The only thing worse than a murder is being followed around by actors. This week, the trio has to deal with both when the cast of their forthcoming movie arrives to shadow them. But before that happens, an actor we’re always glad to see arrives — Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Detective Williams, who oddly enough wants to help Charles, Mabel, and Oliver with their investigation. Since the Feds have taken the case, she’s not involved and decides to pass off what she knows to hands more capable than said Feds. She tells the trio that they think Jan hired someone to carry out the murder from jail, that the shooter was a very good shot, and they found one shell casing in the apartment belonging to “M. Dudenoff,†a retired professor whose neighbors claim is away in Portugal (where, if you recall, their bathroom ham is from). She adds that Rudy (a.k.a. Christmas All the Time Guy) is the only one who heard the bullet because the other neighbors were playing a card game. This debrief is interrupted by the movie stars, including Zach Galifianakis, who Detective Williams calls “scrumptious, fuckable baklava.†An absolutely beautiful collection of words.
With this acting troupe arriving unannounced, the gang has conflicting feelings on whether to let them hang around. Mabel is all business and doesn’t want Eva Longoria cramping her style, but Oliver thinks it’s important that they let their portrayers study up to make the movie the best it can be. Charles is the tie-breaker and gets won over by Eugene Levy being (the one) Brazzos stan. As a result, the actors are able to witness a classic OMITB get-together. Charles thinks that Vince (a.k.a. Pink Eye Joe) might actually be hiding something else under that eye patch, whereas Mabel thinks that Christmas All the Time Guy could have wanted to kill Charles for trying to get real Christmas trees banned from the building. So in true OMITB and Scooby-Doo style, they split up.
Charles and Eugene Levy head over to Vince’s to attempt to get him to take his eye patch off so they can see if he’s hiding a recoil-inflicted bruise under there. Rather than Levy’s suggestion of doing a spit take on him to make him remove it, Charles has another plan. When Vince opens the door, the pair are both standing there … also wearing eye patches. Now, this, of course, goes without saying, but Steve Martin is a comedic genius. I hate to state the obvious, but this entire scene is just too good that I legally have to acknowledge it. Their plan, as it turns out, is to claim that they, too, have pink eye but use miracle drops that they encourage Vince to try. He unfortunately applies the drops in the bathroom, which leaves them no choice but to try operation spit take. Neither Charles nor Levy wants to be the one to spit in a suspected murderer’s face, but their game of hot potato lands on Levy, who promptly gets punched after spitting on Vince. Despite that violent streak, when he removes the patch, he looks like Bob Costas at the Olympics — no bruise, just conjunctivitis. So Vince is innocent for now, but as they leave they spot a photo of the whole floor with someone’s face scratched out. The mystery person is holding a pig, so it’s presumably the mysterious Dudenoff (unless this building has more than one pig roaming around).
Down the hall, Mabel is about to investigate Christmas All the Time Guy solo after shaking off Eva Longoria. “Mabel works alone,†she tells her, something that famously isn’t true. In fact, there are three seasons of this very TV show that refute that claim. Nevertheless, Mabel arrives to find that Eva is already in Rudy’s apartment, determined to solve a murder. Mabel operates with tact, quietly taking note of the gun on the wall and Rudy’s ham radio, but Eva doesn’t have the patience for that. She bluntly dives right in, and after some brief pleasantries quickly accuses Rudy of trying to kill Charles because he loves Christmas. But as it turns out, in one of the show’s classic twists, Christmas All the Time Guy hates Christmas. His Christmas lifestyle is all a lie. He’s really a fitness influencer who made one viral Christmas-themed video, and now all of his content has to feature the holiday to get any traction. Nonetheless, he’s still an expert on the subject, so Mabel asks him what he makes of the tinsel she found at the crime scene. He takes a lighter to it, and since it doesn’t burn, he tells Mabel that it isn’t actually tinsel (which is highly flammable). Okay, Rudy, but what if it was tinsel? Then you’d have just destroyed a key piece of evidence with fire!
Meanwhile, Oliver is focused less on the investigation and more on himself. More specifically, he’s determined to win over Zach Galifianakis because he doesn’t want his one chance at an immortalizing biopic to be ruined by an actor who couldn’t care less about him. Since Galifianakis thinks he doesn’t need any prep to play Oliver Putnam, Oliver Putnam puts him to the ultimate Oliver Putnam test. “You’re six cosmos deep at Joe Allen when Frank Rich picks a fight: Who is the definitive Mrs. Lovett? Lansbury or LuPone?†he asks. Taking a guess, Galifianakis incorrectly answers LuPone — to horrified groans from Oliver and Howard. Just the thought of it’s enough to make you sick. Ashford snubbed, to be honest.
As he tries to style his counterpart as himself, with hair volumizer and bronzer, Galifianakis asks him whether or not all of those signature Oliver Putnam stories (most of which could double as Jenna Maroney asides) are actually true. Oliver comes clean that there’s sort of a truthiness to them, in the sense that he wants them to be real, and teaches him the rubric on how to construct the perfect one. After this, Galifianakis suddenly comes around, which made me think this honesty finally gave him something authentic to grasp onto with Oliver, and the pair have a productive montage (set to the Perfect Strangers theme song) hitting it off.
Amazing, right? Wrong! It turns out it was all a lie. The actor was acting, and Oliver and Howard overhear him on the phone, continuing to lambast him to his agent and calling him a narcissist. While that may be true, Howard won’t stand for it and quickly defends Oliver and his resiliency in a way that, unfortunately, makes him seem pathetic. I don’t like to see Oliver Putnam sad; in fact, I hate it. He’s such a silly character that it hits even harder when he’s conversely downtrodden and embarrassed like this. But as it turns out, that brutally honest description from Howard is just what Galifianakis needs to view Oliver as a tragic character worth playing. A win’s a win, I guess.
Taking a page from Eva Longoria’s playbook (as I often try to do), Mabel decides to be bold herself and returns to the abandoned Dudenoff apartment — but not to investigate. Instead, she researches the city’s squatter’s rights and decides to move in. It’s not just a way for Mabel to finally have somewhere to live again (and for free, no less), but she’s also hoping that Dudenoff will have to show his face if he finds out she’s squatting there. Two birds with one stone! It’s probably not the best idea to make yourself bait to attract a suspected killer, but that just goes to show how expensive rent in Manhattan is.
At their makeshift housewarming for Mabel (sitting on the apartment floor with a pig), she and Oliver realize they both have the theme song to Perfect Strangers stuck in their heads on account of it playing on Dudenoff’s and Rudy’s ham radios. But more importantly, Oliver brings up something else that came through the airwaves: a message that said “meet me at 445,†which Oliver realizes is a frequency. They quickly tune in to that frequency (or whatever the proper ham-radio terminology is, I have a phone like a normal person), and a voice sternly tells them that they shouldn’t be on there. In fact, the voice says, the last person who came poking around ended up dead — presumably referring to Sazz, who we know was on Dudenoff’s coiled tail. “Drop this, or you’ll be next,†the voice warns, but not before recognizing the pig’s oink and sending their love.
We don’t know who the voice is, but whoever it is knows that pig. They know the pig well enough, in fact, to send their love. They love this pig. Now, I don’t suspect this pig gets out all that much, so I think it’s fair to imagine that this voice on the radio (a Delilah, if you will) has been to the Dudenoff apartment if they themselves aren’t Dudenoff. And thanks to the photo at Vince’s, we know that everybody on that floor has hung out with the pig in question.
But I’m honestly still hung up on Perfect Strangers. That has to be something, right? The ’80s sitcom was about a midwestern American moving in with his distant cousin from the Mediterranean. Could Sazz have been a body double for Bronson Pinchot? Or maybe that was a Mediterranean accent we heard over the radio? The Balki character on Perfect Strangers was originally a shepherd, and “Dudenhöffer†is a German name that roughly means “farmer,†so maybe that means something? Or maybe they just wanted to use the theme song for that montage!