Poker Face (Season 1) Episode 5 Recap & Ending Explained: With its four-episode premiere, ‘Poker Face’ brought a one-case-per-episode format back to television. Every episode of this Rian Johnson creation follows a different mystery thriller narrative. The show never fails to amuse you, especially with Natasha Lyone in the lead role. Much of the enjoyment stems from the skillful handling of its elements, which keeps us intrigued about each new discovery.
The previous episode of the show showed Charlie finding out who killed the young drummer for a punk rock metal band. Now she enters an old age home to stumble upon yet another case. Please note that the following paragraphs contain spoilers from the 5th episode, which is now available on Peacock.
Poker Face (Season 1) Episode 5 Recap
Episode 5: Time of The Monkey
Irene Smothers (Judith Light) and Joyce Harris (S. Epatha Merkerson) are two close friends who live at an old age home. They have cultivated a bad reputation in this place due to their rebellious past. Yet, no matter what happens, the two women always stick together. Be it for poking fun at their nurse or a disciplinarian lady; they relish doing all of these things together.
One day, they are surprised to see a new arrival named Ben Holmes. You sense that they share some sort of history with him. Later at night, the two women decide to kill him. To do that, Joyce procures a chemical from the gardener, who warns her not to use it too often. After concocting an elaborate plan for Ben’s murder, they execute it. That day, all the members were supposed to visit a zoo together.
Right when they are about to leave, Irene gets into their washroom and escapes from the side window. This window is right beneath Ben’s room from the third floor. So, she hikes to his floor and gets inside his room. She injects a liquid into his body, takes out his heart rate monitor band from his wrist, and replaces it with her own. Then she starts crawling back toward the basement washroom. Other members create havoc by that time since Irene has stalled the washroom and is making them delay their visit to the zoo.
Luckily, she returns in time and saves herself from getting caught. Then all of them go to the zoo together. But while they were watching some silly show with a monkey, Iris and Joyce stay away from it. At this time, Joyce tasers Irene, who wears Ben’s heart rate band on her wrist. The signal gets fluctuated, which alerts the nurse – Billy (Darius Fraser), to rush to Ben’s room. While the staff tries to save Ben with a defibrillator, they fail to do so. Billy brings back Ben’s band and puts it in their combined storage box. However, soon after that, Joyce comes in and replaces it with Irene’s band.
Before this incident, Charlie enters this old age home as one of the janitors. One of the older men harasses her, and disciplinarian Betty sends him away. Then she gives Charlie a tour through their house and introduces the pair of Irene and Joyce as ex-convicts that she should stay away from. But Charlie being Charlie, gets interested in these unruly old ladies and becomes friends with them in no time. She soon learns that they were actually behind bars because of their revolutionary activities.
The two women tell the story of Gabriel, who brought them together on this mission against authority. In the sexually charged environment of the 70s, they continued their attempts to fight the fascist government of Richard Nixon. They also had a bourgeois pig hit list that they would have liked to take action against. Unfortunately, one day, the police bombard their premises and start attacking one after the other. Gabriel leaves the room before this and has supposedly been on the run. However, because of this shootout, Iris loses both her legs, and both she & Joyce end up in prison for years.
Then the narrative shifts back to the time when Ben arrived at their establishment. Not just Irish and Joyce, but he also recognized who they were. Later that night, he comes to their room, and we learn that he is Gabriel, who has been missing for all these years. The two felt bad that he had to suffer for all those years alone. However, they learn that Gabriel ratted them out to the police and left the premises before they made a hit. This new revelation puts a spin on the two women’s understanding of reality, and thus, they decide to kill Gabriel, who betrayed them and their cause.
Then back at their time in the zoo, we see Charlie watching the silly show and finds both Irene & Joyce absent. By then, she has become a fan of their shtick and wears their group photo on her T-shirt. Since she is also immensely extroverted, she knows details about almost everyone she meets. One of them is Ben, whom she feels has become lonely due to his old age. Due to her sympathy for him, she goes to his funeral and meets Luca (Simon Helberg), who had left him at their old age home.
While he keeps mentioning that he is Ben’s nephew, she deduces the lie instantly and calls him a ‘fake nephew.’ He loses his patience over her constant bickering and discloses that he works for the FBI. Ben was in witness protection custody for helping them, and Luca was kept on duty to take care of him. After their conversation, they go to pay respect near his casket. Charlie sees Ben’s photo from when he was young and instantly recognizes him as Gabriel.
Luca learns from their subsequent conversation that Irene and Joyce live in the same house. He deduces that to be the reason why Ben would have wanted to go live there. From him, Charlie learns that Gabriel was the one who ratted out both the ladies. They were planning to bomb a UN conference that the students from elite schools were participating. These students were children of the fascist pigs that the rebels were against. Charlie considers it to be a possible motive for Iris and Joyce to kill Ben. But she cannot figure out the specifics and goes on to speak with them.
Iris and Joyce see Charlie speak with the agent and question her why she ratted them out. She mentions that she would not have done it if she had known that Ben was Gabriel. The ladies justify their actions to use ‘pressure cooker bombs’ to eradicate the next generation of war criminals. Charlie finds killing high school kids for any cause absurd and now considers them to be the antagonists of their story.
Due to this conversation, Charlie is now certain that the two killed Ben. But she still does not have substantial evidence to prove it. She goes to the old ladies who are obsessed with watching murder mystery episodic on TV. Charlie asks them for chemicals that can induce a heart attack. They start noting one chemical after the other! One of these chemicals catches her attention since they can get it from a gardener.
So, she goes to meet the man who works in their garden. This man mentions that Joyce purchased a week’s worth on Monday and again on Wednesday. That brings Charlie closer to her deduction but not to definitive proof that can be used as evidence. She gets hold of the heart monitor readings and looks through Ben’s record. The nurse shows his reading around the time of his death. She glances upon a sudden spike about two hours before the incident.
Charlie realizes that it is same time she was watching the silly monkey show at the zoo when Iris & Joyce were absent from the group. She speaks with Betty if she felt something suspicious about the two women. Betty mentions seeing them engaged in some weird act of zapping. Hearing that, Charlie understands that they might have faked the rating on Ben’s band. By the time she understands this detail, Betty confronts Iris about this ‘vulgar’ behavior and ends up getting herself killed.
Poker Face (Season 1) Episode 5 Ending Explained: How does Charlie prove the culprits behind Ben’s murder?
Iris and Joyce go back to their room and find Charlie sitting there. In her usual style, Charlie unpeels one layer after the other from the evidence she has found. While the heart meter spike is obvious, there is another factor that both the ladies missed. Ben’s heart meter fell completely flat after the zapping incident. Since the nurses used a defibrillator to save him, it should have gotten recorded on the band, which it did not.
Upon realizing this substantial proof against them, Iris and Joyce start fighting with Charlie to win over her. She fights back against these old ladies, who ruthlessly throw her and stab her, which can even horrify a young assassin. During the moment Iris plans to inject the same chemical into her, Charlie tasers herself. They get confused about why she did that. However, that leads the officers to track that Charlie is in danger since she is wearing the same kind of band on her wrist.
Luca and his associates break down the door and arrest both the ladies. Since Charlie helped him get hold of them, he offered to help her later as a favor. She keeps his card and gets into her car to drive. However, she realizes something is off about the car engine when she puts her keys in. She jumps right out of the vehicle, and it bursts into flames. Meanwhile, Iris and Joyce look back from the police car and smirk at her. Charlie gives them a middle finger while the two get arrested once again.
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