Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 7: One Angry Woman

Teddy is in New York, and the visit is governed by what he calls the one-fact-per-day rule: he doles out a single Teddy Fact each day so that his mother stops treating them as a single organism separated by a porous emotional membrane. He has dropped everything to check on her because Kaya sent him an SOS text summoning him to the city, and he still does not know why she left Chicago.

Because Elsbeth is not excused from jury duty, Kaya does the hosting instead — Coney Island, the subway, the High Line, and then beers back at the precinct with Captain Wagner, where Teddy gets to see how much Elsbeth's colleagues care about her.

The trial is the seemingly open-and-shut murder of Andy Mertens, bludgeoned in his own apartment. Delia, his neighbor and lover, was found by police standing over the body, naked and covered in his blood. The cold open has already shown the truth: after a consensual role-playing tryst, Delia is in the shower while a distrustful, bespectacled middle-aged man beats Andy to death with a baseball bat, the record player cranked up over Donna Summer. The killer and the victim share some history of secret-keeping, and the killer simply does not trust Andy to keep the secret.

He leaves the bat just outside the bathroom door, where Delia picks it up before finding the body.

Elsbeth gets into the deliberation room by getting Lonnie, a sexist true-crime podcaster, disqualified from the jury — and then, once seated, pulls thread after thread out of the district attorney's case: the weapon, the motive, the testimony. Delia has terrible boundaries and a habit of empty, hotheaded threats, but being maladjusted is not the same as being a murderer, and her cut-rate defense attorney Chazz Milano is not providing a defense. The forewoman and the rest of the panel come around and Delia is acquitted.

What Elsbeth does not manage in the hour is to name the killer. Judge Milton Crawford — who fancies himself judge, jury and executioner, and who wants a federal bench appointment — is the man with the bat, and she has him in her sights without being able to prove it. He makes one mistake: in his kiss-off to her he calls Andy a "perverted disco lover" when nobody in the proceedings had ever mentioned disco. That slip gives her the opening she needs.

The episode also turns Lieutenant Connor. The precinct has taken several formal complaints about serious procedural problems in precisely the week Elsbeth has been out on jury duty, and Connor, who does not believe in coincidences, has started to notice what she contributes.

The verdict is the resolution and the non-resolution at once. Elsbeth wins Delia's acquittal from inside the jury room, but she does it by demolishing the state's case rather than by identifying the person who swung the bat — and the person who swung the bat is Milton Crawford, the judge who has been presiding over the trial and steering it toward conviction. It is the first episode of the series in which Elsbeth does not solve the murder by the closing credits.

The evidence the audience already has is the cold open: Andy and Delia's consensual tryst, Delia in the shower, and a bespectacled middle-aged man beating Andy to death with a baseball bat over a shared secret he does not trust Andy to keep. He leaves the bat outside the bathroom door, which is how it ends up in Delia's hands and in the state's case.

Crawford's advantage is that Elsbeth has nothing but suspicion and a hunch about his federal-bench ambition until he talks too much. Dismissing her, he calls Andy a "perverted disco lover" — and nobody in the trial had mentioned disco. That is the mistake that puts him in her crosshairs for the episodes that follow, and it is why the hour closes on him rather than on a confession.