Jessica agrees to substitute when a teacher for a class in a women's prison takes an unexpected trip to the hospital. However, she finds her time more occupied with investigation than instruction when the prison locks down and the staff doctor turns up dead in her office. Jessica finds herself the middleman between the desperate inmates and the law, and struggles to find the truth before the already uneasy situation disintegrates into mayhem.
This episode includes examples of the following tropes:
- Always Murder: Played with; Dr. Matthews was a Guilt-Ridden Accomplice who actually committed suicide, but Mrs. Mimms was in fact killed because she was a loose thread that may have revealed why Dr. Matthews took her life.
- Anti-Villain: Many of the inmates are this, in that the riot and eventual hostage situation are caused mainly to stop the police from pinning the crime on fellow prisoner Mary and because of the substandard conditions they've had to endure. Well, one half, led by hotheaded Kat, want to blast their way out to freedom, while the others want Jessica to find out who really killed Dr. Matthews. Inmate Bertha even mentions that "If any of us had any brains we wouldn't be in this joint," a self-deprecating comment about their criminal pasts.
- Asshole Victim: Played with. As we learn more about Dr. Matthews, it comes out that she's an imposter and a fraud who was selling off the prison's medical supplies, diluting the stock given to prisoners in need, and cared so little about their medical needs that Mary was the only one who cared that her patients were in pain, and Matthews responded to Mary's concerns by extorting her for access to medication for her own patients - an arrangement which, if discovered, would fall on Mary's head for "stealing" meds and not her own. What makes it a bit played is that she turns out not to be a victim: the twist ends up being that she committed suicide, albeit less out of guilt and more out of certainty that she was about to be discovered.
- Blatant Lies: Debs, her perfidy still unrevealed, tries to keep Mrs. Fletcher from seeing Dr. Matthews's fingerprint file by looking in the file cabinet and claiming that it's not in there. This intricate and well-planned bit of deception is foiled when Jessica walks across the room and looks for herself, finding them almost immediately.
- Chekhov's Gun: Mary claims she had been sneaking medication to give to the prisoners in the infirmary, who were always in pain, and says she didn't know enough about medicines to dilute the morphine Dr. Matthews was poisoned with. It turns out the staff of the prison were selling the supplies they were supposed to use for the inmates.
- Chromosome Casting: The episode took place in a prison on lockdown, and everybody - the prisoners, the staff, the warden, and even the lieutenant governor they speak to on the phone - are all played by women. Only the police at the end are played by men.
- The Dragon: Kat, the most trigger happy of the inmates and the one who argued the most about blasting their way to freedom, was secretly working with the deputy warden and killed Mrs. Mimms for her. Inmate Dixie realizes the reason Kat was so eager to get out and escort Debs is because she'd never survive in another prison once word of what a slimy turncoat she is got around.
- Et Tu, Brute?: Dixie sounds genuinely shocked and hurt for a moment after Jessica exposes Kat as Debs' stooge.
- Evil All Along: Deputy Warden Debs initially appears soft spoken compared to the more anxious Warden Gates, but the ending reveals Debs has been looting the prison for herself for years even before Gates was on the scene. The horrid meals and diluted medication are all traced back to Debs' system, with no telling as to how badly some of the inmates probably suffered thanks to Debs' undermining their wellbeing.
- Exact Words: The prison cook says her meals meet state nutritional requirements. She notably doesn't say anything about being made with fresh, quality ingredients.
- Glory Seeker: It's an Open Secret that the recently-appointed warden, Elizabeth Gates only sees her position as a stepping stone on her way to the Senate, which is one of the reasons the corrupt staff she inherited can keep their operations going on under her nose. By the end of the episode, she's decided to put aside her senatorial ambitions and focus her attention on the job she has right now.
- Killing in Self-Defense: Mary hid out from her husband, a Domestic Abuser, upon getting a warning from a friend that he was coming home angry and drunk. She called the police but ultimately wound up shooting him with his .22 before they could arrive. She still got convicted of murder because she was armed and he wasn't.
- Large Ham: Warden Gates gets a couple moments while she's describing how she thinks Dr. Matthews died.Gates: Mary was hitting her again and again!! [...] And then Mary drove the syringe home!
- Lethal Chef: Ms. Springer's cooking leaves much to be desired and is one of the reasons why the inmates were so willing to revolt. Even Jessica cringes when she samples Springer's latest entree. Springer claims she's not getting enough funding for her meals, which turns out to be a lie. The reason the food's so awful is that she's been selling her stock and using substandard and expired ingredients for the meals.
- Miscarriage of Justice: Mary is convicted of murder because her violent, abusive drunk of a husband was unarmed while attacking her and she shot him with his own rifle.
- The Mole:
- With the inmates unhappy despite the reforms she thought her staff were performing, Warden Gates decided to get on Susie's good side and see what the complaints were all about in a genuine effort to make things better.
- Kat on the other hand was working with Assistant Warden Debs.
- Prison Episode: While it's set in a jail, Jessica is only there because of a writing program that involves a former student. She ends up caught in the middle of a riot and spends her time trying to find the truth and keep the inmates from killing themselves and maybe other people with a poorly-considered escape attempt.
- Red Herring: The unknown fingerprints on the morphine vial creates the idea someone infiltrated the prison to murder Dr. Matthews. It's later revealed the unidentified prints did belong to Dr. Matthews. The prints kept on file were forgeries.
- Red Is Heroic: Mary, the most consistently reasonable and good-natured inmate, has red hair.
- The Reveal:
- Dr. Matthews wasn't murdered, she committed suicide realizing if the warden got a registered nurse to help with the patients all the graft and drug selling she'd been a part of would've been exposed.
- Warden Gates genuinely had nothing to do with the substandard conditions the prisoners have suffered from and genuinely was trying to reform the place. Trouble is, she was being undermined by her corrupt staff led by Deputy Warden Amanda Debs who was secretly pissed off at not being named the new warden.
- Revenge: Dixie almost kills Debs when, after years of her crimes making life miserable for the ladies of the prison, Deb claims she'll only get off on a fraud charge. However, Jessica stops Dixie by proving that Debs did kill someone—Mrs. Mims—and will face the consequences for that murder.
- Rewatch Bonus: The assistant warden trying to comfort the doctor after she gets asked some inquisitorial questions initially seems like a moment of kindness, but by the ending, is revealed to have been a nervous appeal to an accomplice not to crack under interrogation.
- Suicide, Not Murder: While Jessica spends much of the episode trying to figure out who killed Dr. Matthews, she eventually concludes that Matthews committed suicide, which wasn't realized because her fingerprints on file were forged and therefore, the police could not identify her real fingerprints on the morphine.
- Sheltered Aristocrat: The warden has shades of this, as she was too focused on her planned Senate run to notice that her staff was corrupt and dismissed the complaints of the prisoners as baseless. She didn't even know what the food in the prison cafeteria tasted like!
- Trigger-Happy: Kat repeatedly tries to rouse the inmates into using their shotguns to blow away anyone in their path to freedom. After she's exposed as a two-faced goon for Amanda Debs, inmate Dixie angrily tries to murder Kat for her betrayal.
- Wardens Are Evil: Played with; the warden gets antagonistic towards Mary and the prisoners are pretty sure she had something to do with the murders. However, she's innocent of the killings and was legitimately trying to improve the prison, only to be hampered by her corrupt staff, including the assistant warden.
- Write What You Know: In-Universe, Jessica says she doesn't necessarily agree that authors should only write concerning things about which they are knowledgeable. However, this does come up in the story; at least one of the prisoners had the criminal in her story caught the same way she was.
