Is There a Second Killer?

After last week’s insane cliffhanger, Bev Melon (Molly Shannon) starts off “Adaptation” with a lot of explaining to do. Why was she caught in Sazz’s near-abandoned warehouse, brandishing a gun and threatening to blow the trio’s brains out? The answer, it turns out, is that this was all a misunderstanding.

When Charles (Steve Martin) asks outright if she killed Sazz, Melon answers, “I did not. But I think someone in the movie may have.” She explains how she was at a party for powerful women in Los Angeles during the time of Sazz’s death, and how Sazz had left her an ominous voicemail at 11:07 pm that same night. Sazz says in the voicemail, “You need to call me, okay? There’s a problem with your Only Murders movie. A big problem.”

Melon explains how she initially ignored the message because it was inconvenient for the movie production; once she found out Sazz had been killed, however, she started snooping around for clues that might help her avoid a potential production catastrophe. The scene ends with Melon telling the trio that she finds investigating boring, and has decided to leave the rest of it up to them.

So, has Melon been cleared from suspicion? I don’t think so. For one thing, nobody ever asks how she came to know about the Sazz Pataki Impact Academy in the first place. The trio also fails to ask perhaps the most important question raised by Melon’s story: When she got that voicemail from Sazz, was anyone else in the room with her? Even if Melon had nothing to do with the murder, perhaps she mentioned the weird voicemail to someone else at the powerful women party—a certain female director duo, perhaps?—and that’s what set in motion the murder this whole season’s based around.

Patrick Harbron/Hulu

It’s understandable why the gang doesn’t ask this question: They start the episode under the mistaken assumption that there’s only one killer, so they stop looking at Melon’s story too critically once she proves she was in California at the time of the murder. But after Charles and Oliver (Martin Short) spend the middle of the episode trying and failing to prove how a killer could’ve both shot and hid Sazz in so little time, Charles finally figures out it was a two-person job, just like it was the past two seasons. He still doesn’t consider the idea that Sazz’s murder could’ve been ordered by someone not at the scene; if he ever does, Melon should be Suspect #1 for that role.

Melon’s claim to innocence isn’t helped by how Molly Shannon is great at playing crazy people. Her explanations to the trio are delivered in a delightfully unhinged, almost sociopathic manner, one that seems designed to make us think about how fun it’d be to see her deliver a proper villain monologue, like Amy Ryan’s back in Season 1.

Another mark against Melon: The running theme of season 4 seems to be a critique of the way Hollywood approaches true crime and biopics in general, and Melon is the epitome of everything the show thinks is wrong with Hollywood. She’s greedy, out of touch, and sees the world through a dehumanizing, all-encompassing marketing lens.

This is notable because in a lot of whodunnits, the thematic relevance of the killer is arguably a more important clue than any of the actual evidence could be. For instance, Only Murders Season 3’s killers could’ve been guessed purely based off of how much that season focused on the ruthlessness of theater. Meanwhile, Season 2 focused on the exploitative nature of true crime podcasts, so the smartest early guess would’ve been Cinda Canning (Tina Fey) or her assistant Poppy (Adina Version). This means that for season 4, if the killer’s not Melon it has to be Eugene Levy, Zach Galifianakis, Eva Longoria, the screenwriter Marshall (Jin Ha), or the Brothers sisters.

“Adaptation” starts off by throwing suspicion on Marshall, a guy who’ll do anything to prove to himself he’s a real writer. The dude suffers from an absurd level of imposter syndrome, to the point where he’s wearing a fake beard and glasses in the hopes of feeling like more of a serious person. The opening also gives us a glimpse of the conversation where Marshall finds out his first script’s been accepted, although it conspicuously denies us any dialogue from it. What did the script look like when Marshall first sent it out? Was it his idea to base it around the Only Murders podcast, or Melon’s? This could be important information.

But this week’s episode seems uninterested in Marshall as a potential killer, portraying him as more of a sympathetic comedic character like Vince Fish or Rudy. What little focus we do get of him after the opening seems to put him in the clear: He helps the trio realize they’re dealing with a second killer, and he remarks that this current case around Sazz feels like someone’s making a “sequel to my movie.”

It’s a stray remark that might’ve just revealed this killer’s big motive. What if the killer is someone trying to give the trio more murders to solve, guaranteeing an endless string of sequel material to adapt and profit off of? If this is the why of it all, Bev Melon would be the obvious main suspect, but as the episode’s closing moments make clear, Tawny (Siena Werber) and Trina (Catherine Cohen) are also on the top of the list.

Fans have suspected the Brothers sisters for a while now. The show’s subreddit has already noticed that the presumed-shooter’s boots in the Season 4 trailer look awfully similar to the sisters’ boots in last week’s episode. That shot from the trailer shows up in this episode’s final moments, as a panicked Mabel and Charles picture what the Brothers sisters’ murder operation might look like. The good news for the Brothers is that these brief clips don’t seem intended as a literal reveal; for now at least, it’s likely that the clip of the Brothers killing Sazz is meant to be seen as Charles and Mabel’s imagination.

The bad news for the Brothers is that the shoeprint match still needs to be explained, and it looks like one of them might not be around to tell the tale. The episode’s big cliffhanger has Charles remarking that he doesn’t know where the second sister (Tawny) has disappeared to. Then the lights go out, there’s a gunshot, and people are screaming. Has somebody new been shot? Will there be another gunshot?

An active shooter situation is a surprisingly intense, terrifying note to end the episode on, but it fits for a season that’s been notably sadder and more disturbing than the first three. For all we know, Tawny Brothers has just been shot by the second killer, who’s figured out the gang is onto her and decided to take her out before she could give them both away. This would make for the first season of Only Murders where the killer’s taken another victim halfway through. A dark but fitting development for a season that seems more than eager to raise the stakes.

So, what do we actually know about the Brothers sisters? Their screen time’s been minimal so far, but in the brief glimpses we’ve gotten we know that they’re eccentric fraternal twins, seemingly with some sort of aristocratic background. They’re not afraid to seem weird or blunt, and they always seem like they know more than they’re letting on. It was also their idea to send the actors over to the Arconia in the third episode to study their real-life counter parts—or, as I speculated at the time, they could’ve been sending them over to spy on the investigation.

The most interesting information this week comes in the final moments. When the gunshot rings out, the one Brothers sister still on set (Trina) seems genuinely surprised and confused, indicating that at least she is innocent of Sazz’s murder. If one of them is innocent, that raises the odds of the other being innocent too; these twins are characterized as so close and in sync that it’s hard to imagine one of them hiding from the other a secret as big as murder.

Then again, we barely know anything about the Brothers yet. It’s possible they’re less of a unified front as the season’s first half made them seem. Perhaps there are major creative/personal differences between them we haven’t been made privy to. Here’s hoping next week is a big spotlight episode for this duo. They’re in the hot seat now; let’s see how they handle it.

Clues From the Crime Scene:

• Oliver is once again relegated to spending most of the episode worrying about Loretta (Meryl Streep) and the new guy she might be cheating on him with. The guy is Josh Jonk, a famous attractive man who seems designed in a lab to make poor Oliver as jealous and insecure as possible.
• Can this Josh Jonk be the killer? It seems unlikely, but this episode does call attention to the idea that only a really strong, athletic person would be capable of pulling off Sazz’s murder on their own. If Charles’ two-killer revelation turns out to be a misdirect, then Josh is one of the only characters strong enough to pull the murder off.
• Although Marshall is treated without real suspicion this episode, there is one odd moment near the end when he looks at Charles in the middle of his two-killer revelation. It’s a look that could be read as concern that Charles is getting closer to cracking the case, or concern that Charles’ new behavior might make him give the script another round of revisions.
• Making things weirder, on further rewatch, is the way Marshall walks past Charles just as he’s telling Mabel about his two-killer theory. The sequence is filmed in a way that’s seemingly trying hard not to call attention to his presence, but that only makes it more suspicious. Marshall walks within earshot of the two, and then he’s completely out of sight in those final moments before the shot rings out. Tawny Brothers might be the one who shot Sazz, but maybe Marshall’s the one who shot the lights.
• Although Howard is no longer my top suspect, I must once again point out how suspicious it is that he’s got a new job on the Only Murders film production. This man has so thoroughly wrapped his life around the trio’s podcast, it’s hard not to be a little concerned. The Howard is Moriarty theory isn’t completely dead, folks!