When I read the comments on my recap of the season premiere of Poker Face, I was surprised to see that some viewers found the Cynthia Erivo–as-quintuplets installment to be “too silly.” This is a show that obviously exists in a heightened reality. You have to suspend disbelief, for example, that Charlie Cale stumbles onto a murder in need of solving in every episode — and that the murders themselves are intricately plotted in a way that almost never happens in real life but that makes for good television. For my part, I’ve had no problem embracing the occasional wackiness and credulity-straining thanks to the top-tier writing, direction, and performances. “The Taste of Human Blood,” however, has pushed me past my breaking point. For the first time, Poker Face has crossed the line into “too goofy” territory.

I say this while noting that I am never going to fully reject any episode of television starring iconic ’90s child star Gaby Hoffmann. She plays Fran LaMont, a Florida cop who’s “one of the good ones,” as evidenced by the fact that she lets an attempted burglar go because “I don’t think a good life should be ruined for one stupid mistake.” (This show’s relationship with law enforcement remains muddled, though I appreciate this particular perspective.) Since 2019, Fran has been nominated for Cop of the Year at the Florida Panhandle Cop Awards (a.k.a. the FlopaCopas), and every year she’s lost to Joseph “Gator Joe” Pilson (Kumail Nanjiani), whose nickname refers to the baby gator he rescued from a meth dealer named Stanky James. On his popular TikTok channel, Joe busts tweakers with Daisy, the now-grown gator, as his sidekick. And while Fran didn’t care about the award to begin with, she’s become dangerously obsessed after being repeatedly bested by an inept, fame-hungry fraud with two cringe-worthy catchphrases: “gator done” and “you have the right to shit your pants.”

The comedy here is broad, but it’s also a deliberate invocation of the “Florida Man” meme that Fran’s boss, Chief Pendleton (John Sayles), rails against. And there are certainly laughs to be had before things go completely off the rails. At the 2025 FlopaCopas, Fran is feeling confident, and not just because she’s sent Edible Arrangements to all the judges. But when she sneaks backstage to look at the trophies, she’s horrified to discover that Gator Joe has won again. Even worse, he bumps into her while she’s in the midst of a tearful breakdown, calling her a crybaby before declaring, “I’m the Michael Jordan of being a cop in Florida … panhandle.” Obviously Fran needs her revenge — and credit to director Lucky McKee for the very harrowing moment where it looks like she’s about to murder him in cold blood. She holds off, though, instead opting to embarrass him by spiking his energy shot with reptile laxative.

While I’m not above scatological humor, Fran’s plan and subsequent actions when it goes awry are where this episode loses me. First, she consults with Rusty from animal control, played by Please Don’t Destroy’s Ben Marshall, who explains that cisapride is safe for humans as long as you don’t exceed a certain dosage, which he helpfully writes down on a napkin. Fran does try to give Joe just the right amount; it’s only after he drops dead in the bathroom mid-defecation that she realizes she was looking at the napkin upside down. An unintentional murder is still murder, and Fran knows toxicology testing plus her convo with Rusty would implicate her. Thinking quickly, she frees Daisy, lures her down the hall and into the bathroom with Oreos, and then tries to get her to eat Gator Joe. Daisy is too docile for that, so Fran does the only thing she can: She steals a bag of meth from the confiscated drugs and weapons photo-op table (sure), and dumps a healthy amount into Daisy’s nostrils. It’s a fairly obvious nod to Cocaine Bear, a movie most of us would rather forget, but it does the trick. Soon, Joe’s partially eaten corpse has been discovered, and Daisy is the only suspect. (The fact that the cops catch her in the act doesn’t exactly help her case.)

Thankfully, Daisy has the kind of ally we all dream of in Charlie, whose aimless post–Beatrix Hasp wandering has brought her to a gator sanctuary led by a group of outlaw activists who secretly liberate animals in distress. Their “white whale” is Daisy, who Gator Joe has been pumping full of drugs. She’s kind of the “Judy Garland of alligators,” Charlie observes. Leader of the group Hutch (Shiloh Fernandez) says a lot of woo-woo shit about looking into an animal’s eyes to open your perception, but he’s so dreamy that Charlie just kind of goes with it — including when she’s tasked with springing Daisy from her cage at the FlopaCopas. Hutch tells Charlie that Daisy has a gentle soul. So gentle, in fact, that Charlie should be able to open the cage, put a leash on her, and lure her out of the building. Charlie isn’t convinced until she stares into Daisy’s eyes and does indeed have a cosmic vision, one that catapults this episode further into the land of absurdity. But after snagging some Oreos from the supply closet — and bumping into Gator Joe in serious need of a bathroom — she returns backstage to find Daisy missing from her cage. As Charlie soon learns, the alligator she’s been tasked with saving is in the process of devouring Joe.

To the surprise of no one, all the cops at the FlopaCopas are eager to put Daisy down. The theory is that once an animal experiences the taste of human blood, they’ll want more. (This sounded fake to me, but it is apparently a thing. I’m still Team Gator on this, though.) Charlie is demanding “gator due process,” but shockingly, Florida law enforcement is unmoved. It’s up to Charlie to start investigating, at which point she realizes the twist tie she put on Daisy’s cage was removed — and it couldn’t have been by Gator Joe, because he told her (honestly!) that he urgently had to shit. She also notes the trail of Oreos leading from Daisy’s holding area to the bathroom, a sign that someone brought the gator there for a reason. I realize that Charlie’s investigations are often quite convenient, but this one is especially tough to swallow, with her perfectly timed near-kidnapping of Daisy giving her most of the clues she needs. To her credit, she does discover that a bag of meth has been stolen, noting that it would have been hard for Daisy to walk away with it herself. Someone must have snagged the drugs to feed them to Daisy with the express purpose of making her aggressive. When Charlie asks Rusty if he’s ever heard of a “meth gator,” he tells her, “Like, every week, yeah. This is Florida.” Fair enough!

At first, Fran is eager to kill Daisy and put this whole accidental murder thing to bed. But a call from a concerned Chief Pendleton tips her off to the fact that Gator Joe posted a TikTok of Fran crying that he recorded with his hidden camera glasses. And while Daisy has eaten that bit of evidence, if she’s killed, the glasses will be removed from her stomach, along with some very incriminating footage of Fran. For reasons of pure self-protection, she joins forces with Charlie, who has located a sleepy post-meal Daisy in the supply closet. The two hide the gator under a rolling buffet table, and get her into the back of Fran’s cruiser. Again, I have to wonder what the commenter who called the premiere episode “farcical” thinks about this turn of events. When the pair make it to the swampland where they’re going to release Daisy, Charlie finally clocks that her partner in crime is not on the level. Realizing that Fran has no intention of letting the gator go, Charlie intercepts her right as she’s poised to shoot Daisy. “I thought you were one of the good ones,” she tells the cop. This episode doesn’t go full ACAB, but it does poke some holes in the “one of the good ones” belief system.

Charlie is able to unravel the truth of what happened to Gator Joe remarkably quickly. In a moment of necessary self-awareness, she notes how truly bizarre the whole thing is: “I’m saying that in a rational tone of voice, but it is empirically insane.” We then reach this installment’s silliest turn as Fran looks into Daisy’s eyes, has her own cosmic connection, and decides to confess everything. It may be a commentary on the way cops protect their own that Chief Pendleton refuses to let Fran come clean and resign, even after she tells him the whole story, which is “the most Florida Man shit of all time.” He wants her to keep doing law enforcement, because she’s — you guessed it — “one of the good ones.” Thankfully, Fran has had enough and decides to make amends by serving her community in another way: working at the gator sanctuary. As for Charlie, she’s ready for her next adventure. “I’m figuring out how to finally start enjoying this journey,” she tells her CB radio friend Good Buddy. Then she avoids a run-in with a fast-approaching Daisy, who has, as promised, developed a taste for human blood. It’s a fitting end to an episode that should really have reined it in.

Just One More Thing

• Good Buddy is played by Steve Buscemi, whom we only hear, similar to how Rhea Perlman’s distinctive voice was all we got of Beatrix Hasp until she showed up in the flesh. I like the idea of Charlie having a distant confidante, and hope Good Buddy sticks around.

• I was hard on this episode, but there were a lot of fun details, particularly at the FlopaCopas. As one of the few remaining people who remembers A&E’s The Glades, I loved Matt Passmore cameoing as himself.

• Other great FlopaCopas jokes: the cop groupies that Chief Pendleton calls “pig porkers,” and the hors d’oeuvres served with the question, “Can I feed you your Miranda Bites?”

• As another nod to cops refusing to hold each other accountable, the announcement of the award for Best Internal Affairs Investigation gets boos. There is a sharpness under the surface here that’s more interesting to me than the Florida Man shenanigans.

• We never really get to see Charlie in a romantic context, so I was delighted by her attempted flirtation with Hutch. “We’ll be in your ear the whole time,” he tells her. “Oh, well, be careful, it’s a little waxy in there,” she says, sticking her tongue out. She is really bad at this!

• Shoutout to director Lucky McKee, who does what he can here, but who had better material to work with last season when he helmed “Time of the Monkey.” If you haven’t seen the 2002 cult horror film May, which McKee wrote and directed, get on that.

 A meth-addled alligator drags this series into “too goofy” territory.