Editor’s note: The below recap contains spoilers for the Elsbeth Season 2 premiere.

The wait may have been shorter than the average wait between seasons, but still, allow me to say: at last the wait is over and Elsbeth is back for Season 2! Everyone’s favorite relentlessly optimistic attorney, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), is back, this time with a permanent position at the NYPD alongside Officer Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson) and under the supervision of Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce). Season 1 didn’t leave a ton of loose threads hanging, or any really, as Elsbeth was asked to remain at the NYPD to help them root out corruption in the ranks, and continue to solve cases in the meantime. We might not see much of the first, but we do see plenty of the second in the season premiere, “Subscription To Murder,” so let’s dive in!

Nathan Lane Takes the Opera Too Seriously in the ‘Elsbeth’ Season 2 Premiere
Image via CBS

As with Season 1, the episode begins not with Elsbeth and co. but instead at the opera, where a very discerning patron, Phillip Cross (Nathan Lane), makes small talk with the usher, one he apparently knows well given that he’s a regular subscriber, before taking his seat. The unoccupied seats in front of him are quickly taken by a young couple, Eddie (Corey Mach) and his date, who don’t seem to him like the typical opera crowd. Cross mentions that he usually sits behind an old lady, and Eddie explains that that was his grandmother, who recently passed away, but left him her opera subscription. Eddie admits he’s not especially into the opera, to put it mildly, but is using the tickets to score with his date instead — and make no mistake, it sounded much skeezier when he said it. Eddie notices the empty seat beside Cross and asks him if he’s waiting for someone, but Cross says he isn’t and explains that the seat belonged to his late wife who used to accompany him, and that he just doesn’t have the heart to give it up.

Just to confirm how ill-suited he is to the opera — or, really, existing in most public places — Eddie attends every performance with a different woman on his arm, and proves to be every nightmarish theater patron rolled into one. He sends texts during the show, falls asleep while his date plays on her phone, violently makes out with his date, and snacks loudly. The final straw comes when he receives a call during the show, and answers it in the theater, though he leaves shortly after to meet a friend at a club instead. Cross arrives back at his home, frustrated at how little enjoyment he’s getting out of the opera season, and decides to take matters into his own hands. Grabbing a prop knife he had on display, he tails Eddie back to his apartment and stabs him several times, mirroring the same scene from the Tosca performance they’d just attended.

With the murder for the episode committed — what a delight that the show returned to the inverted mystery format after veering more traditional in the Season 1 finale — we then check in on Elsbeth and Officer Blanke. The pair are out shopping, looking for something more detective-appropriate for Blanke to wear once she’s promoted. Blanke thinks they’re putting the cart before the horse, but Elsbeth doesn’t see why she shouldn’t prepare for the eventuality of her becoming detective, especially since Wagner has her on the fast track to promotion. The fast track has been a little slow for Blanke’s liking, what with things slowing down over the summer, but sure enough, sirens alert the pair that their break is over, and it’s time to jump back in to things.

Elsbeth and Blanke Work With a New Detective in the Season 2 Premiere
Image via CBS

The pair arrive at Eddie’s house, where Blanke meets Detective Flemming (Daniel Oreskes), a veteran detective Wagner has advised her to shadow. Flemming has been at it long enough that police work feels more routine for him, and he’s eager to wrap things up quickly, telling Blanke and Elsbeth that, as most cases boil down to sex or money, and Eddie’s wallet was missing, that means the murder was the result of a robbery. Blanke and Elsbeth disagree with the conclusion, if only because the method of murder was too violent for it to be a random robbery, and Elsbeth suggests a crime of passion is more likely, especially as the phone was smashed too. To Flemming’s credit, he eschews the stereotype of older, too-comfortable TV detective, and doesn’t dismiss Elsbeth and Blanke outright, saying he personally still believes it to be a robbery gone wrong, but is willing to look into the crime of passion angle.

Back at the precinct, Captain Wagner meets with Lt. Connor (Daniel K. Isaac), who has arrived to replace the corrupt Lt. Noonan (Fredric Lehne). Connor assures Wagner that he’s comfortable being more of the fact-based, stats guy, and doesn’t mind not being the “buddy buddy” type. He agrees to join the precinct, on the condition that he be allowed to look over all their operations to make sure everything is above board. Despite the fact that Wagner had not formally offered him the job, he’s happy to welcome him aboard, as his approach to things sounds promising for the precinct’s future. He introduces Connor to Elsbeth, who offers to give him her office as it used to be Noonan’s. Connor turns down the offer, telling her that he plans to make her and her consent decree unnecessary, thereby freeing up the office and sending her out of the precinct. It’s not that someone wanting to root out corruption and discrepancies is a bad thing, necessarily, but the show is called “Elsbeth” and not “Connor,” so it’s unlikely he’ll get his wish to be rid of her. With Connor off to check out his office on another floor, Flemming and Blanke arrive to report their findings. Flemming says he wants to look into the holes in the case that Blanke and Elsbeth pointed out, but adds that he still thinks it’s a robbery, and that finding Eddie’s wallet will lead them to the killer.

The trio looks over the autopsy report, where Elsbeth notices that the coroner found unknown DNA on the body, and Blanke finds an image of an odd, rectangular bruise that looks like it came from the knife hilt, but without a puncture wound. With the new evidence, Flemming changes his working theory, now agreeing that Eddie was killed in a crime of passion, and they round up his string of dates to interrogate them. None of them has much nice to say about Eddie, though his latest does help them paint a picture of his actions on his last night alive. Flemming tries to pin the murder on one of the women, but it’s all for nothing as it turns out he was onto something with the wallet — Cross, wearing a fake mustache, discarded it near the George Washington bridge — which has just been located.

With Flemming’s robbery theory alive and well, he and Blanke head to the park to investigate, with Flemming checking the area around the bench while Blanke interviews potential witnesses. While he comes up empty, Blanke says one of the witnesses saw a man with a hat and mustache in the area. They’re stopped from investigating any further when Flemming calls it quits for the day, unwilling to work overtime if he isn’t being paid overtime. It’s just as well Blanke suddenly has the evening free, because back at the precinct, Elsbeth goes through the photos on Eddie’s phone, and notices Cross lurking in the back of every selfie taken at the opera, looking increasingly disgruntled. There’s only one solution for this: A night at the opera!

Elsbeth Discovers a Love of Opera in the Season 2 Premiere
Image via CBS

Cross takes his seat at the opera, and Elsbeth and Blanke are shown to their seats right in front of him. They might be there for work, but professional concerns have never gotten in the way of Elsbeth enjoying the hell out of her assignments, and she cries her way through the end of act one — I love how unironically she’s allowed to enjoy things in the series, and how it never makes her less competent, or intelligent, no matter how others may react to it. On their way to the lobby for intermission, she makes small talk with Cross about the show, though he excuses himself quickly when he learns they’re there with the police. The pair then run into Dr. Yablonski (Daniel Davis), who was last seen in Season 1’s “An Ear For an Ear.” Blanke speaks to the usher, asking about Eddie’s actions that night, while Yablonski gives Elsbeth the rundown on Cross, telling her he’s a noted scold, and that he’s attended the shows alone since his wife died.

Yablonski says he never met Cross’s wife, but despite how lonely the man seems, he gave up trying to be friends with him when his obsession with his first ever opera, a production of Tosca he had seen in 1968, which he compares every other show to, became insufferable. Yablonski proposes that Elsbeth and Blanke join him at a bar after the performance, one many of the performers and fans like to frequent. Fans like Cross, who Elsbeth approaches under the guise of apologizing to him for her emotional outburst during the show.

Cross, it turns out, is actually receptive to how the opera affected Elsbeth, pleased someone else feels as strongly as he does. She asks him whether he comes to the bar after every show, and suspecting she’s trying to interrogate him, he tells her that he was at the bar the night Eddie was killed, and even has the receipt to prove it. Maybe it’s just because I know he did it, but I feel like volunteering an alibi without being asked a direct enough question is suspicious behavior. Before he can shut down too much, Elsbeth pivots and just asks if he happened to see Eddie there that night. He says he didn’t but winds up incriminating himself further with an anecdote about another night at the bar, one that highlights how he might have been able to make a quick exit from the bar to go follow Eddie. He doesn’t admit anything further, and Elsbeth doesn’t press, but they leave on pleasant enough terms that he accepts her request to teach her more about opera, since he’s such an expert.

Back at the precinct, Blanke interrogates Eddie’s friend Sean (Kario Marcel), asking about the two calls he made to Eddie that night. Sean explains that the first was to invite him out — the call he took at the opera — and the second was hours later when Sean realized Eddie left without covering his part of the bill. Blanke suggests to Wagner that the first call is of more interest than the second, which went unanswered, since Eddie answered it during the performance. Wagner is skeptical that anyone would go so far as to kill over bad theater etiquette, and Blanke doesn’t have much else to go on to convince him otherwise, though she does observe that by answering his phone in a public room, anyone could have heard where Eddie was headed.

Cross Has a Love/Hate Relationship With Elsbeth in the Season 2 Premiere
Image via CBS

Over at Cross’s place, Elsbeth arrives for her first opera history lesson. She takes in the opera artifacts in Cross’s study, and comes across the knife he stabbed Eddie with. He tells her it’s a prop from that first production of Tosca that he saw, but then directs her away from it to begin her lessons. After a several-hour lecture, which somehow involves Elsbeth bringing up Andrew Lloyd Webber in a way that infuriated Cross, they decide to call it for the day. She asks him why, in all this paraphernalia, there are no photos of his late wife, and he tells her that she was a construct. After buying two seats in an effort to get others to go to the opera with him, and after finding these companions lacking in some way, Cross elected to just go to shows on his own, retaining the second seat to prevent anyone sitting next to him.

She tries again to get some sort of reaction out of him regarding poor behavior in the theater, but as a former attorney himself, he catches her at it. He obviously seems to treasure her appreciation for the opera far more than he is insulted at her efforts to interrogate him, as he offers her a pair of opera glasses of her choosing from his collection. With Cross’s back turned, Elsbeth selects a pair, but scoops them up in an evidence bag, something that doesn’t go unnoticed by the opera fanatic.

While Elsbeth does her best to interrogate Cross without really interrogating him, things go south for Blanke. Not because of the investigation, but rather because of something Connor turned up in his thorough examination of everything at the precinct. Wagner calls her into his office to tell her that Connor found that there was a mix-up with her college credits when she was admitted to her program at the police academy, and the two AP courses she took in high school didn’t count after all. I feel like once you have the college degree in hand, signed off by the college in question, then that’s the end of that, as the degree is really just a formal paper declaring you met the requirements of the program to their satisfaction, but what do I know? Wagner tells Blanke he’ll stall things to prevent it escalating, but tells Blanke she needs to find a way to get those two additional credits quickly. Connor agrees to let Wagner sort it out, but tells Blanke that until it is, her promotion to detective is on hold.

Blanke Hits a Professional Road Bump in the ‘Elsbeth’ Premiere

In her office, Elsbeth reviews the evidence while listening to an opera interview in the background. The interview is with the late Gino Gozzi (Christopher Borg), who was one of the leads in the performance of Tosca that Cross is obsessed with. While the interview itself is quite old, it features Gozzi recounting how, at that 1968 performance, the retractable knife malfunctioned, and didn’t retract after all, stabbing him in the chest. He then adds that after the show, the knife was gifted to a little boy in the audience, and Elsbeth puts it all together, since that was a curious detail for Cross to leave out. She tries to catch Blanke up, but given the news she just received, her friend isn’t really in a place to hear it.

Flemming arrives to tell them that the DNA results came back, and the unknown DNA found on Eddie’s body was not a match for Sean or for Phillip Cross, sending them back to square one. Blanke suggests they go over the autopsy again, suspecting that the strange bruise has something to do with it, but Wagner orders her to step back, given the recent complication with her academic records. While neither of them explain what’s going on to Flemming or Elsbeth, in a surprisingly sweet gesture, Flemming comes to Blanke’s defense, telling Wagner she’s got potential, and it’s a waste not to let her see it through.

With Blanke off the case, Elsbeth returns to Cross’s place and asks to borrow the retractable knife, believing it was responsible for the bruise on Eddie’s body. Cross takes it out of the case and stabs himself in the chest with it, the blade retracting, to prove that it isn’t possible to have killed someone with it, but will not allow Elsbeth to examine it, or the switch on the side of it, any closer without a warrant. At the precinct, Blanke suggests Elsbeth just get a warrant from Wagner, but Elsbeth says that there would be no point, given that any DNA evidence from the knife must be long gone. Even finding Cross’s DNA on Eddie would be a hard sell since the two were sitting so close together that night, that it might have just come from stray saliva as he cheered during the show. The two pause in their speculation to admire the detective-appropriate suit that Blanke bought, a suit she now has to return to put the money towards college credits. An offhand remark about not wanting to wear it out because with her luck there would be traces of her left on it triggers an epiphany for Elsbeth, and things are not looking good for Mr. Cross.

Elsbeth returns to his home, and despite how things ended last time, he seems pleased to see her. She returns the opera glasses, and after he admits to knowing she took them for the DNA, and adds that he knew that wouldn’t solve anything, Elsbeth reveals that the case was cracked by DNA. But not Cross’s; it was Gino Gozzi’s. She’s joined by Blanke, Flemming, and Fritz (Nick Sullivan) from the opera archives. After walking him through the night’s sequence of events, including his stop at the bar for the receipt alibi, Elsbeth and Blanke tell him that they know the knife retracted the first time he tried to stab Eddie, leaving the strange bruise, before flipping the switch to stop the blade from retracting. Since the knife had Gozzi’s blood on it from the 1968 incident, the stabbing transferred the DNA over to Eddie’s body, and they were able to cross-check it with an old costume of Gozzi’s in Fritz’s possession.

With Cross in custody, Elsbeth and Blanke meet up at Blanke’s place, where she is looking over possible classes she can take to make up the two credits she needs, with Elsbeth sweetly bringing her a back-to-school gift bag. While I understand why Season 1 didn’t put a ton of emphasis on Blanke, needing to establish Elsbeth as a character, and also the premise of the murder mystery, I love that Season 2 is giving her a personal and professional arc of her own, and I am excited to see where it goes. The episode ends the next day with Elsbeth out walking her dog when a large SUV stops in front of her. A mysterious voice addresses her by name and orders her to get in.

The first episode of Elsbeth is out now. New episodes premiere on CBS on Thursdays, and stream next day on Paramount+.

ReviewElsbeth Season 2 is off to a delightful start with a return to form episode that heightens the emotional stakes.ProsCarrie Preston continues to delight as sunshine personified Elsbeth Tascioni.The Season 2 premiere ups the emotional stakes with the introduction of Connor and Blanke’s professional hurdles.It’s great to see Blanke get a personal arc this season that has nothing to do with Elsbeth.

Elsbeth Tascioni, an unconventional attorney, gives her singular point of view to make observations to catch criminals alongside the NYPD.Release Date February 29, 2024 Creator Michelle King, Robert King Main Genre Crime Seasons 1 Creator(s) Michelle King , Robert King Expand

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