Only Murders in the Building is typically a fun, cozy show, which makes the opening of this week’s episode so jarring. “Gates of Heaven” starts off with a shell-shocked Charles (Steven Martin) staring at his hands, which are covered with the ashes of his long-time friend, Sazz (Jane Lynch).
He doesn’t know how to respectfully clean the dust off his hands, so after some frantic deliberating, he decides to wash the dust off into a bowl and let the water evaporate. It’s an irrational plan that Charles performs with questionable competence, and the scene straddles the line between sort of funny and deeply sad. We’ve never seen Charles deal with a loss this heavy, even if the Season 1 betrayal of Jan (Amy Ryan) was probably still devastating for him. (More on her soon.)
Charles’ grief leads to the introduction of Ghost Sazz, a figment of Charles’ imagination who follows him around throughout the episode. I personally despise this trope—not only is it overdone on TV, but it always leads to sappy, unsubtle monologues mixed in with cloying attempts at self-aware humor. That said, I understand the appeal of it: It compensates for visual media’s weakness at conveying a character’s inner monologue (something books can do easily) and it gives audiences another chance to hang out with the deceased character before they’re gone forever.
It’s fun to see Sazz and Charles work together one last time, just as it’s heartbreaking to realize how good a friend Sazz was to him overall. Sazz may have been introduced in Season 1 as the woman who kept stealing Charles’ girlfriends, but since then she’s proven herself to be very much worth the trouble.
The other benefit of Ghost Sazz is that it makes the appearance of Jan (Amy Ryan) all the more disorienting. The idea that Jan killed a guard, escaped prison, and snuck into Charles’ apartment sure sounds like something he’d imagine, but Only Murders has always been just cartoonish enough to make it plausible. The result is that we spend half the episode wondering if Charles has truly lost it, if Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) are right to look at him like he’s crazy.
When Detective Donna Williams (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) bursts through Charles’ door and reveals she’s looking for escaped convict Jan, it’s a massive relief. Finally we’re on solid ground; now we know that Charles is only half crazy, and that everything Jan told him is real, useful information that needs to go up on the suspect board.
So, what did Jan say? She tells Charles that Sazz already suspected there’s been another murderer in (or near) their building, and that she was working on figuring this out in the weeks before her untimely demise.
“I called last week and she sounded upset,” Jan says. Later she adds, “She thought someone ‘had eyes on you.’ She was poking around the building because of it.”
Charles asks if Sazz was specifically looking into the Arconia, and Jan doesn’t know. But as a fellow killer herself, Jan’s got some insight on this season’s murderer: They were definitely aiming for Charles, and they’ll almost certainly try again.
Given that Jan’s been characterized post-killer reveal as an honest person, murderer or not, I’m inclined to take her word for this. If Jan thinks Charles was the target, that means Charles was the target.
This takes some of the heat off Eugene Levy from last week, and redirects it towards those neighbors across the street from The Arconia, the so-called Westies. So, who are our newest round of suspects?
First there’s Stink-Eye Joe—his actual name: Vince Fish (Richard Kind). He’s described by Charles as someone who menacingly squints out the window, but it turns out he’s just got a bizarre form of eye-hopping pink eye. Either that, or his eyepatch is hiding something even more sinister. Behavior-wise, Vince isn’t doing himself any favors in this episode: He reveals that he already knows by heart which apartments the trio each live in, and he goes on a brief rant about how he likes to stand by his window and pretend-squish with his fingers the people on the streets below.
Vince then introduces Mabel and Oliver to the family next door. The family’s last name is suspiciously never mentioned, but we get everyone’s first names: There’s Anna (Lilian Rebelo), a sullen young woman around Mabel’s age. Then there’s Inez (Daphne Rubin-Vega), an older woman who has a massive crush on Charles thanks to his Brazzos role. Finally there’s Alfonso (Desmin Borges), who is clearly jealous of his wife’s crush, noting that it’s not fair his wife chose a guy she can see from her window as her celebrity hall pass.
On first glance, Alfonso’s the most obvious killer, but it seems like the whole family’s hiding something. When Anna mentions their neighbor Dudenoff (the same name that was on Sazz’s desk last week!) Inez kicks her and gives her a stern look. Then the whole family (and their neighbor Vince) all seem to protest a little too much when Mabel asks about Dudenoff’s apartment, indicating that they definitely know more about the situation than what they’re letting on.
Another weird thing about this family: They keep a giant leg of ham hanging above their bathtub. Later, when Mabel and Oliver sneak inside Dudenoff’s apartment, they find a live pig in its bathtub. That’s as sure a sign as any that this apartment belongs to either Vince or the next-door family, likely the latter. It’s a damning bit of evidence, especially after Oliver observes that this apartment’s window lock was damaged, making it perhaps the only window in the building that could open and close. Whoever the sniper was, they shot Sazz from here.
But instead of the Westies we’ve met this week, perhaps the killer is Kumail Nanjiani’s character, a mystery figure whose apartment is always decorated like it’s Christmas. He’s the only neighbor Charles mentions who we don’t get to talk to, but he’ll almost certainly play a big role down the line. There’s no way this show would cast Nanjiani for a two-second clip.
My theory? The Dudenoff apartment is shared by all three of the Westies Charles mentioned. Perhaps they have an agreement that each of them can use the apartment for private stuff throughout the day, which might be why whoever’s banging on the door doesn’t stick around in the hallway once they realize someone else is using the room.
The episode’s final big revelation comes when Oliver discovers that the Dudenoff apartment’s key code, 773440, is “Oh Hell” flipped upside down. Oh Hell is the card game the other neighbors introduced Oliver and Mabel to, which means Sazz has almost certainly hung out with these characters and played the same game with them.
However, the episode’s closing moments indicate that Sazz hadn’t learned enough to know the killer’s identity before she died. The final words she wrote with her blood on the floor were “Tap in,” a message to Charles that it’s his time to take action, to do the hard task she couldn’t finish, just as she did for him throughout their decades-long friendship.
Clues From the Crime Scene:
- One story about Sazz we learn is that she helped Charles get a weekly poker group during his Brazzos years. Meanwhile, the Westies immediately introduce Mabel and Oliver to a card game. Oh Hell is different from Poker of course, but could the two card games in one episode be more than a coincidence?
- I never played Oh Hell before this episode, but it turns out it’s a real card game, similar to Bridge (which I also haven’t played). So I tried Oh Hell out for a bit online to learn how it works. The gist is that it’s not really about how good your cards are, but about how accurately you can predict the strength of them. And to win Oh Hell, you’ll often have to intentionally pick a bad card for a hand in order to win the full round. I’m sure this’ll pan out as a thematic metaphor somehow.
- Also worth noting: Two famous fans of Oh Hell are Bill Clinton and Steven Spielberg, so if either of them pop up this season, we can be sure they had something to do with it. (The game was also invented in England, so we should be even warier than usual towards any new British characters that might pop up.)
- A missed clue from last week: someone in the Only Murders subreddit pointed out that Bev Melon (Molly Shannon) was oddly incapable of recognizing that the director/sister duo The Brothers were clearly fraternal twins, not identical. I assumed this was just a silly joke, but some fans speculate that it’s a clue: Melon is bad at distinguishing between similar looking people. If she can’t tell the difference between fraternal twins, maybe she also couldn’t tell difference between Sazz and Charles before she pulled the trigger. I’m not sure why Melon would want Charles dead, but I’ll be keeping an eye on her going forward.
- Jan mentions how everyone who’s listened to Season 2 of the Only Murders podcast now knows about the secret passageways throughout the Arconia, which means that technically anyone can now sneak around the building at any point, listening in on the gang’s conversations. This is relevant because, last episode, the fake text from Sazz assuring Charles she was okay came right after Charles was talking about how worried he was about her. This doesn’t tell us anything about the killer exactly, but it does add a terrifying tone to the entire season: More so than Season 1 through 3, this time the killer truly can be listening in on our heroes at any moment. Not only that, but they likely know how to sneak into Charles’ apartment at any moment, with or without a key.
- The good news about Jan’s brief return is that we can now safely cross her off the suspect list. A lot of fans speculated about her in the gap between seasons, what with her history of murder and her passionate relationship with both Charles and Sazz. Thankfully I was vindicated in my belief that Jan’s not the sniping type; as she herself says this episode, “Snipers are assholes. What’s the point in killing someone if you’re not there for the release?”
Let’s return to those notes on Sazz’s desk from last week. We already know what “Dudenoff” means, and “Looking at Charles” likely applies to the Westies. “Long Game” could still be a reference to the fan theory that a killer’s been lurking around the building uncaught throughout the entire show; it could also be a reference to Oh Hell, which often requires players to wait for the right moment to put a good card forward. Finally, there’s “HELGA,” which was written on top of a plane ticket. Given that Charles and Dudenoff are written regularly, the all-caps of HELGA imply that it’s not referring to a person, but perhaps a place or an organization.
