Review: Only Murders in the Building, "My Best Friend's Wedding" | Season 4, Episode 10
Review: Only Murders in the Building, "My Best Friend's Wedding" | Season 4, Episode 10
One of Peak TV's most steady providers of entertainment finishes another solid season with room for improvement
Early on in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” Charles (prematurely) celebrates the conclusion of their investigation into Sazz’s death, and wonders what timely murder will come immediately thereafter, as is the Only Murders in the Building tradition. Ignoring for a moment the notion that this hasn’t actually happened in every season, with season two having a time jump before its epilogue, the ultimate goal here is sparking Oliver’s paranoia that his beloved Loretta is the likely victim. How dare Charles suggest the possibility that their wedding, presented as the climax of the season, would descend into tragedy?
It’s a notion that the show itself plays with right up until the very end of this finale, as Loretta is fashionably late to the altar and a scream from Una halts the processional. Conveniently, my broken home internet chose this exact moment to crap out, which meant that I had an extra thirty seconds or so of buffering to sit in this alleged moment of tension…or lack thereof. Because we need to be real for a second and acknowledge that as much as Only Murders in the Building is a show capable of dramatic heft when it wants to be, there is a limit to the kind of storyline that would allow the show to sustain its comic rhythms within an investigation. The trio mourning beloved doorman Lester, who ends up being found bleeding out into the fountain that witnessed his own wedding years earlier? We can still laugh within that story. The new Mrs. Durkin-Putnam being murdered on her wedding night? There’s no laughter there, making it an entirely impossible result (especially once they had offered a stronger diegetic justification for Meryl Streep’s recurring status with the shift from NORFBUN to NZFBUN).
Given that the reveal of the killer came in last week’s episode, “My Best Friend’s Wedding” is really not about the investigation itself, and instead becomes a commentary of sorts on how well Sazz’s murder worked as an anchor for the season’s arc. The math adds up on the mystery, as it were: we get some good insight into Marshall (nee Rex) and Sazz’s working relationship, and better understand both why she wrote the script in the first place and why Marshall’s theft registered as such a betrayal. Jane Lynch has always been a strong presence, and while the version of Sazz we see here is much more vulnerable than she tended to be in hammier guest appearances, that makes sense given her acknowledgment that age had brought on new introspection and the desire to try something new (and less damaging to her body). It’s a cheat to have Marshall’s daddy issues be the source of his knowledge of guns, and the idea that he’d escalate to sniper remains a bit absurd, but if we isolate the facts of the case it’s a perfectly cromulent spiraling of one bad decision into a host of others.