Review: Only Murders in the Building, "Lifeboat" | Season 4, Episode 8
The season's antepenultimate episode serves up a healthy helping of red herring
Red herrings are a part of any murder mystery, and they’re built on the principles of narrative worldbuilding: while we might be following one story, there’s always others operating around it, with characters harboring secrets that ultimately don’t overlap with the ones the narrative is invested in. A story gains complexity and depth when it’s clear that even the characters who aren’t relevant have their own relevances, provided we were investigating something else entirely.
The Westies being revealed as a red herring is hardly surprising: setting up the big confrontation for episode eight in a ten-episode season was as big a tell as you could imagine. As such, evaluating “Lifeboat” is not a question of responding to the fact the show revealed the Westies had nothing to do with Sazz’s murder; rather, it’s a question of whether or not the show’s detour into the story of the Westies offers enough value as a narrative to be worth the time spent on it. A detour is fine when it s…