By Tom Smyth, a freelance writer covering pop culture. 
Mabel, Charles, and Oliver meet up with Camila, Bash, and Jay, the billionaires who spin them a story that’s too convenient to believe. Photo: Patrick Harbron/Disney
Lester is dead, long live LESTR. While the Arconia’s beloved human doorman is no longer with us, his name (sort of) lives on by way of the building’s new robot doorman, LESTR, which Howard tells us stands for Logic Engineered Secure Tenant Robot. Don’t worry, Randall’s still there, thanks to his union, but Howard is trying to train this clanker to pick up some of the slack. In other times, this would play as a fun, absurdist bit, but if I walked into a building and saw a LESTR (which looks a lot like the robots that already roam around grocery stores harassing me), I wouldn’t blink. Nonetheless, I don’t think robots stand a chance against humans as long as we’ve got Jackie Hoffman on our side.
In brighter news, Richard Kind makes his grand return this episode as Vince, and it seems like his conjunctivitis has finally cleared up since he’s without his signature eye patch. Oliver, eager to prove that he isn’t a narcissist, has taken it upon himself not only to put together the murder board for a change but also be proactive in their investigation by recruiting Vince to help them decode Lester’s ledger. Like Lester, Vince is a birder, which means he can help them figure out which bird in the ledger corresponds to which billionaire at the casino that night.
While there was normally a whole “flock” of birds at these gambling nights, that evening there were only five. Together, they’re able to figure out which birds represents Nicky, Jay, Camila, and Bash — matching up fowl characteristics with the foul characteristics of each billionaire. And while this exercise does give us the chance to hear Richard Kind deliver several different bird calls, they don’t cover who that fifth bird could be. Presumably, it wouldn’t be Lester himself, so who is it? It seems like the trio is too blinded by the lead they have with Jay’s missing finger to dig into that question, so I guess we’ll have to wait to complete this birdhouse.
Instead their focus is on making contact with Jay, which they decide to do by releasing a podcast teaser riddled with finger puns, hoping to signal that they’re on to him. The plan works flawlessly, and not long after posting it, Jay replies with a video saying he’ll be there at seven that night to clear this all up.
But before that, Mabel and Oliver have another run-in in the hallway with Mabel’s frenemy Thē, which means we once again get to see a flustered Mabel desperately try to impress her. It also means we get to hear a snippet of Thē’s hit song (rest easy, Mabel, it’s no “Single Soon”). Mabel finds herself getting competitive with a podcast that Thē is a fan of, Drunk Sluts Do Murderso much so that she lies and says that they just signed a big deal at Wondify. While no such deal exists yet, back at the apartment Mabel says that she’ll submit a pitch to retroactively make that lie a reality. She also reveals her backstory with Thē further, explaining how they were very close until Zoe’s death (“Oh, from season one!” Oliver remembers), after which Thē completely changed and ditched her.
Later that night when Jay arrives, he’s joined, or rather followed, by two uninvited guests — Camila and Bash — who crash the get-together to ensure that Jay doesn’t throw them under the bus. Or to use their words, they want to give the trio the “opportunity to keep us out of your podcast before we sue you for libel.” When Mabel points out that they saw them sniffing around a murder scene, referring to the casino, they say that, according to the news, Nicky was found hanging from a rack at the dry cleaners. Mabel then lets it slip that they may have done their own little autopsy, so now each side has something over the other. This big group conversation isn’t really going anywhere, so they decide to split them all up to get them talking.
But these pairings prove to be more like therapy sessions than interrogations for the trio. Oliver ends up seeking advice from Camila, an interior-design expert who’s a cross between Gwyneth Paltrow and Martha Stewart, about whether he needs to get a new place to nest and establish his marriage with Loretta. Meanwhile, as Charles (who seems plagued by his own mortality) and Bash (famous for fighting his) cook dinner, Bash tells him that while technology (and his stable of teen-plasma donors) has helped him stay young, reinvention is the real key. We also get a posthumous Regis Philbin cameo during this exchange, when Charles drops his grandmother’s recipe into the sauce, seemingly losing it forever, before Bash uses his phone to pull up a decades-old video of Charles sharing it on Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee. This is an especially fun nod given that one of the show’s writers and executive producers is Regis’s daughter J.J. Philbin.
As for Mabel and Jay, he tells her that the only crime he’s guilty of is being an embarrassing nepo baby and trying to shake off that stigma by doing something good, but he just keeps trusting the wrong people. She can relate to that and shares her own, similar story with Thē, perhaps showing her cards too much. She’s clearly charmed by him, despite crushing on a suspect typically being Charles’s thing, as Oliver later points out. Ultimately, the story they’re told and believe is that Nicky showed up angry, wielding a meat cleaver, and then Jay stepped up trying to be a hero, and his finger got chopped off.
Back when they’re alone, Mabel gets word that her pitch worked and Wondify wants to sign them. It’s like a gift from God, or perhaps a gift from someone with more money than God. But Mabel’s likely too blinded by this chance to stick it to Thē to question the suspicious timing. They sign the contract, tour the offices, and check out their new fancy studio before she has a realization about their evidence. The finger they found is from the opposite hand, so it can’t be Jay’s after all, meaning the story the billionaires fed them was a lie. But before they can even turn their attention back to them, their new boss at Wondify alerts them that a clause in their contract prohibits them from investigating Wondify management, which now includes their new majority stakeholders: Camila, Bash, and Jay.
As we heard from these billionaires at the beginning of the episode, it’s not about money for them; it’s about winning. That’s what they’re drawn to, and it’s what they’re good at. So good, in fact, that they were able to win this time by making their opponents (Mabel, Charles, and Oliver) think that they were playing a totally different game altogether. And now that they’ve finally realized, it’s too late — at least until this three-year contract is up. But then again, contracts have loopholes.
