[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Elsbeth Season 2 finale, “Ramen Holiday.”]

He had it coming! OK, no, he didn’t. Not this time, at least. An inmate was murdered in the prison where Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) was being held in the Elsbeth Season 2 finale on Thursday, May 8, on CBS. And it made Elsbeth feel right at home in her unexpected circumstances. Having a murder to solve kept the lawyer occupied as she reconnected with eight of the perps she had arrested over the course of last two seasons.

Stephen Moyer, Retta, André De Shields, Alyssa Milano, Gina Gershon, Arian Moayed, Elizabeth Lail, and Mary-Louise Parker all returned in their guest star roles in the finale and performed their rendition of Chicago‘s “Cell Block Tango,” which the series dubbed the “Suspect Tango” in the episode. The finale featured a new guest star as well: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend‘s Donna Lynne Champlin as “Mama Martin,” the killer of the week who took out Moyer’s Alex Modarian. Elsbeth Season 1 covered crooked cops. Season 2 had crooked judges. But Martin’s arrest is not intended to be a signal that Elsbeth Season 3 is going to cover crooked prison management.

“I think we’ll go back to lifestyles and murders of the rich and famous” in Elsbeth Season 3, showrunner Jonathan Tolins tells TV Insider, saying Elsbeth’s prison stint was “a one-off, but we are not done looking at what happens to some of our people after Elsbeth seems to be finished with them in their original episode.”

Another storyline that’s changing but not done forever: Kaya Blanke’s time at the NYPD. The Elsbeth Season 2 finale marked Carra Patterson’s last episode as a series regular. Kaya is now off to DC to train for a special task force after her second promotion of the season. Patterson will be back as a recurring guest star moving forward.

Elsbeth got out of jail by the episode’s end, freed by Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce) and Officer Chandler’s (Ethan Slater) blackmailing of John Carroll Lynch‘s character — a judge friend of the slain Milton Crawford (Michael Emerson). He sent Elsbeth to jail for her misdemeanor harassment of a witness because of her proximity to Crawford’s murder. Elsbeth got out of jail just in time for Kaya’s celebratory sendoff at the precinct and gave a teary speech. Prior to that, Elsbeth and Kaya had a private moment to say their loving goodbyes.

Preston tells us that much of her real feelings for Patterson were coming through in those final Elsbeth and Kaya scenes. Tolins says that Kaya’s not being replaced. They “may end up using our uniformed officers like we use our detectives, where we have a great stable, where you’re excited to see every one of them, but you don’t know which one it’ll be in each episode,” he reveals.

Here, Carrie Preston and Jonathan Tolins break down the Elsbeth Season 2 finale and tease what’s ahead in Season 3 in a joint interview with TV Insider.

You film in New York. Was anyone from the Chicago Broadway production involved in the creation of the Suspect Tango?

Jonathan Tolins: Oh, no. But Alyssa Milano, I think, had done a stint on Broadway as Roxie.

Carrie Preston: Our choreographer, Susan Misner is very much a part of that whole Fosse world and Chicago movie. But [we were] careful not to do any of the Fosse choreography. She came up with her own work take on it with the actors involved, and she’s an actor herself, so she really knows how to work with actors of varying different skill sets when it comes to musicals. I can attest to that because I had to do a dancing number in Season 1 from Chicago, the “Hot Honey Rag,” and she choreographed that as well. So it is a very organic, character-based way in which she works, and she did the same thing with all of these wonderful actors that brought the “Cell block Tango” to life for our finale.

Michael Parmelee / CBS

So is a Chicago musical number going to happen in every season of Elsbeth now?

Tolins: It didn’t happen on purpose [laughs]. I guess it’s because it’s about murderers and prison, and our show is too.

And Elsbeth is from Chicago, so it’s perfect.

Tolins: We’ll have to work our way through. We’ll do “Mr. Cellophane.” We’ll try them all out. Or we might move on to other musicals.

Carrie, tell me what it was like on set filming this. Were the rehearsals fun? I imagine this scene could have a fun blooper reel.

Preston: We make an episode of Elsbeth in eight or nine days. Because my character’s in so much, I was doing scenes that they [the guest stars] weren’t in while they were across on another stage rehearsing. So I didn’t actually get to see the number until the day we were shooting the number.

I showed up and it was like opening night for me. It was really fun. And Susie said, “OK, now we got to put you in.” And so I just dovetailed my way into what they were already doing, and we just all worked it out. Lionel Coleman, our director, had a lot of great ideas and he knew how he was going to shoot it with our whole incredible crew. It was magic how it all came together. We took the full amount of time that we were allotted to do it. I haven’t seen the final cut yet, but it was certainly fun to watch everybody putting it together.

Tolins: I think there were six hours budgeted on the schedule to get the whole number, and I think we went only slightly over.

Elsbeth’s been threatened by a crooked judge all season long, Judge Crawford, and now that judge’s friend has wrongfully imprisoned her. And yet she doesn’t seem afraid at all while in jail. In fact, she seems confident. Carrie, why is that?

Preston: Elsbeth is somebody who always has one foot forward. She’s always assuming positive intent, even from murderers for better or worse. And when you’re in a prison, there are guards around, there are things like that around. But I think she realizes that she’s come to a place with all these people who might hate her, but they respect her. And they know that they ended up in jail because of her. So there is something there to, although maybe not love, something to admire about her. So we leaned into that. And also it was necessary for her, for us to just get her in relationships with others to solve the mystery of who killed Alex Modarian. If they all hated her, then we wouldn’t get her in the same room with them for very long. So we needed to do that as well.

Tolins: At the very beginning, you see she is a little scared when she gets there and they’re all a little threatening. But then once the murder happens, she has a mission and she has a purpose, and that always makes things easier for Elsbeth because she knows what she’s after.

Michael Parmelee / CBS

She’s back in her comfort zone, even if it’s unexpected circumstances this time around. John Carroll Lynch played Michael Emerson’s lawyer in Evil, and now he’s defending him again as a friend and a judge in Elsbeth. Is this guy the new Crawford? Will we be seeing him more in Elsbeth Season 3?

Tolins: Well, Captain Wagner has stuff on him, so I don’t know. I don’t know. We know that he hired Chloe, the high-priced escort, played by Jordana Brewster in [Season 2 Episode 13]. [Lynch] is a wonderful actor. We were lucky to get him. We’ll see.

Preston: So fun that he wanted to come and just do that one awesome scene.

Season 1 covered crooked cops. Season 2 had crooked judges. Is Donna Lynne Champlin’s character a sign that in Season 3, you could be covering corrupt prison wardens or maybe just the prison system in general? As Elsbeth points out in the finale, the wealthy prisoners had more freedoms and privileges within the jail.

Tolins: I think we’ll go back to lifestyles and murders of the rich and famous. This particular [episode] was, I think, a one-off, but we are not done looking at what happens to some of our people after Elsbeth seems to be finished with them in their original episode. We’ve talked quite a bit on the show about how many of these people actually are going to ever face real jail time or justice. They’re so connected, they’ve got so much money and so many ways to delay punishment, so I think that’s something that’ll always come back. But our show, as much as we love our beautiful prison set that we built, we kind of stay in glamorous places.

Delia Kirby [Meredith Holzman] murdered Crawford in broad daylight with many witnesses, including Elsbeth. Elsbeth has an emotional moment at the end of this season where she’s basically grieving Delia’s future and that she was driven to murder. How much will this Crawford-Delia scenario reverberate throughout the next season?

Tolins: There’ll be reverberations, but I think it’s a pretty open-and-shut case. She was there, seen doing it, and she knew the consequences of what she was doing. She said she was a woman with nothing left to lose. It’s a very tragic story for her. I don’t think this will turn into [covering] the trial of Delia Kirby. I think that’s done. But I do feel that the way that whole experience affects Elsbeth — and the way people perceive Elsbeth because of her perceived connection to what happened — that will continue.

Carrie, how has this impacted Elsbeth’s view of justice? She’s always very clearheaded on what’s right and wrong, but how has this shaken her up? Because to Delia, what she did perhaps was just. Crawford really did throw her life upside-down.

Preston: Right, and she didn’t see a way out. And Elsbeth did. Elsbeth was so confident that she was going to get the evidence that she needed, and she got it. And then the fact that the judge was so powerful that he was able to get it thrown out, just destroyed it, use his connections to erase all traces of it, is devastating to Elsbeth. It brings her into a bit of a crisis of faith and well, what’s the point? If you can do all this work, you do everything right and it still turns out wrong, what’s the point of doing it? Captain Wagner, he says, “The point is to try.” That’s what she holds onto. But yeah, she’s shaken up by it. She’s trying to, the whole series, correct a lot of wrongs that she made in her life in Chicago, defending a lot of really horrible people and getting them off and letting them back out in the world where they’re going to do more terrible things. It just was eating away at her. And so this new life that she’s experiencing, she’s really trying to have some atonement. That’s just not always going to be achievable, just like life.

As wrong as she thinks it is, does Elsbeth understand why Delia could do that?

Preston: Well, the thing that I love about Elsbeth and I love about the writing is that Elsbeth always understands why they would do it. She just doesn’t agree with that choice. But she gets herself so into the mind of the killers in order to catch them and bring them to justice. In the case of Delia, it makes sense why she would do it. But the first thing that Elsbeth says to her after she kills him is, “We would’ve gotten him, we would’ve gotten him.” And she believes that. It’s just so heartbreaking for her that Delia didn’t believe that. Elsbeth would’ve gone back to the drawing board and tried to figure out another way to take this guy down.

I’ve seen fans online wonder if Elsbeth was wearing a wire during that last exchange with Crawford, and that’s how she was going to nab him. Was she?

Tolins: If only. Part of that story also is, we wanted to acknowledge that things don’t always go the way we want them to. You have to keep trying. There’s a big debate in many parts of our lives now about, well, what is the point of playing by the rules when it feels like the other side isn’t? Because once you slip in that direction, then everything’s lost. We’re a fun show and a procedural and all that, but we also want to tap into stuff that we’re all feeling about living in 2025.

Michael Parmelee / CBS

This was Carra Patterson’s last episode as a series regular. How long have you known that her shift to recurring guest star was coming?

Tolins: We knew for a little while, and obviously we worked this story out so we knew we’d get the character to a place where this was possible. But we don’t want to make too much of it because she’s coming back. The character’s not leaving the world of the show. She’s coming back, just not every day. But also we were excited to actually see this character have a dream and come up against obstacles and then actually achieve her dream, then become a detective and have these new opportunities. So it’s something we’ve been thinking about, been preparing for a while, but that relationship is so key to our show and the character [is so key to the show], she’s still very much part of Elsbeth.

Carrie, you have some touching scenes with Carra in the final moments of this episode as Elsbeth and Kaya have their private farewell. Talk about filming that final scene with Carra and what you both wanted to make sure shone through with these two women and their close friendship.

Preston: Because Carra and I became so close, there was not a problem playing that scene. We both just needed to show up and look in each other’s faces, and we would start to cry and get teary and feel all the depths of what we had built together. So that was a wonderful gift. The writing itself, too. What Jon wrote was just so beautiful. We shot it actually on Carra’s last day for the schedule. It lined up that way that that was going to be her last day on set. We had all of these returning guest stars, several of them were there. So it did feel like a family. It really felt like we were honoring her character, but we were also honoring Carra, so it was moving, and I know that we will always treasure that and remember that.

In the farewell scene at the very end, when you gave the speech in the precinct, it seemed like some of your real feelings as Carrie may have been coming through. What were you thinking and feeling as you closed this chapter on Elsbeth Season 2?

Preston: There’s a sense that Elsbeth’s sad that she won’t see Kaya every day, but also wishing nothing but success, love, and joy for her in this new adventure. And knowing that, like Jon said, that this was a dream that she had had, and to see somebody fulfill their dream, it overtakes any of the sadness. So I had those same feelings as myself of wishing Carra well and knowing that I’m going to miss her. She and I are going to have lunch in a couple of weeks. Just knowing that she’s going to be doing wonderful things and I can’t wait to see what it is, there were many parallels there. And that’s always a gift when you’re bringing a scene to life, that you have things you can draw on in your own life.

You introduced some new NYPD companions for Elsbeth this season after Kaya’s promotion. Is Ethan Slater going to continue as Elsbeth’s new companion in Season 3? Does she need a staple companion officer in your vision for the future of the series?

Tolins: Well, I don’t want to shoehorn another character into exactly the same role that Kaya played in Elsbeth’s life. I do think that Elsbeth usually must be working with a uniformed officer because he’s not a detective. She can’t just go to these places without someone. So we’ve started introducing some new characters. We had B as Nikki Reynolds and Ethan Slater as Chandler, and I think we’ll keep introducing some more. We love Ethan. I don’t know if we’d be able to have him as often because he’s very busy. So we’re going to let things develop organically and see who will end up being there more often with Elsbeth. We may end up using our uniformed officers like we use our detectives, where we have a great stable, where you’re excited to see every one of them, but you don’t know which one it’ll be in each episode.

Elsbeth, Season 3 Premiere, Fall 2025, CBS