Jessica learns there's more to Erik than meets the eye as they track down three potential attackers. Malcolm digs up dirt on Kith's husband.
This episode contains examples of the following tropes:
- The Ace: Sallinger has degrees in four different fields and is a prize-winning wrestler. He's apparently also quite mad.
- Badass Boast: Sallinger hands them out quite freely.Jessica: Congratulations. You've researched me.Sallinger: Particle physics require research. I figured you out in an afternoon.(later)Sallinger: One day you'll meet your match and you'll be exposed.Jessica: You think you're my match?Sallinger: Oh God no. I'm so far beyond you, you look like an ant.
- Badass Normal: Sallinger has no powers, just a vast intellect.
- Blackmail Backfire: Erik was blackmailing three different people without actually knowing what any of them had done or was capable of, only that they were in some way evil. Two paid up, but the last one turned out to be more than he had bargained for.
- Blessed with Suck: Erik's power gives him a never-ending headache that he has to try to drown out with sex, booze and gambling.
- Chekhov's Gun: Among the many records of his lifetime of achievement, Sallinger keeps his old high school wrestling trophies, honorable mention and most improved.
- The Cynic: Erik's rather bleak worldview is on display again. He doesn't bother to try and be a hero because it wouldn't make a difference. Considering his powers physically hurt him when around bad people and he lives in the MCU's Hell's Kitchen, this is understandable.
- Detect Evil: Erik's power. To be specific, he claims that he can detect an absence of empathy.
- Dissonant Serenity: In the final scene, Sallinger calmly eats an apple while letting somebody bleed out from a neck wound in the background.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Sal's son is clearly horrified to discover that she's been injured. Previously, Sal herself cries out when Trish beats her son down.
- Everyone Has Standards: Jessica asks Erik what he'd have done if he'd known one of his blackmail victims was making kiddie porn. Erik says that he'd have squeezed them for even more money... and then turned them in.
- Loan Shark: Sal is one. People who are late paying up gets to spend a minute or two weighed down at the bottom of her pool as an incentive to be more prompt next time.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Trish is horrified when she accidentally nearly kills Sal.
- Psychological Projection: Sallinger calls Jessica an arrogant narcissist who thinks she's better than everyone else.
- The Sociopath: Sallinger gives this impression, with his blank stares, strange thought patterns and haughty contempt for other people.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Jessica calls into Trish's show to tell her that she needs her help. That doesn't mean that she likes it however.
- Villain of Another Story:
- In their investigation to finding her stabber, Jessica and Erik start with Todd White, a man who Jessica discovers is a pedophile with photographs so incriminating that she locks him in his own closet and calls the cops on him within seconds of seeing them.
- The second mark is Reyna Pincer, a woman that embezzled millions of dollars from her fellow employee's pension fund.
- White-Collar Crime: One of the people Erik blackmailed is a woman who embezzled a lot of money from her coworkers' pension fund.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Sallinger is quick to ensure that the evidence will indicate that he's the victim of a violent assault by Jessica. Given she started recording him on her phone as soon as she walked in... this probably wouldn't have worked.
