Two of Jessica's old friends, Julian Lord and Maggie Tarrow, invite her back to the theatre where they all used to work for a revival of a play. However, more than the usual amount of trouble plagues the performance — first Maggie suffers a shock and faints mid-rehearsal, and then her understudy, Barbara, dies on-stage.
This episode includes examples of the following tropes:
- Absence of Evidence: The glass Barbara drank from disappeared shortly after she died because Julian was aware that microscopic traces of the cyanide that he had laced it with could be uncovered at a lab no matter how he cleaned it.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Barbara pretended to be nice, but secretly planned to blackmail Julian.
- Bitter Almonds: The attempts on the actors' lives involved cyanide.
- Blackmail Backfire: When Jessica confronts Julian backstage, it turns out that Barbara had tried to blackmail him into performing with her that night with the knowledge that he and Maggie had conceived and given up a child. Suspecting she would never quit, Julian poisoned her to protect Maggie from her attacks.
- Expy: As actors famed for their destructive romance and known for their problems with alcohol, Julian Lord and Maggie Tarrow seem to be expies of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, respectively.
- Gratuitous French: The local police chief, an amateur actor, uses really bad French while discussing Barbara's death. Julian and Alexander realize, the former amused and the latter aghast, that he's trying to imitate Hercule Poirot.
- Hands-On Approach: Implied when Jessica has an audio flashback about her time in the theatre. She admits that perspective completely throws her off, and the younger Frank offers to guide her brush hand.
- Inspector Lestrade: The chief of police asks Jessica for her help, but then proceeds to jump the gun multiple times and assume the guilt of one of the suspects, in multiple cases against the evidence. In the final case, he continues his accusation even when Jessica tries to stop him and shuts down her protests.
- Large Ham: Chief Drock is a character. That is, Chief Drock treats his role as "chief" as a role on stage, making flourishes, and overdramatic statements and speeches.
- Murder by Mistake: Jessica originally suggests that the killer intended to poison Maggie, not Barbara. Chief Drock even says the trope by name. However, then she discovers that Barbara never drank the poisoned wine, and realizes that, given how fast cyanide works, Barbara had to have been poisoned after taking over for Maggie.
- Overly Narrow Superlative: Jessica says that she was the second-best set painter in the theatre thirty years ago. However, she then admits that the theatre only kept two set designers on staff.
- Plot Allergy: Jessica reasons that Barbara was poisoned onstage, not by the wine in the dressing room, because she had an allergy to red wine and never drank it. The wine was poisoned afterward as a Red Herring.
- Police Are Useless: It appears Chief Drock's investigative skills suck even harder than his acting.
- Red Herring: Invoked. Julian poisons the decanter during the second performance of the play in an effort to strengthen the idea of Maggie being the actual target for the poison which killed Barbara.
- Skewed Priorities: Upon Holt being captured while trying to escape, the chief is informed that the play he's in starts in thirty minutes, and he quickly drops everything to get ready.
- Stigmatic Pregnancy Euphemism: Thirty years earlier, Maggie Tarrow unexpectedly left a show mid-performance, claiming she had a movie offer, years before her first film came out. She disappeared "abroad" for "almost a year". As Jessica quickly realizes, "nine months is almost a year".
- Til Murder Do Us Part: A scene from the play involves a couple planning to kill their spouses and marry each other for the third time.
- Wrong Assumption: Chief Drock comes to the sort of conclusions one might expect from a longtime theater fan, like the killer being the guy who said aloud that he had changed his name (as in taking a stage name), or accusing Alexander due to Maggie abruptly having left one of his shows thirty years ago without checking to see if he had actually been anywhere near the decanter.
