Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 3: Devil's Night

The episode opens on former child star Mackenzie "Mac" Altman dreaming that she shoots a werewolf-masked assailant, then waking on Halloween morning with blood on her white Seven Year Itch-style dress, a haircut into bangs, a tattoo celebrating the love of two people named Rick and Amy whom she does not know, and a hickey from what looks like a very small mouth. Her handgun is not in its locked safe. Officer Kaya Blanke arrives to arrest her for criminal mischief, which is what lets Elsbeth onto the case.

Elsbeth attends Halloween as Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's, complete with updo and cigarette holder. Lieutenant Connor is the only other costumed officer, dressed as Winston Churchill; Captain Wagner refuses to dress up because he hates the "sanctioned mayhem" of Halloween, though he admits he was a high-volume trick-or-treater as a child: "We'd change costumes twice and hit each block three times."

Kaya fills in the background: Mac played the eldest daughter on Father's Keepers on KidPow, and her roommate Cissy played one of her younger sisters. Neither made the leap to adult careers. Mac's lawyer, manager, agent and accountant are all the same man, Danny Beck, who sails in to announce that the club owner is dropping the charges. Danny has a record of extracting celebrity clients from scrapes — one from a cult, another from a drug cartel in Bogotá. Mac, however, is not relieved: she tells Elsbeth she has no memory of the previous night and thinks she may have killed someone.

Using Cissy's memory, Instagram posts, a bartender and the tattoo artist, Kaya, Elsbeth and Mac rebuild the night and find a body: Sonny Miller, an aspiring rapper and Mac's on-again, off-again friend and hookup. Detective Smullen wants the case closed on gunshot residue and a matching caliber. Elsbeth and Kaya list why that is premature — Mac had nowhere to carry a gun, the PostMark party had a metal detector, she led them to the body, and her total memory gaps suggest she was drugged rather than blackout drunk.

The picture of Mac's life sharpens. Cissy is crashing with her, not really her roommate, and the two each think of the other as a user; Mac does not know Cissy's real name and has no real friends. Danny manages everything, including a club in Montenegro into which Mac has sunk over $6 million and which has never opened. Two days before his death Sonny called a production company in Montenegro about shooting a video at the club and learned that no such club exists; his next call was to Danny.

Bloodwork confirms Elsbeth's hypothesis: Mac had high levels of scopolamine, a nightshade derivative Colombian cartels call Devil's Breath because it can be used to compel people into acts they would not otherwise commit. Kaya notes it is easy to obtain in the United States because it has a legitimate small-dose anti-nausea use. Danny volunteers the law that a defendant cannot be held responsible for crimes committed while involuntarily intoxicated — convenient knowledge for the man who knows the combination to Mac's gun safe.

Elsbeth connects it to Bogotá, and a video call with former client Jesse Fox confirms both Danny's exposure to the drug and his habit of embezzling.

The last piece falls at a party thrown by Mac's friend and former producer Roya, who owns the monkey that gave Mac the hickey. Roya's party used invisible-ink hand stamps: the earlier party stamped the right wrist, the later one the left. Danny has insisted all along that he never left the PostMark party, but there is an invisible-ink stamp from Roya's earlier party on his right wrist.

Mac cannot be held criminally responsible for Sonny's death, though clearing her will take time. Kaya and Elsbeth reframe it as a chance to start over with actual friends. That evening Wagner tells his wife Claudia that he is not remote, he is shy, and Claudia wonders whether Connor's campaign is aimed at moving on Wagner or at Elsbeth herself.

The case turns on a hand stamp. Danny has maintained from the start that he never left the PostMark party on the night Sonny died, and every other element of the case points away from Mac: she had nowhere to carry the gun, she led them to the body, and her blood carried scopolamine, which Wagner identifies as Devil's Breath — a drug used to make people carry out acts they would not otherwise commit. That supports the involuntary-intoxication defense Danny himself cites, and it is the reason Mac cannot be held criminally responsible for pulling the trigger.

Danny's own knowledge is what condemns him. He knew where the gun was, he knew the intoxication defense, and Elsbeth traces his familiarity with Devil's Breath to the Bogotá cartel rescue he has built his reputation on. Jesse Fox confirms both that history and Danny's embezzlement, which explains why Sonny's discovery that the Montenegro club did not exist was worth killing over. At Roya's party, Elsbeth sees the invisible-ink stamp from the earlier night on Danny's right wrist — the night he swore he spent at the PostMark party — and he is arrested.

Mac walks, but not cleanly: the legal process that frees her will take time, and she is left with the knowledge that the person managing her entire life was robbing and using her. Kaya and Elsbeth tell her to treat it as a reset — new, actual friends, and, ideally, retirement of her Father's Keepers catchphrase "I'll be the judge of that." The hour closes with Wagner and Claudia: he insists he is shy rather than remote, and Claudia floats the possibility that Connor's campaign is aimed at Wagner or at Elsbeth.