Elsbeth: “Devil's Night” (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired October 31, 2024)

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

After the two Law and Order shows I’d briefly considered showing something from the Universal horror collection as a celebration of Hallowe’en, but instead I switched channels from NBC to CBS for the latest episode of Elsbeth, a quite good mystery show also set in the New York Police Department, or at least a precinct thereof. This was a Hallowe’en-themed episode called “Devil’s Night,” about a former child TV star named Mackenzie Altman (Brittany O’Grady), a young Black woman who along with three other Black girls played on a recently cancelled TV sitcom about a white guy raising four Black female foster children. She’s accused of murdering a drug dealer named Sonny Miller (Geronimo Frias, also known as Geronimo Ambert) who’d been having an affair with her when they were both doing drugs. Now, under the influence of her maniacal and controlling manager, Danny Beck (Ryan Spahn) – who’s also her agent and her attorney, both in civil court and her likely criminal trial – she was secretly slipped scopolamine during a Hallowe’en party and sent off to kill Miller while under the influence of scopolamine, colloquially known as “devil’s night.” I’ve heard a lot about scopolamine over the years, ranging from Edward G. Robinson saying in his 1973 autobiography that his wife’s doctors had used it in the 1930’s as an anesthetic to ease the pain of her giving birth to their son; its use as a so-called “truth serum” in the 1940’s and 1950’s; its use as a recreational drug more recently and, as here, its use by an unscrupulous villain to get an enemy killed by someone else via remote control and leave the killer with no memory of having done the deed (and, of course, no legal responsibility).

Altman comes back from a wild Hallowe’en night with a tattoo on her shoulder with the names of two people she’s never heard of before, and with her gun missing from the lockbox where she kept it. To no particular surprise, the drugged-out killer is Mackenzie Altman herself; the victim is her former drug dealer and lover; and the man who slipped her scopolamine so she’d kill on cue for him is [no surprise here!] Danny Beck, who had been embezzling from her by claiming he was investing her money to build a super-resort on an island off the coast of Africa when he was really stealing it for himself. Sonny Miller found out about this when Mackenzie offered to loan him the island as the setting for a rap video he wanted to shoot, only when Sonny checked it out he found that the so-called “resort” actually didn’t exist. Sonny threatened to tell Mackenzie that Danny was ripping her off, but Danny figured out a way to eliminate him and frame her for the crime by having Mackenzie shoot him and have no memory of this. The plot is unraveled by Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), the show’s leading character, a former attorney turned consultant to the New York police, who solves the case while dressed in the famous black costume and designer straw hat Audrey Hepburn wore in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (It is Hallowe’en, after all.) I’d avoided Elsbeth in the first season because the promos for it made the character of Elsbeth seem all too annoyingly scatterbrained, but I’ve seen two episodes of it so far and I’m really enjoying it. I was also wondering if this story was similar to the 1947 film Fear in the Night, a “B” noir from Paramount based on a story by Cornell Woolrich in which a young man is hypnotized into actually committing a murder but believing he only dreamed the crime. It was later remade in 1956 as Night World with Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers as the hypnotized killer, but in the 1947 version he was played by the young DeForest Kelley, who rather ruefully noted that after Fear in the Night all he got offered to play were young psycho killers – until Gene Roddenberry cast him as Dr. McCoy on the original 1960’s Star Trek series, whereupon all he got after that were roles as doctors!