The Residence S1E7: The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb

Last week’s episode ended with a witness in the Senate hearing testifying that he saw someone dragging a body from the under-renovations Yellow Room across the hall to the game room. This isn’t quite the bombshell it’s presented as, given we already knew A.D. Wynter’s body had been moved, and he didn’t see who was doing the movie.

We fear the underwhelming reveal is a pretty solid metaphor for the show. Breathless reveals, a lot of pieces moving around, but none of it seems to add up to much. The reveal does, at least, bring Cordelia Cupp home from her birdwatching trip in the show’s present, and back on the case.

But before that happens, we open on an unfamiliar young woman tidying up her apartment and getting her Agatha Christie-reading daughter ready for school. The daughter teases her about meeting Hugh Jackman at that night’s White House dinner. She also gets a few phone calls that upset her, although we don’t hear the conversation. 

It turns out she’s part of the cleaning staff, and she does briefly get to meet Hugh Jackman. More importantly, we see her get another phone call at work, we see Wynter’s body, and we see her clutching a candlestick, Clue-style. So is this maid we’re only meeting in the second-last episode the murderer? Or is she the latest in a long string of suspects who get introduced at the start of an episode and discarded by the end? If you don’t know the answer, you haven’t been watching the show and stumbled onto this review by accident.

But there’s still two episodes left and a mystery to solve, so Harry Hollinger calls Cupp back to the White House, and gives her 48 hours to solve the crime, before the Senate can reconvene. We get yet another recap of what we’ve learned so far about A.B. Wynter’s death, but at least this time it feels like we’re watching all the details fall into place in Cupp’s mind.

Cupp had previously found a set of keys in Wynter’s pocket — they turn out to belong to Bruce, the White House engineer (ie. the plumber who unclogs Tripp Morgan’s toilet). He went through this whole thing about the President wanting his shower extra hot. The president was appreciative; Wynter was not. Bruce took it hard.

But does that make him a suspect? He was at the scene of the crime before the murder took place, but he was inspecting the room for water damage after Tripp Morgan clogged the toilet. He claims to have seen Lilly Schumaker, the White House social secretary, and we learn a little more about her: she came from money, her parents were donors to the Morgans, which got her the job. She doesn’t respect the White House traditions and wants to remake everything, which we already knew. Is any of this relevant to the murder? Unclear.

But she did see Wynter having a heated argument in the Yellow Oval Room earlier. Under some pressure she reveals who, and we’re back to the maid. Elsyie.

On the surface, there’s nothing suspicious about Elsyie. She’s the only person who no one on the staff had any issues with, and Wynter loved her. But we learn that Wynter found out some secret, a crime from her past she covered up to get the job. Like so many characters on the show, she said “I am going to kill him”. But she meant her ex-husband, who ratted her out to Wynter, venting to the engineer.

We get an extended flashback of a burgeoning relationship between Elsyie and Bruce. They initially bond during some unspecified attack on DC, and it’s a sad state of real-life affairs that the show can play that as a routine event and not a world-shattering plot turn.

So we get some insinuation that either Bruce kills Wynter to protect Elsyie, or she kills him and Bruce helps cover it up. But like so much of the plausible murder theories the show lays out, we eventually breeze past it and are onto the next thing. Next episode’s the last one, so presumably we’ll finally get a theory that sticks.

Amendments:
• The episode title is taken from a Sherlock Holmes story, in which the detective foils counterfeiters (one of whom loses a thumb escaping the scene of the crime). No thumbs were harmed in the making of this particular episode.

• Hollinger’s insistence that the apparent suicide of a butler is an all-consuming scandal rings a little hollow, given the politics of the real-life 2020s.

• “Enough with the fuckin’ birds.” Harry Hollinger speaks for all of us.

• Cupp’s ongoing aggressive dismissiveness towards Randall Park is the show’s most fun dynamic.

• Then again, angry chefs Bronson Pinchot and Mary Wiseman are pretty delightful.