![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/bee26db08d82fbb54085ebdda48243ea6f-elsbeth-ep3.rsquare.w400.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Elsbeth<\/a><\/p>\n Good Grief<\/p>\n \n Season 3<\/p>\n Episode 3\n <\/p>\n \n Editor\u2019s Rating<\/p>\n 4 stars<\/p>\n ****\n <\/p>\n \n It\u2019s not a stretch to imagine Julia Fox becoming a viral sensation who is capable of a cute little murder. Who doesn\u2019t love a second chance? There are so many ways to enjoy this popular trope. While it\u2019s usually found in romance, second chances pop up in all kinds of stories: love, careers, and success rebound on pages and screens. Some people \u2014 our beloved titular character, for example \u2014 need a full-on second chance at their whole lives. Such is the case of Raquel Drabowski (Julia Fox), the young widow of Johnny, a New York firefighter who died about 18 months ago when the FDNY rescue helicopter he was in crashed in Puerto Rico, leaving no survivors.<\/p>\n Raquel is resourceful and has made the best of her situation, parlaying the social capital of being a firefighter\u2019s widow into a lucrative career as a grief influencer and star of Black Veil, a reality series dedicated to helping widows find their own second chances at love. After throwing a Kelly Taylor\u2013style<\/a> curveball by choosing herself (well, choosing her memories of and love for Johnny, anyway) rather than either of her two finalist suitors in the finale, Raquel has set herself up for a lucrative ongoing career. Her agent is very impressed and can practically see the residuals checks for potential new projects coming in. Her own reality series! A custom line of little black dresses! The increased value of her brand now that she\u2019s racked up 15 million followers!<\/p>\n Well, all of that is great, but it\u2019s \u201cnot going to bring my Johnny back.\u201d Little does she know, Raquel should be careful about what she might wish for, because Johnny shows up at her apartment, very much alive. Theoretically, that\u2019s great, but in practical terms, it\u2019s a huge problem for her. If Johnny is back, how can she continue to succeed as a grief influencer? What about her sponsorship deals? She\u2019s so wound up about the life and career ramifications of Johnny\u2019s return, and not without reason \u2014 he\u2019s monologuing about moving back to his mom\u2019s place on Staten Island, using Raquel\u2019s money to build an extension on the ancestral Drabowski home, and having some kids \u2014 that she doesn\u2019t notice the many holes in his story.<\/p>\n He was thrown from the helicopter into a rainforest, became amnesiac, and was nursed back to health by some kindly locals? He eventually regained his memories thanks to seeing Raquel on Black Veil? He decided that leaning that hard into a Jeff Spicoli\u2013inspired look<\/a> was a good idea in 2025?<\/p>\n The passage of time is powerful, and as Raquel\u2019s fellow daughter of an outer-borough Cyndi Lauper so memorably sang, money really does change everything<\/a>. With Johnny back, Raquel\u2019s dream situation is on the verge of becoming a nightmare. While divorce is always an option, Raquel knows that her entire grief-influencer persona would crumble into dust if she were to kick Johnny to the curb so quickly after his triumphant return from the dead. No, there\u2019s only one way for her to solve this problem: by taking advantage of a brief window where only she knows that Johnny is back and shoving him off the Staten Island Ferry on the way to visit his mother the following day, yelling \u201cI\u2019m nobody\u2019s wifey!\u201d as she does.<\/p>\n Wouldn\u2019t you just know that Johnny was either mistaken or lying when he told Raquel that she was the only person who knew he was alive and back in town? Turns out, he also left a voice-mail for his mother! Whoopsidaisies! This is a problem for Raquel, but for the viewing audience, what a treat to see Jacki Weaver<\/a> pop up as Marie. Down at the police precinct, Marie recounts how Johnny \u201ccalled me yesterday, which was unusual, because he\u2019s been missing, presumed dead, for the last 18 months.\u201d Weaver\u2019s line delivery combines being casual, knowing, and economical in a way that suggests she (or Marie) would make an excellent deadpan stand-up comedian.<\/p>\n Raquel shows up and does the most Raquel thing possible, transforming every experience into monetizable content. Johnny\u2019s voice-mail isn\u2019t convincing at all; instead, it\u2019s just the latest in a long string of harassing communications she\u2019s received. She pulls out her selfie stick and immediately records a heartfelt-seeming video, imploring to be left alone, making sure to get an NYPD logo in the shot.<\/p>\n Something\u2019s fishy here, but the investigation doesn\u2019t kick into high gear until the team runs down the number of the phone Johnny used to call his mother and learns from its owner, a trucker named Darryl, that he\u2019d picked up a hitchhiker named Don in Delaware and dropped him off in Weehawken. The name doesn\u2019t match, but the trucker\u2019s recollections of the hitchhiker\u2019s story about surfing and bartending on a beach in Puerto Rico do, and better yet, so does a DNA test on the empty beer cans \u201cDon\u201d left in Daryl\u2019s truck. Well, now we\u2019ve got a missing-persons case that should end in tears of joy, at least for Marie, but instead, some scuba divers find Johnny\u2019s corpse resting on top of a wine cage<\/a> in the Hudson River.<\/p>\n As Detective Fleming and Officer Hackett peel off to interview potential witnesses, Elsbeth contents herself with finding someone to ask about surveillance footage of the waterfront, and who does she find but Kaya Blanke! Yes, this is not a drill! Kaya is back! Secretly! Her undercover assignment as docks employee Denise Jackson has her very wary of speaking much with Elsbeth at work, but their little clandestine reunion at the bar from \u201cSweet Justice\u201d<\/a> yields the heart-to-heart conversation about Angus that Elsbeth has been needing since she returned from Scotland. Kaya and I both think that Elsbeth may have broken things off with Angus a little hastily, but we are also both supportive of how she\u2019s embracing and enjoying her full, single life.<\/p>\n Even if Denise Jackson\u2019s nosing around the docks yields nothing the team can use, Cameron presents a bunch of solid forensic test results, all pointing clearly to Johnny meeting his end on the Staten Island Ferry, but with no surveillance footage or passenger manifest to prove that Raquel was on the ferry, or that she and Johnny had even met up in Manhattan, they can\u2019t make an arrest. Combined with distinctive orange paint from the ferry under Johnny\u2019s fingernails, the heavily weathered FDNY-issued harness and carabiner attaching him to the suitcase are significant, but they could come from anywhere.<\/p>\n Thank goodness for Officer Hackett and her magnificent Theory of the Case Red String board, which has a map and a photo-rich summary of the evidence they\u2019ve gathered to date, all connected with magnets and red string, and it points the investigation toward following up with Luisa Torres, someone Johnny got particularly friendly with at the resort. Their brief video conversation with Luisa yields a dizzying number of details about Johnny\u2019s tenure in Puerto Rico, including his involvement with upwards of 50 women, his loud and frequent complaints about Raquel, and most importantly, the fact that he was never even on the ill-fated helicopter in the first place, thanks to some overenthusiastic day drinking.<\/p>\n So while Raquel and Marie mourned him, Johnny was enjoying his own illicit second-chance life. No near-death experience, no amnesia, no thought to the devastation his \u201cdeath\u201d had wreaked on his family, and on top of it all, the stolen valor of being a fallen hero. Johnny only bothered to go home after spotting Raquel and her new riches on Black Veil, too. Wow, what a prince! As I said up top: Divorce is a very viable alternative to murder.<\/p>\n Maybe murder seems like the easier solution to a person who is so fixated on maintaining her new lifestyle and public persona, created on the back of her sincere grief. We get a sharper view of what Raquel feels is in jeopardy when the team arrives at her place in Soho. Her agent, Sidney Finn, meets them at the door (and yes, he knows and loathes Kidder Hawes<\/a>, who, like Sid, also specializes in widow representation). Raquel\u2019s apartment is massive by any standard, and in particular, it dwarfs Marie\u2019s Staten Island home, where Raquel and Johnny lived prior to the helicopter crash.<\/p>\n Raquel is okay with multitasking and takes questions from behind a beautiful dark blue-and-gold screen as she\u2019s trying on samples for her forthcoming custom line of little black dresses. There\u2019s something very reminiscent of Dorothy\u2019s audience with the great and powerful Oz about Elsbeth addressing Raquel without seeing her, and something similarly Oz-like about Raquel herself once she\u2019s confronted with proof of Johnny\u2019s infidelity, too. I\u2019m not sure what\u2019s worse for her, the wholesale destruction of her image of her husband or the fact that she\u2019s being confronted with public evidence of just how voluminously unfaithful Johnny was. However performative her grief is in her #content, what she\u2019s feeling about her Johnny not being entirely hers is real. It\u2019s as if he\u2019s died again.<\/p>\n Elsbeth feels bad for Raquel, but the young widow is still her prime suspect, and the more Raquel clings to her TikTok alibi \u2014 how could she have been murdering her Johnny on the ferry on Wednesday morning when she was livestreaming in front of her shrine to her Johnny at home? \u2014 the more Elsbeth digs into breaking Raquel\u2019s alibi, and she eventually does so with a helpful insight from Hackett about LiveClock, an app that would allow Raquel to prerecord content and then schedule when to post it, making it seem as if it were a livestream. Between the timing and Elsbeth spotting a shiny, brand-new replacement for Johnny\u2019s beat-up old harness and carabiner, the jig is up, giving Elsbeth a moment to shine on the set of Raquel\u2019s Behind the Black Veil interview, prosecuting her case in the persona of a reality-show host. Raquel\u2019s ambitious pivot from grief influencer to betrayal influencer isn\u2019t going to happen after all.<\/p>\n Turning back to Kaya\u2019s undercover assignment, her promise to have her alter ego, Denise Jackson, do a bit of digging to see if she can learn something about what\u2019s going on down at the waterfront is both generous and possibly reckless. Captain Wagner explains that she must be participating in Operation Starboard, a \u201cmultistate investigation into corruption on the docks\u201d (a little nod to season two of The Wire<\/a>, perhaps?), and having anything to do with Elsbeth or any of their colleagues is extremely dangerous, for all of them and for the case.<\/p>\n Of course, Wagner is a big softie and tries to put Elsbeth in touch with Kaya again at the very end of the episode, giving her a purportedly untraceable burner phone (I think that\u2019s no longer a thing, but we\u2019ll go with it). Elsbeth\u2019s giddy anticipation turns to dread when she dials and finds Kaya\u2019s number out of service. In addition to the anxiety spike I felt when that automated message kicked in, I see another issue potentially brewing on the horizon: Elsbeth, who could make friends with a pepper grinder, is flailing a little bit in her attempts to connect deeply with her other colleagues. As lovely and capable as Officer Hackett is, she\u2019s not Kaya, and it seems as though her stand-up side gig and perhaps more-than-collegial relationship with Detective Fleming are higher priorities for now. That\u2019s totally fair, and also, I hope Elsbeth can right her emotional ship while getting to the bottom of how Kaya is doing.<\/p>\n \u2022 One more Easter egg: Raquel sings the praises of a moisturizer from Elle M\u00eame<\/a>, the brand highlighted in the episode where Elsbeth and Angus first met.<\/p>\n \u2022 Marie\u2019s A+ hostessing when Elsbeth, Hackett, and Fleming arrive at her home includes an offer of Entenmann\u2019s, which I think was a regional brand in the \u201980s and \u201990s. The obvious pick would be one of its donuts<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2022 The oversize, nearly abstract pattern of red lips and teeth on Elsbeth\u2019s jacket almost looks like a bold Marimekko design<\/a>. Love!<\/p>\n VULTURE NEWSLETTER<\/p>\n Keep up with all the drama of your favorite shows!<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n
\n Photo: Michael Parmelee\/CBS\n <\/p>\n