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Spoilers ahead for episode 7 of Elsbeth Season 2 is titled “One Angry Woman” and will be available to stream with a Paramount+ subscription.

ElsbethThe latest episode of 2024 TV brought the long-awaited arrival of Michael Emerson as a guest star, but he’s not a loner like other guests who worked alongside his real-life wife on the hit CBS drama. Elsbeth has found herself a nemesis after encountering shady judge Milton Crawford during her jury duty, and leading actress Carrie Preston spoke to CinemaBlend to highlight the two characters’ dynamics by comparing them to a legendary duo from literature: Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty.

Elsbeth’s efforts to step away from her jury duty and spend time with her son (played by Ben Levi Ross after last week’s surprise appearance) were rebuffed by Judge Crawford, but not because there were no valid reasons for her dismissal should be. In fact, the accused murderer’s defense attorney tried to fire her when she said she was cooperating with police.

Did Elsbeth break the rules by tipping off Delia during the trial? Sure, but the defendant’s lawyer didn’t do her any good, and it was fortunate that he couldn’t fire her. All in all, it seemed 100% that Crawford was determined to lock Delia up for murder… and with good reason, since he himself was the killer of the week.

The Good woman Alum’s character hadn’t realized that he was the murderer by the end of the episode, like she usually does, but she was still aware that something was wrong. The leading actress described him as “almost untouchable” for good reason! When I spoke to Carrie Preston ahead of the 2025 TV program about how quickly Elsbeth realized there was something serious wrong with the judge, she shared with me:

She sees from the beginning that he keeps making these very strange judgments during the trial that just don’t make any sense to her. And so she’s kind of on his tail when he starts doing this and allowing things that no other judge would allow. She starts to get suspicious of him but just can’t understand why this guy is doing this. She doesn’t necessarily think he’s connected to this murder. She just wonders what’s wrong with this guy and why he makes these mistakes.

Elsbeth may be an incredibly intuitive woman with a flair for making connections that everyone else missed, but there was no reason to believe that the stuffy judge had anything to do with murder other than trying to kill Delia to put behind bars. Until he mentioned “disco” and pointed out to Elsbeth that he knew more about what happened than he was letting on. Carrie Preston continued:

Then when she realizes that the murderer is still out there, she becomes very stubborn and wants to bring the murderer to justice and she has to figure out how to do that. So he becomes her Moby Dick or he is the Moriarty to her Sherlock. This really gives her a lot of momentum for the rest of the season.

While comparing Crawford as Moriarty to Elsbeth’s Sherlock suggests two more or less equal opponents facing each other, we have to hope that for Elsbeth her story doesn’t end like it did in Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick done for Captain Ahab!

Note that Michael Emerson has a knack for playing villains in shows like Devilish and (probably) LostI admitted, still not expecting his Elsbeth The character transformed into a baseball bat-wielding murderer in the first few minutes of One Angry Woman, to which Carrie Preston responded:

On our show we like to show the murder and put it at the top so we all know who we’re dealing with. But yeah, it really speaks to his cold-heartedness. There are many ways to bring someone down. It’s a pretty brutal way, but it was the only way he felt he could cover his tracks.

Crawford actually covered his tracks very well and probably would have gotten away with murder without anyone noticing if he hadn’t left Elsbeth the comment about disco. Nobody had mentioned the Donna Summer record, and of course Elsbeth noticed he had slipped, and she’s now on the trail. So what’s it like for the cast to have a recurring antagonist in Season 2 and not just weekly one-off appearances? I asked Carrie Preston this exact question and she shared with me:

We haven’t had that yet, so that’s fun. Having a conflict that was there. We have all these murderers that I hunt down every episode, and so I don’t have, like I said, Moby Dick. It’s fun to have something like that, and it’s also exciting for me that it’s Michael.

The only thing that isn’t exciting is this ElsbethThe upcoming fall finale will be followed by a several-week winter break for the show before returning at the end of January. However, fans can still look forward to the fall finale as Michael Emerson returns for his second episode of season two. Tune in to CBS on Thursday, December 19th at 10pm ET to watch the fall finale of Elsbethand/or stream the series on-demand via Paramount+.