YMMV / Poker Face

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• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Charlie's airheadedness even extends to her ability to remember basic vocabularies, yet she usually connects crucial clues to music-related descriptions, such as songs, popular artists, etc. While it's somewhat justified since she spent most of her travels listening to the radio, it was sometimes jarring when she didn't even remember what kind of an animal a fox or a deer was. Some of her symptoms do look like dyslexia, but nothing is clear.
  • Gavin's lack of understanding of social cues, easily distracted behavior (to the point where Charlie calls him a "magpie"), impulsivity, rarely wearing shoes and obsessively drumming on everything implies he potentially has something like ADHD or Asperger's.
• Evil Is Cool: More than one fan has remarked upon how Benjamin Bratt has aged very well. Cliff's dark suits only add to the appeal.
• Foe Yay Shipping: While the fandom is small, the majority of fics center around Cliff/Charlie.
• Heartwarming Moments: For as short-lived as it was, Charlie's relationship with Arthur in "The Orpheus Syndrome" is genuinely sweet to see.
• Les Yay: The remainder of fics in fandom are Charlie/Marge, with fans taking Marge's comment about wanting to hook up with Charlie and running with it.
• Moral Event Horizon: Taffy beating the dog and then dumping it on the side of the road is this, in-universe and out.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Basically the entirety of "Escape from Shit Mountain" which leans more into suspense than mystery: Charlie is struck by a car, left to die in a hole, wakes up injured and horrified, has to climb herself out and drag herself to the nearby lodge… where the guy who nearly killed her and his friend are residing at the moment. Charlie is too injured to move for most of the episode. Then, Trey kills his partner-in-crime Jimmy and Morty before (non-fatally) stabbing Charlie and leaving her to die once again. Luckily, Charlie survives and implicitly manages to get the police to Trey's, but is left in traction at the hospital when Cliff shows up.
  • Cliff. A Scarily Competent Tracker par excellence, who is always just four hours away once Charlie's left a digital mark. A ruthless enforcer who easily and methodically murders Natalie in the pilot and plans a worse fate for Charlie once he's caught up to her. While the finale initially seems to portray more sympathetic points as his hunt for Charlie weighs on him, he quickly backs up his terrifying stage presence through the sheer hatred he expresses towards Charlie and Sterling.
• Spiritual Successor: To many of the classic Mystery of the Week network series, but Columbo in particular. After writing and directing Knives Out (which also featured a Columbo-esque protagonist and plot), Rian Johnson expressed a desire to bring back Columbo and thought Natasha Lyonne was the ideal actor to take over for Peter Falk. Out of that desire came Poker Face, with its Reverse Whodunnit format and its gravelly-voiced, cigar-smoking, shambolic, thinking-out-loud detective.

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