Elsbeth
Good Grief
Season 3
Episode 3
Editor’s Rating
It’s not a stretch to imagine Julia Fox becoming a viral sensation who is capable of a cute little murder.
Photo: Michael Parmelee/CBS
Who doesn’t love a second chance? There are so many ways to enjoy this popular trope. While it’s usually found in romance, second chances pop up in all kinds of stories: love, careers, and success rebound on pages and screens. Some people — our beloved titular character, for example — need a full-on second chance at their whole lives. Such is the case of Raquel Drabowski (Julia Fox), the young widow of Johnny, a New York firefighter who died about 18 months ago when the FDNY rescue helicopter he was in crashed in Puerto Rico, leaving no survivors.
Raquel is resourceful and has made the best of her situation, parlaying the social capital of being a firefighter’s widow into a lucrative career as a grief influencer and star of Black Veil, a reality series dedicated to helping widows find their own second chances at love. After throwing a Kelly Taylor–style curveball by choosing herself (well, choosing her memories of and love for Johnny, anyway) rather than either of her two finalist suitors in the finale, Raquel has set herself up for a lucrative ongoing career. Her agent is very impressed and can practically see the residuals checks for potential new projects coming in. Her own reality series! A custom line of little black dresses! The increased value of her brand now that she’s racked up 15 million followers!
Well, all of that is great, but it’s “not going to bring my Johnny back.” Little does she know, Raquel should be careful about what she might wish for, because Johnny shows up at her apartment, very much alive. Theoretically, that’s great, but in practical terms, it’s a huge problem for her. If Johnny is back, how can she continue to succeed as a grief influencer? What about her sponsorship deals? She’s so wound up about the life and career ramifications of Johnny’s return, and not without reason — he’s monologuing about moving back to his mom’s place on Staten Island, using Raquel’s money to build an extension on the ancestral Drabowski home, and having some kids — that she doesn’t notice the many holes in his story.
He was thrown from the helicopter into a rainforest, became amnesiac, and was nursed back to health by some kindly locals? He eventually regained his memories thanks to seeing Raquel on Black Veil? He decided that leaning that hard into a Jeff Spicoli–inspired look was a good idea in 2025?
The passage of time is powerful, and as Raquel’s fellow daughter of an outer-borough Cyndi Lauper so memorably sang, money really does change everything. With Johnny back, Raquel’s dream situation is on the verge of becoming a nightmare. While divorce is always an option, Raquel knows that her entire grief-influencer persona would crumble into dust if she were to kick Johnny to the curb so quickly after his triumphant return from the dead. No, there’s only one way for her to solve this problem: by taking advantage of a brief window where only she knows that Johnny is back and shoving him off the Staten Island Ferry on the way to visit his mother the following day, yelling “I’m nobody’s wifey!” as she does.
Wouldn’t you just know that Johnny was either mistaken or lying when he told Raquel that she was the only person who knew he was alive and back in town? Turns out, he also left a voice-mail for his mother! Whoopsidaisies! This is a problem for Raquel, but for the viewing audience, what a treat to see Cathy Moriarty pop up as Marie. Down at the police precinct, Marie recounts how Johnny “called me yesterday, which was unusual, because he’s been missing, presumed dead, for the last 18 months.” Moriarty’s line delivery combines being casual, knowing, and economical in a way that suggests she (or Marie) would make an excellent deadpan stand-up comedian.
Raquel shows up and does the most Raquel thing possible, transforming every experience into monetizable content. Johnny’s voice-mail isn’t convincing at all; instead, it’s just the latest in a long string of harassing communications she’s received. She pulls out her selfie stick and immediately records a heartfelt-seeming video, imploring to be left alone, making sure to get an NYPD logo in the shot.
Something’s fishy here, but the investigation doesn’t kick into high gear until the team runs down the number of the phone Johnny used to call his mother and learns from its owner, a trucker named Darryl, that he’d picked up a hitchhiker named Don in Delaware and dropped him off in Weehawken. The name doesn’t match, but the trucker’s recollections of the hitchhiker’s story about surfing and bartending on a beach in Puerto Rico do, and better yet, so does a DNA test on the empty beer cans “Don” left in Daryl’s truck. Well, now we’ve got a missing-persons case that should end in tears of joy, at least for Marie, but instead, some scuba divers find Johnny’s corpse resting on top of a wine cage in the Hudson River.
As Detective Fleming and Officer Hackett peel off to interview potential witnesses, Elsbeth contents herself with finding someone to ask about surveillance footage of the waterfront, and who does she find but Kaya Blanke! Yes, this is not a drill! Kaya is back! Secretly! Her undercover assignment as docks employee Denise Jackson has her very wary of speaking much with Elsbeth at work, but their little clandestine reunion at the bar from “Sweet Justice” yields the heart-to-heart conversation about Angus that Elsbeth has been needing since she returned from Scotland. Kaya and I both think that Elsbeth may have broken things off with Angus a little hastily, but we are also both supportive of how she’s embracing and enjoying her full, single life.
Even if Denise Jackson’s nosing around the docks yields nothing the team can use, Cameron presents a bunch of solid forensic test results, all pointing clearly to Johnny meeting his end on the Staten Island Ferry, but with no surveillance footage or passenger manifest to prove that Raquel was on the ferry, or that she and Johnny had even met up in Manhattan, they can’t make an arrest. Combined with distinctive orange paint from the ferry under Johnny’s fingernails, the heavily weathered FDNY-issued harness and carabiner attaching him to the suitcase are significant, but they could come from anywhere.
Thank goodness for Officer Hackett and her magnificent Theory of the Case Red String board, which has a map and a photo-rich summary of the evidence they’ve gathered to date, all connected with magnets and red string, and it points the investigation toward following up with Luisa Torres, someone Johnny got particularly friendly with at the resort. Their brief video conversation with Luisa yields a dizzying number of details about Johnny’s tenure in Puerto Rico, including his involvement with upwards of 50 women, his loud and frequent complaints about Raquel, and most importantly, the fact that he was never even on the ill-fated helicopter in the first place, thanks to some overenthusiastic day drinking.
So while Raquel and Marie mourned him, Johnny was enjoying his own illicit second-chance life. No near-death experience, no amnesia, no thought to the devastation his “death” had wreaked on his family, and on top of it all, the stolen valor of being a fallen hero. Johnny only bothered to go home after spotting Raquel and her new riches on Black Veil, too. Wow, what a prince! As I said up top: Divorce is a very viable alternative to murder.
Maybe murder seems like the easier solution to a person who is so fixated on maintaining her new lifestyle and public persona, created on the back of her sincere grief. We get a sharper view of what Raquel feels is in jeopardy when the team arrives at her place in Soho. Her agent, Sidney Finn, meets them at the door (and yes, he knows and loathes Kidder Hawes, who, like Sid, also specializes in widow representation). Raquel’s apartment is massive by any standard, and in particular, it dwarfs Marie’s Staten Island home, where Raquel and Johnny lived prior to the helicopter crash.
Raquel is okay with multitasking and takes questions from behind a beautiful dark blue-and-gold screen as she’s trying on samples for her forthcoming custom line of little black dresses. There’s something very reminiscent of Dorothy’s audience with the great and powerful Oz about Elsbeth addressing Raquel without seeing her, and something similarly Oz-like about Raquel herself once she’s confronted with proof of Johnny’s infidelity, too. I’m not sure what’s worse for her, the wholesale destruction of her image of her husband or the fact that she’s being confronted with public evidence of just how voluminously unfaithful Johnny was. However performative her grief is in her #content, what she’s feeling about her Johnny not being entirely hers is real. It’s as if he’s died again.
Elsbeth feels bad for Raquel, but the young widow is still her prime suspect, and the more Raquel clings to her TikTok alibi — how could she have been murdering her Johnny on the ferry on Wednesday morning when she was livestreaming in front of her shrine to her Johnny at home? — the more Elsbeth digs into breaking Raquel’s alibi, and she eventually does so with a helpful insight from Hackett about LiveClock, an app that would allow Raquel to prerecord content and then schedule when to post it, making it seem as if it were a livestream. Between the timing and Elsbeth spotting a shiny, brand-new replacement for Johnny’s beat-up old harness and carabiner, the jig is up, giving Elsbeth a moment to shine on the set of Raquel’s Behind the Black Veil interview, prosecuting her case in the persona of a reality-show host. Raquel’s ambitious pivot from grief influencer to betrayal influencer isn’t going to happen after all.
Turning back to Kaya’s undercover assignment, her promise to have her alter ego, Denise Jackson, do a bit of digging to see if she can learn something about what’s going on down at the waterfront is both generous and possibly reckless. Captain Wagner explains that she must be participating in Operation Starboard, a “multistate investigation into corruption on the docks” (a little nod to season two of The Wire, perhaps?), and having anything to do with Elsbeth or any of their colleagues is extremely dangerous, for all of them and for the case.
Of course, Wagner is a big softie and tries to put Elsbeth in touch with Kaya again at the very end of the episode, giving her a purportedly untraceable burner phone (I think that’s no longer a thing, but we’ll go with it). Elsbeth’s giddy anticipation turns to dread when she dials and finds Kaya’s number out of service. In addition to the anxiety spike I felt when that automated message kicked in, I see another issue potentially brewing on the horizon: Elsbeth, who could make friends with a pepper grinder, is flailing a little bit in her attempts to connect deeply with her other colleagues. As lovely and capable as Officer Hackett is, she’s not Kaya, and it seems as though her stand-up side gig and perhaps more-than-collegial relationship with Detective Fleming are higher priorities for now. That’s totally fair, and also, I hope Elsbeth can right her emotional ship while getting to the bottom of how Kaya is doing.
• One more Easter egg: Raquel sings the praises of a moisturizer from Elle Même, the brand highlighted in the episode where Elsbeth and Angus first met.
• Marie’s A+ hostessing when Elsbeth, Hackett, and Fleming arrive at her home includes an offer of Entenmann’s, which I think was a regional brand in the ’80s and ’90s. The obvious pick would be one of its donuts.
• The oversize, nearly abstract pattern of red lips and teeth on Elsbeth’s jacket almost looks like a bold Marimekko design. Love!
This recap originally misidentified the actress playing Marie. It has been corrected.
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