Martin Short, Steve Martin, and some blue spandex save this week’s Only Murders In The Building

With only one episode left in season four, Only Murders In The Building is clearly in a rush to wrap things up. In “Escape from Planet Klongo,”there’s a semi-major death and a killer reveal, but I’m not taking Glen Stubbins’ (Paul Rudd) asphyxiation or Marshall B. Pope’s (Jin Ha) real identity at face value. With the finale still left, I suspect the Hulu show has some nifty twists up its sleeve. 

To be clear, Marshall has been the No. 1 suspect in my book for a few episodes now. I’m not surprised then that he’s playing the long con to get ahead in Hollywood (stealing Sazz’s OMITB movie script and passing it off as his own) or that he may be driven by ambition to commit crimes. Glen has barely awoken from his coma in this episode when Marshall seemingly suffocates him with a pillow in case Irish Paul Rudd recognizes him for who he is, a man named Rex Bailey (although for the sake of this recap, let’s keep referring to him as Marshall). 

This week’s flashbacks make it so easy to guess Marshall was Sazz’s mysterious protegé simply by process of elimination. His face is hidden in every scene with her until the end, but there is no one else who it could have been. It turns out that Marshall, an aspiring screenwriter, backflipped over Sazz’s car two years ago when she hit him by accident. His agility left her so impressed that she was willing to train him as a stuntman, and he accepted the offer as a way to get a foot into the industry. Cut to the filming of Project Ronkonkoma. In this film, directed by none other than Ron Howard, Marshall performed a fire stunt under Sazz’s tutelage. But he screwed up and didn’t check if the flames were fully out on his costume before he confidently approached Howard to hand him a script. Of course, the pages caught fire and burned off the director’s eyebrows. 

It’s traumatic, but this is a disappointingly spiceless reveal of why Sazz and Marshall had an issue with each other. Would Sazz have abandoned Marshall over this? It doesn’t seem like she was the type. It’s not her fault that he messed up either, so why would he hold a grudge? Ron Howard did ban Marshall from his set, but these feel like incomplete pieces of a puzzle that OMITB should complete in the finale. Let’s hope it’s more interesting than the narrator of Arrested Development losing some facial hair. 

So for now, we’ll turn our attention to how our trio finds the truth about Marshall in this episode. They doggedly pursue time with Ron Howard to talk to him about Project Ronkonkoma. It’s all a little silly because Charles, Oliver, and Mabel have plenty of Hollywood connections by now to set up a direct meeting. Only Mabel has the wherewithal to ask Bev Melon (Molly Shannon), who passes along the address of where Ron’s current project is shooting in New York City. The only favor she asks in return is that Mabel help Marshall out with his drafts because each one is worse than the next. (That’s because it was Sazz who wrote the movie that Bev fell in love with. Marshall can’t keep up the tone in his rewrites.) 

With that, Charles, Oliver, and Mabel land up on the set of Howard’s next movie, a sci-fi alien flick called Escape From Planet Klongo that causes Charles to ask how dire the director’s career is. When their techniques to meet him don’t work out, they agree to be extras. Again, it’s an insane distraction because Bev could just as well call the guy and put them all in the same room. Howard literally produced a movie called The Beanie Bubble last year that starred Zach Galifianakis, and he directed Eugene Levy in 1984’s Splash. But logic goes for a toss in favor of putting Steve Martin and Martin Short in blue spandex costumes. And for once, I don’t mind. 

The two legendary actors have been longtime friends and collaborators, and both are very funny on this show as their characters frequently diss each other. So it’s a real treat that “Escape From Planet Klongo” lets them appreciate each other and be sincerely sentimental, even if it lasts only for a hot minute. In fact, Martin and Short are such a highlight here that it’s worth suffering the ups and downs of how they solve the case.

Charles offers to take Oliver out for dinner as a pseudo-bachelor party. He intends to spend time with his buddy, whereas Oliver—in classic Oliver fashion—starts expecting a huge bash. His demands for a party are simple: He wants whiskey, A-list celebrities, and a naughty secret. As his taunts about Charles not delivering drag on, the Brazzos star loses his cool. Instead of reciting their dialogue in front of a green screen, they start yelling at each other, with Charles calling Oliver insufferable and that no one else will want to attend his bachelor event. It’s brutal but also glorious because, on Howard’s monitor, it just looks like two E.T.s are pointing fingers at each other. 

It’s okay, as the two men make up eventually. Charles confesses that Mabel will go on to bigger and better things, but he’s always hoped that Charles and Oliver would grow older together—emphasis on the er. Aww! Instead, he now feels like a third wheel with Loretta (Meryl Streep) around—even though technically she’s been off filming in L.A. for weeks now. The two then go to eat at a Chinese restaurant where Oliver once met Ron Howard (narrative convenience, huh?). He assures Charles they’ll always be best friends. Oh, and to avoid eye contact, he says all this while Charles hides away behind a gigantic menu. 

Despite how this season has fluctuated with its many mysteries, OMITB reminds us time and again that it’s a character-driven TV series about second chances. Charles and Oliver symbolize it perfectly in this episode. Their meal yields fruitful results in many ways because guess who walks into the restaurant in an excellent coincidence? Ron Howard. He sits down with the two men and reveals everything that happened on Project Ronkonkoma, including firing Marshall and hiring Glen as the replacement. (So Glen was the real target at the end of episode five, not Oliver or Galifianakis?) 

At the same time, Mabel reaches home after finding out that Glen’s dead. She’s sad that her inability to solve this case quickly has led to another loss of life. But Mabel doesn’t get the time to mourn because Marshall’s waiting for her, hoping she’ll help him capture the real Mabel’s voice in his draft. As the two are going over his writing, she stops to grab a beer. It’s from the six-pack that Sazz left Oliver, in which it looks like she hid a copy of her original script. So now, the trio knows exactly who Marshall is—and Mabel is trapped with him alone in her apartment. The finale has a lot to get through, and right now, I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that it unravels somewhat sensibly. 

Stray observations 

• • The trio visits Glen in the hospital before he wakes up from his coma and bumps into his nurse, who is also conveniently Irish. They also take a few items with them, hoping to shake Glen up: smelling salts, an Ouija board, and that six-pack of Olde Belgium that Sazz left Oliver. 
• • Oliver and Ron Howard met in 1988 when they were 10 dumplings deep at that Chinese restaurant. They shared spicy soup, sweated through their shirts, talked into the wee hours, and danced on tables. You’d be inclined not to believe Oliver, but Howard validates this story.
• • Bev tells Mabel she’s fed up with the OMITB movie for several reasons, one of them being that Eva Longoria is constantly unavailable. Based on the past episodes, I have to ask: Since when? 
• • When Mabel is in the hospital and learns that Glen’s dead, the TV is on and there’s a weird emphasis on what the news anchor is saying: The cleaning king of Brooklyn has gone missing, and it may or may not have ties to the Caputo mafia family. Are they already setting up season five? 
• • Charles: “Security guards love Brazzos. I’m their Princess Diana.” 
• • Mabel: “I’m going to see if they can remove the part of my brain that stores the image of you in spandex.”