Poker Face Recap: You Cant Un-murder Someone

This series has a gift for identifying and excavating the gloomiest corners of American life. We’ve moved from a dingy regional casino in dire need of carpet shampooing to a transient, one-stoplight town swimming in night-shifters and off-duty truckers. Episode three poked at the rotten core of one of America’s foundational institutions, as essential to our myth-making as the Mayflower and the Liberty Bell: the family-owned-and-operated business. The fourth installment released Thursday, called “Rest in Metal,” stars Natasha Lyonne’s real-life bestie, Chloë Sevigny, as Ruby, a worn-out employee at a big-box hardware store where human adults with intrinsic worth are forced to wear orange aprons over their chosen clothes.

In a previous life, though, Ruby was Ruby Ruin, the front woman of a heavy-metal band called Doxxxology — how subversive. The group is still beloved for their one true hit, “Staplehead,” but now the song gives Ruby the ick. For her DIY colleagues, the entirely inane tune is a source of admiration, but for the misfit rockers of Dox, it’s a reminder of the highs they once knew and are unlikely to recapture as they head deeper into their 40s. Each year the ensemble quit their low-wage jobs and head out on a tour of some of the smallest, sleaziest bars in the Midwest, hoping against hope that inspiration will strike again. There are few milieu more depressing and less sympathetic than the plight of the once and almost famous.

Enter Gavin, a (possibly) Juilliard-trained musician and overenthusiastic Dox fan who answers Ruby’s Craigslist ad for a new drummer. He has no sense of chill or hygiene, but he has his own equipment and that’s enough. The act is in shambles anyway. Guitarist Al — played by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats — can only write awful screeds about his awful divorce. Eskie (G.K. Umeh) moved back in with his mom to afford online law school. But Ruby doesn’t want to die a sad nostalgia act. She wants to be electric again. Next time this year, she wants Krampus, a shitty new band, to be opening for Doxxxology. They were metal gods once; they can be metal gods again. Gavin, however, is just along for the ride. While the band huddles in the RV trying to write the one new song that will restore them to glory, he watches old episodes of the 1980s sitcom Benson with no socks on. Gavin loves “Staplehead.”

Yes, the song is the band’s claim to fame but it’s written and entirely owned by Belinda, their old drummer. They play it every night; it gets blasted on the radio, but it’s never earned Eskie, Al, and Ruby a single cent. So when Gavin comes to them with his own song, “Sucker Punch” — an undeniable hit — they scheme to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself. The band rigs his amp to electrocute him while they’re performing live onstage. Smoke slowly escapes Gavin’s dead lips. Motive, means, opportunity. Check, check, check.

Of the initial episode drop, “Rest in Metal” is the first in which the crime feels genuinely “getawaywithable” to me. Some of that might be because Ruby, thanks to Sevigny’s steely interpretation of what it looks like to be a woman in despair, is the first killer we’ve met who really seems to have her whole heart in the game. She rewrites Gavin’s song in her own hand, and the band members each sign their name as the song’s true authors. They burn Gavin’s original copy. If they’re at all worried he’s played it for anyone else, they don’t mention that aloud.

Which brings us to how Charlie slots into the broader picture. A few days before Gavin’s death, Ruby hired her to come along on tour as a merch girl–slash–roadie. (Find a side hustle that pays cash, Marge once told her.) So she’s been in the background the entire time: absorbing the band, their dynamic, the cringing embarrassment they feel at their own desperation. Charlie even reuses Marge’s Krazy Glue first-aid trick when a crazed audience member hurls a stapler at Gavin’s head during — you guessed it — “Staplehead.” And when the pressure cooker of Ruby’s anger and disappointment gets to be too much, Charlie lets Gavin hitch a ride with her to the next stop of their musical journey through American cities in decline.

Charlie and Gavin naturally hit it off on their daylong adventure, because everyone likes Charlies and Charlie likes everyone. Or at least she wants to. She wants to see the good in people, even a barefoot slop honus like Gav. Charlie vouches for Gavin with Ruby and is on hand to celebrate with him when Ruby offers the ultimate olive branch: permission to perform the primal scream that closes out “Staplehead.” She’s on hand when he puts his bare foot to his booby-trapped pedal. She’s watching when he dies. Charlie’s always nearby when death is.

The three surviving members of Dox lay down a demo of “Sucker Punch” in a Kenosha podcast studio before Charlie’s even done clearing her car of all the debris Gavin left on the passenger seat. Early in the episode, she calls him a magpie for the way he’s always collecting bits and bobs: a travel brochure, a sugar packet. But as she sifts through the flotsam of their road trip, she realizes his lyrics are just as cobbled together. A line of “Sucker Punch” is cribbed from a roadside- attraction pamphlet and forms a couplet with a morsel he found on the paper wrapper of a plastic straw. Single-serve ketchup, a french fry sleeve. Gavin collected the words to “Sucker Punch” like he was populating the landfill of his own mind.

I thought the crime and the criminal would be immediately evident, but Charlie still goes to the source to see what she can shake loose. Unexpectedly, Ruby admits off the bat that Gavin wrote the song, but what’s the point of telling anyone now? This one tune could save Doxxxology from another 40 years of mediocrity.

Still, Charlie can’t drop it. When Dox unites with Krampus for the big culmination of their tour, she’s coincidentally reunited with Deutorotomy, who used to be Dox’s roadie before Ruby fired him — one fewer set of eyes on the band’s equipment meant one less person who could catch them tampering with Gavin’s amp. It’s one of those moments where everything becomes clear at once. Deutorotomy assures Charlie accidents like this happen, but Charlie knows Gavin to be assiduous in his own way and unlikely to make a sloppy mistake. She also stumbles upon the eBay account on which Al is selling morbid Doxxxology mementos, not limited to but including the stapler stained with Gavin’s blood and the amp that killed him. Also, he’s been singing a new song he’s writing called “You Can’t Un-murder Someone.” So there’s that.

Charlie assumes Al acted alone to murder Gavin, which confused me because he’s low-key incompetent and Ruby moves through the world with the single-mindedness of a cold-hearted killer. It’s only when she realizes every single member of the band except Gavin took the stage in brand-new Doc Martens with thick rubber soles to insulate them from the lethal electrical current that Charlie comprehends the scope of what’s happened here.

Before she can right this particular wrong, though, Cliff turns up at the show. Remember Cliff? The stone-cold professional whose life’s work is to track and apprehend Charlie? Hours ago she went TikTok viral for instinctively decking Krampus, a human adult who chooses to wear a four-horned goblin mask to work, as he exited a Porta Potty. By the time she learns she’s famous for the day, her “four hours” are up. She and Cliff engage in a wee pursuit that ends when Charlie escapes into the concert and crowd-surfs to safety as “Sucker Punch” blasts, a moment of frothy TV delight that felt so much like TV I couldn’t help laughing.

It’s not until the coda that Ruby Ruin and Doxxxology are held to account, which I think makes justice even sweeter in this case. They get a small taste of the good life. And it turns out their downfall was overdetermined. Even without Charlie’s sleuthing, their plan to take over the world with Gavin’s creation would have been thwarted … by Gavin himself. Turns out Gavin didn’t so much write the music to “Sucker Punch” but borrow it from the Benson theme tune. And Charlie’s learning new tricks, too. Rather than take her findings directly to the police, she sends them to the host of the podcast Murder Girl, whom Charlie met when Doxxxology stole her studio time in Kenosha.

But about this development I’m of two minds. Ruby won’t just go down for Gavin’s murder, she’ll become famous for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if another 15 years from now she’s out of prison on good behavior and headlining the Murder Girl World Tour — or at the very least a featured guest on the CrimeCon cruise ship.

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