It’s almost as if Hulu could hear my chants of “More Jackie Hoffman! More Jackie Hoffman!” each week because that’s exactly what we finally got. We also got the return of Jayne Houdyshell as the late Bunny. No, not as a force ghost but in a flashback that showed her friendship with Hoffman’s Uma. Via voice-over, we find out that Uma’s still missing her friend, underscoring the season’s recurring theme of loneliness. While people have a habit of leaving her, she says, things don’t. Things she can trust, which is why she’s developed a bit of kleptomania.
With Charles now without his trio, Uma isn’t the only solo diner anymore, and she invites him to her table to get the details on his throuple’s breakup. “Oliver only cares about his show,” Charles says, though he’s certain his friendships will bounce back. Uma says that her friendship with Bunny had its ebbs and flows, but she was lucky they were back on good terms when she died. With that food for thought, and three meals’ worth of food to go on Charles’s tab, Uma gets up to leave. As she does so, Charles spots the handkerchief that Ben had when he died in her bag. “He wasn’t gonna use it,” Uma says, justifying her thievery.
While Charles doesn’t anticipate Mabel or Oliver dying as Bunny did, Mabel is set to move out of the Arconia soon, and with the help of Theo, she’s finally getting around to packing. While discussing the case, Theo suggests that Mabel talk to the person closest to Ben, his brother Dickie, and points her in the direction of the CoBro auction happening upstairs.
While Charles and Mabel have found new temp confidants in Uma and Theo, Oliver is tasked with holding auditions to replace Charles, all of which are going poorly. So poorly that his producer, Donna, encourages him to just make up with Charles for the sake of the show. Oliver refuses to grovel, but luckily Cliff has a producerial idea of his own, and despite everything we’ve been led to believe about Cliff so far, he manages to secure Matthew Broderick as Charles’s replacement.
After Matthew nails the patter song for Oliver and the producers, Cliff explains how he met the Broadway icon while sheltering at the Ritz during Superstorm Sandy. It’s during this conversation that the group spots Charles lurking in the doorway, shocked to discover that he’s already been recast. And, he says, it’s not the first time Broderick bested him — once robbing him of his chance to play what would have been a 41-year-old Ferris Bueller. And speaking of Bueller, when telling Oliver about his intense commitment to a role, Broderick delivers a line that we can only hope he uses in everyday life: “Ferris Bueller might take a day off, but Matthew Broderick does not.”
Upstairs at the CoBro auction, superfan Theo fills in Mabel on the movie’s lore, particularly how Ben drew the CoBro comic book as a little kid and then grew up to make it into a movie. Exactly how Scorsese made GoodFellas, I imagine. When she runs into Dickie, she asks him about the phone call that Ben had to take the night he died, but Dickie shuts her down and calls her out for exploiting Ben’s murder for her podcast. “Even after he’s dead, everyone’s just trying to make a buck off my brother; it’s fucking gross,” he says before continuing the auction of his dead brother’s belongings.
When Mabel apologizes, Dickie says he was just taking out his frustration on her and tells her that Ben was always the star. Dickie says that he was adopted when his parents couldn’t conceive, but then they ended up having their miracle baby Ben. Our detective alarms should be ringing right here, especially for those who theorized that Loretta could be Dickie’s biological mother (and thus her book on Ben was really her keeping tabs on her son in the background of his success). In any case, Dickie has had to spend his life cleaning up after Ben’s messes and making him look good, all while Ben gets the credit for everything.
When Mabel shares her theory that Ben’s stalker Greg wasn’t really the killer, Dickie bristles, already convinced that his slip-up gave Greg a time to strike. Ben was killed at 12:06, Dickie tells her, and Greg was seen leaving the building right after that. Case closed.
Speaking of that night, Charles tries to retrieve Ben’s stolen hanky from Uma so he can give the clue to Mabel and Oliver as a peace offering. Unfortunately, Uma couldn’t help him even if she wanted to because she got “one of those snake dorks upstairs” to pay her $7,000 for the handkerchief. Capitalism at work! But isms, in my opinion, are not good.
Meanwhile, Oliver continues to be unable to succeed in show business despite really trying, as Matthew Broderick’s never-ending Method acting is driving him crazy. So much so that he FaceTimes Mel Brooks for advice, asking if he had to deal with these antics during The Producers, which Oliver says he never got around to seeing. In reality, Martin Short (who is universally beloved) actually played Broderick’s role of Leo Bloom himself alongside Jason Alexander in the show’s L.A. production. The 97-year-old Brooks delivers a tour de force in FaceTime acting, telling Oliver he’s fucked after telling Broderick he’s open to his ideas.
Back in Mabel’s apartment, she has a realization. While Dickie was listing some of Ben’s quirks earlier, he mentioned that he set his clocks early so he’d always be fashionably late. That means that his watch, which indicated that he was killed at 12:06, was wrong. He was really killed at 12:26, by which time Greg had already been long gone from the Arconia. But that’s not our only new breakthrough, as Theo comes in with the original CoBro comic book from earlier. They look closely at Ben’s signature of “B. Glenroy” and realize that the B is actually an R — for Richard, which is long for Dickie. “That’s motive,” Mabel says, remembering what Dickie told her about Ben getting all the credit for everything. But in my opinion, being called “Dickie” your whole life was motive enough on its own.
While Mabel is having breakthroughs, Oliver has a breakdown and (much like Ed Rooney) finally reaches the end of his rope with Matthew Broderick. The timing of this breaking point couldn’t be more perfect because it’s right when Charles is stopping by to apologize. So just like that, Broderick gets fired and Charles gets rehired. “You’re still here? It’s over. Go home. Go!” Charles tells a befuddled Broderick, quoting the iconic Ferris Bueller line that he missed out on delivering the first time around.
So we’ve officially gotten two members of our trio back on good terms — progress! Ferris and Cameron are back, but we still need our Sloane. As the two brainstorm on how to make up with Mabel, Charles asks Oliver why he erased the lipstick from the mirror in the first place. Oliver shows Charles the scrapbook that Loretta had kept, but he shrugs it off. That indifference convinces Oliver that she’s the killer since he knows how shoddy Charles’s instincts are. In any case, they realize it would be the perfect peace offering to bring to Mabel.
But when the pair knock on Mabel’s apartment door, they’re surprised to be greeted by a stranger who thinks they’re movers. Mabel has already moved out of the Arconia. Life moves pretty fast. As they stand at what was once her door, they both get a notification on their phones. Mabel has released a new episode of their podcast, this time “flying solo,” and we see everybody from Uma to the doorman listening as Mabel attempts to clear Greg’s name with the watch bombshell.
We also see that Dickie was the one who paid $7,000 for the crime-scene handkerchief. For sentimental reasons? Or to keep an important clue out of the wrong hands? And how does that compare to how much Kimber got for selling hers on eBay? Maybe there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to Dickie, much like an actual dickey. Either way, Mabel is intent on figuring it out, so long as the police (who’ve decided to reopen the case after hearing her podcast) don’t get in the way.
