Elsbeth Recap: Let My Cameron Go

If we learned anything from Succession, it’s that staggering wealth is not intrinsically a route to happiness. Succession actually makes a great case for the notion that staggering wealth can, and often does, poison the hearts and minds of the people who amass it and turns their children and colleagues into a pit of vipers who care so much about winning that wealth that they endanger American democracy to get their grubby paws on it. Gross. And yet! My delight upon seeing the always-welcome visage of Succession’s own Alan Ruck in (briefly) a dual role in this week’s episode of Elsbeth is boundless!

This week, the Roy family’s real eldest boy gives Elsbeth a run for her money (no regrets, no apologies!) as both tireless corporate raider Peter Hepson and his ill-fated twin brother, Bill Hepson. Poor Bill. Following a near-death experience in his private jet, he re-assesses all of his values and decides to retire from his and Peter’s very successful venture capital firm, Hepson Capital, in favor of giving away most of his assets to various worthy causes, he is summarily executed by his own twin. Whomst amongst us has not had a serious conflict with our siblings, but this seems like a massive overreaction.

One week and $3.6 billion later, Peter pulls off quite a multitasking feat: ditching his usual Brioni suit (a deep cut for the menswear sickos, love this for us) for a getup matching Bill’s more loosely-flowing, aging hippie wardrobe as he power-strides through Queens and stalks his way up to Bill’s fifth-floor walk-up and then hurls his brother out of the hallway window to the pavement below, all while recording a call-in appearance on a major business cable show. Cold-blooded.

It just goes to show that Peter is like a dog with a bone — once he’s in on something, be it acquiring a company or killing his brother, he pursues it fully and without hesitation. This is a man motivated almost exclusively by winning at all costs. To kill Bill (I’m saying nothing! My restraint!) is, in his twisted mind, the way to win in terms of public image and reputation for himself and his firm. It may even be a way to get back at Bill for having been their hardworking late mother’s favorite.

Speaking of their hardworking late mother, Mrs. Hepson was a single mother, raising her boys in Queens and teaching them the value of a dollar. Peter continues to live by her most durable lesson, perhaps in the vain hope of becoming her favorite. The past is gone, Peter, and perhaps if you were just a tiny bit more like Bill, you’d have realized that. Alas! Instead, Peter finds and pockets an envelope of cash he finds on Bill’s corpse, leaving it to look vaguely like a mugging/home invasion gone very wrong.

Unsurprisingly, everyone in the neighborhood is sad to learn of Bill’s murder. He was a recent addition, ingratiating himself with “local thugs” (at this point, I half-expected Detective Smullin to bust out with a number from Guys and Dolls) by giving them each $100, just because. Duncan, of Duncan’s Donuts, was also fond of Bill for being so friendly and a good tipper. Weirdly, though, he walked right past Duncan that morning, yelling into his phone and acting like he didn’t know Duncan at all. Strange.

Elsbeth clocks that there’s something very off about Peter, but his alibi seems legit, claiming that he called into Ava Mournier’s TV show from his office in Manhattan to rebut statements by a CEO who had been forced out of his company after Hepson had bought a controlling interest in it. Ava describes Peter as an “activist investor, ” which is a euphemism for an investor who attempts to influence the market to their investment’s advantage. (There’s a great, season-long plot thread about taking risky positions and insider trading in Industry’s second season if you’re so inclined.)

Elsbeth busies herself by viewing Peter’s past appearances on Ava’s show and notices that they all have a bunch of things in common: he talks nonstop, even talking over Ava. He never asks questions, either — he’s not there to have a conversation, he’s there to be a blowhard. These aspects of his exceedingly charming personality are consistent across the board, except for one, the day of Bill’s murder. He actually asked Ava a question and let her talk for 30-ish seconds. He also sounded just a tad out of breath, which is unlikely to have been the case if he had been calling in from his Manhattan office.

But are we sure he was calling in from his Manhattan office? His assistant went to the trouble of calling Captain Wagner to inform him of Peter’s alibi, and the call logs from Ava’s show indicate he was calling from a Manhattan number, but what if he was using a VPN to mask his real location? Hepson Capital recently invested in a VPN company, and it stands to reason Peter might have wanted to test-drive it, for reasons benign and evil. If he did so, it would have added another layer supporting his alibi, but even then, he still could have called Ava, asked a question, and, in the 32 seconds she took to answer it, killed Bill. Peter’s alibi is quite strong, but poking holes through it is not impossible, and Elsbeth is as dogged in her investigations as Peter is in pursuit of his various bad priorities (according to his and Bill’s biography, The Hepson Way, his dislikes include inflation, DEI, and CEOs. It’s giving Project 25 and Luigi Mangione, somehow?).

The key to everything turns out to be cobalt, a vital element for things like phone batteries. As both we and Elsbeth learn from Ava, cobalt is essential, but mining it is an ecological disaster. Bill’s charity funded research into alternative battery tech, but without their ongoing investment in it, cobalt is far more likely to remain a battery component, which may have led to its recent spike in price. You’ll simply never guess what happened the day before Bill’s death, so I’ll tell you: Hepson Capital took a big position on cobalt that day. Is it securities fraud if you use your prior knowledge of someone’s unbeknownst-to-them impending death to influence the prices of commodities?

Ava furnishes this tutorial on cobalt and insider trading at a restaurant where Peter had met her for lunch. They had a disagreement and unsuccessful blackmail-based negotiation and he left, leaving just $5 on the table to cover his share of a $300 meal. Thanks to Elsbeth’s eagle eye, that spiteful, cheapskate gesture proves he killed his brother. That five-dollar bill came from Bill’s collection of print currency — not just old-timey bills from the 1800s, but contemporary bills with unusual printing errors or, as in the case of the $5 in question, unusual serial numbers.

In his ongoing liquidation and donation of his assets, Bill intended to sell his collection and had visited his bank to make those arrangements, taking with him the envelope of cash we saw Peter steal from his brother’s still-warm corpse. Peter just couldn’t break the habit of a lifetime and fail to sweat every cent. As he’s being cuffed and taken into custody, Peter snarls, “I admit nothing. You think I’m going down for this?” Usually, Elsbeth perpetrators fall more on the “yeah, you got me” end of the spectrum, leading me to wonder, filled with reckless hope, that we might see Peter Hepson again this season. Dare to dream!

Let’s turn our attention to the pickle Elsbeth is in due to her participation in representing Mark Van Ness. Extricating her from this particular bucket of syrup hinges primarily on finding a loophole she can use to nullify the attorney-client privilege that’s preventing her from speaking publicly about how another member of Van Ness’s team had a police report suppressed documenting his physical violence towards his first wife, Amber. This experience shook Elsbeth to such a degree that she swore never to work on endeavors where she’d be prevented from following her conscience.

Kaya is wearing big noise-canceling headphones while Elsbeth happens to be reminiscing out loud about the whole fiasco, and based on what she 100 percent inadvertently heard Elsbeth say, she believes there’s a case to be made for Elsbeth having the freedom to defend herself against the allegation that she’s to blame. The matter takes on extra urgency when Carter (who put the matter to Elsbeth in his massive and intimidating SUV in the season premiere) drops by the precinct to give Elsbeth a heads-up that his firm will be issuing a press release that will ensure she takes the fall for the incident. Once they do, she immediately offers to resign, but Captain Wagner and Lieutenant Connor caution patience and fortitude. Given a little time and a little research, they’ll crack this. Sure enough, when Elsbeth confronts Van Ness as he’s walking down the street surrounded by various legal lackeys, she skillfully goads him into threatening her with police harassment and doxing in front of a witness (Kaya), who immediately arrests him for the misdemeanor, which automatically ends the attorney-client relationship between him and Elsbeth. You know Van Ness must be a special breed of awful as a client because Carter not only went out of his way to warn Elsbeth about the press release but also gave her an encouraging “attagirl!” head nod.

Later, unidentified police sources (definitely Lieutenant Connor, who continues to quietly furnish examples of what makes him a first-rate colleague and friend) provide details of Amber Van Ness’s report to the press, clearing Elsbeth’s name. Kaya and Elsbeth are both very relieved, but as they look at the photo of Judge Crawford, they agree: there’s more to do. Let’s! Go!

In This Week’s Tote Bag

• Elsbeth knew she could find Ava at her favorite restaurant because she’d read an interview with her in Dress-Up where she mentioned that it’s her preferred spot for business meetings. I love a callback paired with a bit of research.

• For any youngsters who may be watching Elsbeth and/or reading these recaps, there’s a classic film I encourage you to watch in order to see another great, early Alan Ruck performance. It’s called Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and he plays the titular carefree hero’s neurotic best friend/conscience, Cameron Fry.