A hard-boiled detective and a novel writer find out a bitter truth about their lives.
Tropes:
- The Alcoholic: One of Katrina's flaws as a clichéd Defective Detective.
- Alliterative Name: Barnabus likes his fictional name Barnabus Bull because "it's so satisfying to say".
- Almost Out of Oxygen: Kat demands an ending from Ezra in which she can have a Big Damn Heroes moment of saving the missing boy right before he runs out of air.
- Animal Motifs: Cats. The name Kat and her two cats.
- As You Know: Ezra constantly tells Kat information that she should know: that her full name is Katrina and she's had multiple ex-husbands, for example.
- Blackmail: Kat threatens to frame Ezra for the kidnapping of his stepson and the murder of officer Gotdon if he doesn't finish the novel her way.
- The Blank: Katrina's daughter has no face (or name) because it was never described in Ezra's draft.
- Blank Book: Ezra finds out that his novel only contains blank pages as it's only a Fictional Document whose content is irrelevant to the plot.
- Body in a Breadbox: One of the possible endings Kat presents to Ezra is her sidekick Barnabus ending up as a corpse in a cupboard.
- Calming Tea: Officer Gordon hands a cup of tea to the upset couple after their child's gone missing.
- Catapult Nightmare: Katrina and Ezra wake up screaming this way. It's one of the many clichés in Matilda's novels.
- Cat Scare: When Kat investigates a noise coming from the kitchen, her cat Kitney Spears jumps out of a cupboard at her.
- Cats Have Nine Lives: Kat's theme. Ezra tells her she has run out of lives before placing the draft of her story back into the bottom drawer.
- Cliché Storm: Invoked. Being the product of a mediocre writer, this episode is loaded with detective story clichés.
- Compartment Shot: The shot from inside the bottom drawer onto Ezra as he drops the file into it.
- Convenient Photograph: When Kat goes through Ezra's wallet, she finds a photo of him and the missing boy.
- Creator's Pet: Invoked. Ezra ultimately decided Barnabus was far more fun to write about than Kat, and had Barnabus replace her as the protagonist of the novel.
- Creepy Children Singing: After his son has gone missing, Ezra hears a creepy children's song when waking up at night.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Side character Matilda gets killed by sheets of paper being stuffed into her mouth.
- Curse Cut Short: Overlapping with Killed Mid-Sentence, Ezra stops existing while in the middle of saying "Oh sh-".
- Defective Detective: Besides her obvious alcohol problem, Ezra describes Kat as a "flawed detective with inner demons".
- Diagnosed by the Audience: Lampshaded In-Universe example. Kat is jealous of Barnabus' character because he gets the limelight for having that popular "unspecified mental illness".
- The Dog Was the Mastermind: Matilda, a side character in Ezra's story, turns out to be the real author.
- Empty Fridge, Empty Life: Katrina's only item in the fridge is a vodka bottle, a clear indication of her life having gone down the drains.
- Expy: Barnabus is one for Monk.
- Fake Brit: In-universe. Barnabus suggests Matt Damon for the role of the British detective in Ezra's story. Defied by Ezra who is against casting an American in the role.
- Fourth-Wall Observer: Ezra, who effectively fills in the numerous blanks in the story.
- Functional Addict: Kat describes herself as one, insisting that her drinking problem doesn't interfere with her work as a detective.
- Hardboiled Detective: Kat is determined to solve the case no matter what it takes and whose toes she has to tread on.
- Hard-Work Montage: A montage shows Kat thinking hard in front of her pinboard.
- He Knows Too Much: Liasson Officer Gordon was killed because she was onto the killer.
- High Concept: Matilda succinctly summarizes the plot as "a hack horror novelist haunted by his own characters."
- It's Personal: One of the many cliches about the missing boy's case that Kat mentions.
- Ironic Echo: When Ezra "kills" Kat, it's by dropping the incomplete draft of the book he was writing into the bottom drawer of the writing desk. At the end of the episode, Matilda, annoyed at how the story is going... does exactly the same thing to him...
- Jump Scare: Lampshaded by Ezra after Kat gets scared by her cat jumping out of a cupboard.Ezra: Is that really the best we can do? Jump-scares with a cat?
- Literal-Minded: Barnabus takes the phrase "put the kettle on" literally and wonders if it would fit.
- Locked Room Mystery: Name-called by Ezra as the theme of his latest detective story.
- Loose Floorboard Hiding Spot: Ezra's latest story involves tiles in the basement wrongly re-laid, clueing detective Bull in about a false floor.
- Mandatory Twist Ending: Lampshaded by Matilda when she explains to her creation Ezra that "it wouldn't be a Matilda Gordon novel if it didn't have that final twist."
- Most Writers Are Writers: Matilda's protagonist is also a writer of detective stories.
- Nested Story: Matilda writes about Ezra who writes about Katrina.
- Nested Story Reveal: Happens twice. The first is when Kat walks in on Ezra deciding to change the main character of his story to Barnabas, having got a lucrative book deal to do so. The second happens when Kat has murdered Matilda and Barnabas to get her book back, and Ezra walks in on the suddenly alive Matilda complaining about how she's having problems continuing Ezra's story.
- Queer Establishing Moment: One of the endings Kat proposes to Ezra is The Reveal that she is in a lesbian relationship with Ezra's wife.
- Rage Against the Author: The character of Katrina comes alive and blackmails her author to finish her story the way she wants it.
- Shout-Out:
- Kat calls Barnabus the Rain Man for his autistic antics.
- Ezra mentions he liked Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley and thought he would make for a suitable protagonist for the televised version of his latest detective novel.
- Slap-Slap-Kiss: Barnabus invokes that he and Kat apparently have a love-hate relationship.
- Straw Misogynist: Kat describes her all-male superiors as demoting her because they didn't want her to tell them the truth.
- String Theory: Kat has a pinboard on her wall for the missing child case with a map, photos and notes connected via red strings.
- Taken Off the Case: Discussed. Kat explains that she was taken off a "missing child" case because her superiors couldn't stand to be told the truth by a woman.
- Take That!: Matilda notes that she attempted to write the new Frankenstein but ended up with an off-the-mill Stephen King-type novel.
- Take This Job and Shove It: Kat's desired story ending for her character is to walk out of an AA meeting and throw her police badge into the river.
- A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Ezra gets the same harsh treatment of the "bottom drawer" from Matilda that he gave to Kat.
- Tomato in the Mirror: First Kat and later Ezra come to realize that they are only figments of someone else's imagination.
- Unusual Euphemism: Barnabus uses the phrase "Elvis did not enter the building" to refer to him and Kat not having had sex the night before.
- Wham Line: "It's not your house, Kat."
- A later one, as Ezra finds himself dealing with the abrupt return of Kat, is when he heads for his writing room to hear Matilda declare "I've written myself into a corner..."
- Writer's Block: Ezra mentions in passing that he was struggling with this while writing on Kat's novel, with it being revealed that it's his author projecting her own writing problems onto him.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Ezra thinks he's an acclaimed writer of crime fiction. Matilda says she actually intended him to be a horror author, and very bad at it.
