Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 1: Subscription to Murder

The premiere opens at the opera rather than with Elsbeth. Regular subscriber Phillip Cross (Nathan Lane) takes his seat behind Eddie Reese (Corey Mach), who inherited the seats from his grandmother and brings a different date each week. Eddie texts, sleeps, eats loudly and finally answers a phone call during the performance; Cross follows him home and stabs him several times with the retractable prop knife he keeps from the first Tosca he ever saw, mirroring the staging of the opera's murder scene.

Elsbeth (Carrie Preston) and Officer Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson) arrive with Detective Buzz Fleming (Daniel Oreskes). Fleming reads the scene as a robbery — Eddie's wallet is missing — while Elsbeth argues the violence is too personal for a random theft. At the precinct, Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce) meets Lt. Steve Connor (Daniel K. Isaac), who replaces the arrested Lt. Noonan and joins on condition that he can review every operation in the house; he tells Elsbeth he intends to make her consent decree unnecessary.

The autopsy report gives the team two threads: unknown DNA on the body and a rectangular bruise shaped like a knife hilt but with no matching puncture wound.

Cross, wearing a fake moustache, dumps Eddie's wallet near the George Washington Bridge, which briefly revives Fleming's robbery theory. Elsbeth instead goes through the photographs on Eddie's phone and notices the same man in the background of every opera selfie, looking progressively more annoyed. She and Kaya attend the next performance, and Elsbeth accepts an invitation to Cross's home for opera lessons.

In his study Elsbeth finds the prop knife and notices that a house full of opera memorabilia contains no photographs of Cross's late wife. Pressed, he admits she was a construct: after buying two seats and finding his companions inadequate, he chose to attend alone and kept the second seat empty. Elsbeth takes a pair of opera glasses from his collection to obtain his DNA; the sample does not match the unknown DNA.

The match is Gino Gozzi, the baritone stabbed with the same knife during a 1968 performance — the blade retracted on Cross's first thrust, leaving the rectangular bruise, and carried Gozzi's old blood into Eddie. With archive help from Fritz (Nick Sullivan), the team compares the sample to one of Gozzi's preserved costumes and arrests Cross.

Two threads close the hour. Kaya is two college credits short of the degree she needs for promotion and Elsbeth brings her a back-to-school gift bag. The next day, while Elsbeth is walking her dog, a large SUV stops beside her and a voice addresses her by name and orders her to get in.

The case closes on the knife, not on the wallet. Because the prop blade retracted on Cross's first thrust, it left a rectangular hilt bruise without a puncture wound; when he switched the mechanism and stabbed Eddie, the blade carried Gino Gozzi's 1968 blood into the wound. Elsbeth's DNA sample from the opera glasses rules Cross out as the source of the trace, which is what sends her to the archives and to Gozzi's preserved costume — and once that sample matches, the arrest follows. Cross's motive, as established in the episode, is Eddie's conduct in the theater, culminating in the phone call.

Two questions are left open by the episode itself. The voice in the black SUV is not identified on screen in this episode, and no identity is asserted here. Connor's audit of the precinct — including whatever it finds about Kaya's promotion path — has not concluded within the episode.