Cindy Garrett and her fiancé Philip Kobler have more to celebrate than their upcoming wedding. They have come up with the perfect crime: a way to kill off Cindy's father Wayde, frame her stepmother Denise for the murder, and get all of Wayde's money all to themselves. They even have it in the plan to use Mark to be the one to "bust" Denise. With such a brilliant plan, nothing could go wrong for the nefarious newlyweds... right?
"Till Death Do Us Part" displays symptoms of the following tropes:
- Actor Allusion: Once again, it is said that Mark has tripped over an ottoman.
- Asshole Victim: Subverted. In the first act, Wayde is portrayed as dismissive of Philip and overly focused on the cost of the wedding, while Denise is snide and self-obsessed. It is then revealed that the first act is in fact Cindy and Philip planning the murder before it's pulled off for real the next day. In fact, Cindy's father and stepmother are both genial, good-natured people, while Cindy and Philip are the actual jackasses.
- Breather Episode: After the harrowing four-part case that ended with the prior episode, this one is far more comedic, at its major focus is on a pair of bumbling schemers.
- Bluffing the Murderer: Steve tells the couple that he, Mark, and the other cops plan to check the photos of the wedding photographer to "check" Denise's alibi and see if she was where she shouldn't have been. Of course, the couple realize the photos could expose Philip's injury happening before he told Jesse it happened. They break into the studio, burn the picture, and take a real shot in the dark on who's waiting for the duo.
- Cigarette of Anxiety: Cindy has quit smoking as part of the murder plot, with a planted receipt for having bought some play a part in the Frame-Upnote . As the plan starts to unravel, Philip offers Cindy a smoke. When she protests, he says it's fine because the plan can be adjusted. That, and they forgot to actually plant the receipt.
- Complexity Addiction: What ends up ultimately undoing Cindy and Phillip is that their plan is so complex with so many twists that all it takes is one bit of mistiming to throw it completely off kilter. Mark lampshades how a far easier scheme would have let them get away with it.
- Epic Fail: Put it this way; what goes right for Cindy and Philip's plan is that Wayde dies... and that's literally it.
- It takes a special sort of ineptitude to be unable to plant a book on a bookshelf without knocking all the other books off while doing so.
- Exact Words: When Morgan the dog goes crazy, Cindy suggests checking "what got into" the dog. Mark decides to check just that: he has Amanda test the dog's blood for the drug.
- Failed a Spot Check: Among the many things that go wrong, Cindy's plan to get Denise to go into the kitchen fails when she neglects to realize that she has the nail polish she's asking for right next to her.
- Frame-Up: Denise is intended to be the one the cops believe committed the murder.
- Her Code Name Was "Mary Sue": Philip's Imagine Spot can't help but paint him as the ultimate charmer who easily sweet-talks Amanda. In reality...not so much.
- Inheritance Murder: The whole basis for the murder is Cindy and Philip trying to kill Wayde and frame Denise to have his money.
- Missing Steps Plan: At first, it looks like Cindy and Phillip have taken into account every step of the murder and frame-up of Denise. However, as things go wrong, it's quickly clear that in all their planning, it never occurred to them that just maybe a practice run-through might have been a good idea to see if, say, Phillip could get the cap off the vial of poison that fast or Cindy could quickly race from one room to another in her wedding dress. Just one "rehearsal," and the pair might have gotten away with it.
- Not a Morning Person: Cindy and Philip's Imagine Spot shows both of them having gotten themselves freshened up by the morning of their wedding. The actual morning shows them both disheveled and with bed heads, as they clearly weren't prepared to get up at such early morning hours.
- Orgy of Evidence: Attempted by Phillip and Cindy to frame Denise only for that to give them away as Mark can't accept Denise would be dumb enough to leave so many blatant clues implicating her.
- The Perfect Crime: The point of the episode, showing how Cindy and Philip came up with this well-planned, expert and nearly foolproof plan...and then how when they try to execute it, nothing goes to plan. Yet they still nearly pull it off despite all that, except for Mark realizing there's no way Denise could be so incompetent to pull off a murder with so many obvious mistakes.
- Psychological Projection: Cindy and Philip's Imagine Spot casts Denise and Wayde as money-obsessed assholes that resent them for no good reason. The first show of this is Wayde getting angry that the wedding flowers are suddenly more expensive that he'd originally planned. When they wake up the next day and Cindy learns the floral arrangements had been changed due to something outside of anyone's control, she starts yelling... and it soon becomes clear in multiple instances that they had been talking about themselves instead of their parents.
- Running Gag: Mark tripping over Morgan the dog.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: What undoes Cindy and Phillip's plan is the mundane things they never accounted for like Phillip unable to get the cap off a vial, Cindy discovering you can't run around in a heavy wedding dress or that the wedding staffers might deliver the wrong flowers. That's without the fact people don't react the way they expected them to in their fantasies and thus real life throwing the wrench into their plot.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: The crux of the plan is putting phenelzine into Wayde's red wine, which combined with the cheese in the food and a puff of his inhaler would combine to give him a fatal stroke. It takes them more than one try, but the duo do manage to pull it off.
- Spanner in the Works: While Cindy and Philip's plan turns into one shitshow after the other, Morgan the dog is ultimately what undoes the plan by drinking the spilled and drugged wine.
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee: The first act appears to be an Unfolding Plan Montage detailing the newlyweds plan to kill Wayde, before being revealed as an Imagine Spot of the couple going over the plan one last time the night before. Naturally when it's time for the real thing everything comes apart.
- Varying Competency Alibi: An interesting variant; the evidence against Denise is quite sound at first, but Mark learns that the dog had been fed the intended poison and starts wondering why that would happen in a supposedly well thought-out murder plan. He eventually realizes it could only have been due to the murder attempt going wrong somehow, and then he starts wondering about all the other ways the murder could've backfired that would've only affected the Bride and Groom...
