Time to tie up loose ends! Only Murders in the Building is back in full swing for episode 9. The penultimate episode of the comedy-mystery’s fourth season wastes no time dropping the pieces into place to unravel the latest murder mystery. Absent this go-round are the fictional podcast movie doppelgängers and elaborate side character backstories, as episode 9 provides valuable insight and new revelations, building an important bridge to the big reveal.
When we last saw our trusty trio of true crime podcasters, Charles, Oliver, and Mabel (played by Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez) had just received a critical clue from former Arconia resident Helga, giving them a new lead in the murder of stunt double Sazz Pataki (played Jane Lynch, in a recurring role). Before her unfortunate demise, Sazz had shared with Helga a foreshadowing, of sorts, of her death involving her former stuntman protege and her last movie, the mysterious Project Ronkonkoma.
At the close of episode 8, we are led to believe the podcasters assumed Glen Stubbins (Paul Rudd), famed stuntman they met at the stunt person bar, Concussions, may be the protege in question. For those taking notes, Glen, stunt double to the deceased actor Ben Glenroy from season 3, was last seen in a hospital bed recovering from a gunshot wound to the head.
The crime solvers rush to the hospital with a get-well gift of aged lager, corned beef, and questionable smelling salts with the hopes of interrogating the stuntie, only to find Glen remains comatose. Charles, Oliver, and Mabel are denied entrance to see Glen with a gate-keeping ICU nurse, dripping in her own Irish brogue, and mildly offended by the Eire-inspired tropes, running interference. (Kudos, if you read that with an accent!) But, all is not lost, the nurse agrees to alert Charles, Oliver, and Mabel when Glen wakes up.
While they wait, Charles agrees to throw Oliver a bachelor party, Mabel agrees to take the beer, and the trio run into the bartender from Concussions. Still skeptical of their intentions to solve Sazz’s murder only for their podcast purposes, the bartender does clear up that Glen was not, in fact, Sazz’s protege. He was brought in to replace the protege when the novice stuntmen proved to be a dangerous disaster on set, the complete details of which were only known to Sazz, the protege, and the director.
In another series of flashback sequences, we learn how Sazz first ran (literally) into her young stunt ingenue, taking him under her wing to develop his stuntman skills, and bringing him in as her protege to work on the now infamous Project Ronkonkoma — a movie, as it turns out, to be a passion project directed by no other than the incomparable Ron Howard.
Back in Charles’ apartment, the murder mystery crime solvers add these new details and persons of interest to their murder board and plot how to contact Ron. Oliver, in true showman fashion, regales Mabel and Charles with a fantastical tale of being friends with Ron Howard after he and the acclaimed director randomly shared an impromptu off-menu soup dinner at a Chinese restaurant…once…back in 1988. A great story for the grandkids but offered no discernible way for them to contact Ron now.
Needing to keep the crime-solving in the world of reality, Mabel calls on movie producer, Bev Melon (Molly Shannon), for assistance in connecting with the director. As luck would have it, Bev tells Mabel that Ron Howard is actually in NYC shooting a new movie. Knee-deep in her own dilemma of a script-gone-bad for the fictional podcast movie, Bev agrees to tell Mabel where Ron is filming if the young sleuth agrees to review the troubled script of their impending Only Murders movie.
The super sleuths make their way to Ron’s new movie set. Though, despite Charles’ “do-you-know-who-I-am” TV nostalgia and Oliver’s “Ron-Ron Howard knows me” name-drop, the professional podcasters are ceremoniously thrown out by security, only to immediately be mistaken for contract background actors. The episode rekindles the comedy magic of the Only Murders formula found in the interplay of the three OG stars, particularly, in this laugh-out-loud moment when the sleuths hilariously find themselves in a scream-emoting audition line-up to get in the movie. Oliver gets in on theatrical merit; Charles, who is recognized from his Brazzos TV days, gets a mercy walk-on, and Mabel’s frozen-in-time scare face lands her a questionable slot.
As Charles and Oliver suit up in the most unforgiving spandex green screen blue suits to stand in as CGI “Klongos” characters on set, Mabel is called back to the hospital by the nurse. Glen Stubbins is awake!
Charles and Oliver remain on set to carry out their roles as background scene players and an off-chance to speak with Ron Howard. However, their time on screen, one of the more humorous bits of the entire episode, was short-lived when a disagreement about the bachelor party during their one-and-only scene gets heated, the duo is thrown off set and lose their only opportunity to visit with Director Ron.
Woven in between the laughs, we find a heart-warming moment where Charles finally comes to terms with Oliver getting married. Believing that he would always be Oliver’s “emergency contact,” a poignant reference to that person who be your first to call when needed most, Charles now understood what the impending wedding meant for their friend dynamic. Oliver’s contact would now be Loretta. The tender moment passes quickly when an unexpected patron, none other than Ron Howard, himself, enters the restaurant, bringing our true crime podcasters back to their task at-hand.
Across town, the “emergency contact” theme resurfaces when Mabel arrives only to learn from the nurse that Glen had in fact died in an unfortunate turn of events. The nurse had no explanation for what could have happened between the time he awoke and the time she called his “emergency contact” in his phone — someone she thought to be one, Sazz Pataki.
Unbeknownst to the good nurse and Mabel, a masked man had slipped into Glen’s hospital room undetected during those intervening minutes and silenced the hapless stuntman for good. More questions and clues come when the nurse confirms that it was a man who answered on behalf of Sazz.
Now, with a third murder in as many weeks plaguing the young mystery-solver, Mabel heads home. Back at the Arconia, she finds Marshall, the troubled screenwriter, waiting for her outside of her apartment. Marshall has been struggling to find “Mabel the character’s” true voice for their fictional movie, and asks for her help. With her thoughts still back at the hospital, she reluctantly invites Marshall in, adding script editor to her growing list of “To Dos.”
Time speeds up as we learn that Ron Howard does in fact remember “Ollie Putnam” from their one and only dining experience at that very restaurant. Over another round of soup and a trip down memory lane, Charles and Oliver question the director on Sazz’s protege during the Konkonkoma movie debacle. Ron recounts moments back on set with his failed movie production — the stunt-gone-wrong, the loss of his eyes brows, and a stolen pair of his favorite shoes, the tread of which where a dead-ringer (pun very much intended) for the footprints at the crime scene. When asked if he could remember what the pseudo stuntman looked like, Ron did one better, showing Charles and Oliver a photo captured on his phone, in a file of “those forever banned from his movie sets.”
As Charles and Oliver come to grips recognizing the young man on Ron’s phone photo reel, they rush to radio their crime-solving partner, but appear to be too late. Mabel, herself, has her own revelation in the West Tower of the Arconia, when she finds an original screenplay of “Only Murders in the Building - The Movie” tucked in between the 12 ounce cans of Olde Belgium Lager in her refrigerator.
Wait, what?
Could it be that Sazz Pataki’s stuntman protege-turned-killer also has a way with words? Why was Sazz’s byline on a movie script that Marshall was to have written? The answers to these questions and, no doubt, many more will have to come in the season 4 finale of “Only Murders in the Building,” streaming now on Hulu.
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