Diksha Sundriyal
In its fifth episode, the second season of Peacock’s ‘Poker Face’ takes Charlie Cale to a place where she faces one of the most terrifying villains so far. The story begins at a private school called Good Hope Academy, where we meet a star student named Stephanie. She is an achiever, and the only thing that she wants is to be better than everyone else, and she is quite good at it. She is good at academics, sports, talent shows, etiquette, organisation, and anything else that will get her a gold star. She has received so many gold stars that no other student is anywhere near her on the tally board. But then comes Elijah, who starts catching up to Stephanie by becoming a promising student whom everyone seems to like. This leads her to do something terrible, but it turns out that this is not the first time she has done such a thing. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Stephanie’s Desire to be Number 1 Leads Her to Plan a Murder
Stephanie would have received another gold star if she hadn’t failed at the spelling bee when she could not spell “abracadabra,” which she claims is not a real word but onomatopoeia. The teacher refuses to listen to her, and when Elijah spells the word, he gets the gold star that Stephanie should have. This angers her, but she maintains a calm demeanour. The teacher assures her that there is still the talent show where she can exhibit one of her many talents and win more gold stars. But when she discovers that Elijah is going to perform a magic act and he is really good at it, she decides to do something about it.
Little Stephanie finds a computer and looks up “how to murder a boy,” which is terrifying as is, until she completes the sentence with “’s self-esteem.” Now we know that she isn’t planning to kill Elijah, but when the Google search tells her that she can achieve her goal by destroying something he loves dearly, she comes up with a plan to kill the class gerbil, Joseph, who is basically Elijah’s best friend. The boy’s magic trick involves making Joseph disappear so that when he smashes the box in front of him with a hammer, the gerbil is safe and sound.
It is a neat magic trick, but Stephanie decides to turn it into a horror show. She discovers Elijah’s photo as a baby, where he is wearing a diaper. She knows that he will be embarrassed by it, so she uses the same picture on the slideshow to introduce each student before their act. She cleverly lets Elijah know about it, which distracts him enough for her to mess up with the box. While the boy is busy removing the embarrassing photo so that no one sees it, Stephanie removes a way for Joseph the gerbil to escape, which means that during the act, when Elijah strikes the hammer, the gerbil is still there and is splattered across the faces of the children in the front row.
Charlie Discovers a Different Face of Evil in Stephanie
Before Joseph the gerbil is smashed in front of the whole school, Charlie finds a job at the school because she thinks it will be good for her to be around children and their innocence. Her friend on the radio, Good Buddy, warns her that children are not as innocent as they might seem, but this is a lesson she has to learn on her own. She is hired as a staff member in the school’s cafeteria and meets the school’s principal, who keeps everyone on a tight leash. Still, Charlie makes friends with another employee who turns out to be Elijah’s father. This means that Elijah is in a private school because his father is working there, and even a single mistake can cost him his education.
When the gerbil is so publicly slaughtered, his father becomes worried about his mental state as well as the possibility that he may be expelled from school. Charlie is sad about it, but there is nothing she can do until she pays attention to Stephanie and realises that this overachieving girl may have had something to do with the sabotage. When she confronts Stephanie, especially with the evidence, a button from her uniform, which she’d left in Elijah’s father’s office by mistake, the girl immediately swallows the button, challenging Charlie to prove her guilt now. Sure enough, Charlie struggles to find any other evidence to link her to the crime, but before that, Stephanie makes her move and tries to have her fired.
Charlie is not worried about losing her job, but she still wants to help Elijah, and when she puts her theory about Stephanie in front of the principal, she discovers that this is not the girl’s first rodeo. It turns out that the principal is a gambling addict, due to which she has been stealing small amounts of money from the school, which she also replaces. One of those times, Stephanie recorded her stealing and found out about her gambling habit because her parents own the casino that the woman frequents. Since then, the principal has been under Stephanie’s hold, and the girl has even given her a bracelet that spells “u r mine,” lest she forget it. The principal wishes for Stephanie’s reign of terror to end, but unfortunately, there is nothing she can do about it.
Charlie Tries to Beat Stephanie at Her Own Game
Discovering that even the principal cannot make a move against Stephanie convinces Charlie that she needs to borrow pages from the girl’s playbook. She also realises that there is no soft side to the child. She is not insecure about not being able to make friends or anything like that, which normal children think about. If it weren’t for Charlie’s ability to see through people’s lies, Stephanie might have fooled her with her crying-girl act. This is when the human lie detector decides that the best way to beat the girl is by making her do something incriminating and record her.
It is clear that Stephanie is highly impulsive, and what really riles her up is when she sees other children being celebrated or appreciated. So, with the class teacher, Charlie comes up with a plan to bring Elijah back to school, where the rest of the children welcome him with open arms and assure him that he is not an outcast because he killed a gerbil during the talent show. As a show of solidarity, the children offer their own gold stars to him, and this is when Stephanie loses her mind. Calling it socialism, which she considers unfair, she runs out of the class, gets the money from the principal’s office, and plants it in Elijah’s father’s pocket.
Stephanie knew that if his father were fired, Elijah would be forced to leave the school, and she could be back on top again. However, her act is filmed by Charlie, who threatens to send the video to the parents of the rest of the students as well as to other prestigious schools, which means she will lose everything she has worked for, and no other good school will ever allow her to enrol with them. Now that she is cornered, Stephanie is forced to back off.
The evidence against her also helps the principal to force her to destroy the evidence the girl has against her. Meanwhile, Elijah becomes friends with the entire class and is back to normal. Now that her work is done, Charlie confesses to Good Buddy that he was right and that she knows how ruthless children can be. As if to remind her of this, she sees Stepahie staring at her from a distance while she finds a note in her car which says that when Stephanie is older, she will find her. This creeps out Charlie more than she expected, and she hurriedly drives away from the school, hoping never to return and never to cross paths with Stephanie again.
