RECAP: “Only Murders in the Building” Season 4, Episode 4
Based on the last two episodes of “Only Murders in the Building” Season 4, the writers are fully leaning into gonzo absurdity in a way I don’t think the previous seasons did. Maybe I’m wrong about that. The show has always had a touch of the ridiculous, but it felt less forced, more quaint. The new suspects and plot devices we’re being introduced this season are so over the top it’s surreal, whereas I feel the previous side characters were merely eccentric. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a bad thing, but tonally it feels like a very different show than it has been previously. And that may be deliberate.
What I think this episode — and Season 4 in general — did well is further demonstrate to Charles how one-sided his relationship was with Sazz. He has obviously been deeply impacted by the death of the someone he believed was his close friend, but the more he investigates her final days, the more he realizes that he took her for granted, and in some ways made her life quite difficult. It’s a sad plot, but compelling, and Steve Martin is acting the hell out of it. Meanwhile, Oliver is in full, hilarious meltdown over his relationship with Loretta, and Mabel actually gets some answers about the Westies.
Spoilers ahead! Consider yourself warned!
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CONCUSSIONS
The bulk of the episode sees the Arconia 3 visiting Concussions, a dive bar for stunt people that they realize Sazz had visited the day of her death. The group was wildly out of place in the bar, patronized by grizzled stunt professionals who continue this season’s trend of hyper aggressive weirdos around every corner. The bartender and clientele are on the verge of throwing them out when a familiar face interrupts the proceedings: Ben Glenroy, the actor whose death propelled Season 3 of this show, is miraculously alive!
Except it’s not Ben (although it IS Paul Rudd playing the role); it’s his stunt double, Glen Stubbins, who has an egregiously bad Irish accent, and who hallucinates rats that he violently attacks. I love Paul Rudd, and would watch him in almost anything, but these scenes veered quickly toward cringe. The physical comedy of stomping on invisible rats wasn’t funny; the accent — although I’m sure a deliberate choice — a chore to listen to; the whole desperate stunt showcase on the street, but not comically bad. It’s this kind of broad comedy that, again, feels out of tone for what this show has been up to this point.
The Arconia 3 promise to help Glen get a gig on the movie being made of their podcast, on the condition that Glen gets Charles in to the backroom to meet with the doctor who apparently treated Sazz on her final day. That doctor is a chiropractor, whom Charles drags mercilessly for her “pseudoscience” before she puts him on the bad and gets to cracking his his various joints. This leads to an out-of-body experience in which Charles again sees the ghost of Sazz, after she has been shot, leading him to Paradise.
The plot line ended with Charles, more aware of ever that he needed to do something to honor Sazz, offering his own body up to the mourners at Concussions so they could hold a traditional stunt-person funeral. This involved the stunt men saying their piece and then smashing breakaway glass bottles on the corpse. That is, until Glen comes up and uses a real bottle on Charles, knocking him out cold. In his stupor, Charles then remembers an exchange on the set of “Brazzos” where Sazz shared that her dream was to build a stunt-person school to train people the way her father trained her, and that Charles encouraged her to purchase the very land they were shooting on — in Paradise, NJ, to make that happen. Which points the Arconia 3 to their next potential clue.
I will say, this was a tremendously long, twisting series of contrivances to get us to the next plot point, and even then, I’m not entirely convinced how any of this stuff will lead to Sazz’s killer/Charles’s attempted assassin. But I guess we’ll find out.
MABEL, HOWARD & THE WESTIES
Mabel, still squatting in the Westie apartment owned by the mysterious Dudenoff, blows off Howard’s request to work on his animal podcast so that she can check out the stunt bar with Charles and Oliver. But in order to keep squatting, SOMEONE had to stay in the apartment at all times, to which Mabel tasked Howard and Hammy Faye Bakker.
What happened next is, frankly, not entirely clear to me. Howard is alarmed by someone slipping a flyer under the door, inviting the recipient to audition for a part in the “Only Murders” movie. Howard, feeling hurt by Mabel’s curt blow off, and always lusting for his own slice of the limelight, decides to leave the apartment with Hammy Faye and head to the audition. Suddenly he’s standing in one of the Arconia’s apartments (?) with producer Bev Melon and directors The Brother Sisters, reading a side for the film. The Brother Sisters tell him he’s amazing, and they can’t wait to work with him, but he won’t be playing himself in the movie — that’s going to be Josh Gad. They all seemed to be confused what Howard was even doing there, but also appeared to be really into Howard. Did someone else concoct the audition ruse to get Howard out of the apartment? If Howard isn’t acting in the movie, what are the Brother Sisters and Bev planning for him? Like everything having to do with this film subplot, it feels completely unmoored from reality. Which, again, may be deliberate.
Mabel returns to the apartment to find the Westies moving the ridiculous bed Eva Longoria regifted to Mabel. She then has a confrontation with the whole floor of weirdos, who show her documents in a secret compartment behind the bed and explain that they all seem shady because they’re all engaged in a rent scam. Basically, Dudenoff was a professor who enjoyed supporting the weirdos of New York City. He owned the entire floor of the West Tower, and leased out the units to the socially awkward for a mere $200 a month. They don’t want to get in trouble, so if Mabel agrees not to blow up their spot, they’ll cut her in on the cheap rent and she can live in the abandoned unit.
Maybe I’m dumber than I thought, but I don’t understand how any of this makes sense. Is it somehow illegal for people who own units in the Arconia to sublet their apartments for whatever price they see fit? People sublet their units in my co-op in Queens all the time. Even if that is somehow against the rules, it still doesn’t explain some of the bonkers behavior of the Westies. I understand the conceit “Dudenoff just likes weird people” but…is that really it? The HAM radio is also discussed, with Christmas Guy explaining that his ex was the woman who warned Mabel to stop investigating Sazz’s murder, saying that she’s the “bad” kind of weird.
It all rings hollow to me. It was a lot of ridiculousness for the sake of ridiculous, and I can’t help but feel this is a ruse to make everything seem perfectly innocent when there is obviously some kind of actual conspiracy going on. I hope so, at least.
OLIVER
Oliver again pulled the short straw this episode, as he spends most of it fretting over imagined problems in his relationship wit Loretta. Specifically, he has created a fake Instagram account so he can stalk her, and for this woman, Robin, he has created an elaborate, ridiculous personality for this woman — at least it gave us quality Martin Short comedy bits. He confesses to Mabel that he was prepared to propose to Loretta when they were all LA, but chickened out because he was afraid it would all fall apart, like his other marriages. Ultimately Mabel convinces Oliver to delete the fake Instagram account, which she seemingly does — but I feel like something weird happened there. The tablet was only on the screen for a second, but I wonder if Mabel deleted the correct one. Additionally, the tablet — which provided a ton of hilarious Oliver this episode — seemingly caught random images at the stunt bar, including the face of someone we couldn’t see, but who was hustling out the door as soon as the Arconia 3 entered. I suspect this tablet is going to play a significant role as the mystery progresses.
THE CLIFFHANGER
The Arconia 3 journey out to the former superfund site in Paradise, NJ, on which Sazz had started to set up her stunt academy. There they find a dilapidated building with seemingly electricity. They realize that someone is insane — it actually sounded like someone also left it — and when they go in they are confronted by none other than Producer Bev Melon (Molly Shannon), who pulls a gun on them and threatens to blow them away. The gun clicks and the episode ends!
Bev has seemed highly suspicious to me, ever since she was introduced. Everything about this movie plot feels like a ruse — it’s just moving way too fast, especially since the rights holders hadn’t even signed off until after the talent was cast — and Bev in particular struck me as someone who is playing somebody else. Hopefully next episode we’ll get more details into exactly who she is, and how she was connected to Sazz.
What did you think of the episode? Who do you think killed Sazz? What do you think is up with his obviously bonkers movie scenario? Leave your takes in the comments!
