Poker Face – Season 2 Episode 4 'The Taste of Human Blood' Recap & Review

The Review Geek

17-05-2025

Episode 4
The Murder
Episode 4 of Poker Face Season 2 begins with a cop named Fran arresting a thief who tried to steal from an old woman's house and failed. The man has a family and needs money for his kids. Fran understands that he simply made a stupid mistake and allows him to go.
Fran's boss then tells her that she's been nominated for the Cop of the Year award at the annual Florida award show for cops, the FlopaCopa. She is reluctant to spend time on things like award shows but her boss convinces her to go.
However, during the event, the award goes to Joseph, a cop who saved a little alligator and then named her Daisy. Fast forward six years and the man has now won six Cop of the Year awards and is known as Gator Joe. He is still in possession of Daisy, who is now a fully grown alligator.
What's more, Fran is now extremely frustrated at constantly losing to him. She gets her seventh nomination, but her boss is worried about how fixated she is on winning the award.
The night of the award show arrives and Fran sees the awards being taken to a back room. She sneaks in and sees that Gator Joe is winning the award again, which makes her tear up. Gator Joe arrives as well and gloats about it, making Fran angrily walk away.
She goes into a green room and finds Daisy there, in a cage. She goes through a box of Daisy's things and finds a reptile laxative that Gator Joe had previously talked about on his social media videos. She quickly consults an animal control cop named Rusty, asking if she can take reptile laxative for her stomach issues. He writes the amount that is safe to ingest on a piece of paper.
She then heads back and puts the laxative into Gator Joe's tiny bottles of energy drink. The lunch break soon begins and Fran watches Gator Joe run to the toilet. She follows and gleefully listens to him outside the toilet. But she then hears him collapse and goes inside to check — he's dead!
She realises she read Rusty's directions wrong and gave Gator Joe too much laxative. Realising that an autopsy would point to her, Fran decides to frame Daisy for the crime instead. She uses Oreo biscuits, Daisy's favourite snack, to lure Daisy out and to the bathroom where Gator Joe's body is.
When she doesn't do anything, Fran takes a bag of meth (the FlocaCopa has used real guns, ammunition, and drugs as props) and dumps it out on Daisy. This is more than enough for the gator to go haywire and attack Gator Joe's body. Fran leaves and not much later, other cops find Gator Joe's remains.
The Investigation
We then shift to Charlie, who randomly drops her finger on a map. She then uses the radio she got from the film shoot in Episode 2 to try and connect with someone. She manages to speak to a man, a truck driver also on the road, whom she calls Good Buddy.
She then finds herself at an animal sanctuary with a group of animal activists, led by a man named Hutch. They feel strongly about saving Daisy from Gator Joe, since he drugs her up all the time, and rope in Charlie to help. Their plan is to save Daisy at the FlopaCopa award show.
Charlie heads in and finds Daisy in her green room. The plan is to wheel the cage out during the lunch break, but she notices that the cage doesn't have wheels. At that moment, Fran comes into the room and has her little cry. Charlie comforts her and then leaves.
Hutch tells Charlie to break the cage and use the leash to get Daisy out by hand. Charlie does so and in that moment, looks into Daisy's eyes and feels a cosmic connection that proves Daisy is a gentle creature. However, she refuses to move. So, Charlie heads out to find some Oreos.
By the time she's back, the cage is empty and Gator Joe is dead. The cops are all in a flurry and want to kill Daisy. But she's still agitated and they can't open the door.
Hutch wants to abort the mission but Charlie wants to prove Daisy's innocence. But now that Daisy has had a taste of human blood, Hutch and his team give up on the alligator. Meanwhile, Fran's boss calls her up, concerned. He tells her Gator Joe uploaded a TikTok of Fran crying over the award. Fran realises Gator Joe was wearing sunglasses with an attached camera.
She goes to the cops outside the bathroom who are waiting for a chance to kill Daisy and asks about the sunglasses, making up a story about how they were a gift from Gator Joe's mother. One of the cops tells her that the sunglasses are probably inside Daisy by now.
The cops finally decide to go inside and attack Daisy but the room is empty. The gator broke open a vent and is now in the walls. Meanwhile, Charlie speaks to Rusty about what could have changed Daisy's behaviour so drastically. She realises it could be the bags of meth around them. By checking the event's photographs, she learns that one went missing.
As the cops arm themselves to hunt Daisy down, Charlie goes to the storeroom and finds the gator there, having munched on a lot of Oreos. Fran arrives as well and Charlie tries to convince her of Daisy's innocence. Fran doesn't want the sunglasses found inside Daisy, so she helps Charlie sneak the gator out and into her police car.
They head towards a swamp and Fran pretends that she's going to set Daisy free. Of course, Charlie knows better and catches Fran just as she's about to shoot Daisy. The truth comes out and Charlie encourages Fran to just confess her mistake.
Fran decides to shoot Charlie instead but Daisy swipes her tail and brings Fran down. Fran then looks into Daisy's eyes and sees the same cosmic realisation that hit Charlie. She agrees to confess.
Right before going into the swamp, Daisy takes a dump and out come Gator Joe's sunglasses. Fran gives them to her boss and confesses the whole thing, but he refuses to let her go down for this. He wants her to stay on since she's a good policewoman. But Fran gives up her badge and goes to work at the animal sanctuary instead.
Meanwhile, Charlie gets back to her car and tells Good Buddy about her escapades. She then sees Daisy go by in the nearby river and calls out to her. Daisy approaches Charlie relatively fast. Charlie remembers the warnings about the taste of human blood and quickly drives away. After she leaves, we see Daisy roll over in the water and Poker Face Season 2 Episode 4 comes to a close.
The Episode Review
Season 2 Episode 4 offers one of Poker Face's more whimsical episodes, what with Charlie not only bonding with Daisy but also getting a cosmic realisation by looking in her eyes. It might not be everyone's cup of tea but I definitely enjoyed watching Charlie defend an animal instead of a person. It ties in so easily with the kind of person she is, she wouldn't let an innocent gator be framed!
The murder itself is a bit different from the usual. Instead of killing someone in cold blood, Fran makes a mistake. The first scene of the episode with the thief nicely ties into this theme. The one thing that feels odd is the fact that an actual cop would leave a literal trail of crumbs that proves her crime. But aside from that, Fran's character is established really well and the entire investigation is riddled with laughs — from the jokes about the undercover cop to the fact that Hutch has never eaten bread to Charlie's epic one-liners.
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