It’s got to be hard to be a minimalism advocate. Look at this week’s murderer, Freya Frostad (Mary-Louise Parker) — she’s built an entire career and life on the belief that one only needs 44 things in this life. We never learn the origins or significance of 44, but having whittled her possessions down to that stringent number, Freya strictly enforces a one-in, one-out policy on possessions, even (or perhaps especially) for gifts she bestows upon her husband, Axel (Will Swenson), and their lover, Taylor (Jess Darrow).
Freya talks a lot about how people slide into untidy, clutter-filled lives as a means of controlling all the unpleasant, unruly feelings they’re carrying around, but what is minimalism if not a means of exercising control in a world of chaos? Regardless of the many holes and unanswerable questions prompted by Freya’s philosophy, I mostly just feel bad for her. Sure, tidying up can be life-changing — magical, even, and we are not here to bash Marie Kondo — but Freya has boxed herself into a way of being in a world that has no wiggle room. She’s just as internally messy as anyone else, and rather than addressing root causes or just admitting to herself that she’d rather dump Axel and be with Taylor exclusively, she goes to the wildest possible extreme by drowning him in their hot tub.
RIP to Axel, and “Hear! Hear!” to Elsbeth’s continued commitment to maximalism. If we are ever confronted with an episode in which our heroine shows up to work with fewer than three tote bags and wearing just one color, we’ll know something is deeply wrong. Anyway, this week’s object lesson is that control is an illusion and being wrong about making the best choices you can under your current circumstances is okay. It happens to everyone and is rarely fatal!
Using the necklace Axel secretly gave Taylor as bait to lure him into getting tangled up with the drains in their hot tub and then using their little Finnish NotRoomba™ to seal the Tub Top is pretty diabolical. Kudos to Parker for managing to imbue Freya’s evil with a touch of desperation. Her motive for killing Axel isn’t his breaking of the rule of 44, it’s her near-frantic desire to get Taylor to herself. How else to explain the repeated urgent-care visits she orchestrates by poisoning Axel with arsenic extracted from a former client’s stash of 19th-century flypaper? She’s so hung up on keeping Taylor in her life that she even acquiesces immediately to replacing Axel as the third member of their relationship.
Figuring out why Freya killed Axel leads Elsbeth and Teddy on their own journeys into self-understanding. Elsbeth is game to try Freya’s method but finds that one woman’s clutter is her route to the divergent thinking that drives her success in murder-solving. Meanwhile, Teddy remains firmly and miserably in his head about the state of his relationship with Roy. What if he hasn’t even got 44 things, relationshipwise? He gets hit on all the time in D.C. and feels that he hasn’t experimented enough with other potential romantic arrangements. What if he and Roy are rushing things? What if committing to being in a couple now isn’t enough for him later? What if he makes the wrong choice and winds up going through a “dumpster fire” breakup like his parents did? On the other hand, what if he’s so spun up about this because he chafes at his mother and Roy’s closeness? Can their relationship be fully theirs if Elsbeth is part of their lives?
I was very glad when Elsbeth eventually put her foot down with Teddy. He comes to her for advice at least twice in this episode, which is progress in their relationship all by itself. She points out that whatever decision he makes is his choice and not to attribute it to his parents’ life choices. She’ll support him no matter what, but no one is to blame for him having a rough time identifying and committing to his own priorities. He’s a grown-up and needs to embrace the responsibility and consequences of making his own decisions.
For her part, teasing out the threads of how two of the dyads within Axel, Freya, and Taylor’s triad have led to tragedy leads Elsbeth to let go of how her relationship with Kaya used to work to make room for Kaya and Cameron to flourish as a couple. What started as a joke that was funny because it was true — Elsbeth wouldn’t know an interpersonal boundary if one bit her, Elsbeth’s rapacious hunger for information about Teddy and his life has to be strictly rationed, and so on — has become a matter she takes seriously and works on to improve her relationships with everyone who’s important to her.
I’ll admit, I enjoy Elsbeth tremendously, but did not expect this degree of psychological growth from a fun little murder show (complimentary). And yet! Twenty-five episodes in, I find myself, like Shaq, obliged to apologize to showrunner Jonathan Tolins and the entire Elsbeth writers’ room because I was insufficiently familiar with their game.
Elsbeth isn’t the only one actively working on personal growth. Detective Edwards takes the bold step of sharing with both Elsbeth and Captain Wagner that she is polyamorous. After being curious and judgy about his detective’s approach to her love life, Wagner apologizes to her. He’s plainly uncomfortable doing so, but the effort and the conversation he must have had with Claudia (and possibly one of their grown children) that led him to make the apology are both significant. I didn’t expect a cogent explanation of dyads, triads, and New Relationship Energy on a CBS procedural, but that 10 p.m. slot offers a little extra thematic leeway.
While the hair found clogging the drain is out being tested on Tub Top’s dime — thanks to a gracious offer by its very capable corporate reputation protector (April Matthis) — Elsbeth and Edwards bring Taylor in for a discreet chat about her relationship with the Frostads. Axel’s many urgent-care visits for severe GI issues come into sharper focus when Taylor mentions the soothing post-workout beverages Freya would customize for each of them. Axel’s were very bitter, but he was a good sport and drank them no matter what, you say? Sure enough, the results of the hair testing show that the clump was entirely Axel’s hair, which is odd because surely some of Taylor’s hair would be in the mix, too, given their joint usage of the hot tub. Weirder and more sinister still, the hair in the drain tested positive for arsenic. Taylor should probably prepare all of her own food and drinks from now on.
As she did with Matthew Broderick’s character in the college-admissions episode, Elsbeth independently hires Freya to guide her decluttering process. She learns a great deal about Freya and her former clients, especially one who hired her for help clearing out their $20 million carriage house. They had 146 — no, wait, it was 147 — gilded deviled-egg plates. That’s such a specific detail for a non-materialist like Freya to recall, and it pays off when Elsbeth and Edwards figure out that a recurring monthly charge to SELF in Freya’s credit-card statement is for a self-storage unit. Turns out, the minimalist is a highly organized hoarder of her past clients’ castoffs! That family in the $20 million carriage house had been there for generations, having inherited their wealth from forebears who made their fortune in pest control, leaving flypaper impregnated with arsenic around for Freya to store and use for her own purposes. It’s too bad that Freya hasn’t fully worked through her possessiveness; maybe there’s a world where she could have had and enjoyed more than 44 things and been a happy participant in her triad with Axel and Taylor.
In the wake of Taylor’s lovers’ departure from her life, we next see her at a coffee shop, being snapped up as another couple’s third. The adorable closing montage, set to “I Got You, Babe,” includes a Teddy committing to his relationship with Roy; Cameron and Kaya slow-dancing and kissing while surrounded by the adorable birthday balloons and table heaped with presents he organized for her; Elsbeth joyfully reunited with her things from the storage unit and then enjoying a FaceTime with Angus. Aw!
In This Week’s Tote Bag(s)
• I love that, canonically, Elsbeth keeps many empty backup tote bags at work. Now that’s what I call preparedness and foresight.
• In retrospect, the full title of Freya’s best-selling book, Less Is More With 44: The Freya Frostad Method of Letting Go for a Life of Quality, Not Quantity, was a pretty significant tell. As Kaya puts it, that’s a really long title for a book about minimalism.
• Freya Frostad, hot-mess self-help writer, leads me to ask: Elsbeth x The White Lotus crossover when?
• Will the sensitive matter Kaya asked to speak about with Wagner turn out to be A Thing or is it just a way to get Elsbeth out of the room so she can coordinate (and ultimately hand over entirely) Kaya’s birthday-party details?