Poker Face (Season 1), Episode 8 Recap & Ending Explained: The new episode of Poker Face appears to be in awe of Alfred Hitchcock’s works. Directed by Natasha Lyonne herself, it takes us through its psychological thriller narrative with music and camerawork that feels reminiscent of the Hollywood auteur’s work. The orchestral music hits a crescendo just when the plot does and heightens the impact of its dramatic moments. (One of the episode’s moments feels eerily similar to the ending of North of Northwest in terms of its psychological impact).
Like Vertigo, there is also a fever-dreamish visual narration where deception takes center stage. The character (not Natasha’s Charlie) wonders what is real and what’s not. There’s a mystery, there’s a tragedy, and then there is an introspection on guilt. Let’s look at what happens in this latest episode. And as you would already know, that means that there are spoilers ahead!
Poker Face (Season 1), Episode 8 Recap
Episode 8: The Orpheus Syndrome
Laura (Cherry Jones) and Max (Tim Russ) are in the middle of their fight in their lofty villa. Max rushes out with a hand on his chest, and Laura follows him. While he seems to be having genuine physical pain, she is emotional. It seems like their argument took a wrong turn, leading him to throw himself off the balcony. He falls down from a significant height in his own pool of blood.
After Max’s death, Laura goes to meet Arthur (Nick Nolte), their old colleague who resides with his works of sculpture. It almost seems like a sanctuary for him, where he lives as a recluse. It turns out he has a traumatic past that made him depart from Max & Laura in their joint venture of Light and Motion studio (LAM, a special effect studio). In the following years, he couldn’t switch to the CGI trend and loved his old-school tangible works.
While looking around in this workshop, Laura stumbles upon those works. Recalling their 30-year-long distance over Arthur’s guilt-bound trauma, she mentions her and Max’s plan for divorce before his untimely death. She speaks about her guilt and, for the same reason, asks him to make a maquette of Max so that she can ‘apologize to the dead.’
Two weeks later, Laura is back in her villa, and it looks like she couldn’t be happier about her present life. She returns inside, brings a box to her hall, and takes Max’s maquette outside. Its uncanny resemblance makes you in awe of Arthur’s impeccable skills despite his old age (more evident through his hoarse voice). Seeing it, she gets emotional. It brings her back to the conversation they (Max & she) had before his death.
Max talks about the footage he has from 40 years ago that implicates Laura in a crime. She reminds him of the time that has passed by and asks him to delete it. He is determined to present it to the police. She accepts her guilt and calls it to be a burden on her shoulders. He tells her to speak with Arthur about it before he goes to the police, and he trusts her. His arms start fidgeting right then, and his whole body suffers from a painful sensation. Laura states that it is because of his tea and asks him to submit to the pain instead of resisting it. There is not even an iota of guilt she feels doing this. While he suffers, the earlier scenario plays out, where he drags himself outside and throws himself off the balcony.
After feeling just a smudge of guilt, Laura returns and retrieves the device that has the incriminating video. She opens the laptop to log in. But it needs his face ID. Since Max’s face was heavily bruised after the accident (which is something she thought of first before saving him), she needed the maquette to get access to his hard drive. So, after two weeks, she finally opens his laptop to find the video and deletes it. Then, she calls Raoul (Luis Guzmán) from LAM’s archive department to find the original tape and bring it to her place.
Meanwhile, Charlie (Natasha Lyonne) is still on the road, taking up temporary gigs. She is now in this town dealing barbershop hair to an artist. It happens to be none other than Arthur himself. While Charlie was sick of a load of bullshit barbershop employees and customers were saying, she is impressed by the old man’s utmost honesty. By then, she grows a tick in her lie-detecting skill – where her eye starts filching whenever someone tells a lie. However, her eye never flicked while talking with Arthur, who says with no fear that he just buried a body or when he tells other details of his works.
Charlie enters Arthur’s workshop and marvels at his little world of creative excellence. She loves it so much that she asks for work for quick cash, and he agrees. Not long after that, Laura comes by this place, tells her emotional story, and asks Arthur to make that maquette. Throughout Laura’s one-sided dialogue, Charlie’s eye keeps flinching. Once Laura leaves, she shares her lie diagnosis with Arthur. He still empathizes with Laura as his old friend who is consumed by guilt and decides to help with what she needs.
While working on Max’s maquette, Arthur tells Charlie the story of his traumatic past. Lily (Rowan Blanchard) was hired as a young, promising actor for his directorial debut feature. In an underwater scene’s shoot, she struggled to finish it until the end. Inside a water tank, she kept hitting a switch that was supposed to be for her safety. Whenever she clicked it, a red light bulb would light up on the side of the tank. A) Due to her failure to do the scene, and B) because of Arthur’s overenthusiasm to get his vision right in his debut, he pushed her a little too much. She finally gave a take that went perfectly well. However, that’s when she died.
Despite decades of time after that incident, Arthur kept blaming himself for the naïve & maddening passion that he believes was the cause of her death. Seeing him being vulnerable about it, Charlie also opens up (finally to someone, after a while of traveling) about her best friend Natalie’s death. While she chose a different path for her life, Arthur also abandoned his old career in LAM to become a reclusive artist.
Why is the episode titled ‘The Orpheus Syndrome’?
During their conversation, Charlie starts seeing the relationship between Arthur’s recent works and his life’s guilt. He was working on a play called ‘The Orpheus Syndrome,’ like the ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Like Orpheus, he was trying to bring back the past from the wretched. Even the little characters he made looked like representations of him, Lily, and others from the set. The drama was also eerily similar to the tragedy from his life. While Orpheus used his song, Arthur used his art.
However, that did not give Arthur the closure that he wished to get. So, he calls Raoul and asks for the tapes from the time of Lily’s death. He opens the one clip that recorded Lily’s death from a side that he hadn’t noticed before. He now sees Laura loosening the bulb cap (which would make the lamp fail to light up). Due to her interference, Lily could not have even communicated a danger even if she sensed it. While on one side, he stumbles upon this bit of truth, Laura calls Raoul to retrieve the same tapes. She learns that they have already been given away to someone else. It infuriates her.
Meanwhile, Arthur is furious for having lived his life with enormous guilt, even though Laura was the one to blame. Of course, that doesn’t negate his egotistical approach to direction, but Laura’s conniving nature seems more interesting, making her the sole culprit for Lily’s death. So, he goes to Laura’s house to confront her. She tries to justify her actions and rather guilt-trips him by saying that she did all the dirty work for him and Max. Furthermore, she says, ‘the dead can’t forgive me, but they can’t hurt me either.’ Hearing that, Arthur gets suspicious and asks whether she is also involved in Max’s death. She denies any guilt thanks to Max’s favor of falling down the cliff.
Laura wants to get the incriminating tape in her possession since she does not want to waste her career success after years of passage after this crime. Arthur drops that tape in the bonfire next to them and decides to leave. On his drive back, he starts getting dizzy. We learn that this is another time when Laura poisoned a person through tea, making her a serial killer for the sake of safekeeping her reputation. Back at her villa, she notices that the tape is missing some parts. Arthur cut just the part of this tape that incriminates her.
Meanwhile, back at his workshop, Arthur falls down from his car. Charlie finds him, and she makes every attempt to save him out of her strong bond with him (due to their shared vulnerability). While looking for medical help for him, she notices cinders on the car wheel that look similar to the outside of Laura’s house, which she recalls because they make it difficult for her to take the maquette box.
However, despite losing two closest people in her life, Laura is committed to saving herself. She calls the LAM administration to get control over Arthur’s workshop (where the remaining piece of tape is). She mentions using Arthur’s artworks for an exhibition for her and Max’s 40th marriage anniversary. Laura glances outside to find Charlie, who notices the cinder that matches the one on Arthur’s wheel. Then, she enters Laura’s villa to detect her lies. She tries to make her open up about these terrible losses and the grief that she supposedly should be feeling.
Charlie asks whether Max got peace of mind in the end. She asks this, stating her close bond with him in that limited period. Laura is honest when she mentions that Arthur was able to let go of his guilt over Lily’s death. However, at the time of Charlie’s departure, Laura feels content that all Charlie wants to do is say goodbye to Arthur and not incriminate her. She ends up blurting out that she did not have anything to do with Max’s death (assuming Arthur may have told her about it). Charlie makes her repeat that statement and gets an eye twitch.
Poker Face (Season 1), Episode 8 Ending Explained
Does Charlie manage to make Laura feel guilty for her crimes?
At Arthur’s workshop, Charlie learns from Raoul that Laura asked for the same tapes Arthur had. That makes her join the pieces of this narrative where Laura has the motive to kill Arthur. She surmises that there is something on that tape of Lily’s death incident that Laura does not want anyone to see. While she starts playing it on his laptop, Laura suddenly arrives with the LAM crew to take away all the tapes. Charlie and Raoul hide, but Laura manages to get him out of hiding. He says that he was there to retrieve the tape for her. She smells something fishy and orders him to return to his archive office basement.
Meanwhile, Charlie notices a tape wrapped around a medusa maquette from her hiding. Soon after this incident, Laura fires Raoul from his job. At the same time, Charlie enters their building wearing a horse’s head from Caligula’s revenge, trying to get the tape back. (She looks like BoJack Horseman and creates surreal chaos in this art world!) After getting thrown out, she meets Raoul, who just got fired. While trying to tell him about ‘the tape,’ she explains Medusa as a lady with snakes wrapped around her head! Raoul understands it. Since his card would still work on their system, they decide to sneak in together.
By that time, Laura had started giving a speech at the exhibition. She starts with some generic thoughts about Arthur and Max’s death. But soon after, she starts seeing Arthur in one of the attendees. It puts her in a state of frenzy, and she suddenly goes off-speech to speak about Lily’s death. It sounds like a clear plea to get out of her impending guilt while Arthur’s ghost haunts her. While she is already mentally unstable, Charlie retrieves ‘the tape’ with Raoul and starts projecting it directly onto the screen.
As if Laura’s downward spiral wasn’t enough, Charlie takes away even a shred of her reputation in the eyes of others. After this devastating blow to her dignity, Laura walks out in delirium, hallucinating Max around her. Her guilt becomes tangible in this neon-filled madness around her, where she becomes motivated to end her life, exactly as he did, by throwing herself down the balcony. In the end, whether it is her or Arthur, they work through their guilt and succumb to misery after a thoughtful process of retrospection.
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