Elsbeth: "The Wrong Stuff" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired October 24, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the two Law and Order shows I switched to CBS because I was curious about the heavily promoted new show Elsbeth, which is about Elsbeth Tascioni, pronounced “Tah-schee-onee” (Carrie Preston), a sort of free-lance attorney who does consulting work for the police department and as a counselor reports to Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), the sort of commanding African-American character who frequently appears on Lifetime shows as an authority figure trying to talk the white characters out of their stupidities. The show started with a tense scene inside a spacecraft in which the five astronauts – alternative-energy entrepreneur Gavin Morrissey (Jason Babinsky); oil magnate Doug Howe (Terry Serpico); paint tycoon Neil Dorsey (Rob Riggle); his son, whom he named Neil, Jr. but so hates his dad he wants to call himself “Randy” (Ked Merwin); and the one woman in the group, Internet whiz kid Morgan Lee (Melanie Chandra) – suddenly have to do with a cabin leak and the camera pulls back. Director Aisha Tyler and writers Erica Shelton and Matthew J. Begbie thereby reveal to us that what we’ve been watching is just a simulation of space flight, as the trainer, Carter Schmidt (Christian Borle), announces to the crew that if they’d really been in space, they’d all be dead by now. Then Gavin Morrissey is killed when the training centrifuge that’s supposed to accustom the wanna-be astronauts to acceleration, the vastly increased gravity you have to deal with when your rocket is on its way to escape velocity before it finally breaks free of Earth’s gravitational pull and you’re officially in space.

The program that’s sending them up is one of those business that for a multi-million dollar fee will shoot just about anyone into space, and my husband Charles said it reminded him of a 2015 episode of the ABC-TV detective series Castle, about a male mystery writer who’s dating a female homicide detective and insists on horning in on her cases. My husband Charles and I had seen the Castle episode at one of the “Mars Sci-Fi” film screenings the late Gerry Williams used to show at his video studio in Golden Hill (see https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/03/mars-on-tv-compilation-1963-2015.html). Its premise was that two megabillionaires, obviously based on Elon Musk and Richard Branson, were both preparing private space expeditions to Mars, and the hot-shot pilot who was supposed to command the mission that was going to fly first is found murdered. Both the Castle and Elsbeth episodes used the locked-room mystery trope – both stressed the utter isolation imposed on the astronauts-in-training by the mission’s regimen – and both even had the same episode title: “The Wrong Stuff,” an all too obvious pun on Tom Wolfe’s classic account of the original seven U.S. Project Mercury astronauts, The Right Stuff. But whereas the denouement in the Castle episode is three of the other members of the crew ganging up to kill the obnoxious pilot because they can’t stand the idea of being stuck on a long-term mission to Mars with him, the ending of the Elsbeth show focused on the long-term tensions between the would-be astronauts.

Randy Dorsey had a goop-eyed hero-worship going for Gavin Morrissey, which his own father was determined to break so Randy would give up his dreams of getting into the alternative-energy business and agree to inherit his dad’s paint company instead. Among Neil’s tactics was revealing to his son the secret deal Morrissey had with oil magnate Doug Howe to buy lithium produced as a by-product of Howe’s fracking operation to power Morrissey’s storage batteries. Elsbeth is able through fragmentary pieces of evidence to deduce that Morrissey was murdered through an electrical fire set off by a battery of some kind mounted inside his thick-soled space boots. She also figures out that Neil Dorsey was the killer because she finds a bit of a pen tip inside the component from which the fatal battery was pried loose. Neil had made a big deal about his company having developed a special kind of pen that, unlike an ordinary one, wouldn’t depend on gravity and therefore would write in a weightless environment. Only the tip of one of his pens broke off inside the device as he tried to extract its battery, and somehow this was supposed to prove that Neil was the killer even though everyone on the mission who wanted one had his special pens. The show ends with Morrissey dead, Neil Dorsey on his way to prison, and the other three spoiled shit-brat rich people determined to go ahead with their ultra-expensive joy ride into space even with two fewer people on their crew than they’d expected. I was surprised how much I liked Elsbeth: the promos for it had made the character seem ultra-annoying, but in the context of a complete episode she came across as a woman of great dignity and charm and not at all the airheaded flibbertigibbet she seemed like in the promos.