Editor’s note: The below recap contains spoilers for Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 11.
It’s Valentine’s Day, and love is in the air and up on the screen this week on Elsbeth. The Valentine’s-themed Season 2 Episode 11, “Tiny Town,” plays with the concept of two screens connecting two cities via 24/7 livestream, much like the Portal installation last summer that connected New York and Dublin. Despite the murder that the NYPD are tasked with solving, the episode is far more lighthearted than things have been recently, with Elsbeth (Carrie Preston) striking up a friendly working relationship-turned-something more with Angus (Ioan Gruffudd), a charming Scottish musician she meets via the livestream art installation. There’s a lot to swoon over with this one, so let’s dive in!
‘Elsbeth’ Heads to Scotland — Sort of — in Season 2 Episode 11
The episode begins not in New York, but in Tattersall, Scotland, which has a view of the Big Apple via the Iris, a 24/7 livestream installation that connects the two. As the New Yorkers peer in curiously, they’re watched by Angus (Gruffudd), a musician who spends his days at The Iris, seeking inspiration, and writing and playing his music — not that they can hear him. Angus and Fiona, the owner of the pub next to the installation are both fascinated with a budding couple on the other end of the screen, who are meeting today for the third time, and who eventually leave together. Valentine’s Day is around the corner, and love is all around!
Or maybe not, as Angus returns another day to find the young woman waiting all alone, a heart-shaped box of candies in hand, and according to Fiona, she’s been there a while. She’s not alone for long, though, as she’s joined by a man who isn’t her sweetheart but is someone she knows, and the two of them get into an argument, and eventually, she trips. Fiona returns with Angus’s drink, and spills it on his notebook, distracting him just long enough to miss crucial key seconds of the New York feed, as by the time he and Fiona turn back around, they see the young woman stumbling back to her seat, looking disoriented, and choking. Angus tries to get the people on the screen to turn around and help her, but none of them understand his hand signals — though how, I have no idea — and the woman dies.
In New York, Elsbeth (Preston) and Officer Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson) arrive on the scene. Elsbeth’s first takeaway is that the victim looks sad, but that’s not much to go on, so the two of them join Detective Edwards (Michaela Diamond) as she questions the barista from the coffee stand next to the New York Iris. The barista didn’t see anything of note, telling them that the victim was just waiting for her coffee, and one of the officers tells Edwards that there were no witnesses either. At a dead end for now, Elsbeth spots The Iris, now sitting there covered up. Blanke tells her that the exhibit connects New York with a seaside Scottish town to connect a big city with a small town to foster connection, and does so via a 24-hour livestream. When Elsbeth confirms that the tarp only went up on the screen once the police arrived, she realizes that there may not have been witnesses in New York, but there might have been in Scotland.
Elsbeth Has a Budding Romance in Season 2 Episode 11
She and Blanke take down the tarp, and find Angus on the other side. Elsbeth motions to the crime scene and asks if Angus saw anything, and he confirms that he did. She tries asking a few more questions using gestures, and he tries to answer in kind, but they both quickly realize that a phone call is probably the better move. Angus calls Elsbeth, and she asks him if he saw who did this to the victim. He says he saw a man confront her and take the Valentine she was holding, but adds that he doesn’t think the man killed her, as she went back to her table and then started choking. Elsbeth tells him that they’ll need to take a full statement from him, and he says he’ll be around for another hour. Despite this conversation ostensibly being about a murder investigation, that doesn’t mean they aren’t both getting their flirt on, in the cutest, sweetest way possible. Blanke then calls her back over as they’ve found the victim’s work ID: her name is Hayley Ritter, and she works at Elle Même Cosmetics.
Elsbeth, Blanke, and Edwards head around the corner to Hayley’s workplace, and try to scan the badge, but it’s no longer active. While they try to figure that out, Elsbeth goes poking around the lobby, and finds a perfume counter. The associate there gives her a sample to try, and tells Elsbeth that all their fragrances are made in house in their private lab. Just as Elsbeth accidentally sprays herself in the eye, the head of security, Mr. Thorwald (Alfredo Narciso), arrives to take them up to his office. He tells them that they deactivated her card that morning after she failed a randomized drug test, which is company policy, and compulsory for anyone working in R&D. Thorwald offers to send them not only the results of the drug test, but Hayley’s employee file as well.
Back at the precinct, Cameron (Sullivan Jones), from the Medical Examiner’s office arrives to give them his report in person — I suspect Blanke’s presence has something to do with the need to do this face to face, though we quickly learn that Cameron actually moved into Blanke’s basement apartment. In short, Hayley died of a fentanyl overdose. Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce) wants to pass the case off to Narcotics, but Elsbeth tells them what Angus told her about Hayley’s confrontation with the jealous man, and suggests there may be more to it than an overdose. Both Wagner and Edwards maintain that it’s probably still just an overdose, but Wagner tells them to get a statement from Angus regardless, so they can give that and the report to Narcotics the next day. They all file out of Wagner’s office, but Elsbeth returns quickly, having left her bags and coat behind. She catches Wagner hanging up his phone in frustration. His wedding anniversary, it turns out, is on February 14 — which sounded really romantic when he and Claudia (Gloria Reuben) first set the date — and therefore, he understandably has trouble securing any kind of special reservation for that night. He wants to go all out this year, with flowers, a fancy date, and a “big surprise” he has planned, which Elsbeth is in on.
Speaking of big surprises, Elsbeth tells Wagner she heard that Merton’s case — the one she served on the jury for — was reopened by Captain Kearnshaw (Jen Colella). Wagner isn’t as surprised as she is, and Elsbeth realizes he had something to do with it, though he denies it as much as he’s able. Elsbeth heads out then to take Angus’s statement, and if she dresses up her fuzzy pink coat and hat with an equally pink scarf… well, it could be because it’s cold, or because Angus told her he likes the color. Who’s to say?
At the Iris, Angus tells Elsbeth that he saw Hayley meeting with a young man romantically for coffee a few times, but guesses they must have met online since they didn’t seem to know each other the first time, and adds he was the one she was waiting for on the day she died. He agrees to describe the man she fought with to a sketch artist as well, and with that, they’ve got the work stuff out of the way, and move into a more personal chat. Elsbeth asks about Angus’s music, and he tells her that he finds New York inspiring, though he’s never actually been. The two of them match each other’s geek so perfectly, but the sweet moment ends when Elsbeth gets a call telling her they’ve found Hayley’s boyfriend, as he was listed as her emergency contact.
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Jonathan Tolins also shares what fans can expect in the back half of ‘Elsbeth’s second season.
Elsbeth Investigates a Suspicious Overdose in Season 2 Episode 11
The man at the station, however, isn’t the man Hayley was meeting for coffee. He actually looks more like the man she fought with…but the police don’t know that yet. Charles (Alex Hurt) tells them they’d been together for years, but were currently in counseling. He adds that he was with her while she was in rehab, and doesn’t believe she overdosed on fentanyl, as he knows what she’s like when she relapses, and insists she was still sober. Elsbeth starts asking if Charles had followed Hayley that morning, and if he was jealous of her meeting with another man. Charles doesn’t follow, as he insists things were good between them, and they were even going to start IVF to have a baby. The questioning isn’t really getting them anywhere, but Elsbeth asks Charles to stick around for one more thing that might help them, and has him follow them to The Iris. There, she calls Angus while they try to get Charles to face the screen to see if he looks familiar to Angus. Sure enough, Angus tells them that’s the man that fought with Hayley.
Now that they have eyewitness confirmation, Charles is formally taken in for questioning. He tells them he’d just found out she was cheating on him, and got upset. His proof that she was cheating? She turned off location sharing with him, and he found an encrypted messaging app on her phone. Blanke and Edwards are less than impressed with this explanation, and are equally unimpressed by his insistence that whoever she was meeting with was the real threat, as she said in the messages she was afraid someone wanted to kill her. Edwards still thinks the fentanyl played a part in Hayley’s death, maybe involuntary manslaughter after the altercation restricted blood flow to the brain. Blanke says she thinks they should find the man Hayley was meeting with anyway to get his side of the story, and Wagner tasks her and Elsbeth with it the next day.
With the case on hold until the next morning, Elsbeth goes home and decides to look up Angus’s music. Despite his insistence that it isn’t very good — artists, am I right — she’s utterly charmed by it, and listens while looking at pictures of Scotland. Despite the characters actively having a murder to solve this week, this episode really is a rom-com. Why else would I be smiling as goofily as the characters are, all while looking up the price of a flight to Scotland? The next morning, Elsbeth and Blanke take a sketch artist to talk to Angus and get an idea of what the man Hayley was meeting looks like. While he draws, Angus once again compliments Elsbeth’s coat, blue this time, inspired by Angus’s surroundings, and Blanke catches on at once, dragging the sketch artist away to give the two of them a moment alone.
They talk about his music, and about his band, who all live in Edinburgh. He also tells Elsbeth that he wants to come out and see New York someday, and if you’re keeping track, that’s twice now that he’s mentioned it. Elsbeth then excuses herself to go talk to the barista once again, to see if she recognizes the other man. I could personally watch these two talk about nothing all day, but that’s not the show we signed up for, so murder investigation it is. The barista does recognize the man, saying his name is George, and he used to come by every day. She doesn’t know much else about him, but tells them that someone else might know more, as he’s also looking for George. The man, it turns out, is George’s partner, and he says the last time he heard from him was a couple of days ago, when he rushed off the phone to go meet with a source. Who the source was, or why they were speaking, he can’t say, as George didn’t disclose whatever he was writing about until it was actually published as he took journalism very seriously. Edwards then calls Blanke to say that they found George…in the morgue.
A Whistleblower Is Murdered in ‘Elsbeth’ Season 2 Episode 11
At the precinct, Cameron tells them that they’re waiting on the full toxicology report, but as of right now, it looks like he, too, overdosed on fentanyl. Edwards says they spoke to his editor, who said he was writing an exposé and was almost ready to file the story, as soon as he had one last missing piece. The police believe that the two overdoses are connected, but Elsbeth remembers the box of chocolates Hayley had with her. Since she still had them after Charles left, but they were missing when the police got there, she suggests that Hayley was a whistleblower, delivering evidence in the chocolate box, and whoever killed her took it to protect themselves. Edwards thinks that’s too far a leap and suggests instead that Charles killed George, not realizing he was gay and the two of them weren’t cheating. Look, Edwards is a great detective when she wants to be, but that theory overlooks at least 3 key pieces of the puzzle. Angus calls Elsbeth again to see if the sketch helped, and she says that it did, though they found George dead, so that was less than ideal. He doesn’t stick around long on the phone, launching into a little investigation of his own. He asks Fiona if anyone else was around the screen when they were cleaning up the spilled drink, and she says the Murray sisters were, and might have seen something.
Meanwhile, Edwards and Blanke question Charles about George’s death, and he maintains he had nothing to do with it. This time, though, he actually has an alibi. On the morning George was killed, he and Hayley were at couples therapy, and had then gone to the fertility clinic for bloodwork. Elsbeth asks him to get them a copy of the bloodwork, and they compare the results to the drug test Hayley took at work, since the clinic would test for drugs in the system, among other things. The drug test her work gave her, administered on the Friday, showed she was positive for opiods, but the fertility clinic test, done on Saturday morning, showed Hayley was negative, meaning Elle Même faked the results. Elsbeth suggests they talk to George’s editor next to see what his exposé was on, and therefore to get an idea of what Hayley was whistleblowing.
Before they can, Angus calls again, asking Elsbeth to come to The Iris so the Murray sisters can share with her what they saw that morning. They tell Elsbeth that the man they saw with Hayley either sneezed or coughed — they can’t agree — in her face, then took the box of chocolates off the ground. They didn’t see his face, because he had a face mask on, but tell Elsbeth he was wearing a tartan scarf. What kind of tartan? They can’t agree, and it’s not like Elsbeth knows the difference anyway. She leaves The Iris and heads off to the Elle Même building, just as the man they’re discussing walks by the screen again. His back is to the camera, so they don’t see his face, but they do see the scarf, and Angus calls Elsbeth back to warn her, but by that point, her phone has died.
At the lobby perfume counter, she gets another sample from the associate, and asks her if the bottle is reusable. The associate is confused at the line of questioning, but Elsbeth doesn’t get the chance to explain as she’s met by Thorwald, who asks what she needs. She heads up to his office with him, and says that she needs to confirm that the date of the drug test is correct, as it’s blurry on the record she has. It’s a thin excuse, but he goes to get the original file, and Elsbeth pokes around his office while he’s gone, spotting his scarf which is clearly some kind of tartan, and finding a mask in his pocket to boot. She tries to call the precinct, but sees that her phone is dead. Thorwald returns and a panciked Elsbeth pretends to be on the phone with Wagner, but he catches her in her lie.
Elsbeth Has a Very Happy Valentine’s Day in Season 2 Episode 11
Thorwald is ready to kill Elsbeth too, to protect the company, just like he did Hayley and George, who were about to report that Elle Même’s concealer was causing health problems. He nearly sprays Elsbeth with fentanyl as well to trigger an overdose, but Wagner, Blanke, and Edwards arrive just in time, and Thorwald says he was paid by the CEOs to kill anyone who threatened to expose the company. As for how they even knew to find Elsbeth? Angus called the police switchboard to warn them of the danger. She hurries back to The Iris to thank him, but he’s not there, and his phone is going to voicemail. She sees Fiona on the other end of the screen, and even she doesn’t know where he is. Elsbeth heads back to his office to brood with Blanke, figuring Angus probably went to Edinburgh as he had some concerts coming up with his band. Blanke speculates he’ll call her later as it’s Valentine’s Day.
Elsbeth asks what Blanke’s Valentine’s plans are, and she says she doesn’t have any. She might think she doesn’t have plans, but she arrives home to Cameron giving her a Valentine’s cupcake he brought her from work. The only problem is that he works in the morgue, and the idea of a “morgue cupcake” grosses Blanke out. She does, however, suggest that the two of them head down to the bodega to get ice cream together, so that’s something. As for Wagner’s big plans, he meets Claudia up on a rooftop covered in twinkle lights to give her his big surprise: he’s taken five weeks of dance lessons so he can dance with his wife properly.
Meanwhile, Elsbeth heads down to the Iris, even though there’s no one to see on the screen. She hears Angus’s music start up, but it sounds a lot louder and closer than a speaker. Angus appears, coming out from behind the screen, playing his song for Elsbeth, and the two share a kiss. She asks him about the concerts in Edinburgh that he’s missing to be there, and he tells her he just told the band to go on without him, and that music isn’t his day job anyway — he’s actually a firefighter. Elsbeth might still only consistently be chased by firefighters, but at least this one comes with a guitar and a charming smile.
The first eleven episodes of Elsbeth Season 2 are out now. New episodes premiere on CBS on Thursdays, and stream next day on Paramount+.
Elsbeth
Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 11 puts the larger plot on pause for a transatlantic murder investigation with a dash of romance.
- Release Date
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February 29, 2024
- Network
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CBS
- Directors
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Robert King, Ron Underwood
- Writers
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Michelle King, Robert King
- Did I rate this episode higher because of how romantic it is? I can’t help it, I love love.
- Episode 11 plays with the format in more ways than one to create a compelling mystery for the team to solve.
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