Only Murders in the Building Season-Finale Recap: Writer’s Glock

As our trio closes in on yet another killer, Charles has the realization that every time they solve a crime, another body drops right on cue. That tends to be what needs to happen for an end-of-season cliffhanger, but it’s funny seeing the characters catch on to their show’s patterns. It feels like we’re watching them gain sentience, and they’ll soon enough realize that they’re trapped in a television show. But Oliver, whose wedding to Loretta is tomorrow, doesn’t appreciate the prediction that someone else is about to die, worried that Loretta will be the next victim. And that very well may be the case depending on The Devil Wears Prada 2’s shooting schedule.

However, there’s a more urgent threat: Mabel is being held captive by Marshall P. Pope (Rex Bailey, if you’re nasty), who uses her phone to text Charles and Oliver to stay away. The thing is, they didn’t know she was in danger until that text, so he was kind of telling on himself. The good news is that she’s still alive at all, a feat she was able to pull off by reminding Marshall that he needs her to fix his screenplay’s horrible dialogue. A lesson to all aspiring screenwriters: be so good that they can’t kill you.

Looking across the courtyard into the hostage zone, Charles realizes that the murder wasn’t a two-person job after all and that Marshall was able to pull it all off in such a short time by walking along the building’s ledge to get between the units. One wrong move from a pigeon and splat. Despite his own fear of heights, Charles decides that he’ll do the same to rescue Mabel — especially since he wasn’t able to save Sazz. He doesn’t want to make the same mistake twice. But rather than dramatically scaling the entire perimeter, they realize that they can get a head start by using Vince Fish’s window. Any excuse to see more Richard Kind.

While the plan is to have Mabel escape with them through the window while Marshall is distracted, Charles can’t help but confront his friend’s killer and jumps into the apartment with them. The problem is that his friend’s killer has a gun. But Charles has a weapon of his own: “It’s Eva Longoria’s 19-in-1 multitool; at least four of the settings can kill you” — and somehow, in all the hubbub, they’re able to disarm Marshall, who Mabel tells them stole Sazz’s script.

With Marshall cornered, we finally get to that point in all murder mysteries where the killer gets to monologue about his motives. We hear all about his hunter father encouraging him to be a marksman instead of a writer, how Sazz befriended him when he was struggling to get discovered, and how she continued to support him even after he almost set Ron Howard on fire. All that talk of writing even inspired Sazz to write a screenplay of her own, based on the Only Murders podcast, which she asked him to read her only copy of. Having just one copy of her script might have been Sazz’s craziest daredevil move of all. Back that shit up to the cloud, diva!

Marshall tells us that the screenplay was great, but he wouldn’t admit that to Sazz. “It’s not very good. But everybody’s gotta start somewhere,” he tells her, and we can see poor Sazz’s heart break. Seeing a normally confident and bombastic Sazz with her tail between her legs is brutal. Marshall should fry! Not only that, he made a copy, created a fake name, and shopped it around as his own in an attempt to get an agent. The next thing he knew, they were making it into a movie.

Being an entertainment industry insider, Sazz naturally found out about this pretty quickly, and tells him that this betrayal hurts more than any hit she’s taken on the job. He tries to explain himself, but Sazz tells him she’s going to New York to see Charles’s play and plans on telling him the truth about the movie. To quote the great Scooby-Doo, ruh roh. But rather than let Sazz unravel his (stolen) big break, Marshall hatched a plan, as criminals are wont to do. He knew all about the Dudenoff apartment thanks to Sazz’s script (convenient), so he takes a red eye to New York himself to take out this new threat. He shoots her, but before she dies, she assures Marshall that her “number one” will get him.

And just as Sazz predicted, Charles is so enraged by all of this that he flings Eva Longoria’s laser at him, but in that hubbub Marshall is able to get his hands back on the gun. This of course is not good. “Welcome to the end of your movie,” Marshall says, just like a villain in a Scream movie. But just as they’re staring death in the face, someone shoots Marshall. From across the courtyard, Jan took her shot, exacting revenge for Sazz’s death, and who had apparently been hiding out in the building’s walls this whole time. Storywise … sure, it works, it’s fine, but it is a little convenient. It feels like this season’s loose ends are being wrapped up a little more hurriedly than we’re used to.

Free from the threat of murder and with a new appreciation for their movie, the trio pays a visit to the set, where they watch their actor counterparts in a scene. “Poor bastards think they only have to solve Tim Kono’s murder,” they say as they watch their past selves from the outside. It’s a cool way for the series to show us just how far these three have come over the seasons. Charles especially has a new fondness for the project, now knowing that it was written by Sazz, who returns as a figment of Charles’s imagination one last time to tell him he did well.

With this season’s mystery solved, Oliver and Loretta are able to get married unencumbered by a killer on the loose and do so despite the uncertainty about whether or not Oliver will be going with her to New Zealand, where her show is moving. But let’s get real, season five has already been greenlit, so we know Oliver isn’t going to New Zealand. Since the whole season borrowed its episode titles from different movies, the finale is fittingly called My Best Friend’s Wedding — but with Meryl Streep walking down the aisle, it feels like a missed opportunity not to go with Mamma Mia.

So where do we go from here? Amidst all the excitement, they’re approached by Téa Leoni, who plays the wife of missing mobster Nicky Caccimelio and asks for their help in finding her husband. Oh, that explains why we got that shoehorned news report about him last week! I was excited at the prospect of this as a fresh framing device for a new season. Plus, it would rebuff people wondering how many more people are going to die in this building just to serve the show’s premise — but I don’t care about that, because it’s a TV show. Plus, there’s only been a handful of incidents so far. My apartment building has seen far worse, and there are hardly any character actresses there. Alas, the trio turn down Téa Leoni, citing their strict rule of only investigating murders in the Arconia. But Mrs. Caccimelio says that the Arconia is actually closely connected to her husband in some way. Guess we’ll have to wait until next season to find out what exactly that means. But just think about all the fun guest stars we’ll get with a mafia-centric season.

With the podcast wrapped up, Oliver married, and Téa Leoni rejected, it looks like this might be our happiest ending yet. But just as they begin to celebrate making it through the wedding without another body showing up, they discover Arconia’s doorman, Lester, dead in the fountain. I’d be sadder if he hadn’t been letting all those killers into the building this whole time.