Review: Poker Face, "Escape from Shit Mountain" | Season 1, Episode 9
In which Charlie realizes she's always been the caretaker
“Are you…me?”
Procedural shows are not built to shock. The formula of a crime procedural is such that you may be able to map out the arc of events before you start watching. If you watch Law & Order or Criminal Minds or even a medical procedural like House, you can get a good feel for the traditional beats from the established character dynamics and from the knowledge that each act of an episode could cover similar tracks but in a way that feels welcome and familiar, instead of tired and boring. Though the events of these shows are rarely comforting, the procedural serves as a perverse kind of comfort food. You know what you’re going to get.
Detective series specifically may only surprise in revealing who killed whom, or why a murder occurred. Even Columbo had its own recognizable formula that meant the propensity to shock was fairly limited. Sometimes the shock came in how Columbo pinpointed the killer in the end, but rare was the episode where a murder wasn’t committed within the first 15 minutes and the murderer’s identity made unavoidably clear.
I say this because while “Escape from Shit Mountain” manages to hew roughly to the formula of Poker Face, it’s an immensely shocking installment in many wonderful ways. Though I’ve been slightly up and down on some of the mid-season episodes, “Escape from Shit Mountain” continues the path of creative heights that “The Orpheus Syndrome” hit last week, and doesn’t miss a beat. To say that this episode – written by showrunning siblings Nora and Lilla Zuckerman – throws some mammoth twists at the audience is an understatement. Mercifully, many of those twists hit very well, making this a standout episode.
From the start, film fans may appreciate a welcome inversion represented the episode’s director and marquee guest star, respectively series creator Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Though Gordon-Levitt has done voice cameos for Johnson in Knives Out and Glass Onion, this is the first time he’s worked onscreen with Johnson since the excellent sci-fi noir Looper1. Gordon-Levitt’s first go-round with Johnson was the indie noir Brick, wherein he portrayed a hard-nosed teenage detective trying to suss out the mysterious death of his ex-girlfriend who’d gotten involved with some bad characters. This time around, Gordon-Levitt is the nefarious fellow who killed a girl in high school, and is desperately and selfishly trying to ensure his long-time freedom as opposed to facing the hard-nosed tactics of a very unlikely detective.
For Trey Nelson, on one very long night, it’s not so easy. He’s in the middle of a 14-month sentence for insider trading, which he’s serving via swanky house arrest in a beautiful spot at the top of a very snowy mountain. He’s gotten so restless in his privileged daily routine that when his house-arrest anklet’s power goes out, he uses it as an excuse to take a joy ride in his Lamborghini…until he hits a figure in the snow, who he tries to offload in a spot underneath a tree where the skeletal remains of the snowboarding high-schooler are buried. Even though his old buddy Jimmy (David Castaneda) is forced into helping, Jimmy’s sour at Trey ignoring his old life and hometown. It’s hard to blame Jimmy, who’s been left to oversee a quaint motel on his own. Also, Trey very quickly reveals himself to be generally obnoxious. Things get worse for the contentious pair when a) the person who Trey ran over manages to extricate themselves from the tree and b) someone else rolls up in an old Plymouth wondering what’s going on.
It would be easy to assume Charlie Cale is driving the Plymouth, because it’s…y’know, her car. But the fun of “Escape from Shit Mountain” is the same fun of Poker Face as a whole: upending obvious expectations. This time around, it’s the upending of the Law of Economy of Characters. That law, conceived by the late film critic Roger Ebert, established that a character whose purpose isn’t immediately obvious must be pretty important, in essence.
To take that a little further, I’ll note that the opening credits tell us a couple important things not established within the first 10 minutes. First, Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu is going to show up; and second, our old friend Rey Curtis–uh, sorry, Benjamin Bratt is also going to make an appearance. The latter credit is unsurprising, considering that Charlie’s whole “on the run” thing would seem likely to wrap up by next week’s finale. Why wouldn’t the show tease that conclusion at some point in this installment? That latter credit also can lead to the presumption that Charlie’s going to be fine by the end of this episode. How else can her story arc wrap up a week early? As such, you might presume (as I did) that Hsu played the person who Trey ran over, and Charlie is driving the Plymouth to the motel.
After the episode rewinds from when Trey and Jimmy see one body in front of the motel and the Plymouth pulling up, we find that Charlie was lured to stay on what she dubs Shit Mountain thanks to an almost comically hunky lumberjack with whom she indulges in a romantic relationship. But come February, the lumberjack is gone and Charlie is scrounging for tips by cleaning off icy windshields so she can get her car back on the road. Charlie befriends Hsu’s pickpocketing snowboarder, known only as “Mortimer Bernstein,” but when they get into a mild fender-bender to avoid running into a stag…well, my presumptions got reversed.
The first big shock of “Escape from Shit Mountain” comes as Morty heads back to a gas station for assistance, and Charlie is run over by Trey, who subsequently leaves her for dead in “the spot.” Charlie thus spends a good deal of the episode desperately struggling to regain her bearings and trying to extricate herself from a very dangerous situation. She’s trapped in a snowbound motel with three strangers, one of whom has a propensity for stealing her wallet, one of whom ran her over, and the last of whom is his accomplice.
The second big shock comes near the end, when Charlie tries and fails to evade Trey entirely. All has been revealed: he killed the missing girl Chloe Jones and passed it off as a drug-related mishap, he killed Morty to avoid her running off with his Lambo and to tell the cops about his misdeeds, and he’s now killed the remorseful Jimmy, who chose to protect Charlie. So much of “Escape from Shit Mountain” is intended to throw you for a loop, and yet when Trey full-on stabbed Charlie, my jaw dropped. Even on a repeat viewing, it’s still a very gutsy move to put Charlie out of commission though salvation is soon at hand: Charlie shrewdly grabbed Trey’s house-arrest anklet, so when its power is restored, he’s found out and she can be quickly located and dispatched to a Denver hospital.
Considering this show’s various pushes into implausibility, I will forgive it the obvious question: “How the hell would Charlie survive this much pain in one night?” Instead, I willingly suspended my disbelief, aided by the expanding tension that explodes in the climax. “Escape from Shit Mountain” benefits primarily from its limited scope, as once Charlie and Morty leave the gas station, it’s just the two of them plus Trey and Jimmy for the rest of the episode, excluding a brief glimpse of local news and Bratt in the final scene. Even the back-of-the-mind knowledge that Charlie’s going to be fine, or that she has to be fine, doesn’t detract from my enjoyment. Poker Face has succeeded in no small part from establishing and then destroying expectations derived from its formula, but there’s no better example of the show creating and gleefully breaking things than this penultimate episode. What an hour of television.
Stray Observations
Because it would be inaccurate, I will not dub this installment a bottle episode. But I will point you to Kathryn VanArendonk’s essay on the importance of getting that phrase right.
I don’t know how intentional it is, but the opening stretch of “Escape from Shit Mountain,” wherein we watch Trey going through his daily routine and losing interest in it over time, put me in mind of the best-ever cold open in TV history. That, of course, would be the opening to the season-two premiere of Lost. Make your own kind of music indeed.
Another reference that may or may not have been intentional: both Charlie and Trey have moments in the woods where they stare in silence at a majestic stag, who pauses and stares back. Maybe it’s just me, but I could not help but think of the quiet moment shared by Mr. Fox and a wolf at the end of Fantastic Mr. Fox in both of these scenes.
Charlie’s mind moves fast as a whip, but I did appreciate amid her initial reactions to waking up in the motel that she throws in a reference to The Shining: “I’ve always been the caretaker!”
Not that we need a ton of proof that Trey is full of shit, but I like how he shows off – classic Harvard behavior – to correct the pronunciation of “gratis” but then tries to distract Charlie and Morty by asking who’s a certified bone-ologist.
There’s nothing like a good dolly zoom, and the one Rian Johnson employs when Charlie takes an accidental sip of Trey’s coconut rum and flashes back to the Proustian moment of her childhood at a country club is a very good dolly zoom indeed.
I wonder where that lumberjack went. I bet Charlie does too.
I am probably the only person who will make this connection, but when Trey tells Jimmy, “They can’t find out about the spot, that’s why it’s called the spot,” it reminded me of this line from David Mamet’s Heist.
Who else among this year’s crop of Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominees should show up on Poker Face next season, after Hong Chau and Stephanie Hsu appeared this season? I wonder if Jamie Lee Curtis will have time.
To close out today’s review, I will once again offer up a Columbo recommendation. I do so this week with the warning that the connection will be tenuous at best, because – as noted above – this is where the standard formula of Poker Face deviates heavily from old-school shows like Columbo. But there is one early episode where the devious killer has to get rid of a less confident accomplice all while trying to smooth things over with a woman in the hopes of getting her out of the picture as well. That’s “Dead Weight” featuring Eddie Albert as a retired general whose nostalgia ends up doing him in when Columbo figures things out in the finale. A good episode, but certainly not the strongest parallel to this week’s events.
You can hear Gordon-Levitt’s voice in a detective show Marta’s family is watching in Knives Out, and he provided the “Bong” sound in Glass Onion.
I definitely share some of the quibbles of the other commenters in terms of the procedural dynamics of the various murders/attempted murders. There’s three separate new characters whose actions have to be legible in order to generate the requisite carnage, and I don’t know that the episode (even with a longer run time) gets there? I liked Hsu here, but Morty felt like a wild card who just got very dumb as soon as the plot needed her to get out of the way. And while I’m with you, Josh, on the shock of when they have him just straight up stab Charlie, I do wonder why Trey wouldn’t have…double checked? This time? It just ends up feeling a bit contrived, in ways that muddle the ending.
That said, the contrivance may have been front of mind for me after SO MUCH GREEN SCREEN. I respect that the show has lots of challenges in terms of budget and sets with an episodic structure, but the virtual nature of so many of these sets was a consistent distraction, and they didn’t have the budget to hide it well enough.
Me can buy that Charlie stumbles onto murder over and over, because that premise of show. Me can buy that Charlie basically indestructible, because we need her to stay alive for show to continue. But this otherwise expertly-constructed episode ended up with two very sour chocolate chips in cookie.
While David Castañeda is giving speech at end of episode, how he not notice JGL pulling out gun and pointing it at his head? It would have been easiest thing in world to have him look back at Charlie, or at deer head, or be distracted somehow.
And while it unlikely Charlie would survive stab wound, especially after everything else she went through this episode... how on Earth would JGL leave her for dead *twice*? When he could have just slit her throat after stabbing her, just to be on safe side? After certain point, me can only suspend so much disbelief.
Which is shame, because it was otherwise expertly written-and-directed episode. And while JGL and Hsu are heavy hitters, Castañeta was real standout, which was another nice twist, given he not given much acting heavy lifting to do on Umbrella Academy.