I’m a firm believer that creative people need to know the rules before they’re allowed to break them, and so far Elsbeth Season 2 has only proven my point for me. With the established “rule” of the howcatchem format, the show has become really good about knowing when to stick to that format, and when to break it for the sake of making sure the series doesn’t start to feel stale, while also ensuring it doesn’t lose its primary format. Such is the case in Season 2, Episode 14, “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,” which once again puts a slight spin on things, while also starting to draw together all the disparate plot threads from throughout the season as we head towards the finale. Let’s dive in!
Elsbeth Investigates a Cold Case in Season 2 Episode 14
The episode opens, appropriately, in Little Italy, where Elsbeth (Carrie Preston), Teddy (Ben Levi Ross), and Teddy’s boyfriend Roy (Hayward Leach) are on a walking tour focused on NYC crime. Elsbeth and Roy get along very well, and have a similar sense of humor, something that Teddy finds more than a little alarming. Lucky for him, the tour is almost over, as they reach their last stop: Pupetta’s, a restaurant and the location of a mob murder so notorious that it became the subject of a movie, City on a Knife Edge, which, as it turns out, is one of Roy’s favorites. Inside, at one of the tables, their tour guide, Henry (Murray Hill), paints a picture of the night of the crime for them, saying it was 1998 and the Del Ponte and Nova crime families were at war. Objectively, I know that for the key players to still be alive today, the murder can’t have taken place that long ago, but as a millennial, I’m still not used to years I have very clear memory of being part of such a distant past.
Henry explains that Goldie Moresco, a member of the Del Ponte family, threw a drink in the face of Eddie Nova at a local bar, and that acted as the catalyst for the war reaching a boiling point. After Goldie returned to the restaurant, he was in the middle of eating his last meal — a meal that is then served to the tour group, gotta love immersive tours — when Eddie followed close behind, stabbed him in the chest with a corkscrew, then shot him twice, in his signature move. He then left without realizing that Gene Gianetti (Ryan O’Dell), a young waiter working there, had witnessed the whole thing. Three days later, the Del Pontes took their revenge by killing Eddie in his driveway, and from there the war between the families escalated until most of them were dead by the end of the summer.
Because Elsbeth is Elsbeth, though, she has a few questions about the crime, as the whole thing feels too impulsive to be a targeted hit. Never mind that Goldie didn’t notice Eddie walking in, despite him supposedly being on edge after their altercation, the fact that Eddie used a corkscrew and Goldie’s gun, rather than his own gun to carry out the hit, but also used his signature double shot to the chest is what trips up Elsbeth. After all, Eddie is hardly hiding his identity by not using his own weapon if he still leaves a calling card behind. Henry doesn’t get a chance to answer before they’re interrupted by a woman (Alyssa Milano), who suggests that maybe Eddie was just an idiot, and that’s all there is to it. As they file out at the end of the tour, Elsbeth sees that one of the walls in the restaurant is devoted to City on a Knife Edge, the movie based on the events of that summer, and includes behind-the-scenes images, including one of young Gene next to the actor playing him.
It might be over 25 years later, but she recognizes the man who was facilitating their meal at the restaurant as an older Gene (Adam Ferrara). She tries to ask him questions about the murder, as he was the only witness, but he’s reluctant to speak to her thinking she’s a producer or with the press. When she reveals she actually works with the police, this gives Gene pause, but they’re interrupted again when the woman returns, this time with a young man in tow. The woman, it turns out, is Pupetta, the one the restaurant is named for, and whoever the young man is, Gene is not happy to see him there, and this is obviously a source of tension for the two of them. Gene dismisses Elsbeth by writing an address down on one of their takeout menus and handing it to her, under the pretense of giving her catering information.
An Old Mob Case Becomes Relevant Again in ‘Elsbeth’ Season 2 Episode 14
While Teddy doesn’t want to go anywhere near the spot where Gene told Elsbeth to meet him, Roy is beyond excited at the idea of the three of them on a case together, so despite his reservations, and his increasing alarm at just how well his mother and his partner get along, Teddy agrees to go with them. They arrive at the appointed place at the appointed time, only to find the police on the scene, as there’s been an accident. Luckily, the officer on duty is Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson) and she waves them over through the police barrier. Elsbeth explains what the three of them are doing there, and then realizes that the police are there to deal with a hit-and-run specifically, and the person who was hit was none other than Gene Gianetti. Detective Flemming (Daniel Oreskes) overhears, and reveals to Elsbeth that the Goldie Moresco murder was one of his earliest investigations, and certainly the first high-profile one, and with Gene as the only witness, it’s not insignificant that he wanted to talk to Elsbeth now.
Flemming spots Pupetta at the edge of the police barrier and tells Elsbeth that she was only 19 when the whole Del Ponte family was killed over that bloody summer, and went to so many funerals she even wore a black dress to her own wedding. She’s also allowed through the barrier, and she approaches them all, wailing about her husband being dead. Elsbeth assures her that Gene survived the hit-and-run, and while she acts relieved, Elsbeth is suspicious. The restaurant isn’t close enough for her to have arrived as quickly as she did, and more to the point, Pupetta was the only person who saw Elsbeth and Gene chatting earlier that day, and her displeasure at that contributed to the tension between her and her husband. It’s not much, but it’s enough for Elsbeth and Blanke to go on.
At the precinct, Lt. Connor (Daniel K. Isaac) meets with Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce) to talk about Blanke. Now that she’s met all the requirements for promotion, and is doing exemplary work on following up on her past cases to the point that the DA has taken notice, they don’t see a reason to delay any further in making her a detective. Connor says that he’ll start looking for a new officer on the list of recent academy graduates to follow Elsbeth around, as she has a tendency to go rogue, and they can get moving on getting Blanke her promotion, even though Wagner laments that her dynamic with Elsbeth will be tough to replace. And speaking of, Elsbeth and Blanke arrive with Flemming in tow to catch the Captain up on the case. They tell him that security footage shows the car deliberately swerved to hit Gene, and they speculate it was to prevent him speaking to Elsbeth about Goldie Moresco’s murder.
Wagner is surprised that there are still details of the case left unexplored, as City on a Knife Edge apparently stuck very close to the facts — just not close enough to include Flemming apparently — but Flemming tells him that there’s a chance they had the wrong suspect from the get-go. He says that the entire case hinged on Gene’s testimony and the fact that the killer used Eddie Nova’s signature gunshot pattern, and since the higher-ups were happy to chalk the whole thing up to gang violence, any evidence that pointed anywhere other than Eddie was dismissed. However, Flemming adds that there were rumors at the time that Goldie was an informant, and that someone in the Del Ponte family found out and killed him to prevent him from speaking. While Flemming says he did try to push at the time for them to look into it further, it caused problems for him in his career, and this second shot at getting it right might just be the break he was looking for. Wagner takes the wind out of his sails, reminding him that they’re there to investigate the hit-and-run, not a 26-year-old murder case.
Elsbeth Interferes in “Family Business” in Season 2 Episode 14
Under orders to investigate the hit-and-run — and only the hit-and-run — Flemming and Elsbeth return to Pupetta’s, where they find the woman herself behind the bar. She sees them and initially assumes that Gene is dead, but they assure her he’s fine, and just going into surgery. She says she’s relieved, but really doesn’t look it. They ask her if there was any chance someone deliberately tried to run Gene over, and when Pupetta insists that Gene had no enemies and never upset anyone, Elsbeth reminds her of the tiff she witnessed them having the day before over the young man Pupetta had with her. Elsbeth initially assumed the man was her lover, but it turns out he’s their son, Gene Jr., whom Pupetta had when she was only 19. She asks what their fight was about the day before, and Pupetta says that while she wants Junior to work in the restaurant now that he’s graduated with a business degree from Wharton, Gene disagrees and doesn’t want him anywhere near the restaurant.
Elsbeth doesn’t get the chance to ask why that is, as Flemming gets word that Gene is out of surgery. They head over to the hospital, and find that Pupetta beat them there. Junior arrives right behind them and goes to join his parents, and Elsbeth notes that they’re both a head shorter than their son. It’s not unheard of, but it’s rare enough that it catches Elsbeth’s attention. Flemming suggests she goes in to talk to Gene alone after they notice Pupetta whispering something to him, and Elsbeth does, but almost immediately gets the brush off from Gene. She asks what he wanted to tell her the night of the accident, but he claims that he can’t remember what he wanted to say, and actually can’t remember anything at all from that day due to his injuries. The only problem here is that his injury is to his shoulder, not his head, and shouldn’t have caused a memory impairment. With Gene’s eyes trailing up to Pupetta waiting outside, Elsbeth guesses that she threatened Gene, and tells Flemming as much. The theory tracks for him, given mafia rules about not talking to the police, but luckily they have another lead.
Back at the precinct, Blanke shares that she tracked the car that hit Gene to a body shop, and located the driver as well, who confessed to hitting Gene, having lost control of the car while impaired. Blanke tells Elsbeth and Flemming that his record is mostly clean, save for a few bar fights when he was younger. This would be open and shut, except that one of the bars the driver was listed as fighting in is The Iron Horse, the same bar where Goldie and Eddie had their altercation back in 1998. Not only that, the night he was arrested there was the same night as the murder. Flemming checks his old case file and realizes that the driver is actually an associate of the Del Ponte family. While looking over Flemming’s old case board, Elsbeth notices scratches on the side of Goldie’s face, and Flemming tells her those also caught his attention back in the day, and adds that there was also a deeper scratch on Goldie’s chest, but he was never able to get a conclusive answer about what caused them. He speculates it might have been a woman, but he can’t say for sure. With Goldie potentially murdered to stop him from speaking to the FBI, and now Gene nearly killed to stop him from speaking to the police, it seems like the two cases are connected, though Blanke isn’t sure what it is they’re trying to cover up, and more to the point, she isn’t sure who in the family is still around to care. But while most of them were killed in 1998, there’s still one Del Ponte around: Pupetta.
They bring Pupetta into the station to ask her about the driver. While she claims she doesn’t know him, and dismisses him as a drunk driver, they explain that the case may be a little more complicated than that, as they suspect he was working on someone else’s behalf to stop Gene speaking to the police. Pupetta resents their line of questioning and gets up to leave, but before she can, Elsbeth stops her to ask about her nails. While they’re currently mid-length, square French tips, Pupetta confirms that she used to wear them long back when that was the style. When Elsbeth uses the opportunity to ask her about the scratches on Goldie’s face, Pupetta is offended, both at the accusation, and at the fact that Elsbeth is bringing up “ancient history.” Goldie, she says, was a loyal member of the family and like an uncle to her, and further adds that she wasn’t at the restaurant on the night of the murder anyway. Then and only then does she leave.
A Mafia Movie Helps the Investigation in ‘Elsbeth’ Season 2 Episode 14
Back at Elsbeth’s, Teddy and Roy have come over for a movie night to watch City on a Knife Edge, which is well over three hours long, and tells the story from Pupetta’s point of view. While Teddy is not into the movie at all, Elsbeth and Roy are fairly invested. Elsbeth’s interest, however, is less in the subject matter and more the director’s attention to detail, like for instance how long Pupetta’s nails are. Long enough to scrach a man’s face and chest. Roy confirms that the nail length is historically accurate, and adds that a making-of featurette showed how a local salon made Pupetta a custom rhinestone to decorate her nails with. Elsbeth takes this new information to Wagner, who is not amused that she wants to reopen yet another closed investigation, but at least agrees to hear her out. She shares her theory with him, that Pupetta attacked Goldie for informing on her family, and Flemming backs her up by saying that the scratches on Goldie’s face were never tested for DNA because the ME was too overwhelmed to properly process the crime scene. Wagner tells her that he might be able to get a judge to sign off on exhuming the body for some new tests, but things would be much easier if Gene came forward with some new testimony.
Elsbeth returns to Pupetta’s, and her attempts to spy on the place do not go unnoticed by Junior. He approaches her outside and tells Elsbeth now isn’t a good time to see his dad, as he’s resting, and his mom wants to keep everyone close, hence his new job at the restaurant. It turns out, though, that Pupetta pushing to have him work at the restaurant wasn’t out of any kind of desire of Junior’s to work there. He tells Elsbeth that a Wall Street headhunter reached out to him, but Pupetta persuaded him to work in the family business instead, and by the sound of things, he doesn’t just mean the restaurant. He doesn’t sound happy about that, or about how difficult it’ll be to leave the business, but he agrees to tell Gene that Elsbeth was looking for him.
She goes home to find Teddy and Roy in her kitchen, with Teddy cooking, and Roy working on a project he wants Elsbeth’s input on, a new podcast he’s putting together about detectives and their “white whales,” aka the cases they never managed to solve. Elsbeth agrees to introduce him to Flemming, and even agrees to appear on the show herself, something which continues to irritate Teddy to the point that he starts sulking. Elsbeth doesn’t have time to deal with this, though, as Wagner calls her to tell her that any judge he approaches to sign off on exhuming Goldie’s body has refused. Wagner suspects that Judge Crawford (Michael Emerson) might be behind it, and if Elsbeth didn’t think she had a while whale before, she certainly does now.
Elsbeth finds the man himself the next day, and approaches him on the street to ask him about it. She tries reminding him that using his power in such a way is unethical, but since when has Crawford cared about ethics? He hand-waves the investigation away, calling it unnecessary, but when Elsbeth pushes him, he tells her that the only way a judge would be legally compelled to sign off on exhumation is if they received a new confession, which is impossible as Pupetta is not likely to confess. Elsbeth returns home that evening to find Pupetta outside her place, talking to Teddy and playing with Gonzo. When Elsbeth approaches, Teddy tells his mom off for telling Pupetta too much about his life while bragging about him. The only problem is, Elsbeth never gave Pupetta any of the information she now apparently has. Recognizing a threat for what it is, Elsbeth sends Teddy and Gonzo inside, and Pupetta gives her a warning: stay away from her family, or else.
At the precinct, Wagner tells Flemming and Elsbeth that they have to shut the investigation down due to a lack of evidence. Flemming is upset that this is now happening to him for a second time, but Elsbeth agrees that ending things is for the best, with Pupetta’s threat still looming in her mind. Blanke, however, arrives with a new lead in the case. While pulling together information on the Ashton Hays (Keegan Michael Key) case — from Season 1 episode “Something Blue” — she noticed that he was an accountant for a shell corporation with the same address as Pupetta’s restaurant, and was likely using the corporation to move mob money. As for how this connects to the case, they check Junior’s LinkedIn and see that he majored in forensic accounting at Wharton, suggesting Pupetta wanted him working at the restaurant to take over where Ashton left off, and proving that this is the real reason Gene didn’t want his son working there, as he didn’t want him involved in mob business.
Elsbeth Discovers a Shocking Family Secret in Season 2 Episode 14
But LinkedIn isn’t the only social media platform that provides a break in the case. As Elsbeth scrolls Junior’s Instagram, she sees a picture of him during No Shave November in his senior year, when he not only grew a mustache, but also let his hair grow out as well — a look that makes him a dead ringer for Goldie Moresco. The team realizes that any time the Del Ponte’s assumed Goldie was meeting with the FBI to inform on them, he was actually meeting up with Pupetta instead. The only question is, how to prove it. Elsbeth finds Gene at the hospital, and blows past his attempt to get her to leave him alone by telling him what she knows — about why Pupetta wanted Junior working with them, why Gene didn’t, and that Junior isn’t biologically Gene’s son. Gene tells her that they never told Junior as part of the deal they made, that Gene would marry her and raise the baby on the condition Pupetta gave up the family business. It wasn’t until Hays’s arrest that Gene realized she’d never given up the old life, and became concerned with making sure Junior didn’t get wrapped up in all that.
While Gene despairs of things actually working out in his favor, rather than Pupetta’s, Elsbeth has an idea. She suggests, via a law school anecdote, that if Gene confessed to the murder, they could get Goldie’s body exhumed and look for DNA evidence that would point to the real killer, thus letting Gene off the hook — both for the murder and Pupetta’s family business. Gene says he would do it for his son’s sake, only if he knew that the evidence would actually point to Pupetta. Elsbeth hides around the corner when Junior comes to pick up his father and waits for them to leave, then scoops up Junior’s discarded coffee cup out of the trash. Back at Elsbeth’s place, she settles in with Teddy and Roy for another movie night, watching the nearly 6-hour-long City on a Knife Edge director’s cut, featuring director’s commentary. Given the movie’s attention to historical detail, Elsbeth is hoping that it will yield some usable information. While the first four hours don’t have much of note — how a movie about a war that was kicked off by Goldie’s murder is only just hitting the murder in question at the two-thirds mark, I have no idea — they finally reach a scene deleted at the request of the Del Ponte family. The director is unsure why, as it was just a scene of Pupetta being interrogated by the police the morning after the murder, and was entirely based on the police transcripts. One detail of the transcript, one that made it into the dialogue and the costume, is that Pupetta’s nail was broken so badly, she needed to wear a Band-Aid over it.
That’s enough groundwork for Elsbeth to tell Gene that she believes she’ll be able to prove that Pupetta killed Goldie, and with that, Gene confesses to the police, and the body is exhumed for testing, with the lab fast-tracking the results. Elsbeth returns to Pupetta’s, just as another of the crime tours is passing through, and she interrupts Harry’s presentation to give the real version of events, saying it wasn’t Eddie coming in to finish Goldie off, but rather a young Pupetta coming in to tell him she was pregnant. When that went badly, and Goldie denied that it was his baby, he and Pupetta fought, leading to the scratches on his face and the one in his chest that broke Pupetta’s nail in the process. She then stabbed him with the corkscrew and shot him twice, in Eddie Nova’s style. Since Gene was the only witness, they made their deal on the spot to cover everything up. Pupetta tries to spin the story, saying it was Gene who killed Goldie in a jealous rage, as he was in love with her all along. The only problem there is broken nails with custom rhinestones designed only for Pupetta don’t lie, and they found her broken nail under Goldie’s skin. That and the fact that her DNA was all over the corkscrew, which they were able to trace to her using Junior’s discarded coffee cup, and which also confirmed that Junior is Goldie’s son. With Pupetta under arrest, Gene and Junior are left behind to deal with the fallout, though in a sweet touch, Junior tells Gene that he always suspected Goldie was his biological father, but that Gene is the only dad he recognizes.
They return to the precinct, where Roy gets the chance to sit down with Flemming to interview him for his podcast. Elsbeth comments on how cute she finds Roy, and Teddy tells her that he’s debating breaking up with him. He makes excuses, saying that he doesn’t want to move to New York, and they don’t want to do long-distance, but the real reason seems more rooted in the fact that Elsbeth likes him. While I’m not clear on why that’s enough of a reason to dump someone you’re otherwise happy with, Blanke arrives and assures Elsbeth that Teddy and Roy will work it out. But that’s not the only breakup happening this week, as Wagner and Connor watch Elsbeth and Blanke laughing and chatting, and realize that whoever they put her with once Blanke is promoted, it just won’t be the same. Once again, I am very worried that the season finale is gonna see Blanke promoted and moved away from the precinct, though I have to believe they’ll find a way to bring her back in Season 3. You just can’t mess with a rock-solid dynamic like the one she and Elsbeth have, and if there’s one thing this week’s episode proved by having her do work elsewhere for most of it, there’s a void in the show when Blanke isn’t around.
