[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 2, “Doll Day Afternoon.”]
Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 2 had two exciting Easter eggs for fans of shows made by Robert King, who wrote and directed this episode, and Michelle King. One was the first mention of The Good Fight‘s Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), who was referenced by Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) when the killer of the week needed a good lawyer, and the other might not have been as obvious. An Evil and Elsbeth editor/voiceover actor lent their talents to the episode in a scene where David Cross‘s character, Nolan Hurst, was speaking through a toy megaphone. Here, King breaks down the episode.
Elsbeth is testing out new ways to involve the killers of the week in Season 3. In Episode 2, which aired on Thursday, October 16, dealing with the killer was the episode’s full-time gig. A hostage situation transpired when Nolan, who had just gotten out of prison for financial crimes, accidentally killed a successful toy store owner who was upcharging him for an American Girl parody doll by thousands. Nolan was desperate to get the doll for his daughter, who was kept away from him while he was in jail.
Nolan returned to the toy store after the murder. Evidence from the crime scene led Elsbeth and her NYPD escort, Officer Summerville (Boots‘ Angus O’Brien), to the store at the same time, and Elsbeth got caught up in the hostage situation that unfolded. Her compassion and quick thinking led to no casualties, despite the new character Captain Tully’s (Campbell Scott) best efforts to take Nolan out.
Dive into “Doll Day Afternoon” with King below to learn new details about Scott’s future with Elsbeth and more. Next week, Kaya (Carra Patterson) returns.
You make a Big reference when Elsbeth is playing on that giant keyboard in the toy store. Tell me why that’s a perfect reference for a character like her.
Robert King: If you mention [floor pianos] in any toy store in the world, you’d remember Tom Hanks dancing on the keyboard. It felt like it would be fun to give Carrie a chance to outdo it. And then you use it as a plot device later, it’s a good thing. You start in comedy, and then you don’t realize the plot device has been buried within the show.
That was my favorite sequence of shots in the episode, where the agent is slowly rappelling down from the air vent and looks very serious the whole time, and then it cuts to his shoe dangling over the keys.
That was a fun one.
Michael Parmelee / CBS
You also referenced Dog Day Afternoon in the episode title and in the script. Where did the idea for this episode come from?
This came from the [writers’] room. I’m always commissioned to do one directing job for them a year, and [showrunner Jonathan Tolins] had five possibilities laid out for me. This is the one that seemed most appetizing to me. It seemed to be the most challenging filmically and broke Carrie off into a new territory.
How would you categorize this new territory?
It’s all, let’s catch someone over the course of that episode. You find out who did it right in the beginning. It’s a Columbo paradigm, and then it’s how is Elsbeth going to trap that person? In this one, they’re all trapped. You [and Elsbeth] figure out pretty early on who did it, but then it takes you into a different genre, which is a hostage-taking drama.
I live in New York. I recognize the storefront you were in, but I couldn’t place it for the life of me.
Right now, it’s just an empty room. They’re trying to rent it. We just used it. That was some wonderful production design that was done in there to bring that all up.
The storefront, specifically, is it in Soho?
Yes, exactly. It’s in Soho, on one of the cobblestone streets. It’s a beautiful store and a beautiful street.
Is that why you wanted it as your location, because it’s so beautiful?
Yeah, and also unlike most of the [episodes], which split their time between our standing sets — the police department or [Elsbeth’s] apartment and exteriors — this one was going to be all out and about that place. So we needed a beautiful exterior that we wouldn’t mind looking at; a great street, so the cobblestones make that street; and then an interior that was of a certain size, so you weren’t always exposed to the windows up front because you needed to be away from sharpshooters.
Whose voice did you use for Nolan’s megaphone?
One was sped up. The other is Matt Kregor. He is an editor who does amazing voices. He worked with us on Evil. He did all the voices of the funny animals in Bumble Bee Valley, so he has this repertoire of voices he could do.
So you’ve got a little Evil Easter egg in here, and you’ve got a Good Fight Easter egg with the mention of Diane Lockhart. Tell me about the decision to mention her in this episode. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s Diane’s first mention in Elsbeth.
Yes, I think it is, maybe in some oblique way. Anju [Andre-Bergmann], who co-wrote it with me, and I thought it would be fun. If you’re getting a lawyer that you want to suggest that Carrie isn’t steering him wrong in suggesting, well, who else can you get other than Diane? And also Diane and Elsbeth didn’t end on an uncomfortable place by the end of Good Fight or even in Good Wife, so it felt like it’d be someone more that Elsbeth would suggest.
Michael Parmelee / CBS
How did you film the shots from the nanny cam?
They had two teddy bears. It’s amazing what the props [department] did. One just sat there. There’s no camera in it, of course. And then the other was a puppet that they operated off-screen. I think they had one wire, like a ventriloquist dummy kind of thing. When we wanted those shots, we just removed the bear and put a GoPro there to shoot.
One of the major scenes in the episode filmed through that nanny cam is Elsbeth “back in the courtroom.” Talk to me about putting her back in the courtroom, even in this hypothetical scenario.
It felt like she needed to try to calm down a tense situation that the police outside were making even more tense, and it seemed like one of her fallbacks would be her earlier career. She would use that as a way to say, Look, this is not hopeless. If I were your lawyer, I could get you off. In the process of doing that, she really realizes who she was. And she even sort of feels guilty about it, even as she’s talking through it, that one of the ways to win in a case is to blame whatever witness, to make them look like the villain. It’s a way for the Campbell Scott character to have some motive to even be angrier because he realizes Elsbeth is kind of damning him over the nanny cam. It felt like it had two levels to it.
That’s indicative of Elsbeth’s mindset in general. She can tackle many birds with one stone, so she’s screwing with Captain Tully’s plan while also showing compassion and doing the work of convincing Nolan.
Yeah, she’s a multitasker of immense proportions. Carrie does such a good job of really making you feel like you’re in her thought process, like going through all these variations.
There’s a zoom-in shot around this scene of Captain Tully when Elsbeth is talking about him wanting to prove himself. That felt like it was a foreshadowing. I wonder if Tully is going to be a continued presence with Wendell Pierce‘s Captain Wagner?
I know he is going to be in more episodes. I don’t think that’s wrong to say because I know we were just introducing him for stuff later, so I bet he will. By the way, Wendell and Campbell were great together. They really did make it work. These arguments they had, I like ad-libbing a little on top of what the lines are suggesting, and they were doing that ad-libbing that doesn’t make it seem like ad-libbing often. Ad-libbing looks like they’re just repeating the same line over and over again. But they were great at it.
Michael Parmelee / CBS
What were some ad-libs that made it into the final cut?
That’s a really good question. I need some time to think that through because yeah, you had some great stuff. David Cross was really, I mean, obviously, being a comedian, he’s great at coming up with things. I have to think on that one.
But you think that some ad-libs did make it into the final cut?
Oh yeah, definitely. I enjoyed them. And also, there’s an energy that comes with ad-libs. You start seeing that everybody reacts a little differently if they don’t quite know what the next line will be.
With Wagner’s commitment to Elsbeth’s methods and the success of her plans, juxtaposed with Captain Tully’s poor leadership, do you think this episode proves that Elsbeth is having a positive impact on the NYPD?
Yes. I mean, it’s a difficulty of dramatic storytelling because in many ways, if she’s solving as many cases as she is, she would just be running the NYPD.
Wagner knows that she’s a loose cannon, too, so you can’t always trust her to be exactly right sometimes. She’s like one of these AI computers that hallucinates. Sometimes you’re not sure if you’re getting exactly the right thing.
But she’s clearly having a positive impact, because in Elsbeth Season 1, this trust with Wagner did not exist. Now, everyone’s seeing how effective she is with more humane methods, while Captain Tully is very trigger-happy.
Captain Tully’s trigger-happy. And I think we’re suggesting that the militaristic aspect of some police work is counterproductive because it aggravates situations. It heightens tensions. And so I think what Elsbeth was doing in this episode was trying to loosen things up to bring it down as a safety valve, just as a way they could survive the day. She wants to bring everybody down from this tense level. And I think Wagner is trying to work between those two extremes. He’s still a cop, but he is also a cop who sees the worthiness of what Elsbeth is doing.
The effectiveness of Elsbeth’s methods shows in that final shot of Nolan, where he’s looking at his daughter, and you can see he’s changed.
I think so. First of all, that young actress was great, the one who played his daughter. The connection between the two, you get the sense now she’s going to be visiting him in prison because she was pulled away from that for a while.
That final shot of him in the episode was very moving. You could see that he was really appreciative that someone helped him instead of just trying to hurt him.
That’s right. It seems like a guy who’s had bad luck all his life and then created his own bad luck too, by making bad choices.
Elsbeth, Thursdays, 10/9c, CBS