‘Murder in a Small Town’ Puts Phyllis in Crisis & It’s Just the Start

[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for Murder in a Small Town Season 2 Episode 4, “One Last Song.”]

We knew that Phyllis (Fiona Vroom) would go through some things in Murder in a Small Town Season 2, but we had no idea it’d be so many things all at once. On Tuesday’s (October 14) new episode, she faced several crises — none of which are of her own making.

First, she had to deal with a nosy neighbor who complained nonstop about her tenants bothering her. Then, she had to deal with the fact that one of her new tenants fell down a cliff and was impaled on a tree branch in her yard. All of that was on top of the fact that she was already struggling financially to recover from a bad breakup. Ouch!

The victim of the day was a famous singer named Gracie Westing (MacKenzie Porter), who was ostensibly looking for some quiet time to be creative — when her assistant Parker (Katie Findlay) and security guy Daniel (Darien Martin) weren’t causing her stress, that is — but was secretly meeting up with her old partner, Jade (Thomas Cadrot), all while dealing with a stalker named Brendan (Chris Carson) who showed up in town right before her falling death.

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After Karl Alberg (Rossif Sutherland) got to work interviewing all the people of interest, he was able to crack the case and clear the ex-partner, the nosy neighbor, and even the stalker. In the end, it was her assistant who was responsible for her fall. As it turned out, she’d been stealing from the singer for years and found out Gracie wanted to reunite with Jade, thus putting the brakes on her gravy train. She didn’t mean to kill her friend, of course, but that’s still what happened during an argument.

Now, Phyllis is out of a tenant yet again — and has a body count at her carriage house now, to boot. Her blow-up at (and eventual apology to) Cassandra Lee (Kristin Kreuk) proved just how in distress she really is about all of this.

Series creator Ian Weir told TV Insider there’ll be more troubles ahead for Phyllis after this incident, too, teasing, “Phyllis’ marriage fell apart three years ago and left the financial mess, which she’s been digging herself back out of. Phyllis, for the first time in three years, gets back, dips her toe, back into the dating waters, into so yeah, rather than being the Greek chorus on Cassandra’s relationship, there’s a sense in which Cassandra can be the Greek chorus on what Phyllis has going on in Season 2. And one of one of Phyllis’ dates manages to go wrong in the last way Phyllis would ever had expected. I’ll just leave it there…. It’s nothing to do with a creepy date. It’s, it’s something that happens around the date.”

Murder in a Small Town, Tuesdays, 8/7c, ABC