making his pitches preternaturally nasty. To secure the loss, the catcher has to tell the opposing team’s final batter to bunt, at which point the fielders in on the fix make intentional errors, leading to an inside-the-park home run, Little League-style. Problem solved? Not quite. After the game, Felix—who has sussed out the whole scheme—demands that Rocket give him all the money.
What happens next happens quickly. An angry Rocket suddenly regains his heater and fires a 101 mph fastball at the back of Felix’s head, killing him instantly. Then he covers up the crime by staging the scene so that it looks like Felix was taking batting practice with the Mongers’ notoriously balky old pitching machine, “Rambo.”
After that, it’s time for the circle back, where we learn that Charlie has spent the past week or so working for the Cheesemongers as a ball girl and gofer. Unlike last week’s episode, where Charlie’s job felt random, there’s some narrative and thematic logic to this move.
Still searching for a sense of purpose, Charlie has binge-watched The Office and taken a job doing filing and copying, hoping for some daily interpersonal connection—only to discover that at the office that hires her, nearly everyone works from home. So when a baseball from the stadium next door crashes through a window and hits Charlie on the head—and when Lucille, coming across very much like a quirky TV character, asks her, “What is your general philosophy regarding litigation and such?”—Charlie knows she’s found the community she’s been looking for.
There are a few reasons why this episode really works, but a big part of it is that Charlie seems to be having so much fun at her new gig. She gets to wear cool knee-high socks, and she can drink and vape during games, while deputizing some random fan to perform her actual ball-girl duties.
When Felix dies—and when it looks like Lucille’s glitchy Rambo is going to lead to a massive, team-destroying lawsuit—Charlie takes it personally. And when she sees some team members walking into the clubhouse with new furs, new jewelry, and new teeth, she starts getting suspicious. Then she hears Rocket’s lament, “My fastball’s gone and it’s not comin’ back,” and she knows he’s full of shit (or “bullshit,” in Charlie-speak).
It’s not just Charlie’s righteous ire that gives this episode its juice. Tost, Dahl, and Natasha Lyonne also work wonders with one risky set-piece, where we see Charlie dosed with the same drugs that flummoxed Felix. Hallucination sequences often come off as corny and shrill, but this one begins with a bit of absurdist delight—as Charlie encounters a talking, gum-chewing cartoon sock, saying “yum” repeatedly—and then takes a weirdly poignant turn when she has a conversation with the spirit of Hiram Lubinsky about protecting his family’s legacy and preserving a sense of community. Fittingly, Hiram is played by B.J. Novak…y’know, from The Office.
The murder mystery has a fun resolution, too. After Charlie learns from the police report that Rocky likely couldn’t have pitched a ball fast enough to crack Felix’s skull, she tries to bait Rocket into throwing another 100-plus “speedball” (to quote Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” which is prominently featured in this episode). When Rocket makes his next start, the cops plant a fake scout in the stands—dressed just like the Los Angeles Dodgers’ former radar gun guy—while Charlie goads Rocket into making the pitch that incriminates him. Then the episode ends, immediately.
This is an advantage that post-fugitive Poker Face has over the old version of the show. There needn’t be a lot of wind-down and transition at the end of the hour. Instead, just like the series’ spiritual forebear Columbo, an episode can just…end. In most Columbos, once the lieutenant solved the mystery by revealing the key piece of evidence, the episode cut to the credits in about a minute.
Granted, it does take some confidence and skill even to attempt such a move. But this Poker Face episode? It has zip.
Stray observations
- • Other teams in the same league as the Montgomery Cheesemongers: Augusta Duffers, Black Mountain Poetics, Ft. Smith Chickadees, Houston Sombreros, Lake Charles Crawdads, Raleigh Blue Bonnets, Tennessee Moon Pies, and Tupelo Honeys.
- • In our first encounter with Charlie in this episode, she is reading Borges in an empty office and trying to repair a stalled printer. (“Now I’m like emotionally invested in this shit,” she mutters after multiple fix-it attempts fail.)
- • Skip, meanwhile, is reading the book So You Find Yourself In An Open Marriage, but he doesn’t seem to be getting much help from it, given that at one point in the episode he tries to rally the team to win for “good ol’ fashioned monogamy.” (After a brief pause, one of the Mongers emits a short, quiet “woo.”)
- • As I mentioned, Ego Ngwodim is grossly underused in this episode, though she does get a good line when she describes the after-effects of eating a lot of canned cheese: “I seem to have stopped seeing the color green?”
- • Kristin Minter, on the other hand, has a fun couple of scenes as a Bull Durham-esque “Baseball Annie,” talking about all of the ways she tried to cure Rocket of his yips: ritual tugging, “slutty Babe Ruth”… y’know, the usual.
- • In addition to “Glory Days”—twice!—the classic rock soundtrack to this episode includes the America chestnut “Sister Golden Hair” and one of my all-time favorite Jackson Browne songs, “Boulevard.” Sounds like summer.
