Elsbeth Recap: Shot Through The Heart

Congratulations, Kaya Blanke, on being promoted to detective! It’s way overdue and so well-deserved! And your lovely suit! May the suit and the solving of who, how, and whydunit of Tim Pearson’s murder both be the first of many! (Not that we’re endorsing murder, of course, just acknowledging that if homicide continues to be a thing, Detective Blanke’s ultra-competence and kindness would be assets to those investigations.)

This week’s murder is quite cleverly done, with a flair for the dramatic. We know heading into the credits that Tim’s (Max Jenkins) killer is Marilyn Gladwell, played for a few good laughs and an unexpected degree of genuine pathos by theeeeeee Tracey Ullman. Marilyn is the on-call psychic to Tim’s stepmother, Phyllis, who Phyllis has been relying on throughout the two years since Tim’s father’s death. She helps Phyllis consult the late George’s spirit when she needs his comfort and guidance, to the tune of $200,000 per year. I did the math (that is, I fired up the calculator on my phone), and at $1,500 per hour, Phyllis sees Marilyn about 133 hours annually, working out to just over 2.5 hours weekly. Alert viewers will recall that for her rarefied consultation services, Jordana Brewster’s character in “Tearjerker” earned about $250,000 from her biggest client. Like Nathan Jordan before her, Phyllis Pearson (Jill Eikenberry!) is Marilyn’s whale.

Marilyn’s apparent lack of motive and seemingly rock-solid alibi the night of Tim’s death by arrow-based misadventure in a city park while waiting for his internet date to arrive make her an unlikely suspect, but there’s definitely something off with her. Her undefinable but vaguely Eastern European accent, her caginess about where she grew up, her selectively uncanny ability to connect with a spiritual realm outside of our everyday existence — it doesn’t quite all add up, and there’s something fishy about her purported lack of motive. Phyllis herself notes that Tim had been dead set against her continuing to work with Marilyn, saying the cost was too high and that Phyllis should find a therapist like other normal neurotic people. Further, George’s advice — as conveyed by Marilyn — not to sell the family company, Bakewells, to their rival Snackerdoodles runs counter to Tim’s intent to do just that at a swiftly approaching Bakewells board meeting.

Still, the team has more leads to pursue and a new perspective on how to do so. Now that Kaya has been promoted to detective, Elsbeth’s patrol officer is Nikki Reynolds, who is more buttoned-up than Kaya but not quite as starchy as Lieutenant Connor. Shout out to all of Nikki’s coworkers for having their pronouns down pat immediately. Collegial respect! We love to see it! Nikki (played by the actor known simply as b) really likes to keep their work and private lives distinct, and while Elsbeth experiences that initially as Nikki being judgmental, I think she’s also grown enough as a person in the last year that she knows on some level that her warm-hearted openness can come across as aggressive even though she intends it only as enthusiastically seeking common ground. Their eventual bonding over dogs — Nikki hopes to be transferred to the K-9 unit eventually and happily accepts Elsbeth’s invitation to join her for walks with Gonzo — may be Elsbeth’s route into appreciating and working well with someone whose communication preferences and style are so different from her own.

While Nikki and Elsbeth pay another visit to Marilyn, Kaya’s visit to the Park and Rec department yields both a trove of video evidence of the park where Tim was killed and an excellent tight five by the Abbott and Costello of independent rodent management. The representatives of the Rodent Death Society (a great name for a humorous metal band, should anyone be in the market for one) furnish important facts, including the technological advancements in rodent-killing arrows, which have blunt tips incapable of puncturing a human sternum and dangers of rat poison to birds of prey. There was a similar storyline in All Creatures Great and Small a season or two ago, when a dog dies because it’s dug up and eaten a strychnine-poisoned rat that wasn’t buried deep enough. The more we know!

Their research goes even further afield when forensics comes back with some interesting information about the arrowhead that killed Tim. They were able to recover a serial number from it that identified where it had been purchased, so Elsbeth and Kaya hold a very informative Zoom call with Harlan Wike, co-owner of Wike’s Hardware Store in a small town in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Mr. Wike explains that the line of arrowheads in question has long since been discontinued, thanks to the development of modern, more accurate and lightweight carbon fiber arrowheads. Such granular knowledge of arrowhead design, technology, and fabrication is essential in his line of work, as Bucks County is the woodchuck-hunting capital of the Northeast. Bucks County is beautiful and is apparently a convenient refuge for famous people who want to be left alone in bucolic beauty (with the option of getting to Philly or New York easily), but all of the woodchuck content Mr. Wike provides — including the fact that, contrary to the fun tongue-twister, woodchucks do not actually chuck wood — was news to me. This is one of the most educational Elsbeth episodes I’ve seen to date.

Nikki’s careful review of Tim’s dating profile reveals several important details about this poor unfortunate soul: he used the same intro line to everyone he matched and messaged with; he got blocked pretty often; and his final match, a woman named Kristy Brown, was catfishing him. Rather than meeting up with him at the park as arranged, Kristy blocked him at the last minute. If she had been real, it seems as though she’d have been Tim’s dream woman, thanks to their uncannily similar shared interests in Italian horror films, basketball, and cryptocurrencies, but instead, she’s the invention of Tim’s murderer.

Nikki’s dogged review of all of the park footage the night of Tim’s murder seems fruitless until Elsbeth spots a notable, minor detail. Somehow a small shrubbery seems to be moving in a very non-shrubbery way, reminding Elsbeth of her duck-hunting dad, who wore a head-to-toe camouflage getup called a ghillie suit. Since Tim’s killer was a very accurate bow-and-arrow user (the helpful Mr. Wike notes that contemporary carbon fiber-tipped arrows are easier to shoot accurately and less likely to veer in the wrong direction than old-fashioned metal ones), it stands to reason that they’d also know about and use a ghillie suit to appear not to appear at all.

Remember Wike’s Hardware in Bucks County? Well, it turns out that Marilyn’s assistant Reagan (Kate Rigg) grew up there, as did Marilyn herself, though in those years she was known as Mary Lou Grunderson. The former Mary Lou had been Reagan’s babysitter, and their bond eventually led them to work together as psychic and sidekick. Marilyn trusts Reagan to such an extent that she occasionally allows Reagan to handle phone consultations with new clients, and wouldn’t you just know, she did so on the night of Tim’s murder? Marilyn’s alibi hinged on the lie that she’d been at the office, using her landline to speak with a client, but now that dog won’t hunt.

Marilyn clearly has motive (the potential loss of $200,000 yearly, not to mention what she’d make as a Snackerdoodles shareholder if its acquisition of Bakewells went through) and opportunity (being at an unknown location the night of Tim’s death). Means eventually turns out to be the coup de grâce for Marilyn. You can change your name, but if you’re Mary Lou Grunderson, your local fame as the 1971 Woodchuck Festival Champion of super-accurate bowhunting lives on forever. Elsbeth, Kaya, and Nikki enlist Phyllis to lay a trap using the fictional Aunt Bitsy whose equally fictional recent death Tim always invoked in his messages to matches in his dating app. The hunter became the hunted, taking the bait and implicating herself several times over in the process.

Once Marilyn is safely in custody, Captain Wagner asks her to try to reach the spirit of a young man whose death he blames himself for not preventing. He normally doesn’t go in for psychics, but she’d impressed him earlier in the investigation by asking if an old blue station wagon was meaningful to him at all. It turns out that the station wagon was the vehicle of a serial killer who preyed on male college students, and Wagner had been unable to nab him, which led to another student’s death. Marilyn determines that Scotty Fenton’s spirit has moved on from our realm, indicating that he is now truly at rest, which is at least some comfort to Wagner.

In the episode’s final moments, Marilyn has another vision, seeing terribly dangerous times ahead for Elsbeth, involving lots of blood, lots of water, an evil figure in a dark robe, and dead silence. I know she’s a murderer, but I kind of hope we’ll see Marilyn again as we get closer and closer to the conclusion of the season-long arc with the nefarious Judge Crawford.

In This Week’s Tote Bag

• I think hair and makeup must have had so much fun working with Tracey Ullman on this episode. Her wig and prosthetic teeth are fantastic, as is her magnificent extravaganza of a massive fur hat, in a very Anna Karenina style. I’m not usually a hat person, but I think I might be a this hat person.

• When a bunch of crows circling overhead lead Marilyn, Elsbeth, and Kaya to Tim’s corpse, Elsbeth notes that a group of crows is called a murder. Collective nouns are so vivid and playful, and bird collective nouns, especially so. An unkindness of ravens, a parliament of owls, an exaltation of larks! (Want more? Here’s an abundance of options.)

• Lieutenant Connor inviting Captain Wagner to confide in him about Scotty really tickled me, describing his “flat affect” as particularly appealing to people looking to unburden themselves. He’s so perceptive and kind, and I’m glad Elsbeth’s 20-episode season has invested some of its time in giving this character and Daniel K. Isaac such rich texture and nuance to play with.

• This is the first episode of Elsbeth that I can recall making me tear up a little, with Elsbeth’s late grandmother sending a bracing message of encouragement through Marilyn. Elsbeth’s maximalist approach to color and clothing is the continuation of and perhaps a tribute to a lovely family lineage.