Review: Only Murders in the Building, "Opening Night" | Season 3, Episode 10
Another finale means another reveal, but does this one really matter?
I often wonder what it’s like to watch television as a normal person.
To clarify, none of you reading this are normal: you’re taking the time to follow up your viewing of this season finale by digging deeper into it with this review. And I’m obviously not normal as the person writing it. For these reasons, anyone who’s been reading along in no way took last week’s “reveal” that Donna had poisoned Ben as the end of this season’s murder case. Sure, the same could be true for anyone even casually versed in the murder mystery genre, but it’s particularly the case for someone who has chosen to take that to the next level of conversing about it with others on the internet.
I raise this point not to speak down to the normals, but rather to inquire how a casual viewer was meant to relate to Oliver, Charles, and Mabel’s single-minded vision of the crime of Ben’s murder when “Opening Night” begins. Gathered with Loretta at their Murder Board, they’re laying out a scheme to catch Donna in a confession, with Charles pitching notes based on the dialogue Mabel has written. Loretta watches in awe, and Mabel insists that this is the trio “on fire.” But as someone who’s been writing about the show weekly, I couldn’t help but focus my attention on why they at no point considered that someone other than Donna might have been the one to actually kill Ben, even if she was in fact the one who poisoned him.