Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 6: Gold, Frankincense, and Murder

Christmas tastemakers Dirk and DeeDee Dashers (Christopher Fitzgerald and Vanessa Bayer) are preparing a Dress Up magazine collaboration — Dress Up x Dashers — with the magazine's imperious editor Gisela Mott. DeeDee wants a divorce: decades of celebrating Christmas year-round have drained her, and she says the brand has subsumed her sense of self. Dirk, whose enthusiasm has never waned, treats divorce as fatal to their business and decides a tragic accident would serve the brand better.

At the launch and tree-lighting, DeeDee points out a burnt-out bulb on the tree. Dirk climbs the ladder to fix it, is shocked by frayed wires on the vintage light strand, falls, and is impaled on decorative reindeer antlers. Detective Donnelly (Molly Price) describes it as a classic Christmas light electrical shock and ladder fall resulting in a reindeer antler impalement. Fire Marshal Lee Sparks identifies the frayed wires as the mechanism and also flags the hand-crafted tree-lighting switch Dirk built as capable of delivering a fatal shock to whoever threw it.

DeeDee misdirects the investigation, saying all-vintage lights were used at Gisela's insistence and pointing at the time Dirk spent with the Dashers' strapping young Little Helpers. One of them, Grayden, describes a strict but safety-minded boss who had lately become preoccupied with working out and a skincare regimen. Gisela's newly fired assistant Laird reports that Dirk was astonishingly rude to Gisela when she asked to throw the tree-lighting switch.

The long daily phone calls were not with agent Kidder Hawes but with Kidder's assistant Holly: she and Dirk were in love, and Dirk believed divorce was too toxic for the brand to marry her. Elsbeth breaks that news to Holly, and DeeDee's surprise at it reads as genuine. The closing details are physical — DeeDee's rubber-lined black gloves, Gisela's non-insistence on vintage lights, and the cookie that reveals DeeDee's colour blindness, which explains the red and green baubles she had put away jumbled together.

In the precinct and at home, SantaCon fills the cells, and Kaya's renovation finishes early, so she will be moving back to her own place. Wagner and Kaya arrange for Elsbeth to decorate a tree with the Blanke family ornaments and bring Teddy (Ben Levi Ross) to town as a pre-holiday surprise; Elsbeth gives Wagner and Claudia couples dance lessons at FlashRob Studios.

The death is a contest of two mechanisms. Dirk built a tree-lighting switch capable of killing whoever threw it, and the recap establishes that he intended it for DeeDee; what kills him instead is the frayed vintage strand he climbs to fix. DeeDee's guilt is established by the details rather than by a confession: rubber-lined gloves consistent with handling the lights, a claim about Gisela insisting on vintage lights that Gisela contradicts, and the cookie that reveals her colour blindness — the same condition behind the red and green baubles she stored jumbled together.

The episode does not stage a court outcome for DeeDee. Whether a defense based on her having discovered Dirk's plan first would succeed is raised as speculation by the recap and is not established within the episode.