The Ledger

Mayhem

Fast-paced and unusually structured episode (4.17) in which Briscoe and Logan attempt to solve FIVE consecutive murders which take place all over the city.

Murder #1: The episode begins with two horseback officers discovering the body of a young man in a car in Battery Park. He'd been shot to death by a high-caliber weapon. Shortly after the discovery of this body, Briscoe and Logan get a call that a topless woman was found several blocks uptown screaming. It turns out that she was in the car when he was shot, and she ran away mid-encounter. She is able to offer a description of the shooter, a heavyset man with thick black plastic glasses (think Roger Ebert). Briscoe wants to wrap up the case quickly because he has court-side seats at a Knicks game at 7.30 pm, a fact he makes repeated references to throughout the episode.

Murder #2: Just as they start making some progress on this case, the detectives encounter a man screaming out his apartment window. They reluctantly run upstairs to investigate, and find that the man's wife has forcibly castrated the man because of his adulterous ways. As Logan enters the apartment, the man's wife whacks Logan with a frying pan. He subdues her while the husband is screaming, and a bunch of cops show up to find his missing body part, which they eventually do. Good thing it was cold outside! It doesn't matter in the end, though: he dies on the way to the hospital. Later in the episode, the woman pleads guilty at her arraignment, over the objections of her attorney.

Murder #3: The owner of a small grocery is killed by an assailant. The wife of the victim remembers that the shooter cashed a government check at the store a few days earlier. They get the man's name, and head over to a crack house he's known to frequent. From some of the crackheads, they get his address.

Murder #4. When they get to his apartment, they find the killer dead on his bead, shot to death. Seconds later, they hear a woman screaming, and run down the hall, where they find a disheveled man yelling about something. He's got something in his hand, although I couldn't quite tell what. Logan thinks it's food. In a classic line, Logan shouts at the man, "Put the burrito down, Senor."

After they take Burrito Man into custody, they get back to work on the original murder, and come up with a prime suspect, a guy everyone calls Scotty, who fits the description of the shooter, and who was the prime suspect in a similar killing in Queens a few months earlier. They track Scotty down at the garden shop he works at, and take him in for questioning. But they don't really have much evidence, and the witnesses they bring in for the line-up can't identify him. Meanwhile, Burrito Man starts shouting that he's hungry (I guess because he never finished that burrito) and causes a real ruckus in the holding cell they stuck him in. He starts attacking his cell mate, and Logan enters the cage to break them up, but Burrito Man escapes and starts attacking people in the office area, shouting the whole while about how he wants something to eat. After about 10 seconds, Logan grabs hold of him and smashes his face into a bowl of chips or something and says, "Eat this!" as chips go flying everywhere. It's a great Logan moment.

Back on the Scotty case, the detectives still can't come up with any hard evidence...just a string of circumstances that seems to connect him to the crime. They conclude that, in Van Buren's words, he's just "the unluckiest guy in the world." They have him in holding at a central facility, and when they go to get him released, they stumble across Murder #5: Scotty was stabbed by a fellow inmate wielding a sharpened toothbrush. He's dead.

By the time they deal with all the red tape related to that, they're ready to leave, but Briscoe has missed his Knicks game.

The episode is notable because of its extremely unusual structure: Briscoe and Logan spend all their time responding to and trying to solve all these murders, and the prosecutors have only a limited role. The plot moves from case to case to case, and back again, which is very irregular for this series. The only other episode I know like this is Couples, an episode I've seen but haven't written about yet. That episode also follows several cases simultaneously. Couples was written by new executive producer Lorenzo Carcaterra, who is perhaps best known for his book Sleepers. (More about him some other time.)

The episode is also unusual because the famous black-and-white interstital title screens that establish location and time before most scenes have two added features this time: the seconds are shown ticking by while the titles are on the screen, and they are accompanied by a clock-ticking sound. This serves to emphasize the fast-paced nature of the episode, and the unusual format of the script.

One casting note: the woman who castrates her husband is played by Katherine Narducci, best known as Charmaine Bucco on The Sopranos. She also appears in the L&O episode Faccia a Faccia, in which she seeks justice for a man who killed her father.

This episode is enjoyable, amusing, engaging, and it give you a rare chance to spend practically an entire episode following Logan and Briscoe around.

Posted by adm at February 18, 2004 12:55 AM

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