‘Poker Face’ Recap, Season Two, Ep. 10: ‘The Big Pump’

Jun 29, 2025

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Let me get this out of the way upfront — gym culture is completely foreign to me. (As with my admission earlier this season that I’m not a baseball person, I’d appreciate you not acting too surprised.) One thing I do understand, however, is the feeling of inadequacy when everyone around you seems to be reaching new heights while you’ve plateaued. This is where we find Rodney (Jason Ritter), who is not seeing gains despite his daily gym attendance and lifestyle changes. (“I’m eating enough protein, I’ve had like 18 eggs today,” he says.) Rodney — or, spoiler alert, his murder — is at the center of “The Big Pump,” an episode designed to ease us into Poker Face’s new normal. Charlie has indeed decided to stay put in New York City, and she even has a new sidekick in the form of Patti Harrison’s Alex, whom we met briefly last week. It’s not yet clear how long the series will stick with this more static setting, but it’s certainly not a bad place to be.

Rodney, on the other hand, is feeling anything but settled — his high-school reunion is coming up and he needs to get swole before seeing his former bully, now a firefighter. He’s also convinced that his trainer and gym owner, Brick (Chris Smith, a.k.a. Method Man), is holding out on him. All over the gym, Rodney’s heard chatter about the “good stuff” that Brick is selling, and he wants in. Brick is horrified at the suggestion that he’s slinging steroids; the Brick House is an all-natural and sustainable space. But yes, there is a secret something the other gym bros are imbibing, and he can’t afford to turn away more under-the-table income from Rodney. As we learn from the collection of envelopes littering Brick’s desk, the gym is drowning in debt, something he’s done his best to keep hidden from his wife, Lil (Natasha Leggero). She’s also, it turns out, his supplier of the so-called good stuff: human breast milk that she steals from her job at the Brooklyn Birth Center. Because Lil knows Rodney is a health inspector, she warns Brick not to sell to him, but he’s already promised to cut him in. His solution is to supply Rodney with some harmless protein powder and hope that’s enough to put him off the scent.

It’s the scent that ends up being the problem. Two weeks into his new regimen, Rodney isn’t seeing any changes, and he’s suspicious that he’s not getting the real good stuff. He sniffs the protein shakes the other guys are drinking and immediately knows he’s been duped. When Rodney confronts Brick after hours, he shares a horrifying fact: “I can smell fresh human breast milk from a mile away.” There’s no sense in Brick denying it, and while Rodney would have let actual steroids slide, his health-inspector duties require him to report the “health-code catastrophe” he’s stumbled onto. Brick panics — selling the good stuff is the only way he’s been able to keep the Brick House open, and Lil will lose her job if her employer learns about her side hustle. As the gym owner hastily tries to pour the evidence down the drain, Rodney reveals himself to be a black belt in karate who is not afraid of a fight. The two men tussle, and Rodney impressively holds his own against a much stronger opponent. That is until Brick throws a weight at Rodney that instantly crushes his throat. Though Brick didn’t mean to kill him, there’s no turning back now. He places the dead man on the bench press and lets a heavy barbell fall on his neck, making the murder look like a gnarly accident.

Rodney isn’t the only one with a neck issue in this episode. Charlie, still living in Good Buddy’s apartment, tweaks hers mid-stretch. (“I yawned,” she later explains. “Like from being tired, a yawn.” Getting older is filled with such indignities.) At her new neighborhood coffee shop, Pour and Ponder, she sees a flyer for the Brick House offering spinal realignment, an intriguing solution to her predicament. As a bonus, her new friend and fellow coffee-shop regular Alex has been looking for a local gym, so she tags along. Brick is easily able to fix Charlie’s neck pain, and he even manages to talk her and Alex into a trial membership. It helps that they get free Brickbit fitness trackers that can be paired and access to the gym’s social-media app, BrickedIn. And they’re already finding new gym buddies — or maybe more than buddies. As Charlie vapes her way through dumbbell curls, Rodney intercepts Alex trying to bench without a spotter. Sure, he’s mansplaining a bit when he explains why you always need a spotter and how to rotate muscle groups, but there’s a definite spark between them that Charlie picks up on immediately.

Unfortunately, that’s not something Alex is able to explore, because when she and Charlie meet at the Brick House the next morning, Rodney is dead. Alex is suspicious from the jump: Why would Rodney be using the bench press without a spotter in the middle of the night? Why would he be using the bench press at all when he’d already worked out his arms and chest earlier in the day? For her part, Charlie is adamant about staying out of it. As she told Good Buddy last week, she is eager to live a normal life without any more murder investigations. She doesn’t even seem all that keen on a friendship with Alex, identifying herself as a “lone wolf.” I do wish Charlie’s sudden rejection of attachments were more expressly tied to her recent experiences, namely Maddy’s murder in the last episode and Bill’s murder a couple episodes prior, but it is refreshing to see Charlie acknowledge the peril and death she attracts, along with her desire to break free from it. For the time being, she is simply going to let Rodney’s death be a sad accident, no matter how eager Alex is to jump on a case.

Meanwhile, Brick is in serious trouble. No, not because he killed someone — the detectives don’t find Rodney’s death all that suspicious. But their presence is enough to keep Lil from supplying more of the good stuff for Brick to sell, and he needs the money to keep flowing. In desperation, he decides to pass off soy-based infant formula as breast milk, and that leaves the bodybuilders with gurgling stomachs and a suspicion that they’re being had. Alex and Charlie can’t ignore the tension around them at the gym, much as Charlie would like to. After learning about Charlie’s human lie detector power, Alex decides to prod Brick about Rodney’s death in front of her, and Charlie can’t entirely ignore how much Brick is lying either. Still, she pushes back on a full investigation, knowing the danger involved. It’s only when the onslaught of clues in front of her — including, in a gross but very funny detail, the smell of baby burps — suddenly click together that she decides she can’t suppress her innate crime-solving skills any longer. Brick is selling human breast milk to his gym patrons to keep his business afloat, and he almost certainly offed the health inspector who knew too much.

It’s a little frustrating that after all of Charlie’s admonitions about the danger of murder investigations and confronting suspects directly, she decides to pay a visit to Brick solo. She also pairs her Brickbit with his — I was waiting for the fitness-tracker ex machina — and heads to the sauna, where she sees that Brick set a record for barbell curls at 1:55 a.m., right around when Rodney would have died. Unfortunately, Charlie accidentally clicks the heart icon next to the record (“I do not love murder exercises!” she insists while trying to undo it), which sends Brick a notification and triggers the hell out of those of us who have inadvertently liked a photo during an ill-advised Instagram deep dive. Brick didn’t mean to kill Rodney, but there’s no question that he’s trying to murder Charlie when he locks her in the sauna and cranks up the heat. With her cries for help unanswered, Charlie does the next logical thing and sends a message to Alex via their paired Brickbits. In spite of the rapidly escalating heat, she does heel raises, arm circles, lunges, and push-ups in quick succession. In other words: HALP.

Clearly “HELP” would have been more effective, but close enough. Alex slips in the gym unnoticed and manages to rescue Charlie from the sauna, though they run into Brick on their way out. At this point, he’s desperate enough to murder as many people as he has to, which leads to the episode’s second fight involving heavy weights. Before Brick can crush the two women with a barbell, however, Lil shows up demanding to know what’s going on. Rodney breaks down and tearfully confesses his crimes. His wife comforts him with a baby bottle of the good stuff (bleh!) and tells Charlie and Alex to call the police. Obviously, the Brick House won’t be around for much longer, which Charlie seems to have some guilt about. “Another community down the drain,” she laments over coffee at the Pour and Ponder. “If it takes lies to keep something together, it deserves to fall apart,” Alex answers. She means that sincerely, Charlie notes — in fact, Alex hasn’t lied once since they first met. Unlike pretty much everyone else Charlie has ever encountered, her new sidekick is firmly committed to telling the truth. And while that’s probably why Alex doesn’t have any other friends, it makes her the perfect companion to someone with a preternatural nose for bullshit.

• This episode was directed by Natasha Lyonne’s But I’m a Cheerleader co-star and real-life bestie Clea DuVall, who does a really nice job here.

• With two episodes left in the season, there’s a good chance we’re planted in New York from here on out. Personally, I’m enjoying the new dynamic, especially with a real friend who’s not (God willing) just a future murder victim.

• Patti Harrison is always such a charming screen presence, and I like the way the character is written as just the right amount of weird. I loved Alex’s suggestion that Brick might be supplying his patrons with blood boys. “You know … blood boys?” she asks a baffled Charlie. Oh, I know.

• Let’s also take a moment to note her Pour and Ponder order of a buttered popcorn latte (“a travesty forced on us by management,” according to the barista) and a Watergate-salad cronut.

• Lots of references to past episodes when Charlie warns Alex, “I know this all seems like high jinks and adventure to you, but I know where this goes: bullets, people trying to burn you to death, alligators.”

• Charlie also delivers a perfect description of endorphins: “It’s like hitting the vape minus the existential dread.”

• While I enjoyed this episode overall, I was happier before I learned that bodybuilders drinking breast milk is an actual thing. Nothing has ever been less of my business.

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