Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 19: I've Got a Little List

Elsbeth (Carrie Preston) sits in an olive-drab NYC jail uniform, weeping about the dark place she has been in for the past few months, and takes what solace she can from Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce) and Kaya (Carra Patterson). Seeing her arrested and then failing entirely to get traction in her arraignment hearing is shocking, but the fall has been building: she has been staggered by how many levers of power Crawford controlled and how skillfully he wielded them, including in the divorce case of her abusive former client.

The case she returns to is the murder of Lichtenburg's Crown Prince Wilhelm von Hofer (Sam Ogden), worked with ICE agent Wes McCarthy (Ben Horner), who says his investigation “takes precedence over the situation in Greenland.” Elsbeth and Kaya are forced to take seriously McCarthy's casual sexism about the “angry feminists” of Lichtenburg's Crown Free Movement, his assumptions about their propensity to violence, the alleged plan to murder Prince Wilhelm in the United States, and their use of a “lady gun.”

Elsbeth's own conduct is the problem. Her standard reenactment of the murder triggers an awful flashback to Crawford's killing, and she becomes so obsessed with the possibility that Rod Bedford (Billy Magnussen) is the killer that she loses her ability to stay on the right side of the investigative line, veering into criminal harassment.

She is correct about Rod, whose apparent lifelong inability to experience joy has driven him from standard rich-jerk thrill-seeking to getting away with murder, backed by the staggering wealth of his gun-manufacturing family — but that is irrelevant once her conduct crosses the line.

Judge Edwin Dousant (John Carroll Lynch) faults her sharply for it. She had previously been an advocate for Crawford's murderer, Delia Kirby, though that was before the judge's killing, and the recap notes that Dousant appears to be driven by his emotions as much as he believes Elsbeth is. Even so, her fever does break: during an inventory of her personal effects as she is being processed into police custody, she identifies the last clue Kaya needed to arrest Rod, in her usual nonlinear way.

She is moved to the Midtown Detention Center, where she will be jailed among many of the killers she helped put behind bars.

Two costume notes frame the hour: the Big Bird-coded yellow belted mohair coat she wears at the scene of Prince Wilhelm's murder, with its half-furry, half-feathered capelet, and the hot-pink-and-black number with the wild eye on the back that she wears on her last trip to the Canister Club — a cigar bar and whiskey-tasting lounge that is also an open-carry shooting range. The episode title comes from a song of the same name in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta The Mikado.

The case is solved from inside the booking room. While Elsbeth is being processed into police custody, the inventory of her personal effects prompts her, in her usual nonlinear way, to identify the last clue Kaya needed to arrest Rod Bedford. She is right about Rod: his apparent lifelong inability to experience joy has driven him from rich-jerk thrill-seeking to getting away with murder. Rod is arrested, and Elsbeth is moved to the Midtown Detention Center, where she will be jailed among many of the killers she helped put behind bars.

Unresolved inside the episode: Elsbeth's own legal position. The arraignment produced no traction, Judge Dousant has not granted leniency, and the episode ends with her in custody rather than released. Whether Rod's arrest changes her standing is not shown here. Also unresolved is the source of the pressure on Dousant himself.