Photo: Patrick Harbron/Disney
As we’re all well accustomed to by now, each episode of Only Murders in the Building usually starts off with a different character delivering a little soliloquy over voice-over relating to the episode we’re about to see. Normally, we recognize the voice right away, whether it be a major or minor character — but this week, I couldn’t place the voice, which spoke in an Irish accent about the special, albeit at times unbalanced, relationship between an actor and his stunt double (something we’re hearing a lot about this season). Daniel Day-Lewis didn’t sign on to this show without me realizing it, did he?
After an eerie dream where Sazz leads him to “Paradise,” Charles spends the night making a second murder board. We had just settled into the idea that Sazz wasn’t the target but was only shot because the killer thought she was Charles. But after the voice on the ham radio suggests that Sazz was killed for poking around the Dudenoff apartment, it seems like she could have been the target after all. So they have two murder boards, one for each potential victim. As Mabel puts it, they’re not just searching for the killer; they’re searching for the victim, too. But imagine if after all of this, it turns out that Scott Bakula was the intended target?
However, for now, we’re focusing on Charles and Sazz. Mabel welcomes this new thread to follow because she’s hit a dead end investigating the cult-y Westies, who’ve iced her out ever since she started squatting next door.
Meanwhile, Oliver, as usual, is more preoccupied with his own personal storyline than with the investigation at hand. Specifically, he’s insecure about his long-distance relationship with Loretta and (in a relatable moment) starts agonizing over a mysterious arm around her in one of her Instagram posts. So naturally, he did what any reasonable person would do: He created a finsta under a fake name to surveil Loretta and get to the bottom of who the man was. But his online stalking isn’t necessarily unproductive — it reveals that Sazz was following Loretta, and they see on Sazz’s account that the day she died, she posted a photo from a stuntman bar called Concussions.
So off to the bar they go, where their orders of a Cabernet and cosmopolitan immediately signal to the bartender that they’re not stuntmen. Charles is just one of the “faces,” which is the term used to describe the on-camera actors that stunt people protect, and “faces” aren’t welcomed there. Especially ones profiting off of Sazz’s death, as the bartender thinks they’re doing with their podcast. But speaking of the podcast’s subjects, someone suddenly tumbles into the bar in true stuntman form, falling before our trio who all gasp in shock. It’s the long-dead Ben Glenroy, played by Paul Rudd — except it’s not actually Ben, it’s Ben’s stunt double, who’s such a dead-ringer for the actor that Paul Rudd is back to play this new character. That’s how much actors love being on this show; they’re using every move from the soap opera playbook to stick around. His character died, so first, he came back as a ghost, then a lookalike, and next up, we’ll find out that he was an identical twin. The only differences between Ben and his stunt double Glenn Stubbins, are that Glenn has a questionable Irish accent (ah, that’s whose voice we heard at the beginning of the episode), one less tooth, and a beard. He also keeps seeing and trying to stomp out invisible rats around the bar — a surely meaningful quirk that we should probably bookmark for later. Before Glenn threatens them out of the bar, they spot a purple light coming from a back room, which Mabel recognizes from Sazz’s selfie.
They have to get back there, and luckily, Glenn follows them out with a deal. The threat was just keeping up appearances he explains, and asks them for help landing work. Mabel tells him they can get him a gig on their movie if he takes Charles to the back room, where a chiropractor named Dr. Maggie helps the clientele. Honestly, more bars should have resident chiropractors and masseuses. Glenn tells them that Dr. Maggie had helped Sazz with chronic pain, which Charles didn’t even know she was suffering from — and he’s visibly upset to be finding out about it since taking his hits was what caused it. While the purpose of this investigation is of course to find Sazz’s killer, it’s become just as much of an investigation into Charles’s relationship with her. And the more he finds out, the more he becomes riddled with guilt over how imbalanced that relationship was — that guilt, more than the podcast, is fueling his eagerness to find justice this season.
So he has questions for Dr. Maggie, who insists on answering them while giving the visibly tense Charles an adjustment. She tells him that Sazz was looking forward to her retirement and getting out of a relationship where she was giving more than she got — which Charles thinks is about him. Sure, everything we’ve found out would suggest that, but I think that’s too obvious. I think there’s somebody else, maybe someone we haven’t met yet, that Sazz’s comment could have been referring to. Dr. Maggie then pulls a move that sends Charles momentarily back to the dreamscape, where a bloodied Sazz again leads him to “Paradise.”
Meanwhile, Mabel is still trying to get Oliver to stop catfishing his girlfriend. He confesses that he almost proposed to Loretta out in L.A., but stopped himself out of fear that another marriage would fail, just like everything he does in life fails. Before we can dig much deeper into the painful insecurity that Oliver hides under his bombastic persona, Howard enters. Now, this whole episode, Howard has been doing a little side quest of his own. While Mabel still refuses to do his animal jobs podcast, she recruited him to guard the Dudenoff apartment (and babysit the pig) while she’s away. But while standing guard, he found a casting call flier for the movie and decided to audition to play himself for the Brothers Sisters and Bev Melon — who quickly turned him down. As it turns out, Howard’s role has already been given to Josh Gadd. So a disgruntled Howard arrives to Oliver’s, pig in tow, to finally stand up for himself and exit this one-sided relationship with Mabel. Giving more than you’re getting in a friendship seems to be a theme in this episode, but Howard is putting a stop to it now, unlike Sazz, who died without ever resolving that imbalance.
But Mabel’s more concerned with the fact that Howard left the apartment unmanned — so she rushes over there, where she finds the cultish Westies already trying to move her out. She threatens to call the cops unless they finally come clean and tell her what their whole deal is — and they reluctantly oblige after some consideration. They’re not a cult, as Mabel thought, but they are running a rent control scheme. As it turns out, they’re all illegally subletting rent controlled apartments from Professor Dudenoff, who rented out the entire floor years ago before retiring to Portugal. He sends them ham, they send him rent. How much is the rent exactly? Well, here’s the biggest gasp-worthy twist of the whole series: $200. And they get ham!
They offer to let Mabel in on the deal if she agrees to leave the scheme out of the podcast. But what about the threatening voice on the radio? Apparently, that was Rudy’s “unhinged” ex-girlfriend, Helga from Finland. He blocked her number, so she tried to reach him via ham radio. Who among us? Mabel seems to buy their story, but then again, a $200-a-month apartment is a pretty good incentive to believe them. But it’s also pretty good incentive to kill. If someone came poking around, who could potentially cost them that sweet deal, I can see a world in which they’d kill to keep their units. Plus, something felt off about the Helga story. I do think she could have been the person whose face was scratched out in Vince’s group photo in the last episode, but history has shown me that when someone calls their ex-girlfriend crazy, the ex-girlfriend is almost always in the right.
Mabel, Charles, and Oliver go over everything they’ve learned over a game of “Oh Hell,” during which they also finally convince Oliver to ditch his burner account. But his little funeral for his online alter ego gives Charles an idea for something that he can still do for Sazz, even in her absence. He can turn tables and be her stunt double for once, stepping in and playing the role of her body so that the patrons at the bar can have the traditional stuntman’s funeral. This involves Charles lying on the pool table as each of them says their goodbyes to Sazz before smashing a breakaway glass bottle over his head. But Glenn accidentally uses a real bottle, briefly knocking Charles out.
In his third state of unconsciousness in this episode, Charles remembers Sazz telling him about her dream to open the Sazz Pataki Impact Academy in her retirement and where exactly she planned to build it. So after coming to, Charles takes Oliver and Mabel to Sazz’s “paradise” — Paradise, New Jersey — where they find Sazz’s unopened academy. After hearing a rustling coming from one of the buildings, they investigate what looks like a hideout and see a familiar face. It’s the Paramount executive, Bev Melon, who points a gun at them and says, “Don’t move, or I’ll blow your fucking brains out.” A cliffhanger where Molly Shannon is making death threats? Sounds like my paradise.
