Steve Martin (Charles-Haden Savage), Martin Short (Oliver Putnam), Selena Gomez (Mabel Mora), Paul Rudd (Ben Glenroy), Michael Cyril Creighton (Howard Morris), Paul Rudd (Ben Glenroy), Meryl Streep (Loretta Durkin), Linda Emond (Donna DeMeo), Allison Guinn (K.T.), Jeremy Shamos (Dickie Glenroy), Wesley Taylor (Clifford DeMeo), Matthew Manuel (Clerk), Makia Martin (Security Guard)

In a dream sequence much more unsettling than any of the gruesome murders this show has depicted thus far, Mabel dreams that she’s giving birth to triplets: one being a microphone, and the other two being Charles and Oliver’s heads on baby’s bodies. “Congratulations, it’s a podcast,” the doctor tells her right before she wakes up. Fresh off of another cardiac event, Oliver’s already being discharged, which means it’s time to return to the murder board. Because what better way to celebrate avoiding death than by diving right into it? The trio’s mission at hand is to clear Loretta’s name by finding the actual murderer before she pleads guilty at her arraignment that night. If she’s really taking the fall for Dickie, they need to prove his guilt to free her. As the three leave to interrogate him, they’re met with deliveries waiting at the door: Joy’s no-longer-needed wedding dress and a case of Schmackary’s cookies from Donna, wishing Oliver well. We just can’t escape these cookies … In their conversation with Dickie, he admits to covering up Ben’s bloodwork — but to hide the drugs he was taking, not the poison. Plus, it turns out that Dickie has a solid alibi for that night. “I got wasted, put on Ben’s CoBro suit, and went looking for drugs and whores,” he says, an activity that was apparently routine for his brother. He explains that Ben would often disappear to somewhere on 35th and Broadway every Thursday night to “do sex with his five whores.” Dickie even gives us their names, which could pass for a Drag Race casting announcement: “Trixie, Marigold, Emerald, Dot, and MaeMae.”

And with that, the trio knows where their next stop is. But how do you get into a brothel without an appointment? Oliver’s convinced that if you’re carrying a ladder, you can get anywhere you’re trying to go, while Charles’s Plan B is crying on command. Neither works, but nonetheless, they make it to the back of the “brothel” and find out that it isn’t a brothel at all. It’s just a regular fabric store, and the “five whores” are five old-lady seamstresses. But the good news is they know Ben Glenroy, explaining that Ben was a part of their Thursday-night sewing circle. They explain that they had helped him sew all those handkerchiefs leading up to his opening night and then got a distressed voice-mail from Ben right before curtain about needing them, feeling alone, and being surrounded by people he can’t trust. So what happened in those 30 minutes between him excitedly arriving at the theater and him leaving that upsetting voice-mail? To try and fill that gap, the trio finally watches the footage from Detective Williams’s interrogations, and piece by piece, they assemble the events of that night. Ben arrived late and was met by a cranky KT. Cliff then tried to deliver the Schmackary’s that his mom ordered, but Ben resisted, telling Cliff he was fasting until after the show. In Dickie’s interrogation, he told Detective Williams that Loretta was encouraging him to quit his position with Ben, who interrupted them and discovered his brother’s plan to leave. That resulted in a blowup fight between the pair with Ben blaming Loretta. So when it was time to rehearse his fight with the nanny, things escalated, with Ben grabbing Loretta and yelling at her to stay away from him and his brother. This is where Charles stepped in and punched Ben in the face.

After Joy touches Ben’s now bruised face, the next person to see him is Donna, who encourages him to collect himself in his dressing room and do whatever it takes to get himself ready to go onstage. Tobert arrives to film the documentary, but Ben grabs his camera and tells him to fuck off. It’s that camera that captures Ben’s conversation with someone in his dressing room. But with everybody accounted for, the trio still doesn’t know who he could have been speaking to, and they hit a dead end. With dwindling hope of freeing Loretta, Oliver is down in the dumps, and Charles can commiserate after being confronted with Joy’s wedding dress. But Mabel insists she has both of them beat, with the case unsolved, her life a mess, and no place to live. This is exactly the kind of life crisis the Friends theme song was written about. She’s not where she thought she’d be in life at all and casually mentions that today is her 30th birthday. The one positive is that there’s nothing she’d rather be doing on her birthday than solving a murder with her guys. And what better birthday present than a new lead rushing into the room to save them from their dead end? It’s Howard, who bursts in having finally pieced together the shredded evidence and hands the taped-together paper to Oliver, who immediately recognizes it after reading just two words: “didn’t sing.” It’s Maxine’s unpublished, negative review of the show. It says that Ben is the weak link of the play, calling him as wooden as the lighthouse onstage. Hmm, doesn’t that last line sound familiar? With new evidence to ponder, Oliver breaks out one of his beloved dips to celebrate Mabel’s birthday (if someone ever tried to replace my birthday cake with hummus I’d be the murderer in that building), and begins talking to it about how much he’s missed it while on his heart-healthy diet. Seeing Oliver speak to his food like a person makes something click in Mabel’s head, and it suddenly occurs to her who Ben was talking to in his dressing room. It was, as some bright minds have suspected, a Schmackary’s cookie. We see it play out: Ben houses the cookie, and faced with his own reflection in the mirror, grabs the lipstick, and writes “Fucking pig” over his own reflection.

When their attention turns to the cookie, Oliver remembers that they were ordered by Donna. He also recalls that at sitzprobe, Donna had said the same line from the review about being “as wooden as the lighthouse,” suggesting that she had read it ahead of time thanks to her press connections. But would a producer sabotage her own play? Would she really kill the lead just because of Maxine’s bad review? If a producer killed their lead every time their show flopped, the Tonys “In Memoriam” would be three hours long. But Mabel points out something very important: This wasn’t technically Donna’s play that she was trying to derail; it was her son Cliff’s. And if it were brutally panned, his big debut could have also been his last. So our trio sets the scene: Donna reads the review calling Ben the weak link and shreds it in KT’s office as Howard tries to retrieve the ritual broom. She spots the rat poison and a Schmackary’s cookie and gets an idea — as you can imagine, a Broadway producer with a bright idea is a dangerous thing. She leaves the poisoned cookie in his dressing room and encourages him to “be nice” to himself ahead of curtain. And when the cookie didn’t work, she slipped out of the cast party to push him down the elevator shaft. The weak link is taken care of, and the bad reviews are never to be published. The last few episodes have been carefully laying the groundwork for the killer to be a mother doing whatever it takes to protect her child; it just wasn’t the mother we’ve been focusing on. Loretta proved to be an excellent avatar for the show to explore this theme of motherhood, which is also ingrained in their fictional musical via the nanny, and now, with this reveal, those seasonlong themes can seamlessly be applied to our killer. So they’ve solved the case, but Loretta’s arraignment is in 20 minutes. How will they ever get there in time? Oliver and Charles are fresh out of ladders and tears, respectively, but Mabel spots Joy’s wedding dress. “Nobody stops a bride,” she says and dons the gown as her ticket to wherever she needs to go. Let’s suspend our disbelief and just accept that our gang can make it from the Upper West Side all the way downtown in 20 minutes by cab, which they do without incident. At the courthouse, a bailiff almost stops them, questioning their getups, but Charles tells her, “We’re the fathers of the bride,” prompting an “Oh, that’s fun!” from Oliver — our George Banks and Franck, respectively. (Speaking of, isn’t it about time Diane Keaton made a cameo? Season four, maybe …)

They burst into the courtroom hoping they aren’t too late, and with Mabel in a wedding dress, it reads like a reverse “Speak now or forever hold your peace” moment. Luckily, they’re right on time, and Oliver can tell Loretta that they cracked the case and she doesn’t need to go down for it. “Who do you think did it?” she asks, and right as she does, Donna stands up in the courtroom. With a whole episode left, I don’t know if Donna plans on going gently into that good night.

Steve Martin (Charles-Haden Savage), Martin Short (Oliver Putnam), Selena Gomez (Mabel Mora), Paul Rudd (Ben Glenroy), Meryl Streep (Loretta Durkin), Gerald Caesar (Ty Wessex), Linda Emond (Donna DeMeo), Allison Guinn (K.T.), Da’Vine Joy Randolph (Detective Donna Williams), Don Darryl Rivera (Bobo Malone), Jeremy Shamos (Dickie Glenroy), Wesley Taylor (Clifford DeMeo), Jason Veasey (Jonathan Bridgecroft), Bret Shuford (Director), Joel Waggoner (Tom)

One of this season’s biggest mysteries is the details of Meryl Streep’s contract to guest star. Were there a certain number of episodes she committed to? Were all of her scenes for the whole season shot back to back? Who’s idea were the Willie Nelson braids? Since she’s obviously not going to play background actor for group scenes that don’t involve her, Meryl has breezed in and out of the show every couple of weeks for Loretta’s big moments, and luckily for us, this is yet another one of her episodes. In fact, it’s such a Loretta episode that she kicks things off with a voiceover that once again digs into her past. Some of what we learn isn’t new, like how she fell in love with theater after seeing No Strings and moved to New York to pursue it. But we find out that in between those life events she had become pregnant and put the baby up for adoption to follow her dream. As some have suspected, that baby was in fact Dickie, and thanks to his connection to his famous brother, Loretta has been able to follow her son’s life from afar. That explains her book of newspaper clippings, all of which feature Dickie in the background of Ben’s success — which Loretta discovers has been taken from her apartment. She explains that when she saw Ben Glenroy was doing a Broadway show, she knew it was her chance to finally meet Dickie. So she weaseled her way into an audition and ultimately booked the role. She writes this all in an explanatory letter to Dickie, which she plans to give him after the show’s sitzprobe. A sitzprobe is the first rehearsal where the actors perform with the orchestra, and, as Loretta’s voiceover says, it’s where actors have opportunities to change their choices for the better. These voiceovers love a good double meaning. Just as the sitz are getting ready to probe, Mabel shows up. Our estranged trio is finally reunited. She tells them that her gut is telling her that Dickie is the murderer, and Oliver is thrilled to get on board with any suspect that isn’t a part of his cast.

As the cast performs a booming rendition of “Creature of the Night,” (a title I can’t hear without thinking about the end of “Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me” from Rocky Horror), they all get news alerts on their phones that Greg’s name has been cleared of Ben’s murder — and he’s been released. Now, that’s great news since we know he didn’t kill Ben, but he did kidnap Charles and Mabel and tried to kill them with a crème brûlée torch, right? So maybe they could have kept him in custody for that? Anyway, just as Loretta says her line, “Who goes there?” the doors burst open and Detective Williams answers, “NYPD, motherfuckers.” “The killer is someone in this room,” she announces like she’s an Agatha Christie protagonist before getting momentarily distracted when she recognizes Kimber, who she saw play Roxie in Chicago. A key part of any theater-going experience (even if you’re going there for a murder investigation) is trying to place what else you saw an actor in. Oliver is able to convince Detective Williams to conduct her interrogations in the theater, so as not to further disrupt their sitzprobe (and to keep the show from having to pay for a second shooting location). But the police being present for the sitzprobe, though not ideal, isn’t nearly as bad as another attendee that producers Donna and Cliff spot in the audience. They’re horrified to learn that Oliver has invited Maxine, the theater critic that told him the opening night performance didn’t “sing.” Sitzprobes are not a place for critics, but that’s just how desperate Oliver is for her approval. While Charles awkwardly tries to spy on Williams’s investigation, Mabel gets pulled away by Howard, who says he’s made a huge break in the case. He takes her to KT’s office and explains that when the cops arrived he rushed there to shred his “Papa Smurf Skeletor slash fic,” if I heard him correctly (I hope I didn’t). It was then that he discovered that the shredder was the mysterious noise he heard from the locked room on opening night. Someone was in there shredding something, and Howard is convinced that he can reassemble the shredded papers to crack the case.

Speaking of incriminating papers, Oliver admits to Loretta that he swiped her book full of newspaper clippings from her apartment. He says that she doesn’t owe him any explanation … but he would still like an explanation. He assures her that he doesn’t think she’s the killer, and that, in fact, Mabel thinks it’s Dickie. This isn’t the relief to Loretta that he thinks it’ll be — now she’s worried about her son being the target of the investigation. While Mabel’s on the hunt for scotch tape for Howard’s crime-stopping crafting, Loretta approaches her and awkwardly tries to pry for investigation details. Mabel doesn’t budge, noting that the killer often tries to insert themselves like this, but Loretta says that her interest is because she’s worried about losing her long-awaited big break. Being a late bloomer herself, Mabel throws Loretta a bone, admitting that Dickie is her prime suspect. Eager to get the attention off of her son, Loretta throws out some other possibilities like Bob and KT, but Mabel doesn’t bite. It’s finally time for Charles to perform his patter song — “all two minutes and 46 seconds” of it, as Oliver says, like it’s Ariana Grande’s longest track. Though at severe risk of being a trainwreck, Charles avoids the white room and knocks the song out of the park like a regular Matthew Broderick. As he patters away, Oliver sets out on some mission of his own, Loretta spots the cops talking to Dickie, and Mabel and Howard try (and fail) to piece together the shreds of paper. Just as they’re about to give up, Mabel sees a box of rat poison near the shredder and is reinvested in this theory. Howard has a small lead after taping together a few scraps that spell out the date of opening night, so Mabel encourages him to keep going.

Meanwhile, Mabel rejoins Oliver and Charles to see if they’ve had better luck spying on Detective Williams (based on what we’ve seen, I’d say probably not). But all is not what it seems because it turns out that their failed attempts to eavesdrop were really all part of a carefully orchestrated plot. Knowing that she’s a theater fan, Charles muttered the patter song in front of her to pique her interest, and then Oliver told her that Charles’s performance was sure to be a trainwreck, knowing that she’d want to see for herself. She took the bait, leaving the interrogation room to watch Charles, thus giving Oliver an opportunity to bug the room with Tobert’s GoPro, which was able to capture the rest of her interrogations in full. “That sounds so unnecessarily complicated,” an impressed Mabel says before we have time to question why they couldn’t have just left the GoPro in there from the get-go. In any case, the gang’s back together. Loretta, meanwhile, finds Dickie, and the pair talk about opening night. “He said I was dead to him,” Dickie says about his fight with Ben, but he’s not upset about how things left off between them. Instead, he explains, those few moments after the initial poisoning, when he thought his brother was dead, he finally felt free. And then when he came back to life, he was “trapped” again. “I couldn’t take it anymore … you understand,” he says, flirting with a confession. A guilt-ridden Loretta tells him that he doesn’t deserve any of this, feeling responsible for putting him in this position. It’s almost time for her to perform her number, but just before that, Oliver talks to Maxine, who is impressed at what she’s seeing. She calls it “pure Oliver Putnam.” He’ll have to wait for an official review though before finding out if it “sings.” Riding high off of that good news, he pulls Loretta aside to tell her he trusts her, doesn’t care about the book, and tells her that he loves her. She then takes the stage.

As Loretta sings her song, Mabel and Charles peruse her purse, finding the book of clippings and the letter she had meant to give to Dickie explaining everything. Then, just as she sings, “If you want those kids, you gotta go through me,” the cops begin to take Dickie away. Loretta, panicked, stops the song and yells out, “I did it! I killed Ben!” Loretta is presumably taking the fall for her son, but that seems too neat and tidy given that we still have two episodes left. We don’t technically know for certain if Dickie is actually guilty and needs her to fall on her sword like this. Based on their earlier conversation, it sounds possible that someone else poisoned Ben, and Dickie liked him being dead so much that he finished the job in the elevator. In any case, if Loretta’s confession is a lie, it’ll be easy to debunk. And I think that could very well be the case because I still think those Schmackary’s cookies had something to do with this. As his star and love interest is taken away in handcuffs, Oliver has another heart attack. Not since Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has a show been so cursed.