“Elsbeth’s Eleven” is my favorite episode of the new season so far: The guest stars are perfect in every scene and are clearly having so much fun, and the story is built around a heist devised by horrible people who fail in their objectives because significantly better people execute a counterheist, and then one more person executes a heist within the original heist (a triple heist! Am I in actual Heaven?). As if that were not enough, the episode as a whole presents compelling arguments for notions such as the superiority of interclass solidarity over charity, egalitarianism over exclusivity, defined benefit pensions over market-dependent retirement plans, and relationships governed by caring frankness over those governed by Waspy notions of propriety.
To get there, let’s back up a bit to the financial woes of poor Roselyn (Vanessa Williams), who is fabulously wealthy but, despite having married and divorced quite well three times so far, may not have enough funds (a mere, trifling $1 million! Can you even imagine?!) to continue to live for the next 30 years at her current pace of luxurious consumption.
Being faced with this brutal reality is bad enough, but to learn of it while trying to leverage the wealth and influence she thought she had is even worse. It turns out that Vivienne’s, the highly exclusive Manhattan luxury shopping club she’s been a member of for over 20 years, is now enforcing rules Roselyn didn’t know existed and finds hideously gauche. Being required to show proof of funds prior to shopping? In a store where, if you have to ask how much an item costs, you surely cannot afford it? This country really is going to the dogs! She’s also learning that, thanks to Vivienne’s new managing director, Valentina (Katie Lee Hill), and her comprehensive rebrand in the run-up to the store’s grand reopening after a five-year renovation project, no new members are being admitted for the time being. This makes Roselyn look foolish in front of her friend, prospective member, and struggling frozen-yogurt magnate Celeste (Jenn Lyon), and she simply can’t have that. The obvious solution to this problem is one that will make Vivienne pay for the embarrassment they’ve forced on Roselyn and Celeste and will refill their own coffers at the same time: a heist. How elegant! How simple! How … murder-y? Wait, what?!
We’ll get to that in a minute. The heist is, as a plan, fine. It’s based on the Met Gala jewel-thieving heist in Ocean’s 8, complete with fake jewels being swapped out for real ones, facilitated in part by a bathroom emergency. Roselyn and Celeste team up with Judith (Becky Ann Baker), a sales associate who has been working with Roselyn for decades and is being pushed into an early retirement she’ll barely be able to afford on the benefits offered by Vivienne. “That pop-tart” Valentina is behind it all, of course, so Judith is in with a vengeance. Celeste’s high-end bag faker, Huey (Adrian Martinez), will pose as a plumber and swap replica jewels into loaned pieces for the gala reopening worn by Roselyn and Celeste.
The murder comes as a spur-of-the-moment thing, as Roselyn finds herself poisoning Vivienne’s security chief and gemologist Claude (Patrick Breen) after he declines her invitation to join the heist and tells her he’s going to rat her out to Valentina. Villainous monologuing when you’re trying to bust someone is amateur hour, bush-league nonsense on his part, to be sure, but murder seems like a disproportionate response. As Claude leaves a weirdly nonspecific voicemail for Valentina in the next room (another classic blunder), Roselyn scoops some cyanide-containing silver polish out of its container on his desk and stirs it briskly into his tea.
After delivering a devastating quip — “Don’t worry, by tonight you won’t be able to buy a pair of studs at Claire’s” — and taking a big sip, Claude dies nearly instantly, not unlike how Heather Chandler goes out in Heathers. Roselyn takes a few moments to stage the scene, complete with a lipstick-stained teacup of her own, so that it’ll seem as if poor Claude’s death was a terrible accident and, in a brilliant moment of improvisation, as if she were poisoned, as well. She leaves a tell-tale clue behind — the polish-scooping silver spoon from the set Claude had been polishing for her — and sets about covering her tracks by consuming what must be gallons of home-pressed apple cider (ingested in sufficient quantities, the compounds in apple seeds can yield cyanide in one’s bloodstream). The calm, matter-of-fact way she and Celeste explain Claude’s unfortunate cup of tea to Judith is both amusing and chilling. What’s a little Agatha Christie–style poisoning among the ultrarich and everyone else when prestige is on the line? Judith is (correctly) pretty horrified, but what’s done is done, and Roselyn — in an echo of Laura Dern’s character in Big Little Lies shouting “I will not not be rich!” — yells, “I will not be upper-middle class!” I’m not at all sorry to say that joining what amounts to a Costco for Affluent and Aspiring Ladies Who Lunch seems extremely upper-middle class to me.
The solving of the murder is quite straightforward, particularly after last week’s merry-go-round of visits to places Mac visited on Halloween night. Elsbeth and Kaya are suspicious of Roselyn, even after Valentina’s quick assessment — supported by the medical examiner — that Claude’s death was a terrible accident. Her grief is too theatrical and performative, her lipstick is smudged very deliberately on the teacup’s interior and exterior (normally, you’d just see it on the outside of the cup), and her trash is full of apple pulp in the wake of her experiencing a slight touch of cyanide poisoning.
Combine those means and opportunity with the financial motive Elsbeth and Kaya eventually uncover with a bit of forensic accounting and intel on the heist once they flip Judith, and they have only to set a trap for Roselyn, Celeste, and Huey. That’s right, it’s time for a reverse heist! Detective Donnelly (Molly Price) has been resigned to working with Elsbeth and Kaya again until this moment, but she loves a heist and is all in immediately. Judith is crucial to the plan, pretending that she’s still on Team First Heist so that her former partners in literal crime do the crimes they’ve been planning. The would-be heisters perform exactly as expected, and once again, Elsbeth and Kaya have helped their colleague get their man.
The brisk pace of crime-solving leaves more time for this episode to stretch out a bit with the ongoing plot strands of Captain Wagner’s concerns about workplace morale and his team’s perception of him as a leader, and Kaya and Elsbeth’s friendship. Wagner thinks holding a raffle for Lunch With the Captain is a good strategy, and while it’s not bad, he may want to revisit the drawing board to come up with something more substantive and less forced. Kaya has moved in with Elsbeth during a home renovation she suspects may take several months, and it takes them a little while to get on the same page about finances. Kaya, very reasonably, wants to pay a portion of the rent, which makes Elsbeth extremely uncomfortable, as if they’d be introducing a business arrangement into their friendship. Kaya’s perspective is just the opposite, and I like that she doesn’t back down about it. This is the kind of productive conflict that helps make good relationships work!
In honor of Vanessa Williams, I have saved the best plot twist for last: Judith gets to go enjoy her forced early retirement in far greater comfort than she imagined would be possible, because when Roselyn shoved her and her “tacky purse” into the walk-in closet filled with jewels, she got revenge by taking everything in Roselyn’s safe. Living her best life in Paris, enjoying perfectly laminated croissants daily with funds she got by being the one successful heist-perpetrator and quasi-class warrior of the episode — now that’s what I call retirement! I just hope for her sake that we don’t have an extradition treaty with France.
In This Week’s Tote Bag
• Great needle drops bookend this episode: “J’aime Pas,” by Christian Padovan, and Julie London’s recording of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
• The award for achievement in blazers is shared by Elsbeth’s, which looks like it’s from an apocryphal Missoni x Bargello collaboration in lush, deep autumnal shades, and Roselyn’s, featuring a bold floral in subdued metallics on a black background.
• I have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in Derek Guy’s erudition on menswear that I hooted aloud upon seeing how masterfully Claude’s costume layers and mixes patterns and textures. His dress shirt features a small windowpane check in blue and gray on a white background, layered under a black-and-charcoal Glen plaid waistcoat and a gray/navy/black floral Jacquard (I think) tie.
