Spoilers ahead for Episode 7 of Elsbeth Season 2, called "One Angry Woman" and set to be available streaming with a Paramount+ subscription.
Elsbeth's latest episode in the 2024 TV schedule delivered the long-awaited arrival of Michael Emerson as a guest star, but he's not a one-and-done like other guests who have worked opposite his real-life wife on the hit CBS drama. Elsbeth has found herself a nemesis after she caught on to the sketchy Judge Milton Crawford during jury duty, and star Carrie Preston spoke to CinemaBlend to tease the two characters' dynamic with a comparison to a legendary duo from literature: Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty.
Elsbeth's best efforts to get out of jury duty to spend time with her son (played by Ben Levi Ross after last week's surprise appearance) were shot down by Judge Crawford, but not because there weren't valid reasons why she should be dismissed. In fact, the defense attorney representing the accused murderer tried to dismiss her as soon as she said that she works with the police.
Was Elsbeth bending the rules by tipping off Delia during the trial? Sure, but accused woman's lawyer wasn't doing her any good, and it turned out to be lucky that he couldn't get her dismissed. All in all, it 100% appeared that Crawford was determined that Delia be locked up for committing murder... with good reason, because he himself was the killer of the week.
The Good Wife alum's character didn't catch on that he was the murderer by the end of the episode like she usually does, but she was still savvy that something was off. The leading lady described him as "almost untouchable" for a reason! When I spoke with Carrie Preston ahead of the 2025 TV schedule about how soon Elsbeth caught on that something serious was off with the judge, she shared:
She sees from the beginning that he keeps making these very curious bench rulings in the trial that just don't make sense to her. And so she's kind of on to him when he starts doing that, and allowing things that any other judge would never allow. She starts to be suspicious of him, but she just can't figure out why this guy's doing this. She's not necessarily thinking that he's connected to this murder. She's just wondering what's up with this guy and why he's making these errors.
Elsbeth may be an incredibly intuitive woman with a knack for making connections that everybody else missed, but there was no reason to suspect that the stuffy judge had anything to do with murder other than attempting to put Delia behind bars. That is, until he mentioned "disco" and tipped Elsbeth off that he knew more about what happened than he was letting on. Carrie Preston went on:
Then once she does see that the killer is still out there, she gets very tenacious about wanting to bring whoever that killer is to justice, and she's got to figure out how to do that. So he becomes her Moby Dick or he's the Moriarty to her Sherlock. It really gives her a quite a drive for the rest of the season.
While comparison of Crawford as the Moriarty to Elsbeth's Sherlock suggests two more or less equals facing off, we have to hope that their story doesn't end for Elsbeth the way that the classic Herman Melville novel Moby Dick did for Captain Ahab!
Noting that Michael Emerson has a knack for playing bad guys on shows like Evil and (arguably) Lost, I admitted that I still didn't expect his Elsbeth character to turn into a baseball bat-wielding murderer within the first few minutes of "One Angry Woman," to which Carrie Preston responded:
On our show, we do like to show the murder and see it at the top, so we all know who it is that we're dealing with. But yeah, it really speaks to his kind of cold-heartedness. There's many ways that you could take somebody down. That's a pretty brutal way to do it, but it was the only way that he felt like he would know how to cover his tracks.
Crawford actually covered his tracks very well, and probably would have gotten away with the murder with nobody any the wiser if not for dropping the comment to Elsbeth about disco. Nobody had mentioned the Donna Summer record, and Elsbeth of course noticed that he'd slipped, and she's on to him now. So, what's it like for the cast to have a returning antagonist in Season 2 rather than just the weekly one-offs? I asked Carrie Preston that very question, and she shared:
We haven't had that yet, so that's fun. To have a conflict that has been there. We have all these killers that I take down in each episode, and so I don't have this, like I said, Moby Dick. That's fun to have something like that, and also just to have it be Michael is exciting for me.
The only thing that's not exciting is that Elsbeth's upcoming fall finale will be followed by several weeks of the show's winter hiatus before returning in late January. Still, fans still have that fall finale to look forward to, with Michael Emerson returning for his second episode of Season 2. Tune in to CBS on Thursday, December 19 at 10 p.m. ET for the fall finale of Elsbeth, and/or stream the series on demand via Paramount+.
