Felicia Nickens
The following recap contains spoilers for Only Murders in the Building S4E5, “Adaptation” (written by John Hoffman, Steve Martin & J.J. Philbin, and directed by Jessica Yu).
Only Murders has hit the halfway point in the season and we got our first big “Ah, Ha!” moment. As if it weren’t difficult enough for the trio to find one murderer, now they are searching for two. Before we get into that, let’s start with that cliffhanger from last week.
The Trampoline Park
The trio is held at gunpoint by Bev Melon. They accuse her of being involved in Sazz’s death, to which she is overjoyed. She is excited to see the trio do what they do, but laughs off the accusation and reveals she was at Variety‘s Powerful Women Under 100 party. However, she informs them that Sazz called her the night she died and left a voicemail letting Bev know there was a problem with the Only Murders movie. This leads the trio to believe that a member of the production is either involved in Sazz’s murder or knows what happened. It makes you wonder how Sazz knew about the movie before the trio did. It’s possible through her Hollywood connections that she may have heard about it through the grapevine, but maybe she had a connection to the as-yet-unidentified person of interest.
Back at the Arconia
The trio congregates in Charles’s apartment along with Detective Williams (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). She bags the gun Bev had into evidence (apparently she found it in the shed at the trampoline park). They turn over some possibilities and Detective Williams heads off before the trio decides they need to snoop around production to gauge the attitudes of the people involved.
In the production suite, the trio immediately runs into the Brothers sisters. They invite the trio to be a part of a photo shoot later in the day and head off with a thin, but tall, case. It looks like something one would tote around a production area, yet the camera lingered longer than it should have. I imagine there is something of value to the mystery in there, but we have yet to discover what that could be.
Charles begins walking around, pretending to talk on his phone while “inconspicuously” taking photos (he forgot to turn the sound off). Mabel confirms that the camera is facing the right direction, and of course, it’s not. Charles corrects his mistake and continues taking photos. Just then they notice that Marshall, the film’s screenwriter, has spotted them. He nervously backs out of the room and makes a beeline for the elevator. The trio stops him before he has a chance to exit. He is immediately relieved to find that they are considering him a suspect. He was scared that they wanted to discuss re-writes, because of course that is more terrifying than being accused of murder.
They speak to Marshall back at Charles’s apartment. Besides the fact that he is pretty much “faking it til he makes it” as far as being a writer goes—fake beard, fake glasses, writing until something sticks—it appears he has an alibi for the night Sazz was killed, trying his hand at standup. Charles decides to show off his murder boards and it is then that Marshall points out the all too obvious fact that the timeline of the murder (12 minutes from one building to the next, including clean-up) is impossible. Oliver, trying to assert his youth, decides to test that theory by recreating the timeline. It takes him 36 minutes and an incident with a pigeon to complete the challenge, proving useless.
The Photoshoot
Everyone is at the photoshoot. The actors, the production team, the trio, and even Howard, who is working in production now as well. Eva Longoria, at the request of Mabel, demands Howard put down the sticky mats to prevent dirtying up the floors, even though their real purpose is to find a matching footprint to the one they found in the abandoned apartment. It doesn’t take long for that footprint to appear and for Mabel to put 2+2 together. Almost simultaneously Charles tells Mabel that it couldn’t have been one person due to the tight timeline, but rather two people. Just then, Mabel realizes the footprint belongs to one of the Brothers sisters. As she tells the rest of the trio her revelation, gunshots are fired and the episode comes to an end.
Some of my thoughts on this episode… Something about Bev’s story doesn’t seem right. Why does Sazz contact her before Charles? While the Brothers sisters are a little “sus” as the youngins say, I don’t think they murdered Sazz. What reason would they have to do so? Marshall is also off the hook a little too quickly. The episode dedicated the cold open to his story, which to me as a viewer should mean that he has some sort of importance to the story other than pointing out an obvious flaw with the timeline.
We should be getting some more answers soon as the season is approaching the last half. Here’s two hoping (see what I did there?).
