It was definitely the grimmest one yet. Charlie’s been shot, hit by a car and stabbed in the chest now (and probably an injury or two I’m forgetting), and is still breathing. Talk about nine lives!
I strangely find myself wishing the show would be more formulaic. It’s supposedly partly based on ‘Columbo’, but every episode seems to be less about Charlie using her skills to uncover a crime than just having the dumb luck to find herself in the middle of shit. I miss the satisfaction of a ‘Columbo’ type using their wits to first toy with, and then bust, a bad guy every time. In this recent episode ‘Mortimer’ had as much, if not more, to do with uncovering the crime than Charlie.
I’m not a gambler and have never been to Vegas, but I’ve heard that casinos can and will ban a person for whatever reason they want-- it doesn’t have to be outright cheating. Counting cards? That’s really just paying attention, but it’ll get you banned. Just having a lucky streak? If it lasts too long, you get banned. Casinos want to take money from you, not give it away.
Are you confusing her winning at cards for the reason the casino owner was ‘mad’ enough for her to have to go on the run? That’s not the reason-- when she was caught using her special skills the owner banned her from gambling there, but still gave her a waitressing job, out of a kind of respect. It wasn’t until she caused the owner’s son to kill himself in ep.1 that he vowed to track her down and kill her.
I think I tried to express something similar to this above. Post 39, if I’m reading this correctly. Haven’t seen this latest ep, but my impression strengthened in the couple of weeks since I posted that. Too often (IMO) the ep is almost over before she notices, “Holy shit? Something happened here?”
Firstly, Rian Johnson hates adhering to formula, so this is his way of playing with that expectation, but hopefully while still delivering solid entertainment.
But secondly, Charlie is not a Detective. She’s not meant to solve the crime, she delivers the just deserts when the crime cannot be proven by conventional means. They think they’re going to get away with it, but she sees the way to make sure they don’t. Not necessarily via the Justice System.
Also, why she’s a smart person, she’s not a genius, she’s not exceptionally knowledgeable, nor does she have a brilliant analytical mind. Her powers are her lie detector and her ability to connect with people. She wouldn’t take a job as a detective if someone offered it to her.
Yes, I know. She’s not even a l/c detective. But in earlier episodes she was much more about putting 2 + 2 together, like the truck stop episode where she realized the winning lottery ticket was out of sequence, or the BBQ episode where she used her knowledge of wood types learned from the murdered pit master to incriminate his brother.
As the episodes wore on though, she seemed to become more and more just an unwitting victim of circumstance.
Overall, I liked the finale quite a bit. The story/twist was quite good, Ron Pearlman was fantastic as Sterling Sr., and Benjamin Bratt finally had something meaty to do. All the storylines of the season got wrapped up nicely.
That said, two big negatives for me:
(1) Why did she just get in the car with Bratt when she got out of the hospital? She was surrounded by people! Just scream and refuse to get in! Bizarre, and so totally out of touch with reality that it really took me out of the show
(2) While I liked how the plot with Sterling Sr. wrapped up, it seems just silly and cheap that suddenly she’s right back where she started, except with a different voice-only ruthless casino boss hunting her down over the phone. That doesn’t seem clever, just cutesy and lazy.
Poker is very different from other games, though. Most games, the player plays against the house. If the player has an edge, counting cards or x-ray-vision or whatever, the house loses money. So of course they will firmly escort them from the premises.
Poker, on the other hand, the players play against each other, and the house gets a small cut (small, but it adds up). So the casino doesn’t, at least on the surface, care one way or the other who wins.
Now, you could presumably take that too far… if an ultra poker genius showed up and scared away all the whales, the casino would be sad. But until the whales actually left, the casino wouldn’t care.
(Which isn’t to say that a casino wouldn’t throw the book at someone who was actually cheating at poker… but again, not because the cheating had been costing the casino their edge.)
Furthermore, for a poker tournament, everything I said goes even more so. Someone is going to win the poker tournament. The casino has literally zero reason to care who that is. And one person winning a huge multi-day poker tournament isn’t going to scare the whales away, because the entry fee for a big poker tournament is piddly pocket change to someone who would qualify as an individual whale.
(I don’t remember the precise verbiage, but the scenes with Sterling Sr. in the finale reinforced my memory of how that all went down. It’s definitely implied that he “gave her a break” in some way. Like, she was doing something bad/underhanded/forbidden, and he “went easy” on her. Being freakishly good at poker purely through your own talents shouldn’t qualify as any of the above.)
I thought that at first, too. She knew a ‘private party’ had paid for her hospital stay, and she knew what that meant. Why not just sneak out a back way or something? But she said to Sterling Sr. when she met him in the Atlantic City casino, something to the effect that she was tired of running. It had been over a year of close calls. She had resigned herself to ‘facing the music’.
To me, that was consciously playing with the tropes of 70s TV series. It was the classic TV show reset-- hijinks happen, but the status quo never changes. It’s a show about a person on the run-- David Banner never got to settle down and start a family. On the phone at the end, Rhea Perlman says to her word-for-word what Sterling Sr. had said to her over the phone at the end of ep.1, which we heard again at the start of this episode. I’d say you can argue it’s cutesy, but not lazy- it was very intentional.
That was also referenced by the repeated viewings of “Burn Notice.” Pretty much every season ended with “You thought you defeated the big bad, but here’s a voice on the phone telling you they’re really the ones in charge.”
Ha, hadn’t noticed that. Very odd coincidence that two actors who are similar ages, with the same last name that I wouldn’t think is too common, are not related. But I even googled it, and nope, no relation.
I loved Benjamin Bratt’s bizarre interpretation of that Blues Traveler song as beat poetry. I also noticed that he stopped just before the line, “I ain’t telling you no lie.”
Speaking of which, there was no “bullshit” this episode. I really liked Bratt carefully choosing his words when talking to Charlie when talking to her on the boat.
Sure, that’s definitely true. But… the initial scene didn’t play out that way. In particular, why would Bratt’s character know she felt that way? From his perspective, he’s driving up in front of a hospital, in a very public place, likely with security cameras around, and more or less saying “ok, I’m kidnapping you now” and expecting her to go along with it. It’s like they wrote dialog that would have made sense with him holding a gun on her on a secluded side street, and then just ran out of time to film it there, so filmed it right in front of the hospital instead.
Rule of Funny: It was a better cut from “the trunk or the passenger seat, your choice” to Charlie being in the trunk.
You don’t need to explain everything. The story requires Charlie to go from the hospital to the car. You could have a five minute sequence where she tries to escape but can’t, or just have her get in the car. We can fill in the gaps ourselves.
Yeah MTV, you’re not wrong, but I agree with ANB-- the plot was “no more running; she’s caught, the jig is up, etc.”. Didn’t really matter at that point how he gets her in the car.
What I had more of a hard time buying was Sterling Sr. going from “you killed my son, I’m going to hunt you down, there’s no corner of the Earth you can hide in” to “eh, no hard feelings. Be there as a human lie detector when I talk to the five families-- one time job, I’ll pay you half a mill and you can go on your merry way”. Seemed like a whiplash-inducing 180 flip for his character.
I think that worked because (a) an entire year had passed, and (b) at some point he listened to the tape and realized his son was not just going behind his back to set up poker games to stupidly cheat whales (which maybe he could forgive) but literally trying to get into bed with his most hated rivals.
I thought that too, but I imagine he would have listened to the tape pretty soon after the incriminating stuff was recorded, and in the recaps of Benjamin Bratt’s near-misses in capturing her over the year, he and Sterling Sr. talked about how he’d say how deep to dig the hole when she was finally caught, right up to the hospital parking lot scene when he reported to Sterling that he finally had her.
So Sterling Sr. ether had a last-minute change of heart, or he had decided to make nice with her months before, and just let Bratt think he was still planning to kill her. Which is plausible, seeing as how Bratt’s character felt so dissed by Sterling that he betrayed and killed him.