On this week’s episode of Only Murders in the Building, Charles enters the white room as he works through some onstage/personal nerves with Joy (Andrea Martin). Meanwhile, Oliver and Mabel shift the investigation to the theater, and Mabel gets an intriguing offer from Cinda Canning (Tina Fey).
For this week’s episode, let’s go to the CableTV.com Only Murders in the Building Suspicion Power Rankings. As always, we’re ranking characters from most to least suspicious using two metrics:
- Who killed Ben Glenroy on Only Murders in the Building?
- Did they have something to do with the murder?
Who killed Ben Glenroy on Only Murders in the Building?
#1: Loretta
We’re in an in-between week for leading suspects, which brings Loretta (Meryl Streep) back atop the leaderboard. We don’t have a clear motive for Loretta just yet, but she’s the only one who had outright bad blood with Ben. And as always, you don’t book a Special Guest Star for your show if they aren’t playing a big part.
#2: Joy
Joy gets this week’s spot as a potential suspect, but we’ll eat her missing lipstick tube like a chocolate bar if she has anything to do with the case.
We’re definitely not besmirching the great Andrea Martin, who makes the most of her screen time in this episode. (Our favorite Joy lines from this episode are a draw between “Breakfast Magazine. . . which does not exist” and her pantomiming an antelope by slapping her hands together like two elephant trunks while screeching like a monkey.)
But Joy was largely a side character in season 2, and even if she just moved in with Charles, it’s tough to see how she’d regularly intersect with the Death Rattle cast. Plus, Charles already shacked up with a murderer in season 1! We’ll call her a red herring until further notice.
#3: Kimber
To wit about red herrings: Kimber’s spot atop our power rankings as a leading suspect lasted for all of one episode before it mostly got deflated. Her relationship with Ben? It was for an influencer endorsement that went south. Her missing hankie? Sold out of spite on eBay. Her death stare and possible rivalry with Loretta keep her on the suspect board for now, but she’s likely not a key suspect.
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Others receiving suspicious votes
- K.T. (the beleaguered production assistant)
- Dickie (the equally beleaguered manager/ex-personal assistant)
Off the board
- Cliff (the producer’s son)
- Jonathan (we’ll eat a shoe if he’s involved)
Playbill notes
- We rarely get to see Steve Martin do silly physical comedy in a white suit these days, so we’ll take it when we can get it.
- The only source we could find for the term “white room” was this 2013 Playbill article, but we’ll take Playbill’s word for it and hope no one’s time in the white room is as bad as Charles’ stint.
- The grapevine’s a real roller skating move that involves spinning your legs and hips around like a spiraling vine—it also looks wildly painful if you fall while doing it.
- This week’s opening credits easter egg: multiple white rooms in the Arconia.
- Patter songs like the one that drives Charles up a wall are a standard musical song genre categorized by dense wordplay, speed, and rhymes. They were popularized by Gilbert and Sullivan or, if you’re born after 1990, animated shows doing riffs on Gilbert and Sullivan that no one except parents would pick up on.