Steve Martin (Charles-Haden Savage), Martin Short (Oliver Putnam), Selena Gomez (Mabel Mora), Meryl Streep (Loretta Durkin), Bobby Cannavale (Nicky Caccimelio), Beanie Feldstein (Althea), Jermaine Fowler (Randall), Russell G. Jones (Grover Stanley), Richard Kind (Vince Fish), Da’Vine Joy Randolph (Detective Donna Williams), Dianne Wiest (Lorraine Coluca), Renée Zellweger (Camila White)

While our crew is grappling with the sad news that Camila White has been buying up the Arconia to turn it into a casino, there’s some good news on the horizon. Mabel runs into Thē (one of the most annoying names to type), who invites her to an exclusive girls’ night. And while that would be a great way to lift her spirits in any case, this party is in the gaming parlor and hosted by Camila, giving Mabel another chance to investigate and potentially stop the sale before it’s too late. As Mabel is telling Oliver and Charles the good news about this exclusive invite, they share her excitement — but in a very “women be shopping” kind of way, saying that when girls get together they yap like hens, which will surely lead to some good intel. Best of all — and the part that made me laugh out loud — is when Mabel jokes that she should bring “tampons” as a party favor and Charles sternly replies, “Mabel, please don’t swear.” “If only you two were ladies,” Randall then says, but unfortunately for us, Oliver rejects the idea of them pulling a Tootsie. Instead, he calls up his favorite woman, Loretta, who abandons her trip back to New Zealand to help Mabel on this mission. After all, we’ve never known Mabel to necessarily be a “girl’s girl” — she’s more of a “theatrical old man’s girl.” Loretta arrives with Detective Williams, who’s planning on using her card-game expertise to get Camila to confess after a losing streak. But Loretta has a different idea: using her untapped talents as a medium (which everyone is hearing about for the first time), given Camila’s notorious “woo-woo” reputation and belief that she’s the reincarnated spirit of her great-grandmother.

The show does an impressive job of keeping Meryl Streep’s Loretta in the fold without feeling like it’s making a monumental change to the original formula. It’s not typical for a past season’s suspect to stick around so permanently like this, but since she’s Oliver’s love interest turned wife, it makes sense. At the same time, the conceit of her primarily living in New Zealand to shoot her television show helps to ensure that she never feels like a fourth wheel and can breeze in to do some silly voices, service the plot, hang with Marty, then leave. But speaking of fourth wheels, as this new all-female trio makes their way to this glitzy ladies’ night, they run into Rainey crying in the lobby. She’s been distraught ever since she found out that they think someone killed Lester, and when they tell her where they’re heading she demands to join in to help find his killer. There doesn’t appear to be a strict guest list at this thing, so why not! Their plan starts off strong, with Detective Williams posing as a card dealer and ensuring that Camila gets bad hand after bad hand in blackjack. But soon enough, Rainey can’t bear sitting across from the woman she believes killed her husband, so she finally snaps at her and Mabel has to escort her away. When they return to the lobby, they linger at Lester’s old doorman hat that’s on display but then realize that his most coveted possession, the elevator crank, is still missing. More on this later.

Back downstairs, Loretta continues to operate under her psychic persona but boldly rats out Detective Williams for cheating as a way to earn Camila’s trust. All the wheels are falling off this mission now, so Loretta’s the last chance for them to walk away with something. She tells Camila about her psychic abilities and that someone’s coming through, but it’s not her great grandmother, it’s someone else — which prompts Camila to have visions of the mysterious finger chop. Via these psychic flashbacks, we see that not only did Camila try to bring Nicky in on her casino plan, but she did so because she was in love with him. He turned her down, and even worse, told her that he’s not leaving his wife after all. That seems like reason enough to kill, doesn’t it? But not so fast, because we see later on that Nicky had a change of heart. In the midst of his “disappearance” he changed his mind after catching his wife sleeping with someone else — so all bets are off (pun intended). Camila told him to set up a private game night with just the billionaires, and soon enough their plan will come together. It all would have worked too, if it weren’t for that “fucking doorman,” she tells Loretta. Back upstairs, Oliver and Charles are distressed to discover just how many apartments Camila has already bought up. In fact, she’s only one unit away from having a 51 percent majority stake in the building, which would mean curtains on the Arconia. Luckily, they find the owner of that last apartment, which is hours away from going into escrow — and since he’s a therapist, they sit for a session in hopes of convincing him not to sell (and work through their own mommy and relationship issues along the way).

Things don’t really start getting productive on that front until Detective Williams shows up and proves to be a much better therapist — so much so that she turns the tables and manages to convince the real therapist to stay put. But the celebration is short-lived when they realize that it’s already midnight, which means the apartment (and building) is now Camila’s. It’s all riding on Loretta now, and luckily for them she soon arrives to share all of the fresh new intel she got from pretending to be a psychic — and delivers Camila’s “fucking doorman” line in an uncanny Renée Zellweger impression. Best of all, she also found the murder weapon: Lester’s missing elevator crank, bloodied and hidden in Nicky’s office. And speaking of guest stars doing all of the trio’s investigative work for them, Richard Kind then bounds into the room (as Richard Kinds are wont to do) with a huge development of his own. He got a notification on his bird-watching app that Lester’s favorite bird was just in the courtyard, but it was actually Rainey using Lester’s old bird whistle that activated the bird camera attached to the app. Camera, you say? That’s right, a camera that Bash Steed doesn’t have control of, which is activated by bird calls, and has footage from the night Lester died. We see that after his fall (or push) into the fountain, Lester made a point to blow his whistle to turn on the cameras — and what they show is Randall retrieving the bloodied elevator crank. When Camila said the “fucking doorman” interfered, she didn’t mean Lester. And if you recall, the “DIE LESTER DIE” carving that Randall made in the staff room wasn’t about the robot like he tried to claim (duh, the robot’s name is spelled LESTR). But why? A classic understudy killing the main star situation? Did Randall want a chance at all that casino money Lester was raking in? Or maybe Randall was the person having an affair with Nicky’s wife and this was some kind of attempt to keep him from selling away the building? In any case, we’ve got two episodes left to tie up these loose ends, and probably untie a few more in the process.

Steve Martin (Charles-Haden Savage), Martin Short (Oliver Putnam), Selena Gomez (Mabel Mora), Michael Cyril Creighton (Howard Morris), Meryl Streep (Loretta Durkin), Beanie Feldstein (Althea), Téa Leoni (Sofia Caccimelio), Da’Vine Joy Randolph (Detective Donna Williams), Christoph Waltz (Bash Steed), Dianne Wiest (Lorraine Coluca), Andrea Bianchi (Sue), Elizabeth D’Onofrio (Nonna), Joshua Iverson (Young Artful Dodger), Camden Everett Kwok (Young Oliver Twist), John Leone (Realtor), Hayes McCracken (Young Oliver), Judah Horenfeldt (Young Pickpocket #1), Oliver Logue (Young Pickpocket #2), Avion Burrell (Young Pickpocket #3), Nico Calero (Young Pickpocket #4), Jim O’Hare (Al), Ivy Schur (Tween Girl), Rigby Sheehan (Pat Rafferty), Ian Unterman (Fagin)

It took half the season, but Meryl Streep is finally back. Loretta and her Wednesday Addams braids make their grand return to the Arconia for the first time since her wedding, but sadly it’s for an unfortunate reason. Her apartment of 47 years burned down, and she lost everything in the fire. “But let’s put aside the gloom and doom; let’s talk murder,” she says, which is a phenomenal line. As we saw at the end of last week’s episode, Sofia and Rainey appear to be up to no good, which means the trio finally has two suspects that their Wondify contract doesn’t stop them from podcasting about. And in even more good news, Sofia returned Charles’s phone without issue, and he’s put that relationship behind him – so he’s back to the dating apps to satiate his testosterone-fueled appetite. Although he now has his phone, it turns out something else is missing. When Detective Williams arrives to collect the severed finger for testing, they discover that the cup holding it is empty. Based on the mysterious scuff marks near Charles’s freezer, it looks like someone with sticky fingers of their own broke in to steal it. So he and Mabel decide to take on that side mission, sending Oliver and Loretta to check out what the widows are up to. As they head out to Oliver’s old stomping grounds in Flatbush, the rest of the gang bumps into Thē in the elevator, where Charles lets it slip that they’re investigating a potential break-in. As it turns out, the previous night, Thē spotted a suspicious light coming from one of the apartments on the 14th floor while doing ’shrooms with Seth Rogen (likely), and sure enough, it was Charles’s unit. The last thing Mabel wants is Thē encroaching on her turf even further, but Detective Williams (who can read their entire dynamic right off the bat) tells her she has to essentially grow up and work with her to get more information.

Mabel doesn’t exactly follow that advice, though, at least not at first. When they all track down the replacement LESTR to watch the security-camera footage of Charles’s door, there’s no sign of anyone, even though Thē claims she was there. Was she really, though, Mabel asks her, or was she just lying for attention? Naturally, Thē takes offense and storms out, just before they catch a glitch in the video that proves she was, in fact, there and that the footage had been tampered with. This, of course, creates a nightmare scenario for Mabel, in which she now has to go apologize to her nemesis. When she tries to do just that, she’s met with a shoe being hurled at her across Thē’s apartment … which, fair. The pair’s cold war finally comes to a head, and we get to hear Thē’s perspective on the end of their childhood friendship. Mabel was depressed after losing her friend, but since Thē didn’t know that, she just thought she was being ghosted, which in turn made her depressed – a classic Three’s Company–esque misunderstanding when you think about it. She even confesses that she’s always wanted to be like Mabel, even moving into the Arconia to emulate her. After talking this all through, they come to a truce, and Mabel now has a new old friend in the building with her. Beanie Feldstein masterfully changes this character from the almost caricature-like narcissist we first meet into one that’s much more dimensional, grounded, and pleasant, without it ever feeling like a jarring switch. It’ll be interesting to see how she continues to walk that line, what role this friendship plays moving forward, and most importantly, if the show releases Thē’s pop song on Spotify. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, Oliver and Loretta (clad in sunglasses, a hat, and a long trench coat to avoid suspicion) arrive at Rainey’s home to discover that she’s conveniently having an open house, meaning they can waltz right in. They split up to investigate, and Loretta finds herself in a room with an “off-limits” sign on the door, because that might as well be a flashing neon arrow that says “Evidence This Way!” But as she begins to poke around the memento-filled room, Rainey bursts in, wielding a dagger. Dianne Wiest should get to hold weapons more often.

But fear not, we find out that she’s simply an opera fanatic and it was a prop used by Maria Callas in her final performance of Tosca at the Met. But now she’s selling it, along with her home and many of her other belongings from her life with Lester, which is something that Loretta, who is still grieving the loss of everything she owns, can’t wrap her head around. But Rainey tells her that it’s Lester she wants, not the stuff. Isn’t it nice when suspects can offer wisdom that’s so perfectly applicable to whatever struggle the characters investigating them are going through? Ultimately, Rainey wins over Loretta, who buys the dagger just so Rainey can keep it as a memory of Lester. But just as she’s telling Oliver that she believes Rainey is innocent, the pair spot her with Sofia making yet another suspicious handoff and decide to trail them. Unfortunately, they almost immediately get distracted and lose them, but Oliver finds himself outside of the old theater that made him fall in love with the medium when he was a kid. In fact, this whole jaunt to Flatbush has been a somewhat haunting trip down memory lane for Oliver, who has been having flashbacks of being bullied and judged for his little purple scarf and penchant for the arts. This all just further supports what we already know: Martin Short is the most culturally gay straight man we have. He and Loretta go inside and recite some of the lines they never got to deliver from their old respective projects, but as they finish, there’s clapping from the audience. Sofia and Rainey are sitting in the balcony, like a gender-bent Statler and Waldorf. Despite how sinister that reveal was, and how suspicious they’ve been acting, it turns out they’ve got a pretty good story. They say that the handoff the previous night was just Sofia giving Rainey the money Nicky owed Lester from their business dealings, and today Sofia was lending Rainey a prop gun for a production of Newsies she’s directing at that theater. But wait a minute … is there a gun in Newsies? I have no memory of there being a gun in Newsies, but Loretta and Oliver seem to just accept this explanation. If you or a loved one were in a production of Newsies that required a gun, please comment below to clear Rainey’s name.

It’s during this exchange that Rainey informs us that Lester wasn’t even supposed to be working the casino the night he died, and that he had taken off to attend Oliver’s wedding. She also hands over a bird-shaped bird whistle that he had on him when he died to aid the investigation, so at least Oliver and Loretta are walking away with something. When they return to the Arconia, Oliver pulls Mabel aside to tell her that he will, in fact, be moving from the building. I feel like we’ve seen this kind of story line play out before, so it feels a little “Boy Who Cried Wolf,” but Oliver says he won’t be leaving the Upper West Side, so we shouldn’t be too impacted by this move in any case. And speaking of stories that we’ve seen play out before, Charles is flirting away with someone he shouldn’t be. This time, it’s the mystery woman from his dating app, and he’s being a little too forthcoming about the case to keep the conversation going. Not only that, but as Detective Williams shows them the footage of Lester’s death, which has also clearly been tampered with, Charles realizes there’s a familiar logo in the corner. The dating app he’s using and the security-camera system are owned by the same company, and they quickly find out that that company is owned by … drumroll … Bash. The billionaire played by Christoph Waltz not only has been able to watch them this whole time, but he’s also been able to edit the security footage to have it show whatever he wants. And, if Charles’s online prospect is in fact a catfish like the others suspect, Bash could be the person he’s chatting to. Right on cue, he gets a haunting message, supposedly from Bash posing as “Priscilla,” that reads, “You’re such a smarty pants, now I need to come hunt you down.” I know they’re all assuming it’s Bash, but I’m still holding out hope that it’s a real lady who just happens to be flirting very ominously.