Elsbeth Recap: Don’t Cross Mrs. Claus

It’s the most murder-ful time of the year! Like so many events that we allow ourselves to believe should be purely joyful, Christmastime can be a really mixed bag. Take, for example, Dirk and DeeDee Dashers (Christopher Fitzgerald and Vanessa Bayer), the King and Queen of Christmas who are such successful retro tastemakers that the Rockefellers will soon be their clients. For its 60th anniversary, Dress Up magazine (whose imperious editor Gisela Mott you may recall from the season one finale set at Not Fashion Week™) has announced a sweet little collab, Dress Up x Dashers, which is a line of vintage-inspired Christmas decorations. So cute!

Less cute: DeeDee’s demand for a divorce. The years of celebrating and decorating Christmas 24/7, 365 have utterly sapped her affection for the holiday, and she wants out. Dirk, whose passion for the holiday has never waned, is horrified. Not only would divorce break up the band, but it would spell doom for their entire brand! Christmas is about togetherness and harmony, not grubby messes and conflict, and as far as DeeDee (Vanessa Bayer) is concerned, that’s part of the problem. She’s always been supportive, but it’s sapped her of a true sense of self, instead subsuming all of her energy and effort into building their business and burnishing their public image.

Locked away in his workshop and perfecting a custom figurine for John Waters (he needs to get that pencil-thin mustache just right), Dirk quickly hits upon the idea of DeeDee meeting with an unfortunate accident as a better solution for this problem. Mr. Christmas, being tragically widowed at Christmastime, could actually be a boon to their business. However, on the day of the Dress Up x Dashers launch and tree-lighting event, DeeDee emerges unscathed, while Dirk succumbs to his own perfectionism. She points out a burnt-out lightbulb on the tree and when Dirk climbs up the ladder to correct the imperfection, instead he’s zapped by frayed wires on the vintage strand of tree lights. After the shock, he falls off the ladder, and is impaled on some decorative reindeer antlers. Grisly, but very on-brand.

Unsurprisingly, both Kaya and Elsbeth find the scene — sad though it is — enchanting. Detective Donnelly is once again on Straight Man duty, describing Dirk’s death as “a classic Christmas light string electrical shock and ladder fall, resulting in a reindeer antler impalement.” Between this and her very Wayne’s World-coded “I’ll be in Delaware”, she gets Best Line Delivery this episode. Gisela gives her a run for her money, though, remarking from behind her black-and-silver ensemble and signature oversized sunglasses that being present on two of Elsbeth and Kaya’s cases in the span of six months shows that the world “is very tiny – and very violent!”

Thank goodness, then, for Fire Marshal Lee Sparks, the second in what I hope will become an increasingly long line of fire-adjacent men who see Elsbeth and immediately believe she hung the moon. In addition to the frayed tree light wires, Sparks also notices that the tree-lighting mechanism, hand-crafted by Dirk himself, is really dangerous and could easily result in a fatal shock to whoever threw the switch. Once Marshal Sparks identifies the how of Dirk’s death, DeeDee — actually, make that De’Dée — does her best to very helpfully fill in some misdirecting details. They’d used all-vintage lights at Gisela’s insistence; and Dirk sure loved to spend hours and hours in the company of the Dashers’ Little Helpers — all strapping, conventionally handsome young men — in his workshop.

One of the very well-informed Not-So-Little Helpers, Graydon, is totally baffled by Dirk’s death, considering how beloved he was. He was kind of strict as a boss, but all in the cause of safety and precision, and a total gentleman. He did seem preoccupied lately, though, with working out and his new skincare regimen. He could be difficult to reach at night, too. The investigators file that away, along with De’Dée’s seemingly disorganized putting-away of ornaments with red and green baubles all jumbled up together. After Gisela’s newly fired assistant Laird comes to them with his recollection that Dirk was astonishingly rude to Gisela when she asked to throw the tree-lighting switch, they have to wonder: could Dirk have “wanted De’Dée…de-dead?”

Elsbeth, Kaya, and Donnelly don’t want to share this barely half-baked hypothesis with De’Dée without other corroborating details, so they carry on with the investigation, paying a visit to the Dashers’ agent to learn why he and Dirk were on the phone for hours almost daily. Son of a gun, De’Dée hasn’t wasted a minute — she’s already in Kidder’s office, resplendent in a sparkly and iridescent all-white get-up to pitch a minimalist, monochromatic line of products. It’s a hard turn into a completely different merchandising strategy, and Kidder puts the kibosh on it immediately. Turns out, Dirk was right, being widowed at the holidays has produced tons of sympathy sales for their Dress Up collab. De’Dée must become the Queen of Christmas once more.

Turns out, Kidder is not who Dirk was having such in-depth conversations with; it was Kidder’s assistant, the distraught and grieving Holly. (Of course her name is Holly!) They were deeply in love, but single-minded Dirk could never have divorced De’Dée, due to its (presumed) brand toxicity. It falls to Elsbeth to break the news of Dirk’s affair and his foiled intent to kill De’Dée so he’d be free to remarry his beloved fellow Christmas enthusiast. Over cyanide-free apple juice shots — a callback to two previous episodes with Vanessa Williams and Arian Moyaed! — Elsbeth’s suspicion of De’Dée’s story grows. The news of Dirk’s affair with Holly is a genuine surprise, and Elsbeth recalls that her monochromatic home goods proposal was over a year old. De’Dée, who’s reluctantly going back to DeeDee now that she’s stuck being Mrs. Claus again, clearly wanted out and had been wanting an exit for a while.

It’s funny — not in a laugh out loud way, but definitely in a things that make you go hmm way — that Dirk and DeeDee agreed about exiting their marriage and only initially disagreed on methodology and rationale. Killing DeeDee was a business-first-affairs-of-the-heart-second decision for Dirk. For DeeDee, divorce was a sanity-restoring and lifesaving choice; she’d never have killed Dirk if she hadn’t figured out his scheme to kill her first. If Elsbeth were still a defense attorney, I bet she’d come up with an argument that would stand a chance of an acquittal for DeeDee.

As usual, it’s the little details that make the A-plot resolution sing: DeeDee’s rubber-lined black gloves; Gisela’s non-insistence on vintage lights; the vocabulary lesson of the week (shunts! Lifelong learning is so important!); the reveal-by-cookie of DeeDee’s color blindness and its role in the whole affair. Meanwhile, back at the precinct and at home, there’s a lot going on at the moment: SantaCon is in full swing, so there are a bunch of red-and-white-clad jolly (drunk) fellows packing the cells, and Kaya is moving back home soon, because the renovations that sent her to bunk in with Elsbeth have wrapped up a few weeks early. It’s good news on the whole, but sends Elsbeth into a bit of a tailspin.

Captain Wagner and Kaya are worried for her; with no Kaya and no Teddy (he’ll be going to his Dad’s for the holiday) to fuss over and celebrate with, it’s going to be a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas. Fortunately, they hatch a multi-pronged plan to restore Elsbeth’s spirits to full brightness, getting her to decorate a tree at home with Kaya, using vintage Blanke family ornaments, and bringing Teddy (Ben Levi Ross) to town as a pre-holiday surprise. Kaya’s right, the sparkly, warm meanings we ascribe to Christmas decorations only happen thanks to “the relationships we build and treasure throughout the year.” You can’t tell through the screen that I’m wiping a couple of tears away, but this tender heart is weak for thoughtful surprises.

I’m sure Captain Wagner would have played his part in helping Elsbeth get her mojo back even if she hadn’t figured out a great gift idea for him to share with Claudia, but couples dance lessons at FlashRob Studios are going to be a hit. Maybe we’ll get another episode with Keegan-Michael Key into the bargain? That can be my Christmas episode wish for next year.

In This Week’s Tote Bag:

• Wow, firefighters really are mesmerized by Elsbeth; her presence at the fire station to ask Marshal Sparks (hee!) throws them off entirely. They’re doing pushups! Giving her twinkly-eyed smiles! Not doing whatever fire truck work they’re supposed to be doing! Elsbeth holds fast to her assertion that it’s her hair they can’t resist; this hypothesis needs further study.

• My favorite non-story aspect of Elsbeth is the costume design, particularly the coats that Dan Lawson puts Carrie Preston in, and his gift to us is the most coat-rich episode I can recall. From gold lamé to lush faux fur, pink wool to green and yellow plaid, it’s an extravaganza of colorful and richly textured toastiness.

• DeeDee has a first-rate Bond villain-style moment before the fire after learning about Dirk’s affair with Holly, hurling her stuffed & mounted turtledove into the fire and growling, “Merry Christmas, darling.” More of these, too, please!