‘Elsbeth’ Unpacks What’s in Those Tote Bags — And Why She Carries So Much

[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 16, “Hot Tub Crime Machine.”]

Elsbeth just dove deeper into what’s inside Elsbeth’s tote bags. As it turns out, Carrie Preston‘s endearing character has an equally charming reason for carrying so much in her bags. In addition to being a continuation of her storage quirks from The Good Wife and The Good Fight, in the Thursday, April 3 episode of the CBS procedural, we learn more about what they’re really all about.

The episode finds Elsbeth defending her sentimental items while also doing some much-needed spring cleaning, with the help of the killer of the week — Mary-Louise Parker‘s decluttering guru, Freya Frostad.

Freya and her husband were in a throuple with a younger woman (played by Encanto‘s Jessica Darrow). When Axel and Taylor were spending more quality time as a pair than as a trio with Freya, Freya decluttered their relationship by killing her husband. Elsbeth agreed to a decluttering session with Freya as part of her investigation into the murder. Freya is eager to make Elsbeth stop carrying all of that literal baggage, but the lawyer realizes there is “a lot of quality to [her] quantity” by the episode’s end.

Michael Parmelee / CBS

Freya has Elsbeth divide the contents of her bag into “quantity” and “quality” bins. Quantity gets thrown away, quality is kept. The tote bags are full of things Elsbeth loves, but it’s not the same items in each episode. As Preston explained to Deadline after Season 1 ended, “The bags are [filled with] whatever she thinks she might need that day to help her with her work.”

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“She needs to always be carrying a bunch of things. We got very specific about what those bags were,” Preston explained. “She won’t carry a briefcase. She doesn’t think of herself in that way. They became a fun accessory. She has bags in her brain, she has Rolodexes in her brain. She’s picking out little things that she put there 20 years ago, and she’s like ‘I can use that here.’” Notably, Preston added, “I’ve made the choice in Elsbeth that once I have got a killer and I’m ready to go in and frame them, I don’t have the bags.”

In Season 2 Episode 16, Elsbeth explains to Freya that “having all my things with me, it helps me think.” Freya thinks decluttering is the key to focus. A fun montage set to a jazzy cover of “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music played as Elsbeth reveals what she has packed in the tote bags that day. The contents include a rubber duck, plushie dog toys for Gonzo, a rainbow Hoberman Sphere, a missing dog sign for Gonzo (a memory that brought Elsbeth to comedic tears), a giant bubble gun, a smaller bubble wand, books, notebooks, the coconut from Season 2 Episode 9 (the Eric McCormack wellness retreat episode), the first Mother’s Day card Teddy made for Elsbeth when he was a child, and more.

“I guess I just like having my things on me. My bags don’t feel heavy… to me,” Elsbeth explains. As it turns out, Freya likes hoarding stuff as much as the next person!

Elsbeth cracked the case by figuring out that a “self” expense in Freya’s finances is the monthly payment for a storage unit. That storage unit contains every discarded item she ever convinced her clients to toss away, including Elsbeth’s things. She is very happy to be reunited with her discarded belongings. “I realized, there’s a lot of quality to my quantity,” she charmingly says. This storage unit contains evidence that proves Freya didn’t just kill Axel — she’d been attempting to kill him for months in various ways. She really should’ve decluttered that storage space.

Elsbeth, Thursdays, 10/9c, CBS

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