The Ledger

15.1 Paradigm: Joe Fontana's First Episode

Well, here we go again.

• Intro
• Multimedia
• Plot Summary
• Analysis
• Extras

Introduction

In this episode (15.1), an Iraqi-American woman kills a US soldier who recently returned from working as a guard at Abu Ghraib. Meanwhile, Detective Joe Fontana replaces Lennie Briscoe as Ed Green's partner, and the two of them work to solve the case. McCoy and Southerlyn attempt to set aside their political differences and build a prosecution.

Multimedia

• Screenshot of Bloomberg, with cast members
• Screenshot of Bloomberg, close up
• Screenshot of Bloomberg press conference
• mp3 of Bloomberg
• Screenshot of Fontana's first appearance
• More

Plot Summary

The episode begins rather provocatively, with a professional couple sneaking off to a remote portion of their office building as they discuss another employee's eating habits. They start taking their clothes off, and the woman (in a red bra, at this point), kneels down to help the man with his pants and some other stuff. As she's getting ready to dive in, she looks over and sees the body of a dead woman. I guess they wanted to open the season with a bang: this is certainly one of the most risquee teasers in the show's history...so risquee it almost seems like a parody of L&O body discoveries.

So Det. Ed Green arrives on the scene and gets the details from a uniformed officer. The officer asks if Green is working solo, and he says his new partner, Fontana from Bronx Homicide, failed to show up. The officer says this must have been because of a mix-up at "1PP," meaning One Police Plaza.

Green looks at the body, and we see that the victim is wearing a white blouse with a red cross, painted in blood, across it.

After the opening credits, Green and Lt. Van Buren discuss whether the office building had security tapes. In the middle of their conversation, there is a knock at the door, and Det. Fontana enters. AVB asks him, "Can I help you?" and he replies, "I'm Fontana." This is his first line of dialogue.

He gives AVB and Ed Green a long once-over, and says it's about time he (Fontana) got a partner "with some smooth." (Green has a reputation for being more stylish than other detectives on the show.) He asks for the DD5 on the case so he can get up to speed. (Sounds like the writers were reading Blue Blood over the summer, too.) When he leaves, Green and AVB exchange meaningful glances, and Green says he didn't know whether Fontana was a cop or a wise guy. AVB tells him to "make it work."

Green and Fontana visit our old friend ME Rodgers, who tells them the victim was bludgeoned and smothered. Fontana asks an informed question about the vic's condition, while sticking his finger in the vic's mouth, and Rodgers removes his finger sternly and recognizes that he "knows [his] way around a body." Did I imagine a barely perceptible confrontational flirtation between them, like kids in a school yard? Rodgers also says the blood on the victim's shirt was "porcine." "Pig's blood?," Fontana helpfully asks. Thanks, Joe. Yeah, pig's blood. On the victim's back, they find a tattoo that says "713." Fontana suggests that it's a military identification, and that this woman was "forward deployed" in a military operation, and that 713 is a unit designation.

So that sends them out to the 713th Reserve Unit, located on a suspiciously-large-looking base in Long Island City, Queens. They talk to her captain, who is vague about the unit's responsibilities, but says they were in Baghdad. He complains that Iraq was chaotic and it was hard to know who the enemy was. Fontana says, "Tell me about it. I was in Saigon," a statement he later admits to Green is a lie.

They interview the victim's parents, who say something was different about her when she got back from the war. They also say she had gone into the city to pick up some tickets for a free cruise for veterans of the Iraq war. When told she was found wearing a white blouse, the parents say she left the home wearing a black t-shirt. They point them to her boyfriend, Donnie.

They talk to Donnie, and for some reason are the first ones to notify him of his girlfriend's death the day before. (He's wearing a shirt with some unusual script characters on it [screenshot], but this is never addressed again. Does anyone recognize the writing on the shirt?) He is sad to learn his girlfriend is dead, and Fontana steps up, full of apparent empathy, and tells him to hold it together because they have to ask him some questions. Donnie says she didn't change her clothes at his house that day, which suggests that the white blouse was placed on her post-mortem.

They visit her workplace, a grocery store. The owner is upset because he had to hold her job for her while she went off to war. Fontana makes it clear that he thinks the victim was off fighting for our freedom, and the store owner should be more grateful. He says she wasn't fighting for him, though.

Green goes through her workplace locker and doesn't find much, but then Fontana steps in and finds a key for a safe deposit box taped to the inside of the locker. How observant! (The old "important item found in workplace locker" device has been used many times before, and it never makes sense to me. Why would this woman keep an important item like that at her job at the GROCERY STORE. Why? Because it's scriptually convenient, that's why.)

Anyway, cut to the bank, where they open up the safe deposit box and find photos of prisoners being tortured/abused at Abu Ghraib. The photos look remarkably similar to those that were made public in real life earlier this year, but Green and Fontana agree that these photos have not been seen in public before. They reason they were from her "private collection." Green begins to suspect that she was killed to keep these photos from being made public.

The detectives and AVB review the photos back at the precinct, and AVB suggests that military officers (not just low-ranking soldiers) are pictured in the photos, and they may have wanted the victim dead to suppress these photos. Fontana finds this idea laughable, and the two have a very heated debate about the nature of the torture and whether the military would kill someone over the photos. Fontana comes across as politically conservative. He even raises her voice at her, which doesn't seem particularly believable to me. (But, in nearly every debut of a character in L&O's history, the writers have amplified the characters' traits so they make a lasting impression. By the fourth episode or so of a character's run, however, they turn into normal people. More on that later.) Anyway, Eddie settles them down and tells them to focus on the case at hand. This is a paradigm (note the episode's title) that we'll see again later in the ep.

Green and Fontana go out for a drink. Fontana has a martini, and asks whether Van Buren is "always like that." Green casually defends AVB, and Fontana admits AVB has a good reputation, and also says he worked for the first female captain in the Chicago police department (thereby explaining his accent and filling out his attitude -- good writing!) Green makes a joke, and Fontana also says he didn't get along with his last boss, which we'll probably hear more about in future episodes. He says he has to go meet somebody, and as he leaves, pulls out an extravagantly large knot of bills and pays for his drink.

AVB and Van Buren, walking outside, discuss their impressions of Fontana so far. AVB says he has a reputation as someone who "works hard, plays hard," and asks Green whether that sounds familiar. (Green had a big gambling habit which he eventually semi-kicked.) They meet Fontana inside, and he shows them a history book about the Crusades. He gives them and us a brief history lesson, and shows them a picture of a Christian knight with a red cross across a white tunic. Get it? Just like the victim! What is this -- Se7en? He figures a Muslim person wanted to evoke Crusade imagery and so painted the cross on the victim. AVB counters that maybe somebody just wanted them to think it was a Muslim person.

They go back to the reserve base to check it out, since the captain was so vague the first time. This time, they have information to use as leverage, and manage to wrangle a list of Abu Ghraib detainees with US contacts out of him. They visit a mechanic at a Brooklyn auto repair shop (the third borough of the episode!) and he says he had a brother in Abu Ghraib, but blah blah blah it's all irrelevant. He also says Saddam had him in jail for a long time. Asked whether he had a grudge against the US because of his brother's treatment there, he says any Iraqi would prefer being in the US-run Abu Ghraib than the Saddam-run Abu Ghraib. (This is factually incorrect, given several prisoners who served time in both are on record as saying they preferred imprisonment under Saddam, but whatever.) This guy somehow points them to an oil company they never heard of, which somehow leads them to an oil company they have heard of, which happens to have offices in the same building where the woman was found murdered.

They visit the oil company, and implicitly pressure the boss to give them the name of an employee whose brother-in-law was imprisoned at Abu Ghraib. They talk to him, and he seems like a nice guy, very co-operative. He says his b-i-l was detained, later released, and subequently killed in a random car bomb attack. They ask him whether his b-i-l was tortured in prison, and he says his wife Nadira (the detainee's sister) would know.

They visit the wife, an Iraqi-American, at her home, and Fontana gets under her skin a little bit by suggesting the abuse at Abu Ghraib wasn't that severe. The actress (Sarita Chowdury, who is of British/Indian decent i-r-l) does a good bit of acting, and you get the impression she's about to lash out at Fontana, but instead she composes herself and says her brother was not abused (so therefore she would have no motive to kill the female soldier). They ask her for an alibi, and she says she was shopping on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.

They visit a shop on Atlantic and learn that she was there on the morning in question, and she bought a jar of -- da-da-dah! -- pig's blood. They bring her in for questioning.

AVB, Green, and Fontana all gather around Nadira in the interrogation room. She's reticent at first, but then Fontana does something weird...he moves in and puts his hand on hers, looks at her right in the eyes, and says, "You don't have to talk to us...that's okay" And then something breaks inside her and she says her full name and birthdate and says she demands to be treated as a "prisoner of war." Well, my dear little mujahideen, let me tell you something: In this country, President George W. Bush will be the judge of that!

She gets arraigned for Murder 2, and (predictably, if you've watched the show before), there's all kinds of confusion because she refuses to plead because she's calls herself a soldier. The arraignment judge, as they always do, says, "I'll take that as a not guilty." Southerlyn says the woman might kill again, and so she gets remanded.

McCoy and Southerlyn discuss the case, and we quickly learn that nothing has changed over the summer: Elisabeth Rohm's performance is as wooden and tone-deaf as always. (Sorry Lis, it just is.) They have a bit of a tense discussion about the war, and SS essentially defends Nadira's claim to POW status. McCoy, trying to focus on the law, says (naively) that the case has "nothing to do" with the war in Iraq. (He has taken the opposite stance in previous episodes involving Vietnam, but whatever).

McCoy says that Nadira has a new lawyer, Bernie Adler. Whenever one of the DA's identifies a lawyer by name, you know he or she is a big shot and McCoy's going to be in for a big courtroom battle. That's especially true in this case, since (a) if you were paying attention during the opening credits, you would have noticed that Ron Silver is a guest star in this episode, and (b) by this point in the episode, you're going to assume that Silver will play the defense attorney, and (c) Ron Silver played Alan Dershowitz and got Claus Von Bulow aquitted on appeal in Reversal of Fortune, so he must be a good lawyer.

So Adler/Silver/Dersh's first step is to argue that because Nadira is a POW, NY courts don't have jurisdiction. He has a motion hearing on this matter in the judge's chambers along with McCoy and SS. Adler says she's a soldier, a mujahideen fighting a holy war. Now, this argument is absurd on its face, given that holy wars are not the same thing as one sovereign country being at war with another sovereign nation, B.W. So then Adler quotes the Geneva Convention and says that an insurgent fighting an occupier counts as a POW. Well, fine, but McCoy rightly points out that, among other things, such insurgents have to have a command structure and wear an insignia, neither of which Nadira can claim. And then, Adler says something completey stupid: he mentions supposed dirty-bomber Jose Padilla as a parallel case, since he, too, is an American citizen. GIVE ME A BREAK. The whole point of the Padilla case is that he was designated an ENEMY COMBATANT, NOT A PRISONER OF WAR. So why would you bring that case up to a judge when you are trying to get protected status for your client? Sloppy writing, that's why.

Predictably, droll, cranky old Judge Bradley denies the motion to cede jurisdiction. The trial will go forward, news that doesn't seem to bother Adler, since he says that while McCoy's trying Nadira, he'll "try the war." (Something tells me they edited this from, "I'll put the war on trial!!" to keep from being completely cliche.)

So back at the DA's office, McCoy, SS, and DA Arthur Branch (former Republican senator Fred Thompson, i-r-l), have a big discussion about the war. If you've been watching L&O the last couple of years, you could see this scene coming a mile away, and I spent most of the episode dreading its arrival. So they have it out, and SS predictably gets into an unwinnable debate with Thompson, who accuses her of being a "pusillanimous pussyfooter," a phrase McCoy helpfully points out was employed by Spiro Agnew (but reportedly coined by then-speechwriter Pat Buchanan). Branch serves up the old "they hate our freedoms" canard, and says Abu Ghraib is a "distraction." SS lamely suggests maybe we should stop killing and torturing everybody. McCoy settles them down and tells them they should focus on the case at hand. Recognize the paradigm? Good.

He tells them there's going to be a press conference about the case tomorrow, and says SS can get on board or stay home and sulk.

We get back from the commercial, and we're treated to Mayor Bloomberg's second appearance on the show. Just like the last one, this one is in the context of a press conference. The staging of it is quite elaborate. He's in a big rotunda, and there's tons of reporters around him [screenshot]. He says the Nadira case is "one of the most important trials of the last 50 years." (Why? The woman's POW status has already been rejected, so it's just another murder case, isn't it? For him to say otherwise is to inflate Adler's claims, thereby working against his own DA's case. Aargh.) Branch takes the mike and answers a few questions from some earnest reporters. Branch himself says the jihadist claim is irrelevant.

The trial begins (45'), and as the reserve captain testifies, Adler shows the torture photos to the jury. The captain's character is a caricature, and he gets all aggravated and starts telling Adler how the ends justify the means because have you ever seen a child's arm get sliced off and seen a soldier's head explode and so on. Scenes like this damage the nuances of both sides, in my opinion, but military commanders on L&O almost always follow this stereotype, and it takes away from the realism and narrative.

During a break, Branch, McCoy, and SS have another meeting and Branch and SS have another boring fight about the war. McCoy looks exasperated, as do the millions of people watching. Branch says that the US has become "poster kids for Schadenfreude...until they need us." Well, I wouldn't characterize initial international reaction to 9/11 as Schadenfreude, but what do I know.

Back at the trial, Nadira testifies about how her brother was tortured at Abu Ghraib, and how he was sodomized with a stick while being forced to sing the Iraqi national anthem while face down on the ground. She also describes how she learned through her husband that one of the guards from Abu Ghraib -- the eventual victim -- was in NYC, and how she lured her to the empty, under-construction part of her husband's office building by sending her a letter offering tickets to the veteran's cruise. This seems like a rather elaborate plot to just go kill someone who doesn't know you. She says she bought the pig's blood just to splash it on her and shame her, but they ended up fighting, and that's when Nadira wacked her over the head with a pipe. On cross-examination, McCoy gets her to admit that bringing the white blouse along was a sign of planning, and that after hitting her with the pipe, she smothered her victim, another clear sign of intent. Nadira emotionally exclaims she was mad about what the victim did to her country, and McCoy challenges her to answer "which is it," her country or her brother. She recovers and says the US proclaims itself to be "guardians of freedom," but we don't actually respect Iraqis.

Adler gives a compelling closing argument in which he asks the jurors to imagine NYC being under the control of Saddam's Republican Guard, and how they would act when their loved ones were imprisoned and tortured, and what they would do when their spiritual leaders called on them to fight the occupiers.

McCoy's closing is drab by comparison, and basically just says that the killing wasn't justified and that Nadira should have pursued grievances through the court system or by voting. Boh-ring!

Still, because America needs it to happen, the argument persuades the jury, and they find her guilty of Murder 2.

Don't worry, Nadira! Silver will get you off on appeal!

The episode ends with Branch going out on the courthouse steps and telling a million assembled reporters that this case was a victory for "truth, justice, and the American way." Really. He actually said that.

Analysis

There are two notable components to this episode, namely the way Fontana's arrival is handled, and the discussion of the war.

As I suggested above, the show's writers tend to offer exagerrated characterization for a new character's first few episodes. Briscoe's first wisecrack was, "What I was doing, you don't wear a beeper," and he was very, very gruff and patronizing for the whole first episode. When Phil Cerreta (Paul Sorvino) replaced Max Greevey in the premiere of season 2, Logan couldn't stand him, and they had all kinds of tension. In his debut, Rey Curtis(Benjamin Bratt) questioned Briscoe's old-school methods, and Briscoe disapproved of Green's hotshot tactics. In nearly every case, with the possible exception of Green and Briscoe, the detectives ended up fitting in just fine, and muted the caricatured traits that were so salient in their early eps. (Although I don't think Briscoe and Green ever really seemed to completely lose the tension between them, except maybe last season.) I can see the writers' wanting to have a story arc on Fontana's assimilation into the unit, but I think his in-your-face political and racial attitudes will subside in a few eps, and we can get back to focusing on the case at hand. See the paradigm?

Characters' dialogue about the war has become customary for post-9/11 episodes, but in this one, it is so prevalent, it borders on becoming a plot element. Other episodes (namely American Jihad, Veteran's Day, Embedded, Patriot) have dealt with terrorists in NYC, returning veterans, and so on, but the dialogue in them about the issues felt obligatory and detached. In this episode, it serves to round out your perception of the characters, and establishes motivation. It also illustrates the divisiveness of the war, and how it effects even people who work together very closely and know each other well. Unfortunately, apart from Nadira's outburst at the end and Adler's closing statement, most arguments were filled with the same old ideas. I would have liked to have seen McCoy offer an eloquent rationale for what is going on, but instead, his closing felt borrowed from any one of a dozen other episodes in which the killer had an emotional reason to commit murder.

Extras

• Other characters' first appearances
• Guide to cast changes, with screenshots of each cast
• Bloomberg's first appearance on L&O

Here's a summary of the season's second episode, Dead Wives Club, which also aired last night.

Posted by adm at September 23, 2004 03:40 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thousandrobots.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/269

Comments

Post a comment

validate