Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 8: Toil and Trouble

Regina Coburn has played Detective Felicity Watts on Father Crime for roughly 20 seasons and has finally landed Lady Macbeth in London. The director cast her on the strength of the sterling accent work she has done across the series, and the schedule works because Felicity is slated to spend the last episodes of the 24-episode season in a coma — time Cal has already agreed to give her for rehearsals and the run.

Then Cal takes it back. The network wants a splashier, punchier ending than a comatose detective with Father Garvey at her bedside, so he is deploying the emergency turbo boost he has held in reserve for nearly 20 years: letting the ship sail at last, giving the fans the Watts-and-Garvey kiss. Regina loathes the idea on principle — she loathes her co-star Jack — and on timing, because she flies to London within days. The next day she gags Cal, handcuffs him to his massage table and kills him with a stiletto heel through the eyeball.

She is thorough. She took the method from a spec script written by Blake, one of the show's background actors, and couriers that script and some threatening Wavey fan mail to the police to point at him. She canceled Cal's massage from the phone on his assistant's desk, disguising her voice with one of her specialized accents. She hired a Van Leeuwen ice-cream truck for the cast and crew. And she built an alibi by playing a recording of herself running lines over the expensive speakers in her dressing room, loud enough to be heard in the hallway.

Elsbeth reads the spec script aloud in a one-woman table read, tries on a Serious TV Detective Voice, and cuts to the chase: after the long-delayed kiss, Watts and Garvey spend the next 20 pages consummating it in every room in the precinct.

Wagner gives Elsbeth and Kaya 48 hours to find evidence sufficient to release the screenwriter they are holding and to charge Regina. What breaks her is exactly the thing she is proudest of. The masseuse can only describe the voice that canceled the appointment as weird. There is a discrepancy between the Scottish accent in the aired episode and Regina's delivery in the raw footage. And when Regina says "out, out, damned spot" live to get Elsbeth off her back, it matches the raw footage — which is to say, it is terrible. Detective Felicity Watts may be a master of accents; Regina is not.

Cal and her accent coach had been overdubbing her bad accents for years and never told her.

In the raw footage Elsbeth also finds Cal telling Regina that preparation means reading more than her own lines — noting stage directions, knowing other actors' lines. It is unprofessional and it is also right, and it is what undoes her plan: she never read the whole spec script, so she assumed the stiletto in it was the shoe rather than the knife.

Around the case, Kaya meets the new medical examiner, Dr. Cameron Clayton. Judge Crawford finds Wagner at a cocktail party, mentions casually that he knows Elsbeth was at the courthouse the day before, and asks the captain to pass on his regards — he will see her very soon. And the Mark Van Ness divorce story breaks on television; Crawford watches it, sips whiskey and says, "Your move, Ms. Tascioni."

Regina is caught by her own instrument. The voice the masseuse heard canceling Cal's appointment, the Scottish accent in the aired episode of Father Crime, and Regina's live delivery of "out, out, damned spot" are three versions of the same bad accent — the raw footage proves the polished accents were dubbed in afterward by an accent coach whom Cal had been paying to protect her ego for years. That is why the cancellation sounded merely weird: it was Regina unfiltered.

The rest of the plan is undone by the same vanity. Regina never read all of Blake's spec script, so she took "stiletto" to mean the shoe and used a stiletto heel instead of the stiletto knife the script described — the detail Cal had actually been right about when he told her to read the whole script rather than only her own lines.

The hour does not end with the arrest alone. Judge Crawford waylays Wagner at a cocktail party and makes a point of saying he knows Elsbeth was at the courthouse with Delia, asking Wagner to pass on his regards because he will see her very soon. Then the Mark Van Ness divorce story breaks on television, Kaya hurries off the phone, and Crawford lifts a glass: "Your move, Ms. Tascioni." The personal and professional cases Elsbeth has been avoiding both arrive in the same minute.