The Residence S1E3: Knives Out

Last week, we saw a flashback of Swiss pastry chef Didier Gotthard (Bronson Pinchot) murdering A.B. Wynter. We open on him cleaning what looks like blood off of a knife, and hiding a bloody cloth. It can’t possibly be him this early in the season, can it? But what actually is going on here is certainly a mystery.

It seemed possible that the flashback was merely a what-if. But we very quickly get another flashback this week, of Gotthard removing the bloody knife from the murder scene. So whatever his involvement, he was at the scene of the crime. We also get a quick flashback of Cordelia Cupp meeting Gotthard in the first episode, and noticing one of the knives in his otherwise-immaculate slightly askew.

We also go back several months, to some low-stakes White House drama. Every year, Gotthard puts a tremendous amount of effort into an incredibly detailed gingerbread model of the White House. He even includes a candy figure of Wynter, who tries to be gracious, but doesn’t try very hard. But Christmas at the White House, and tradition in general, are important to Gotthard, so when Lilly Schumacher, the White House social secretary, brings in a new-age medium who wants the holiday season to, “highlight balance, hydration, and meditation,” the gingerbread house is relegated to a small, out-of-the-way room, Gotthard seethes.

Except he isn’t mad at Schumacher, he’s mad at Wynter. Wynter’s his boss, and while they don’t always see eye to eye, he expects the boss to go to bat for him. Instead, Wynter demurs with a quiet, “We’re not here to push back. We’re here to execute.”

Jasmine Haney, Wynter’s replacement, walks us (and Cordelia) through the sharp divide between the long-term White House staff who are expected to execute, and the presidential administration they’re not expected to push back against.

We also learn that Gotthard had a grudge against Marvella, the fiery-tempered White House chef we met in the previous episode. She was a newcomer with new ideas; he was a long-serving traditionalist. She was a temperamental genius, he was the Salieri to her Mozart. It doesn’t seem like that rivalry ends up with A.B. Wynter being murdered, but the show takes note of it, so we should as well.

It’s still clear that someone wanted Wynter dead; at some point after Hydration Christmas (which predictably ends up being a debacle), a member of the staff finds the Wynter candy figure in the neglected gingerbread house, with a tiny knife in its back.

This all feels like it’s building up to something, but we abruptly drop all of it so Cordelia can pick up another, seemingly-unrelated thread. The detective isn’t terribly involved in the first half of the episode, as we get backstory and exposition surrounding Gotthard. But we end firmly in the present, with Cordelia interrogating the White House gardener, to try and deduce who was skulking around the shed the night Wynter was murdered. 

We get a great moment where Cupp very quickly uses her powers of observation to pick apart the scene at the greenhouse and unravel the gardener’s story. In doing so, we see how good the show is at laying down seemingly unimportant details that come back later. And we have another set of clues to lead us into the next episode.

Amendments:
• Pinchot is known for his very broad roles in Beverly Hills Cop and Perfect Strangers, but he’s terrifically dry and restrained here.

• Along those lines, we’ve been critical of the show’s clumsy attempts at awkward humor, but a running question about what type of Swiss Gotthard is — German-Swiss, French-Swiss, or Austrian-Swiss — and whether there even is such a thing as Swiss-Swiss, is the kind of understated humor the show does well.

• Uzo Aduba is terrific when the show simply lets Cordelia be the smartest person in the room. But her long digressions about birds simply aren’t that interesting, and the more the show goes back to that well, the more it feels like “look at us, we gave this character a quirk, singular.”