Welcome back, Elsbeth viewers! It’s fall in New York! It’s time to go back to school, buy bouquets of sharpened pencils, and, if you’re Elsbeth Tascioni and NYPD officer Kaya Blanke, it’s also time to get back to solving murders!
The premiere episode’s cold open is brisk, efficient, and witty, introducing us to the victim and killer of the week and deploying Elsbeth and Kaya to furnish an amusing, self-aware recap of last season. Oh, it’s good to be back. I love it when a show gets meta, and Elsbeth is going hard in this department as these two partners in work and friendship describe the odd feeling of having finally gotten into the groove [of airing ten episodes] and then taking an abrupt, seemingly inexplicable monthslong break between solving high-profile cases. You might even call it a hiatus! I see what you’re doing, writer and executive producer Jonathan Tolins and it makes me chuckle.
We’re also treated to a couple of Easter eggs from season one, including the closure of designer Matteo Hart’s boutique and the takeover of his space as a Halloween Megastore (certainly not to be confused at any time with Halloween Spirit). Perhaps Hart’s emporium would have survived longer, Elsbeth and Kaya muse aloud, had he not been, y’know, a confessed murderer. The other standout is an unremarked-upon sidewalk bench ad for Joann Lenox Realty; if there’s anyone who could find a way to make her business thrive while serving time for murder, it is Jane Krakowski’s guest character.
What a relief it is — a response we should all unpack — to hear the unmistakable sirens announcing the approach of several police vehicles and probably an ambulance. To the crime scene! In a little shift in roles from last season’s premiere episode, this time around it’s Kaya introducing herself to the detective on the scene. Among the detectives she and Elsbeth have worked alongside so far, Detective Fleming (Daniel Oreskes) may have the best attitude right out the gate: He knows to expect them both, doesn’t take their presence personally, and announces himself as a handy furnisher of exposition thanks to his 36 years of service.
Fleming has a great attitude, but is not a particularly creative thinker. He believes that all crimes are about sex or money, and, noting the absence of a wallet, quickly attributes the stabbing death of Wall Street bro Eddie Reese (Corey Mach) to the latter. His death by 36 cuts is clearly a case of a burglary gone wrong. But nothing else is missing from Eddie’s home, and someone appears to have thrown his phone across the room so hard as to smash it up. Things aren’t adding up, and fortunately, Fleming is gracious enough not to need Captain Wagner’s insistence for Elsbeth and Kaya to participate in his continuing investigation.
As is often the case with Elsbeth, the fun of solving the crime will be watching how Elsbeth and Kaya figure it out, as viewers have already seen whodunit (Phillip, played by Nathan Lane) and why (Eddie’s inability to behave properly at the opera went too far, too often). I oppose murder (brave and iconoclastic, I know) but will allow that Eddie was, at best, annoying and gauche and, at worst, very disruptive to others’ enjoyment of the opera.
This obnoxious, disrespectful parvenue only showed up because he’d inherited his late grandmother’s seats following her death, and the opera is a very classy and successful chick magnet. Perhaps if he’d been seated anywhere else in the theatre, he might not have met with a stabby end, but he had the misfortune of being seated in front of Phillip, whose tolerance for such behavior started in the basement and only plummets further down. A helpful montage shows us what this doltish cad got up to at performances of Il Trovatore, The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro, La Bohème, and fatally, Tosca. He played games on his phone, took selfies during performances, made out with his dates, and eventually crossed his final line by taking a call during a crucial aria and making the mistake of saying out loud where he was going.
Phillip, clean out of patience, stalks Eddie, then stabs him in a reenactment of Tosca stabbing Baron Scarpia during “E qual via scegliete” — he matches the choreography of the performance to his own vengeful stabbing. The two scenes are intercut, emphasizing Philip’s in-depth knowledge of the aria and its staging and the notion that he’s killing Eddie to avenge the dignity of the opera itself. It’s nice that he concludes by quoting the opera and declaring his forgiveness to Eddie’s lifeless body, but sir. You’re an actual murderer, not just playing one on stage. If anyone should be hoping for forgiveness, it’s you.
The investigation proceeds as you might expect: Elsbeth and Kaya are better detectives than Fleming, who is fundamentally incurious, leaps to wrong conclusions, and lacks the acting chops to play an effective bad cop in an interrogation. He puts to good use his two best qualities, speaking up for Kaya as a great future detective, and demonstrating perfect ease with admitting when he’s wrong. There’s no need to ask for his further blessings, and having noticed Phillip’s many grimaces of disapproval in the background of Eddie’s selfies, Elsbeth and Kaya decide to attend a performance themselves, sitting in his late grandmother’s seats.
Elsbeth and Kaya’s presence piques Phillip’s curiosity and re-introduces Elsbeth and Kaya to the kindly Dr. Yablonski from last season’s plastic surgery episode, who furnishes some useful backstory about Phillip. He’s infamous as The Aisle Seat Scold, an attorney forced out of his law firm for “being too argumentative”, which is saying something. Elsbeth’s genuine admiration for that evening’s opera — she weeps copiously at a performance of Madama Butterfly — convinces Phillip that in spite of her investigating a murder he’s guilty of, she might make an apt pupil, leading to the episode’s best scenes. It’s so much fun watching Preston and Lane dance around each other, and for inveterate TV sickos like me, it’s particularly amusing to see Lane again play a questionable character (as he did in the second season of Only Murders in the Building) and a person embroiled in the politics of opera audiences (as he’s been doing in The Gilded Age).
Their scenes include several other delightfully witty moments, including Phillip saying, at the conclusion of a four-hour informational lecture, “And that is why you should never mention Andrew Lloyd Webber in that context.” What prompted this caution is not revealed; I assume Elsbeth said something about her enjoyment of Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera.
Kaya’s observation that the hilt of the killer’s knife made a distinctive bruise on Eddie’s chest leads to Elsbeth’s eagle eye landing on a retractable knife on display in Phillip’s massive room of opera memorabilia. She later learns that he’d received the knife from the great (fictional?) singer Gino Gozzi following a prop mishap during a 1968 performance of Tosca in Philadelphia. Now, why would Phillip, who clearly lives for the details and for sharing them with anyone demonstrating the faintest interest in opera, not include that colorful anecdote in his hours-long lecture earlier? Hm.
Elsbeth turns against Phillip’s strategy of assiduous withholding of relevant details and enthusiastic sharing of details he believes are irrelevant. She doesn’t just notice the provenance of the knife, and doesn’t just try to prove he was at the murder scene by comparing DNA found on Eddie with what they can pull from the pair of opera glasses he gives Elsbeth. Believing the DNA from the murder weapon can be matched to someone connected with the Opera Company, she reaches out to Fritz, the allegedly rapacious archivist. Sure enough, DNA from the crime scene matches some found in the archived (and unlaundered, ew) costume Gino Gozzi wore to play the titular role in Rigoletto many years back. It doesn’t matter that Phillip washed away evidence after stabbing Eddie, because Gino’s DNA was on the knife before the stabbing. Another week, another case cleared from the Homicide Board of Crimes.
The scenes covering two of the arcs of the season feel a little shoehorned in after the smooth sailing of the mystery of the week. Now that the corrupt Lieutenant Noonan has been caught and dismissed, Captain Wagner needs a new administrative lieutenant and finds his man in Lieutenant Connor (Daniel K. Isaac). A self-described rules and regulations guy who seems likely to get buddy-buddy with the good captain, Connor conducts a full audit of the precinct. It’s a solid approach for getting the lay of the land, but his findings do throw a wrench in Kaya’s journey toward becoming a detective. It turns out that Kaya is a few college credits short of qualifying for a promotion to detective, so the fast-track promotion she was promised has to be put on hold while she finishes up her coursework requirements. Apparently an overenthusiastic PD recruiter misled her into believing that her two high school AP courses would count toward her application. Any bump in salary or responsibilities will have to wait for now.
We are now at the season premiere’s final moment and first cliffhanger, as Elsbeth walks her dog. As she strides through the park in a head-to-toe hot pink ensemble, a large black SUV pulls up and a male voice invites her to hop in. Some might describe this as an offer she can’t refuse. DUN, DUN, DUN!!!
In This Week’s Tote Bag
• What theatre was the location for all of the scenes in the opera house? It’s magnificent!
• Dress of the episode has to go to Elsbeth’s quite structured dress for the scenes at the opera. It’s A-line, and color-and-floral-print blocked with oversized roses in hot shades of coral, yellow, and pink. Elsbeth doesn’t do toned down, even as she dresses for the occasion and setting.