Only Murders in the Building opens its penultimate episode in the third season on one of its most horrifying images yet. This is saying a lot, considering the show has featured three grisly murders. But no, this may be the most unsettling moment of the show: Mabel (Selena Gomez) dreams that she’s having a baby. No, two babies. Charles (Steve Martin) and Oliver (Martin Short) pop out of her, big heads on tiny bodies—like New York Magazine’s infamous Nepo Baby cover.
But wait, Mabel is still in labor. The third baby? A microphone.
“Congratulations!” the doctor cries. “It’s a podcast.”
This is actually a good twist for the new mom. Mabel is finally reunited with her besties, Charles and Oliver, to solve the murder of Ben Glenroy (Paul Rudd). After a season pitching hissy fits over Mabel suspecting murderers in his cast—first starlet Kimber (Ashley Park), then romantic interest Loretta (Meryl Streep), ruining all his chances at a Tony—Oliver comes to the table at the very end. Loretta has confessed to murder, but they want to prove her innocent.
After some charming banter, Mabel forces the guys over to Dickie’s apartment, thinking his jealousy got the best of him and forced him to kill his brother Ben. Perhaps Loretta took the fall because, as revealed last episode, Dickie is her biological son. But Dickie has a solid alibi, although he’s quite embarrassed to confess what he was doing: Dickie put on Ben’s CoBro suit and went to look for “whores”? That’s what Ben did when he was depressed, apparently.
According to Dickie, every time Ben did this, he used to say something along the lines of, “Snitches get stitches.” With this in mind, Mabel, Charles, and Oliver go hunting for where this late-night ritual took place in order to exonerate Dickie. They find a glitzy fabric store in midtown: Snitches Get Stitches. Oliver assumes it’s a brothel, because brothels “always have pun names.” Charles panics over how to get in. He cries at the cashier’s desk, his strategy being that criers get anywhere they want.
Mabel is the only successful sleuth here, asking to go to the bathroom and, in essence, winning a backstage pass to Snitches Get Stitches. There, she meets “The Five Whores,” a sewing circle made up of five elderly women and…Ben Glenroy. This is how he decompressed. The night before Death Rattle’s grand premiere, he sewed everyone in the cast a hankie covered in rattles. Dickie’s name is cleared because he has a photograph of himself (in the costume, of course) on the night of Ben’s death, sleeping outside of the same midtown location that The Five Whores frequent.
Now, it’s time for a new strategy: Mabel, Charles, and Oliver will filter through the GoPro footage of Detective Williams’ (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) cast interviews. As they do so, Only Murders adds a cool effect: The trio watch every new interview as it happens on a timeline of opening night, sitting in the audience, or hiding backstage as they witness each new moment in what feels like real time.
We start with K.T. (Allison Guinn), who yells at Ben for arriving late—but how sad! Ben brought everyone presents. He wants to start fresh. Next, producer Cliff (Wesley Taylor) arrives at Ben’s stage door with a peace offering. The peace offering, however, is Ben’s noted weakness: a cookie. He pushes Cliff away, but still asks to make sure the Five Whores are in the audience. They’re, like, his surrogate grandmas. How adorable. Paul Rudd, you are loved!
Dickie was furious with Ben on opening night—if you’ll recall, they had a big fight over Ben’s attitude the night before—and Loretta encourages Dickie to leave his brother. Now that we’re almost certain Loretta isn’t the killer, it’s nice to fully fall in love with her quirky character. Streep is such a charmer. But we knew this. Now, though, we don’t have to raise an eyebrow every time she does something weird. She’s just a protective mama bear.
Ben discovers that Dickie was going to quit right before the show, ruining Dickie’s plan to raise his issues with Ben after the show. (“CoBro? More like NoBro!” Charles quips, the best line in this episode.) Ben fights Loretta over stealing his brother, which leads Charles to punch Ben in the face in an attempt to protect Loretta.
Second producer Donna (Linda Emond) gives Ben a pep talk, but it’s really no use: Ben is upset, feeling lost and lonely, and just wants to make sure the Five Whores are in the audience. Infuriated, Ben fires Tobert (Jesse Williams) as his documentarian. He then locks everyone out of his dressing room.
This is where the trio is lost: From Tobert’s camera, they have footage of Ben ranting to someone else about some twisted kind of love affair. Ben rants about how much he wants this person, but how she’s ruining his life. Is it Kimber? Loretta? Mabel?
Mabel cracks it. He’s talking to himself in the mirror. The desired item was the cookie, which Ben restricts himself from in a way to lose weight. But it’s no use. Ben needs the cookie. He’s depressed, feeling like a failure, and hungry, so he shoves the cookie down his throat and calls himself a “fucking pig,” writing the insult over his face in the mirror with Joy’s (Andrea Martin) red lipstick.
So, the cookie had to have poison in it. Who did it?
The team settles on Donna, who was trying to protect her son Cliff as he worked to produce his first stage show. Oliver invited the NYT theater critic to their sitzprobe, which led to a poor review blaming most of the show’s mishaps on Ben. So, to rid the cast of their weak link and be sure her son’s show survived, Donna put some rat poison in the cookie and gave Ben a “pep talk” that would only make him feel more insecure.
Loretta is saved! The trio arrive at the courthouse looking to stop her from confessing to the crime. Thank goodness. We also get a clever Father of the Bride throwback here, where Mabel sports a wedding dress, while Oliver and Charles (noted former star of FOTB) wear suits. “We’re the fathers of the bride,” Charles shouts, hoping to enter the courthouse and free Loretta. It works!
Case closed. But wait, case reopened. Who the hell pushed Ben down that elevator shaft? There’s no way Donna could’ve done that in heels and a fur coat.
Clues From the Crime Scene
-We didn’t know Ben’s first cause of death was rat poison because Dickie cleansed the toxicology report. Dickie knew Ben was taking some mixture of pills to work through his anxiety, and didn’t want any of that leaking into the press.
-Let’s not forget: Tobert is enraged after being fired from Ben’s documentary. We didn’t get to see the aftermath of that whole debacle.
-Donna gave herself away by saying aloud what was in the review: “Ben Glenroy is as stiff as a wood board.” You’ve been caught, Donna. She was the one who shredded the review, the same noise Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton) heard on opening night.
-But we get to “see” Donna poison Ben in the clever flashbacks to opening night. We don’t get to see anything after that—like who actually pushed Ben down the elevator shaft. While the trio suspects Donna simply went to finish the crime, we won’t know until we’ve seen everything happen in a dramatization.
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