Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Elsbeth Season 3, Episode 4.It’s Halloween, but not on Elsbeth, where our fair lady Elsbeth (Carrie Preston) is celebrating Halloweek, My Fair Lady style. And nothing seems more fiendishly festive than a murder, a beheading no less, in the hamlet of Sleepy Hollow. It’s the wittily titled “Ick, A Bod,” the fourth episode of Elsbeth‘s third season, and it makes the argument that nothing is scarier than a suburban housewife.
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, but Chainsaws Make Them Dead in ‘Elsbeth’s “Ick, A Bod”
“Ick, A Bod” opens with Sharon Norman (Annaleigh Ashford) walking out of her house holding a pie, stopping briefly to straighten a hanging sign on her porch. She makes her way next door to greet her new neighbor, Beryl, as head of the neighborhood welcome committee. And the garden club, the PTA, and the social committee. Sharon gives Beryl the pie (no sugar, dairy, or gluten) as well as a binder containing the community calendar and suggested guidelines the community likes to follow. It’s abundantly clear that the “suggested guidelines” are dictated by Sharon herself, with rules about outdoor light wattages, noise considerations, and landscape maintenance. But the towering maple tree that straddles their property line is exempt, of course, because Sharon loves it. Sharon’s intimidating, but Beryl won’t have it, smiling as she hands back the pie, and the binder, to a visibly unimpressed Sharon.
As the days go on, everything about the free-spirited Beryl is eating at Sharon. Her wind chimes are driving her mad, she’s constantly hosting parties and drum circles, and she has the audacity to send donuts over for her husband and daughter, Avery (Olivia Daponde). Worse, she doesn’t appreciate the beautiful maple tree, seeing it as an impediment to the sunlight into her art studio rather than the stately and noble tree, a tree that has grown with Sharon’s family, a tree that is part of Sharon’s family, that it is.
Or was. The tree is dead, leaving Sharon distraught, and while the tree expert chalks it up to old age, Sharon has her suspicions. But that will have to wait, as the social committee needs to make preparations for Halloween. Beryl is to be in charge of the Halloween maze, and Sharon will be sending her the details. Only, Beryl has been talking with the other ladies, and they agree with Beryl that the maze should be amped up, made terrifying, unlike the boring mazes of years past. It’s practically a slap in the face to Sharon, but she collects herself and even offers to volunteer to help set up the maze.
Cut to Halloween night, and Beryl’s maze is a hit, capped off with Beryl as a talking head at the end. Sharon, however, is doing what she always does every Halloween: sits on her porch, dressed as a scarecrow, and startling kids when they come to her door. But after seeing Avery off, the scene cuts – no pun intended – to Sharon working her way through the maze, dressed in surgical scrubs and wielding a chainsaw, and next thing you know, Beryl’s head comes clean off. The next day, one of the workers on the crew sent to clean up the maze asks, “Why do we have an extra head?”
It’s Halloween Halloweek for Elsbeth in “Ick, A Bod”
At the station, where Julia (Brittany Inge), Wagner’s (Wendell Pierce) daughter, has come to visit her father (put that aside for now), and is warmly greeted by Elsbeth, who is dressed as Eliza Doolittle. Wagner, who should know better, reminds Elsbeth that Halloween is over. Only Elsbeth’s costumes arrived late, and since she couldn’t just pick one My Fair Lady costume, she’d decided to wear them all during Halloweek. He sighs and sends Elsbeth and Detective Donnelly (Molly Price) off to investigate the murder in, yes, Sleepy Hollow. They’re greeted, rudely, by Sharon, who demands to know what’s going on, and, feigning shock, promptly places the blame on the work crew, asserting that Beryl shouldn’t have hired those “outsiders.” But Sharon’s irritation at Elsbeth’s accidental (at least initially) brush against the wind chimes raises Elsbeth’s suspicions.
After a brief sojourn to the Julia/Wagner subplot, Elsbeth comes back to our heroine visiting Sharon again, as she’s gardening. Sharon again tries to pin the blame on the work crew, but, alas, they were on a break when Beryl died, with the heart monitor on Beryl’s fitness tracker able to determine an exact time of death. Elsbeth asks Sharon where she was at the time, but Sharon was on her porch, doing her customary jump scare scarecrow, and suggests they check out Beryl’s Ring camera. Back at the station, Elsbeth, in costume #2, is watching the Ring footage with Donnelly, where a parade of husbands are seen coming in and out of Beryl’s house, as well as footage of Beryl arguing with a teen boy. They bring him in, but he and Avery loved going to Beryl’s, who was far, far less uptight than their own parents, and the argument was over something else.
Besides, he has an alibi. Does Avery? That’s the question, and Elsbeth and Donnelly interrupt a heated meeting of the community wives to talk to Sharon and Avery, but Avery has an alibi too. No, not volunteering at the costume contest, but out with her dad for MFT – “Mom Free Time” – where they do stuff together that Sharon would never allow them to do. Like eating donuts. Sharon is visibly pained by the revelation, but when Donnelly posits that Avery still may have had time, Sharon says there’s no way she could have, since she didn’t know the maze. You know who does? Sharon. And Elsbeth proves it with a clever ruse that sends Sharon bolting through the maze without second-guessing her direction at all. Only Sharon plays the victim, so Elsbeth gives her a chance: prove that she was on the porch at the time Beryl died. Turns out Sharon does, in the form of footage from her own Ring camera. Elsbeth meets up with Donnelly, who’s been scouring the footage. Sharon hasn’t moved… or so it seems.
Nothing Brings the Neighborhood Together Like a “Gotcha” Moment in ‘Elsbeth’s “Ick, A Bod”
The sound of those damned wind chimes sends Sharon running over to Beryl’s, where she finds Elsbeth, in yet another costume. “We solved the murder!” she exclaims, offering to show Sharon how a fingerprint broke the case open. As Sharon’s mind races, Elsbeth walks her through the maze, where they’re “attacked” by a police officer with a chainsaw. They’re safe – the chainsaw has no chain, just like the other chainsaws from the prop crew that Sharon was so sure committed the crime. But the next “attack” is with a real chainsaw, Beryl’s chainsaw, the one Sharon used to kill her before stashing it back in Beryl’s art studio. And by giving the crew permission to clean up the crime scene, the framing job was complete, and Sharon was free to assume the role of concerned neighbor. Elsbeth knows Sharon hated Beryl, but Sharon says everyone hated her. “Ask around,” she brazenly tells Elsbeth.
“I did.” With that, Elsbeth guides her to an open area where her husband, daughter, and the entire neighborhood stand waiting. “What are you doing here?” Sharon asks, and they are more than happy to let her know. Sharon, refusing to cede defeat, demands to see the evidence, so Elsbeth explains. The fingerprint wasn’t on the chainsaw, and it didn’t even belong to the murderer. Instead, it belonged to a boy whose friends dared him to touch Sharon’s scarecrow hand on Halloween, around the time of Beryl’s murder. The scarecrow, Sharon, didn’t move because it wasn’t Sharon at all. It was a dummy scarecrow, found in the garage, and the boy’s fingerprint matched what was on the dummy’s glove.
That was enough to get a warrant, which allowed them to test the pipes of the washing machine used to wash the scrubs she wore when she killed Beryl. Lo and behold, they “found a little bit of Beryl.” There’s a brief pause before Sharon loses it, yelling at those gathered wondering how they could possibly have loved Beryl. After all, she was a tree killer. Her tree killer. Only Beryl didn’t kill the tree: Sharon’s husband did. As Sharon is walked away, Elsbeth, in her best Cockney accent, cries out, “I think Sleepy Hollow will be just fine without Sharon Norman.” She then promises Donnelly that it was the last one. To Elsbeth’s delight, Donnelly, the gruff, no-nonsense New Yorker, quips back in her best Cockney accent, “I’ll write up the report. How’s this: trace amounts of blood of the slain stayed mainly in the drain.” Perfect.
That ending is intriguing, suggesting that Elsbeth may have found her “new” Kara in Donnelly, and that could really be a fun dynamic going forward. Speaking of Kara (Carra Patterson), there’s nothing in “Ick, A Bod” that clears up why last week’s phone call from Elsbeth to her failed to connect, with everyone assuming she’s simply undercover and can’t be contacted at the moment. But she’s fine. Right? We’ll see, but I’m not getting the warm and fuzzies about it. As for the subplot with Wagner and Julia, it’s almost disappointingly stereotypical: Wagner can’t accept that his little girl has grown up, there’s a fight, there’s reconciliation because dad has come to accept it. I guess you can’t hit a home run every week. Speaking of which: Go Blue Jays!!
- Release Date
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February 29, 2024
- Directors
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Nancy Hower, Robert King, Lionel Coleman, Rob Hardy, Robin Givens, Ron Underwood, Rosemary Rodriguez, Aisha Tyler, Bille Woodruff, James Whitmore Jr., Joe Menendez, Kevin Rodney Sullivan, Lily Mariye, Nick Gomez, Peter Sollett, Sam Hoffman, Tyne Rafaeli, Darren Grant, Fong-Yee Yap, Mary Lou Belli
- Writers
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Jonathan Tolins, Erica Shelton Kodish, Bryan Goluboff, Sarah Beckett, Michelle King
- Another (mostly) sharply written episode in a season where it’s been exceptional.
- Annaleigh Ashford does a full 180 from her ‘B-Positive’ character, and her controlling, Alpha Sharon Norman is another great guest star turn.
- Elsbeth and Donnelly have the potential to be a really fun relationship going forward.
- We get Elsbeth is quirky, and we love her for it, so we don’t need it to be taken to extremes to prove it, ala “Halloweek.”
- The writing has been so good this season that it’s a letdown that the subplot with Wagner and his daughter Julia leans so heavily into trope territory.
