It’s almost as if New York City’s would-be murderers have gotten wind that a slightly odd, very tenacious, unexpectedly incisive redhead is running around town in a series of great overcoats and colorful tote bags, foiling every attempt to get away with their dirty deeds. They’ve had to get craftier, and I’d love to see how much better the NYPD’s homicide clearance rate is now that Elsbeth Tascioni is in town. She puts Captain Wagner in a real bind, too: He knows now that she’s there to investigate him, and he wants to stay a few steps ahead of her, but he also genuinely appreciates what a good detective she is. Natural police, as they used to say on Wendell Pierce’s old show.
Elsbeth has gotten the better of all adversaries, both on the force and among the city’s ne’er-do-wells, but this week’s case has her squaring off against the most competent detective she’s been paired with yet. (Outside of Officer Kaya, that is.) Captain Wagner has been dangling a promotion as a possible quid pro quo in exchange for her keeping a watchful, tattletale eye on Elsbeth, but she’s always deserved to be a detective in rank as well as in practice. They’re paired with the bright, thoughtful, and meticulous plainclothes Detective Edwards (Micaela Diamond), who is also overreliant on technology and refuses to bother with the messiness of observing people’s behavior and scoffing at the intuitive leaps that are Elsbeth’s go-to. I’d love a scene or two down the line where we get a peek at the detectives talking among themselves. In the break room, they surely chat about their cases and might well detect the X factor in their suddenly improved ability to solve them.
This week’s case is set in another of Manhattan’s hyperspecific, high-income microcosms, the world of boutique private plastic surgery. It’s a very competitive and exactingly results-based field, the type of milieu where a veteran surgeon can identify their colleagues’ respective stitch techniques the way you can discern one friend’s handwriting from another’s. Is it too obvious to say that it’s a youth-fetishizing profession, one where generational differences provide opportunities for practitioners to learn from each other but are even more likely to incite rivalries? And that, in the case of Dr. Vanessa Holmes (Gina Gershon) and Dr. Astrid Olsen (Jillian Gottlieb), leads to bitter rifts and, ultimately, murder most foul? Dr. Holmes proves to be Elsbeth and Kaya’s toughest suspect to crack, too.
Having offered rising superstar Olsen a partnership in her practice, Holmes is hurt when Olsen declines, right in front of all of their co-workers, and then opens a clinic of her own. Pouring a truckload of salt in the wound, Olsen exploits the age gap between herself and her former mentor to take shots at Holmes’s practice, along with the work of all of Manhattan’s old-guard plastic surgeons via catty TikToks lambasting their entire approach.
Olsen’s surgical techniques are subtle, but her marketing is not, and when she starts hawking skin-care products and shapewear, suggesting that plastic surgeons should be subject to a mandatory retirement age and bragging about her ability to make dissatisfied patients look the best they ever have, it pushes Holmes over the edge. Her former protégée may be, as her practice name suggests, Just That Good, but nobody is good enough to survive 23 jabs with a Botox-type injectable, with the fatal blow hitting Olsen’s spleen.
Edwards pegs the murder as the culmination of a personal vendetta. She’s partially right — Holmes’s mask of calm never drops, but she was furious and likely wanted to maximize Olsen’s suffering — but she refuses to entertain Elsbeth and Kaya’s hypothesis that since the spleen is so difficult to locate, the murderer was likely a medical professional. She also uses voice-to-text software on her phone to take notes at her crime scenes and plans to crack the case using the digital footprint she’s sure the perp must have.
We already know that Holmes devised a careful, methodical plan for killing Olsen, using the classic “Oh, I’m such a klutz!†décolletage-flashing maneuver in front of a security guard at the City Museum to generate an alibi for herself. She gained access to her nemesis by posing as another surgeon’s gauze-swathed patient at the Reveal, a luxury recovery center just a few minutes’ walk from both the museum and her own practice. The NYPD investigation reveals (sorry, I had to) a few other clever details, including Holmes’s use of a paper chart to check in her fake patient and paying in cash for the appointment. The only electronic bread crumb she left behind is her theft of Olsen’s key card, using it to exit the Reveal post-murder.
Funny enough, one of two threads Elsbeth finds to tug on and unravel Holmes’s whole story is provided in the establishing details of the alibi itself. If only “these entitled millennials†had not arrived to hurl “all this paint on incredible works of art†and destroyed her custom black square-toed boots, she might have gotten away with it. After all, the security guard remembered the hot doctor d’un certain age and that her timed entry ticket had been scanned and that she used her key card to reenter the Reveal after Olsen met her sticky end.
Elsbeth, bless her inability not to ask questions, uses old-timey analog technology to chase down a better understanding of the paint-and-boot situation: phone calls to local hardware stores and pilfering the newspaper bundled for recycling that Holmes’s wife — a blameless and kind dancer named Carolyn (Holly James) — notes is a chore the good doctor has just taken off her plate. Whenever someone changes a long-entrenched behavior pattern, there’s a reason. In this case, Holmes’s reason was to prevent Carolyn from seeing the telltale paint splatters on the newspaper from when she ruined her own shoes to make her alibi extra-convincing.
Holmes is further thwarted by Dr. Yablonski’s (Daniel Davis) and Carolyn’s sincere desire to help with the investigation. As it turns out, Olsen was hateable, but 99.999 percent of everyone else in her orbit had not been driven to murder her for it. Yablonski identifies one of Olsen’s impressive and truly invisible ear sutures on one of Carolyn’s Instagram posts. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it means that she’d gone behind her wife’s back to have her much-loathed rival correct a mistake Holmes had made when trying to perfect the position of Carolyn’s ears (a procedure I didn’t even know existed until this week — I do love lifelong learning). On top of everything else, the indignity of this betrayal for someone as proud as Holmes was simply too much for her to bear.
Carolyn’s offhanded mention of various dancer’s injuries she’s been treated for over the years also points Elsbeth and Kaya in the right direction, leading them to read the fake patient’s chart more carefully and finding it’s a duplicate of Carolyn’s real chart, something only Holmes could have done. Attention, Detective Edwards: Actually listening to people and remembering things they say is just as crucial to cracking cases as key-card swipes!
Elsbeth’s murders of the week are sufficiently satisfying that I’d actually be fine with dropping the seasonlong arc of the DOJ investigation story line, but it’s starting to pay off with some bigger dun-dun-DUN!!!! moments and character-depth opportunities. We see Wagner’s faithful lieutenant, the conveniently titled Lieutenant Noonan (Fredric Lehne), accept an envelope heaving with cash from a shady character. He may turn out to be the real Big Bad, simply name-dropping the captain to add heft to whatever crimes he’s making sure get swept under the carpet.
Meanwhile, Kaya’s sincere, concerned questions after witnessing Elsbeth meeting Agent Celetano and the elusive Wally in Central Park is kind of heartbreaking. Elsbeth doesn’t want to share anything that would get her friend into subpoena trouble, and the idea that Wagner might be a bad guy is viscerally upsetting to Kaya. The two agree to be on the side of truth, rather than of any person or institution, which isn’t going to make this situation any easier, but it will be better for them as humans. I can’t imagine that Wagner’s warning to Elsbeth about the blurry line between intra-collegial favors and corruption is going to help, either. Just four episodes left to unweave this tangled web of quite possible deception!
Just One More Thing
• Coats of the week: Dr. Vanessa Holmes’s rich cognac-brown coat featuring very furry, very deep cuffs, and Elsbeth’s belted, slightly A-line sky-blue-and-cream tweed longline jacket with brass fastenings. Both immaculate and compliment-worthy, 18/10, no notes.
• The understated silky blouses Gina Gershon wears as Holmes are buttoned quite low, all the better to show off her gold-chain-strewn décolletage. This can only be interpreted as an homage to famed fastened-button-eschewing, gold-necklace-embracing Phillies player Nick Castellanos.
• A fun detail: a perfume bottle on the bedside table of one of the patients at the Reveal. Based on the distinctive shape, I believe it’s an Annick Goutal fragrance. I couldn’t see a label, so if any Elsbeth set dressers read this recap and feel moved to share (and/or correct me if I’ve got the brand wrong), I’d love to know for sure.