This Week’s Mystery Completely Changes The Dynamic Of The Show In An Exciting Way

June 26, 2025

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Warning: This review contains spoilers for Poker Face season 2, episode 10.

Another Poker Face episode, another great guest cast. Method Man stars in “The Big Pump” as a beefy gym proprietor named Brick, while Jason Ritter plays a customer named Rodney, who wants to see some serious gains before confronting his old bully at his high school reunion. He asks Brick for the same performance-enhancing supplement he gives to other customers to get him in shape faster, so Brick asks his girlfriend Lil to get a hold of some more of “the good stuff.” As it turns out, the good stuff isn’t steroids; it’s breast milk that Lil snags from the birth center where she works.

In an ironic twist, it turns out Rodney is a city health inspector. He’s willing to overlook steroid use, but not the theft and resale of human breast milk, which he describes as a “health code catastrophe.” When Rodney confronts Brick at the gym after hours, they get into a fight that turns deadly when the kettlebells start getting thrown around the room. Brick stages Rodney’s death as a lifting accident and plays dumb when the morning workouts show up and find his body.

Natasha Leggero plays Brick’s girlfriend who steals breast milk from her job. Leggero is great in her brief appearance, but she’s massively underutilized in the same way Carol Kane was in Poker Face’s baseball episode a few weeks ago. Leggero is a biting comedian and a staple of Comedy Central Roasts; it feels like she should’ve been trading comedic barbs with Natasha Lyonne, but they hardly share any screen time.

Poker Face Settles In One Place For The First Time

Will Poker Face Become A New York Show Now?

Following on from last week’s Poker Face, “The Big Pump” sees Charlie settled in one place for the first time. She’s still staying at Good Buddy’s grimy New York apartment. Having her permanently reside in the crime-ridden Big Apple makes it a little more believable that she would encounter a murder victim everywhere she goes. She heads to Brick’s gym for a free spinal adjustment and gets a free week of gym membership. She makes a friend called Alex, played by Patti Harrison, who’s similarly lonely and similarly looking for a more stable social circle.

Having her permanently reside in the crime-ridden Big Apple makes it a little more believable that she would encounter a murder victim everywhere she goes.

At the gym, Charlie and Alex meet Rodney, who gives them some lifting advice. Rodney’s two golden rules of weightlifting are Charlie and Alex’s first clues that the circumstances of his death are suspicious. He told them to always have a spotter and always rotate which muscle groups they work out, so it doesn’t add up that he would die doing a bench press without a spotter the day after he already worked out his chest muscles.

But even after getting her first clues, for the first time ever, Charlie isn’t too eager to investigate. She wants to just leave things alone and not interfere, but Alex is keen to investigate — and she needs Charlie’s gift as a human lie detector to do it — so Charlie reluctantly trains Alex in the art of amateur sleuthing. She teaches her all the lessons she’s learned from all the mistakes she’s made in her years of unofficial crime-solving. I love the old-school episodic nature of this show, but it’s also fun to see some continuity as Charlie goes over the events of past episodes.

“The Big Pump” Gives Charlie A Crimefighting Partner

The Introduction Of Alex Completely Shifts The Dynamic Of The Series

A gym was a great setting for a murder mystery. Everyone there is huge and formidable, dozens of potential murder weapons are lined up on racks around the building, and there’s a room designed to seal shut and get uncomfortably hot. At the episode’s climax, Brick locks Charlie in the sauna. She was already nearly cremated in Poker Face’s three-episode season premiere. It makes sense that Charlie would almost get herself killed in her endless quest to bring murderers to justice, but the show needs to use that kind of life-threatening danger sparingly for it to have the right impact.

Poker Face releases new episodes on Peacock every Thursday.

Charlie is still hanging out with Alex by the end of the episode, and I hope she sticks around for a while. Harrison is a great “straight man” foil for Lyonne, and it’s an interesting new dynamic to give the solo detective a partner. The introduction of Alex builds on Charlie’s season-long efforts to connect with other people and leave behind her lonely life as a one-woman wolfpack. From now on, Poker Face might be a very different show.