While Nancy and the Drew Crew follow up on the latest Lucy lead, they also work to uncover who tried to kill Ryan leading them to a startling revelation
Tropes:
- Arranged Marriage: Despite her protests to the contrary, it's clear Diana wanted to propose a more permanent sort of union with the Alston family by giving Bess to Amaya, which Amaya makes clear by being aggressively sexual at Bess during their double-booked lunch. Alternatively, see Sex for Services below.
- As You Know: Carson lays out how Ace just broke him out of prison, to Ace.
- Becoming the Boast: This is the first advice Amaya gives Bess: Fake it til you make it. This is almost a cliché in the business world, it's so commonly applied.
- Bedlam House: Nancy, Nick, and George have to infiltrate an asylum whose east wing has been shut down for who knows how long because of haunting. It's actually a decent asylum, bright and clean. The problem wasn't the doctors or the patients, it's the ghosts of the family that were murdered in the house that became the east wing.
- Book Safe: Downplayed, as the only thing hidden in it was a keycard and didn't demand an elaborate construction to take care of it.
- Cliffhanger: The episode ends with Nancy collapsed in the Roeper house, waking up in her bed at home next to the bottle Bess broke at the beginning of the episode, with her father knocking on the door and telling her "mom made pancakes". We get a tracking shot as more and more cockroaches cover every surface of her room after she leaves.
- Cryptic Conversation: Nancy gets some information out of Lucy's mom, but because the latter had a stroke (or a supernatural encounter with The Thin Man?) she's less than clear.
- The Dog Bites Back: Bess, trying to deal with the fact that the Hudsons put a hit on Carson, finally gets tired of Amaya's shit.Bess: I don't need you to bitchsplain the stockmarket to me.
- Executive Excess: Bess's meeting with Amaya begins with Amaya dismissing her as a potential business anything, focusing on aggressively flirting with her and making her uncomfortable.
- Haunted House: Lakespur Lane Sanitarium meets the requirement because before it became an a psychiatric hospital there was an family who lived there who died under mysterious circumstances.
- Hidden Depths: Amaya finally realizes that there's more to Bess than the easily flustered socialite who wants to talk about "business stuff" when she explains the less supernatural elements of the show.Amaya: Bess Marvin, you might be more interesting than I thought.
- Implied Death Threat: "Everett Hudson has a message for you."
- Intrepid Reporter: Nancy poses as one when she sees that the orderly is nervous and gets him to open up about the haunting of the facility.
- Oh, Crap!: Nancy has a big one when she turns around in the east wing and sees that the door has disappeared and she's trapped in the worst part of the asylum with the ghosts of the Roeper family.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: When Ace confronts Ryan about his father putting a hit on Carson, Ryan insists that his father would never do anything like that. He's right, it was his mother.
- Sex for Services: Instead of a formal arrangement between their families, Diana might just be pimping Bess out to Amaya, expecting Bess to play along out of desperation to be a Marvin and Amaya to reward the favor with business deals.
- Shown Their Work: Ace's plan (despite the Too Dumb to Live bit where he takes Carson directly to the Drew house and parks his stolen prison van out front) is solid. There's an exception for prison escapes if your life is in danger. So, 1) get you out of immediate danger, 2) get you someplace safe, and 3) ask a judge to do something about it is all perfectly correct, hence it shuts up Carson who, as a lawyer, would have reason to know this.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: By breaking into the asylum through the east wing and breaking open the doors blocking it to the rest of the hospital, the Drew Crew unleash the full force of the ghosts haunting the former home. Worse, their seance is the reason for the haunting in the first place, as it freed the ghosts a few weeks past.Orderly: I've been trying to tell people for weeks!
