Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 5 recap: A dying poet outsmarts her killer as Elsbeth’s world collides with city politics

Poetic Justice, the fifth episode of Elsbeth Season 3, landed on CBS on November 6, 2025, right at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

That is halfway through the season, as this one has ten episodes altogether, and the show keeps doing what it does best: mixing sharp legal drama with a good dose of oddball humor and a cast of characters who always keep things interesting.

At the heart of it all is Elsbeth Tascioni. She is not your typical lawyer. She is clever, a little unconventional, and she is always looking at things from an angle nobody else sees. Working with the NYPD, Elsbeth dives into some of New York’s trickiest murder cases and legal puzzles. She has a knack for digging up secrets, outsmarting liars, and weaving her way through the city’s social and political messes. And she manages all of it without losing her quirky, offbeat spark.

Elsbeth Season 3 kicked off with Elsbeth up against a string of tough cases. She is poking around corruption in the NYPD, getting caught up in some personal drama, and wading into more than one political scandal. Episode 2 threw her into the middle of a high-society murder, tangled up with complicated motives.

In Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 3, she started to pull apart a shady legal scheme connected to political campaigns, hinting at something bigger going on behind the scenes. By Episode 4, her bond with Captain Wagner had gotten a little deeper. We saw her open up, show some real vulnerability, and push herself in ways she hadn’t before, all while wrestling with the ghosts of her past.

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Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 5 recap: Poetic Justice

Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 5 kicks off at a charity event with her friend Dr. Yablonski, rubbing elbows with artists and politicians. That is where she meets Alec Bloom. He has an easy charm, used to be a fire marshal, now running for mayor, and his whole pitch is about keeping the city affordable because he grew up without a home.

Alec works the room like a pro, chatting with everyone, swapping stories, and even singing a bit of “Manhattan” with Elsbeth. She likes his vibe as he has a mix of hopefulness and approachability. Still, she can’t help but wonder: is this guy really that sincere, or just really good at playing the part?

Seeing Alec again brings her face-to-face with Marissa Gold. Marissa is running his campaign now and swears she is not like her father, Eli, who is legendary for his scheming. But the way Marissa watches Elsbeth and Alec together, you can tell she has her own game going. By the end of Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 5, her promise to keep things aboveboard feels more like wishful thinking than reality.

The night grows heavier when Dr. Yablonski starts thinking about Dolores Feinn, the sharp-tongued poet everyone respected, even if she scared them a little. Her death was weird: her cigarette set off her oxygen tank, and that was that. Yablonski always figured Dolores played up her need for oxygen, mostly to get special treatment at restaurants.

Still, Elsbeth can’t shake the feeling that something is off here. And then there is Gary Pidgeon, Dolores’s colleague at her nonprofit, who has been putting on a show of grief every chance he gets.

Gary runs Pigeon Print, a literary journal that is always running on empty. He looks worn down, desperate, barely keeping it together in a world where money is tight and reputation doesn’t stretch as far as it used to. But Elsbeth picks up on something strange about him. His sadness feels forced, his stories keep changing, and he is almost too eager to talk about the details of the explosion. It makes her pause. With Captain Wagner’s sign-off, she quietly starts digging into Dolores’s death all over again.

This time in Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 5, Elsbeth teams up with Detective Rivers again. He is usually a pain, but lately he is trying to be polite. Maybe he has actually changed, or maybe HR had a word with him, but Elsbeth doesn’t care. Either way, he is easier to work with now, and together they start to put the pieces.

The more Elsbeth digs, the more obvious it gets: Gary messed with Dolores’s oxygen tank. He wanted a big inheritance, and he was in a hurry. Dolores was about to cut him out of her will. But Dolores? No pushover. She had built a reputation as a generous patron, but the truth is she barely scraped by in a rent-controlled apartment, surviving on charm, scams, and the free perks she wrangled out of arts nonprofits. She had already decided to slash Gary’s share.

So Elsbeth sets a trap. She ropes in Alec, who used to be a fire marshal, and gets a little help from a friendly doorman and a dry cleaner. Then she drops her ace: a perfect explanation of how oxygen affects bleaching. That’s it. Gary cracks, panics, and spills everything.

So, what we got to know in Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 5 is that Dolores left Gary almost nothing. Just some of her impossible-to-decipher poems and a little over four hundred bucks once the lawyers took their cut. Even in death, she managed to outsmart him.

But things don’t just wrap up when the case file gets shoved in a drawer. Back at the precinct, Marissa comes clean. She is the one who leaked that photo, the one who set off all the gossip about Elsbeth and Alec. And she tells Elsbeth to keep quiet about it unless Marissa says otherwise. Whatever mess Alec is in now, this political drama is just getting started.

Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 5 digs into what it really means to be genuine, whether it is feelings, politics, or art, and how tough it is to tell the difference between real passion and a carefully staged act. In a city packed with hustlers, dreamers, and true believers, Elsbeth is the only one still looking for what is real underneath it all.

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Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 6

Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 6, Bunker Down, will be released on CBS on November 13, 2025. In case you missed the last episodes, this one continues right from the spectacular turns in Episode 5.

The series stays with its Thursday night slot. Elsbeth Season 3 will have a minimum of 10 episodes, which will be released across the first months of 2026, and each new episode is going to be available on CBS and Paramount+ simultaneously.

Elsbeth Season 3 Episode 6 dives right back into the political drama and tangled murder cases the season has built so far. Elsbeth still centers on the quirky, brilliant attorney Elsbeth Tascioni. The show mixes legal drama with smart, character-driven stories and plenty of procedural surprises.

At the same time, the first two seasons of Elsbeth deal with perplexities and tensions in the life of Elsbeth Tascioni. In the first season, Elsbeth vacates her Chicago apartment and moves to the Big Apple. She essentially seals her fate to cross paths with the most dubious of crooks and the most unprincipled of detectives by taking an investigatory position that almost guarantees such a scenario. Among the major plots woven this season is her stubbornness to expose the rot in the NYPD, more so as she deals with Captain Wagner's difficult relationship.

At first, she is knee-deep in investigating the murder of a student from the college theater department, and eventually, she finds herself embroiled in more cases, for example, the suspicious death of the co-op board president, Gloria Blecher. Throughout the whole season, there are secrets, grudges, and crimes that are only surface-level in New York, and are hiding under its polished surface. In the end, Elsbeth not only exonerates Wagner but also secures a genuine place for herself in the team, whereas her friend Kaya Blanke is honored with a promotion she has been waiting for.

Season 2 picks up the pace. Elsbeth and her crew are dealing with an entirely new set of cases, along with political scheming and social issues that are very much in the news. We witness her bonds with cops and lawyers becoming more intricate, and her not-so-typical way of interrogating suspects is as amusing as always. New characters, larger political scandals, and a lot of moral ambiguity are all present. The series, however, still maintains its classic mixture of humor, intelligence, and courtroom heat, thus constantly reminding you why you began watching it in the first place.