Elsbeth Recap: Radically and Transparently
Happy (okay, the jury’s still out on that one) New Year, fellow Tascionians! Elsbeth is continuing its ginger yet deliberate march into more turbid character-development waters, and I’m here for it. While Elsbeth’s plan to drop her life in Chicago for her prior DOJ assignment in New York may have been more of a running away from than a running to something, she’s made a real home for herself in the city. She has friends and colleagues, favorite places and activities, but until recently, has kept the more knotty and messy aspects of herself under wraps. Elsbeth’s look and demeanor — the vibrant red hair, the bold color-and-texture combinations, the abundance of totes — have already been very effective in her pursuit of murderers. Her exuberance and apparent dottiness are a form of armor that fairly screams, “Who’s afraid of little old me?”
Elsbeth has put down roots in New York and has started confiding in Kaya and Captain Wagner, but it seems like her armor could also be a prison. While investigating a murder at a wellness center in “Unalive and Well,” she realizes that her determined sunniness has been so effective that she’s out of practice with feeling and expressing most other emotions. She’s in potentially very big trouble and doesn’t know how to ask for help.
Elsbeth’s first inkling that something’s got to change is her arrival at the police precinct the previous day. Everyone in the elevator is reading the splashy cover story in the New York View (a daily tabloid that is not at all to be compared with the Post), in which she is named as one of the attorneys who suppressed evidence of her former client Mark Van Ness’s domestic abuse in his first divorce. Things are no better when she arrives at her floor and is greeted with stony silence until Kaya dashes after her, saying that she should get in touch with the reporter to request a retraction to the story.
Elsbeth knew this was coming, as did we, because we’ve seen the moments in earlier episodes where she’s been reminded of it by another attorney from Chicago and Mark Van Ness’s second, soon-to-be-former wife. We also saw Judge Crawford’s smug little solo toast to her when the news first broke in a TV report just before the holiday hiatus. Poor Kaya, however, is knocked sideways by the revelation that Elsbeth can’t request a retraction because it’s largely true.
Kaya’s disappointment at Elsbeth’s cagey, unsatisfying response, which is that she did the best she could with the information she had at the time, is devastating. Everyone needs a best friend who loves us enough to cut through our b.s. to tell us when they find our behavior appalling, and Carra Patterson turns in a particularly effective performance here. The warring impulses of disgust and hopefulness on her face are in perfect proportion and are of a piece with Kaya as a person whose high esteem comes with a high bar.
Wagner wisely sends Kaya and Elsbeth to meet up with Detective Smullin to investigate the suspicious death of a young driver, Cole Campbell, who seems to have suffered a fatal allergic reaction while driving. He had previously been participating in a toxin-clearing meditative retreat at the nearby Heiwa Zen Center, which offers mental and bodily clarity for the very reasonable price of about $3,000 per day. How does a young man with perfectly flowing chi and an EpiPen in his glove compartment wind up puffy faced and dead just off the Van Wyck Expressway?
Here’s one way: go undercover at the wellness retreat center where your beloved sister died 15 years ago following a treatment with a hallucinogenic tree-frog venom called Combo. Next, suffer a suspicious allergic reaction after demanding to undergo the same treatment in an effort to prove that the retreat leader is still administering Combo, after promising never to do it again.
The trio pays a visit to Heiwa Zen Center and has an unsatisfying conversation with the center’s owner and retreat leader, Tom (Eric McCormack, draped in the most expensive rustic-looking linen money can buy and wearing a massive bezel-set carnelian ring conveying so much about his character that it deserves a guest credit of its own). Elsbeth volunteers to stay at his schmancy, higgledy-piggledy Asian-fusion wellness center to continue the investigation. She can afford the cost of transformative moon journaling and guided meditations, and some time outside the gossip machine will no doubt do her some good as well.
Kaya and Smullin follow some of the bread crumbs Tom shared about Cole. It’s odd that although Tom refers to him as Cole, everyone else at Heiwa knows him as Billy. Tom explains that away by saying he’d seen through Billy’s ruse right away and chose to address him by that name during his stay out of respect for the young man’s journey. Sure. Tom was also weirdly forthcoming about what had brought Cole to Heiwa in the first place, describing the reason as Cole’s desire to connect with and honor the memory of his late sister, June, who had died of a gallstone infection while at the retreat some 15 years earlier. Okay, but was that really it? What is Tom not telling them?
Conversations with June’s former retreat partner and Cole’s lawyer fill in some of the blanks. June and her partner were among the earliest attendees at Heiwa Zen Center’s retreats and were so young that they put a lot of faith in Tom’s knowledge and confidence in the mystical healing properties of “natural” treatments from Asia and the Amazon. Rather than sending June to the hospital when her infected gallstone worsened, Tom performed a combo ceremony. The delay in seeking medical care led to June’s death, and, ultimately, Tom reached a private settlement with June and Cole’s parents to keep the case out of court and to ensure his business survived.
A key stipulation in the settlement was the permanent cancellation of ever administering Combo again (a practice wellness attendees call “seeing Midori”), with a penalty of paying a further $2 million to the Campbells should Tom ever be found doing it again. Well! That detail explains why Cole’s last two calls were to a local diagnostic lab and his attorney, somewhat cryptically leaving a message saying he now had all of the information he needed. They still have to wait on autopsy results for the specific cause of death, but this is progress.
Meanwhile, Elsbeth is loving her time at Heiwa. Guided meditations, a class on the health benefits of something called seed cycling (ingesting finely calibrated amounts of sesame, flaxseed, and their ilk), various high-end juices, flowy natural fiber PJs in a palette ranging from white to ivory to (nondairy) cream — it really is what the doctor ordered for her. Elsbeth also clicks right away with Cheryl, who had previously been Cole’s former journey partner and is a font of Heiwa Zen Center lore and details about Cole.
She’s also the kind of sincere person totally unconnected with any other part of her life that Elsbeth has been longing to pour her heart out to, so when Cheryl mentions in an evening chat by the campfire that Elsbeth’s throat chakra seems quite blocked, she immediately comes clean about her investigation into Cole’s death. And then, because she’s on a roll, Elsbeth also confides that she’s so angry and embarrassed all the time about having been tricked while making a fortune by working for terrible people. She’s harmed other people and doesn’t know how to explain it to her friends or ask them for help, and it’s just eating her up inside. Cheryl’s advice is as wise as it is straightforward: You have to be transparently honest with your friends. These are people who care about you, so let them! Also, the hypercompetence that leads to the illusion that you don’t need help is a prison!
Finally, Cheryl suggests that the reset and insights Elsbeth is looking for might just be accessible if she tells Tom she wants to see Midori, which is the code name for the banned combo ceremony. Unsurprisingly, Tom stonewalls Elsbeth when she asks to see Midori, explaining that Cole brought his own Combo to the retreat and must have self-administered it, leading to his untimely death. Of course, we know that’s a bunch of hooey, having seen Tom furnish the Combo ceremony and Cole’s ensuing vomiting (aka “releasing your toxins and pain”) and brief loss of consciousness. Elsbeth later learns that Midori is the on-site tree frog who hangs out in a very cool-looking geodesic dome greenhouse. Yes, Tom gave an Amazonian tree frog a Japanese name, which explains an awful lot about Tom.
Back at the precinct, Smullin and Kaya share their latest findings with Captain Wagner and Lieutenant Connor. Combo didn’t cause Cole’s death; he died from anaphylaxis brought on by exposure to sesame oil. Huh! Tom also hired a private ambulance company after June’s death, concealing from law enforcement that there have been over a dozen medical emergencies at Heiwa under his leadership. He also updated Heiwa’s participant waivers to include language barring participants from suing in case they fall ill while at the center. Connor already disdains Heiwa’s whole deal, noting that “they shamelessly appropriate a bunch of Asian cultures” (Orientalism is indeed alive and well in the philosophy and practice of Tom Murphy) and that “the kanji on their website means ‘emptiness’, not ‘peace,’” which is amateur-hour nonsense for someone wanting to project believable erudition and authority as badly as Tom does.
All of these findings are pretty disturbing, but what does Elsbeth make of them? Well, she’s in the midst of an RU phase (a.k.a. radical unplugging), so she can’t take any phone calls at the moment. Connor’s total horror at Elsbeth being at this retreat alone, and being prevented from contacting the outside world, is his most animated moment to date. “May I ask why you’re still here?!” is a delicious moment of peak rectitude and care from a man whose face appears in the dictionary next to “starchiness.”
Connor’s concern isn’t unreasonable; for a moment, it seems as if Elsbeth may have gotten herself into an inescapable pickle, passing out in the 104-degree hothouse after catching a glimpse of Midori. Thankfully, Heiwa staffer Starlight finds her and promises to have Tom — for safety reasons, the only person with access to hypodermic needles — give her a B12 shot right away.
That detail about the needles is the final piece of the puzzle, which Elsbeth, Kaya, and Smullin quickly reveal to Tom and all of the retreat participants. To avoid paying the dreaded $2 million penalty Cole having Combo in his system would expose, he poisoned Cole by injecting mustard seed oil (which is in the same family as sesame) into all of the illicit snacks Cole kept in his car. Starlight, who up until now has been Tom’s chirpy, true-believing lackey, refuses to call his lawyer, offering instead to “send you positive energy … IN JAIL.”
If nothing else, Elsbeth’s time at the Heiwa Zen Center may indeed be healing for her friendship with Kaya. She’s not ready to say she’s fully okay with Elsbeth’s history with Van Ness, but she agrees to help, as long as Elsbeth comes clean with her about every detail it’s legal for her to share. Unbeknownst to Kaya and Elsbeth, Wagner does his bit for justice, urging the new-to-us Captain Kershaw to reopen the baseball bat murder case that made nemeses of Elsbeth and Judge Crawford. No Red Sox fan worthy of the name would own a Yankees bat, the late Andy deserves justice, and leaving this case unsolved is bad for Homicide’s statistics.
In This Week’s Tote Bag
• Elsbeth’s devotion to accessories is eternal. Sure, she’ll wear whatever retreat uniform is on offer, but there’s no way she’d leave off a signature scarf. This time, it’s a Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat riff on crocheted hexagons.
• The funniest line of the episode belongs to Wagner. The Heiwa Zen Center is so well known as a haven for the super-rich and low-level global royalty that “the global press is already trying to blame Meghan Markle, and she wasn’t even there!” Badum-bum! Thank you, he’ll be here all week! Tip your waitress!
• I’m also tickled by Tom’s use of Scientology-style abbreviations: SCs (superficial crap); FF (frog face, a.k.a. the facial swelling brought on by combo treatments); the aforementioned RU. Silly yet totally believable.
