Natasha Lyonne‘s lie-detecting Charlie Cale has returned for another season of mystery solving on Poker Face. The Peacock series’ second season has taken her to all manner of strange new locations, from minor league baseball games to an alligator farm. But there’s one place the series will never go, no matter how much Lyonne and creator Rian Johnson want to. Lyonne and Johnson discussed a rejected episode of the series that proved too impractical to film in a new interview with Variety.

The episode was to have taken a page from one of Agatha Christie‘s best-known mysteries: Johnson describes the episode as “s***** Murder on the Orient Express.” He elaborates: “It would have been a train mystery set on an Amtrak. It was a great script, but…trains are tough, man.” Unfortunately, the realities of filming in the cramped confines of a train mean we’ll never see Lyonne suss out a murderer among the commuters and travelers of the underfunded rail line’s Northeast Corridor. While some shows have pulled it off, like the recent third-season finale of Dark Winds, they had the luxury of executive producer George R. R. Martin lending them his own personal train for filming.

What Is ‘Poker Face’ About?

Lyonne stars as Charlie Cale, a streetwise woman with one nigh-supernatural talent: She can instantly detect any kind of lie. When the series opens, she’s working as a cocktail waitress in a casino. In the pilot episode, she uncovers the murder of her friend by the casino’s manager, Sterling Frost Jr. (Adrien Brody), leading to his suicide. Pursued by gangster Sterling Frost Sr. (Ron Perlman) and his enforcer Cliff LeGrand (Benjamin Bratt), Charlie goes on the run in her Plymouth Barracuda, but murder and mayhem (and celebrity guest stars) seem to follow her wherever she goes. In the first season’s finale, she gets the upper hand on Frost Sr. and Cliff, giving her a brief sense of relief until she crosses a second crime boss (Rhea Perlman), sending her out on the road again.

Poker Face is Johnson and Lyonne’s homage to the classic crime series Columbo. As in that series, the crime is depicted at the beginning of each episode, with the culprit clearly revealed. As the rest of the episode unfolds, viewers are intrigued not by who the murderer is, but how Charlie will catch them in their own web of lies. The second season currently holds a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but Collider’s Aidan Kelley feels that it’s a step down from the first season. In his review, he notes that it “doesn’t pack quite as strong a punch as its predecessor.”

Poker Face is now streaming on Peacock. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.

Source: Variety