Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Episode 5 of Poker Face.
The previous episode of Poker Face quite literally rocked. We got to jam out with the metal band Doxxxology led by Chloë Sevigny’s Ruby Ruin, a has-been rock star desperate to get another hit song on her hands. So desperate, in fact, that she and her bandmates end up killing their new drummer in an attempt to take credit for his lyrics and music to a new song. But never fear! Our favorite bluff-caller Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) was on it. Charlie also had a close call with Cliff (Benjamin Bratt), the casino security guard who’s been on her tail since Episode 1. Let’s drive and see where Episode 5 takes us.
Diapers and Teletubbies
“Time of the Monkey” has a very different energy to it, as it takes place at the Mossy Oaks retirement home. We follow the lead of Irene Smothers (Judith Light) and Joyce Harris (S. Epatha Merkerson), two unfiltered besties who do not feel like they belong. And it’s not because they are left out or lonely, but because they know they are better than all the other residents. They dress and act like rebellious teenagers and aren’t afraid to talk back to those in charge. They laugh off their peer’s attempt to rat them out for having marijuana and will absolutely drop an F-bomb if you cross them (or even think about crossing them). And don’t try to tell Irene that a strawberry is a nut. Because it isn’t.
The air gets sucked out of the community room when they notice a man around their age talking to the staff. It’s clear by Joyce and Irene’s reactions that this fellow is from their past, and they don’t want him in their present. That night at their place, Joyce tells a bloodshot and teary-eyed Irene, “We have to kill that mother*cker.” And boy do they! The women concoct quite an elaborate plan that involves them stealing medicine, getting drugs from a drug dealer, scaling the side of the building, and sneaking into the man in question’s room as he sleeps. Irene carefully removes the health bracelet that tracks his pulse and then injects him in the neck with her serum. He’s dead.
On the zoo trip they so reluctantly attend, Irene puts on the dead man’s bracelet and Joyce tases her, triggering a red alert on the dead man’s bracelet. This sends the nurse upstairs, where they try to revive him, but ultimately, Ben (Reed Birney) is pronounced dead. Nurse Billy (Darius Fraser) puts Ben’s (Irene’s) bracelet back on the charging station, and then Irene and Joyce do a switcheroo.
Droopy Hues
Now that the dirty work is done, it’s time to take a few steps back. It appears our favorite amateur sleuth is working as a maid at Mossy Oaks. She fends off suggestive comments from “Pervy Pete” with a blunt, “What the f*ck, dude?” and we learn that there is a zoo trip the following week. (This means we are one week out from Ben’s murder.) K Callan’s Betty (who is basically the fun police) gives Charlie the skinny on the residents. Namely, Irene and Joyce, who are busy blasting music in the common area and giving her the finger. She tells Charlie to steer clear of these two “junkie villains” and Charlie is intrigued. “Ah. Real den of iniquity, this place.” Of course, what does Charlie do when she’s told not to do something? She does it anyway.
Charlie spends her days smoking and playing shuffleboard, laughing it up with Irene and Joyce like they are old pals. She learns that Joyce welcomed Irene into her friend group in the ‘70s and introduced her to Gabriel, a hotshot who believed in holding people accountable for their actions. No one was safe, especially not politicians like Richard Nixon or the “bourgeois pig shit list,” especially as they were on the cusp of a “real” revolution. Right when they were going to “set the world on fire,” they were raided, gunned down, and sent to prison. Irene wouldn’t leave Gabriel behind, and in the process, was shot in the back. They took it all from her: her ability to walk, her freedom, and her Gabriel.
This takes us to the beginning when Irene and Joyce lock eyes with the man they decide they need to kill. Ben is equally devastated upon seeing Irene and Joyce, but he gets distracted when Charlie helps take his bags. He’s being moved in by his nephew Luca (Simon Helberg), who says goodbye, but it’s…weird. Ben has no emotion and tells Charlie that he is from nowhere and has no one. Later that night, Ben shows up at Irene and Joyce’s place, and, drum roll…we find out that Ben is actually Gabriel!
The reunion is understandably emotional as the two women thought that Gabriel died the night of the raid. They say they never would have left if they thought there was a chance he was still alive. Gabriel says he’s been dreaming of this moment for years, but it’s not the moment you might think. He looked forward to the day when he could tell them the truth about what actually happened the night of the raid. Turns out, he was the one to turn them in to the cops, and in turn, was handled pretty easily by the authorities. He’s an emotional mess and admits that he feared they wouldn’t forgive him. They say they do, filling him with relief, but as soon as he leaves, Irene and Joyce know what they have to do: they have to kill that motherf*cker.
While Irene is killing Gabriel, Charlie is corralling people for the bus to the zoo. At the zoo, Charlie excitedly shows them the shirt she got of the album cover that their anarchist group was on back in the day, and says she wants to know which one Gabriel was, who they then identify. Of course, this freaks them out, as they just murdered him. Joyce and Irene turn down the monkey exhibit because they claim to be allergic to monkey dander, which Charlie of course knows is bullsh*t. While Charlie is with the chimp, Joyce tasers Irene to jolt the wristband, sending the nurses upstairs to Gabriel’s (Ben) room. Right as they return to Mossy Oaks, Gabriel is being wheeled away in a body bag.
Pigs and Rats
Charlie decides to go to Ben's memorial service and bumps into his "nephew." She tells him how she knows he was lying about being his nephew, and he admits that Ben worked in Witness Protection and he was actually his case agent. Charlie clocks the picture they have up of Ben to be the same guy from her Droopy Hues shirt and tells Luca that he used to be an old flame of Joyce and Irene who live at Mossy Oaks. This sends Luca’s alarm bells ringing, as he knows those two are bad news. He heads to the home and brings them in for questioning.
On the way out, Betty tells Luca all about how much Irene and Joyce misbehave and mentions how she caught them doing “sexual zapping” at the zoo. Of course, we know it wasn’t sexual, it was their attempt to zap Ben’s wristband. Luca shrugs off Betty’s theory that they killed Gabriel because they were at the zoo at the time of Gabriel’s death, but, deep down he still thinks it’s a very real possibility. Charlie doesn’t think so because she swears they are “cool as shit” but Luca explains how they are domestic terrorists who had plans to blow up a Model UN with explosives they made from pressure cookers.
Charlie has a beer with Joyce and Irene, who tell her that they were grilled by the police. They saw Charlie talking to Luca, so did she rat them out? She insists that she didn’t, but she does ask them what Luca was saying when he said that they were going to blow up a “UN for babies.” Surely, that had to be a misunderstanding, right? Well, actually, Irene and Joyce double down and say that, yes, their plan was to kill the offspring of the reigning fascists. Yikes. “It was a different time,” Joyce insisted. Okay, so maybe they are the assh*les. Charlie asks them if they killed Ben, but instead of answering, Irene asks if she was wearing a wire. Charlie leaves upset that the cool women she thought she knew were actually bad seeds. As soon as the door closes behind her, Irene and Joyce know what they have to do.
Charlie approaches the trio of bossy women known as "the Fletchers," who are always watching TV and asks, since they are obsessed with murder shows, if they know of any easily accessible poisons that could trigger a heart attack undetected. Potassium chloride is a response that is floated around, followed by a very long list of other options. The one that sticks out is sodium nitrate, which is used for gardening. Charlie buys some from the landscaper (as Irene and Joyce did earlier in the episode in exchange for drugs) and he can’t get over how often they buy it from him. Charlie tells Luca that she thinks they could have been the ones to kill Gabriel because they were conveniently not at the chimp show at the zoo which was during the time of Gabriel’s death. But, how could they have gotten back to Mossy Oaks and committed the murder that quickly?
Charlie gets Billy to show her Ben’s time of death on the monitor, and she notices that the heartbeat patterns are subtly different. It’s almost like it’s from a different heart. That’s because it’s the data from Irene’s heart, since they switched out the bands. There was also a weird spike around 11:10 am, the time Irene was in the “bathroom” but actually killing Gabriel. Charlie calls Betty and inquires about the “sexual zapping” and tells her that she told Irene that the FBI will catch her for her sexual deviancy. Oh, great. Charlie panics because she knows Betty would likely be their next target, and sure enough, Betty’s Instant Pot explodes and kills her.
The last few minutes of the episode are, well, bonkers. Joyce and Irene return home to see Charlie in their living room, who lights up a cigarette and explains exactly how she knows they did it. The giveaway? The nurses used a defibrillator to try to revive Gabriel, and if he was wearing his wristband, those jolts would have shown up under his data. Joyce bashes Charlie’s head with a bowl, igniting an epic fight between the three of them. Charlie tases herself to trigger a wristband she was wearing, which then gets the attention of the nurses and Luca. Luca offers Charlie a spot in the FBI, but Charlie declines. As she was about to drive away in the golf cart, she senses something is off. She leaps to safety right as the cart explodes from Irene and Joyce’s last attempt at holding someone that wronged them accountable for their actions. It's time for those two ladies to return to prison.