The Residence S1E8: The Mystery of the Yellow Room
The Residence is not without its flaws, but it’s final episode begins and ends with something that sets the show apart from the many non-White-House mystery shows on TV. A reminder that our murder victim isn’t just a mystery to be solved, a body to be examined, a series of clues to unravel. He was a person.
A.B. Wynter was as much a character on the show as anyone who wasn’t murdered, and in Giancarlo Eposito’s more-than-capable hands, he’s the most well-drawn of those characters. He cares deeply about the White House and what it represents, he has very firm ideas about how things should be done, and that makes him a pain in the ass, if an admirable one. He’s someone other people respect, but also get frustrated with and occasionally threaten to kill, and then, eventually, do kill. As this episode opens, we learn that his parents died in a car accident when he was a child, and the White House staff is his surrogate family. And that sometimes emotions can in fact break through his carefully-controlled facade. He was a person before his murder, and he remains one after.
We also get another recap, this time of Wynter’s last day on Earth, and the never ending cavalcade of stress that’s a necessary part of keeping the White House running smoothly. It’s a constant stream of demands and complaints without a break, and by the end of it you wonder if his death wasn’t a suicide after all. Apart from giving us a fuller picture of Wynter, we also learn that when he tells Jasmine Haney he’s not leaving, it’s for her sake – he doesn’t want to dump this tremendous mess in her lap.
Only after all of that do we finally get Cordelia Cupp in the Senate hearings. It goes without saying that she’d rather be birdwatching. She has a suspect, and isn’t willing to say who. Not until she’s told Senator Al Franken (and therefore us) how she figured it all out.
She’s come from investigating the White House a second time, where she picks up more clues. A vase, and a clock with a sculpture of Ben Franklin built into it are missing from the Yellow Oval Room. (That would be the room where Cupp believes the murder took place, although the body was found in the Game Room.) The flowers in the vase were killed by paraquat – a toxic weed killer, and we know someone suspiciously visited the greenhouse the night of the murder. Cupp now thinks Wynter was poisoned, and then hit over the head with the Franklin clock.
More clues follow. Unsurprisingly, Tripp stole a sculptural clock from the house, but not that one. Wynter’s apparent suicide note was ripped out of a larger page in the diary, which also contains a code Cupp can’t easily decipher. She also notices that paintings were moved between several rooms, including the Yellow Oval Room.
In classic detective fashion, she gathers all the principal players together to tell them who did it. After lampshading that this is how murder mysteries end, we get a nice redirect, as Cupp admits that she doesn’t actually know who did it. She does know it was one of them, and she’s confident she’ll figure out which one by the evening’s end.
So the show does its favorite thing – recap, recap, recap. We rerun through basically everything we’ve learned so far in seven previous episodes, largely focused on the web of petty grievances between the various players. It’s only worthwhile because we get some new information. In flashback, we see Cupp cleverly setting up one suspect to start running his mouth, and we thus find out who moved the body and why. We get accusations, reversals, evidence, wild theories, and finally our killer. In satisfying mystery fashion, it’s someone who’s never been at the top of our list of suspects, but never at the bottom either.
And then Cupp brings us back to A.B. Wynter. He was a difficult man who believed in what the White House stood for – not as a seat of power, but as the People’s House. Those people can be selfish, squabbling, violent, even murderous. But the ideal, of people from all walks of life working together for something bigger than themselves, is an idea that persists. It’s a nice note to end things on, even if it took a lot of recaps, and jokes that fell flat, and long birdwatching stories to get there.
Amendments:
• We get two more extended birding metaphors. At least one of them is tied into presidential history and therefore doesn’t feel like a complete sidetrack from the story.
• The episode is an hour and 28 minutes long. Dial M For Murder, referenced in a previous episode title, is an hour and 45, and didn’t have seven previous episodes leading up to it. It’s hard not to feel like you could trim the fat from The Residence and have a very smart, fast-paced two-hour movie in the vein of Knives Out. Some of the padding isn’t a bad thing – nothing wrong with letting beloved character actors like Jane Curtin or Jason Lee steal a scene or two, and episodes focused on individual suspects had their moments. But one suspects had The Residence been shorter and more focused, we’d be clamoring for more Cordelia Cupp mysteries, instead of vaguely relieved that this all got wrapped up.
• On that note, very hard to see where The Residence goes from here, as a series of murders in the White House stretches credulity, and the title doesn’t leave room for much else. This is likely a one-off, which at least means Netflix can’t cancel it before it’s time.
• That being said, we’d watch the hell out of a season two where there’s no murder, just Mary Wiseman’s overly-passionate chef and Bronson Pinchot’s perpetually-indignant pastry chef locking horns, while Edwina Findley’s unprofessional butler dips into the vodka and provides running commentary.
