Elsbeth Recap: He Wants Sweet Revenge

It seems like Elsbeth wants to continue exploring the slightly gray area of murderers who claim that everything they do is for the greater good (thanks to Hot Fuzz, that’s a phrase I can never hear without immediately responding “the greater good” in a zombified West Country English accent). After chronicling a self-obsessed CEO who killed a journalist in alleged service of crime prevention in “Artificial Genius,” “Sweet Justice” puts that idea down, flips it, and reverses it by creating a self-deluded do-gooder/creepy avenging angel who accidentally kills someone other than the self-obsessed CEO he intended to dispatch.

Not that Gemma Nelson (Audrey Corsa) doesn’t deserve a vigorous, non-murder comeuppance! We first learn of her awful exploits through the anguished reminiscences of Ivy Benson (Paulina Singer), a struggling writer whose pre-job-interview confidence is shattered by a reminder of how, as a college freshman, Gemma stole and shared entries from her diary and then cyberbullied and harassed Ivy into dropping out altogether. This is unambiguously appalling and is very appropriate territory for working through with a good therapist. It’s also totally fine for Ivy to pour her heart out about it to her friend, neighbor, and bartender/confidant, Joe Dillion (Arian Moayed, beloved of Succession viewers for his performance as Kendall Roy’s sort-of friend and veteran truth-teller Stewy Hosseini).

Joe takes his responsibility as a bartender/confidant very seriously. Very, very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that his overzealous belief that he, personally, can impose justice on bad people combines with his intense crush on Ivy, leading him to break into Gemma’s gorgeous loft apartment and strangling her to death in her own bed. Ivy’s got an alibi — she’s visiting her sister and new niece in Pennsylvania — so she’ll be safe from scrutiny; no fuss, no muss! Just a couple of problems with Joe’s little plan: He leaves behind a partial footprint covered in sticky industrial cleaner at the scene; the ring/bottle opener he wears as a fashionable, yet functional, bartender about town leaves very distinctive marks on his victim’s neck; and said victim is not Gemma, but Jane Dunhill, the blameless Midwesterner with whom Gemma’s boyfriend Brad had arranged a house swap. Oh, say it ain’t so, Joe!

At the murder scene, the whole team has the unusual experience of meeting the victim. That’s not a euphemism; Gemma is both alive and most seriously displeased with the entire situation. It’s reasonable for her to be upset upon returning to her apartment to find that the woman her thoughtful boyfriend Brad had swapped homes with is dead. That’s a creepy and tragic turn of events! Unfortunately, even considering that X factor, Gemma is somehow more awful in person than the already nightmarish roommate Ivy described to Joe. She blames Jane for her own death, is vicious to her boyfriend, and behaves like a petulant jerk to everyone working the crime scene. Kaya remarks that she can understand someone wanting to kill Gemma, and as disturbing as it is to hear a police officer say that, she’s speaking for everyone within earshot of the unremittingly awful intended murder victim.

Gemma doesn’t make it easy to make the case that even rotten people like her don’t deserve the vigilantism Joe dispenses like it’s candy. Even when Elsbeth, Kaya, and Detective Smullen (Danny Mastrogiorgio) pay her a call at her company Tykoon’s flagship store, she’s nasty from start to finish and points their investigation toward Ivy, citing a threatening Facebook comment as very suspicious. That comment was inadvisable, but it’s meaningless as evidence given Ivy’s location the night of poor Jane’s murder. Detective Smullen is keen on Jane’s husband as a suspect, but he’s plainly grief-stricken, describes Jane as having been nearly angelic, and has an alibi for the murder. Gemma, undaunted and enraged, incites her many Instagram followers to flood the precinct with calls demanding an arrest.

Elsbeth is suspicious of Joe’s freelance guardian-angel shtick from the jump, and circumstantial evidence pointing to him stacks up quickly, but he’s clever enough to know that all she has is circumstantial evidence. He goes so far as to state flatly that Ivy was completely uninvolved in Jane’s death and to warn Elsbeth that she’d better not make things sticky for his friend. Joe’s overdone chivalry has quickly become a fatal error, overplaying his hand, and Elsbeth’s realization that barkeep-in-training Dion also heard Ivy pouring her heart out to Joe about Gemma combines to unleash the full force of Elsbeth’s tenacity. She enlists Ivy and Dion’s assistance to stage Dion’s false arrest. Joe confesses to Jane’s accidental murder, but not because it’s unjust for Dion to go down for it. When he sees Ivy declaring Dion her hero and kissing him in front of the whole crowd at the bar, it triggers Joe’s deep need for recognition and credit for being a noble agent of justice.

I particularly like how Elsbeth’s investigation peels back the layers of Joe’s personality. We first meet him as a mixology perfectionist, chiding junior bartender Dion about how, since they’re charging their customers $80 for a martini, the balance of ingredients and flavors needs to be ultraprecise. Something far more sinister emerges over the episode as we learn about the variety of notionally charitable acts Joe commits. He seems not to grasp the differences between anonymously making sure neighbors have Christmas gifts and enough to eat and following a bar patron home to beat the daylights out of his mugger.

Arian Moayed crushes this aspect of Joe’s character, dropping his self-righteous veil inch by inch until we see the self-satisfied and self-interested villain just beneath the surface. Unlike the flashes of fun in Keegan-Michael Key’s portrayal of the perfectionist dad/evil accountant in “Something Blue” and the zest for one-upmanship in Stephen Moyer’s turn as the caddish theater professor in the series pilot, Moayed’s Joe starts out just a hair too protective and reveals increasingly disturbing soul rot with each moment.

And finally, the limited series Captain Wagner: Good Guy or Bad Guy comes to a close, not a moment too soon. It turns out that it’s possible that I, a veteran overthinker, got just a tad in my head about this arc, and Captain Wagner is, as he always was, a Very Good Guy. As a resolution, it’s far more on-brand for Elsbeth than my flights of fancy, such as Claudia being Lieutenant Noonan’s accomplice and maneuvering Wagner into facing the music in their stead.

Wagner shows his mettle as a detective by bugging a bartender’s ring/bottle opener that Noonan had been admiring and telling him about a phony Department of Labor investigation. This bit of misdirection prompts Noonan to flush out Flair-All’s CEO, Declan Armstrong (Kelly AuCoin, in a free-from-bad-wigs shift from Pastor Tim from The Americans), and inadvertently gets a bunch of exculpatory-to-Wagner remarks on tape. The one sour note comes at the very end when Wagner reveals just how much he’s been hurt by Elsbeth’s secret investigation of him under the guise of a DOJ consent decree. He’s also kind of angry with himself for not seeing the truth behind Elsbeth’s cheerful, smiling demeanor. He can never trust her again and tells her, very pointedly, that she is 100 percent free to return to Chicago. Ouch!

• Coat of the Episode goes to Elsbeth’s silvery tweed jacket, which is festooned with big faux pearls and dark-gray crystals along all of the seams. They form a sort of jewel-based piping effect. It’s magnificent.

• Joe is not just a murderer; he’s also a composer of cocktails — a true Renaissance man! I jotted down the ingredients of his mocktail tribute to Elsbeth, which he described as being, like its namesake, frothy, colorful, and complicated. The ingredients are zero-proof aquavit, beet juice, orange acid, young Thai coconut, and mace mist (the warm spice, not personal-safety pepper spray).

• My favorite recent example of Elsbeth’s nonlinear thinking: her use of paint-chip colors as her coded way of telling Captain Wagner that he’d better exonerate himself ASAP or he’s in the soup with the DOJ.

• Gemma’s comment that “you come at the queen, you best not miss” is a nod to an iconic moment in The Wire’s first season. By putting it into the mouth of a cruel and petty white lady, the writers transform the line into a joke that captures Gemma’s towering vanity and lack of self-awareness.