The Ledger

Bebe Neuwirth joins cast of Trial By Jury

She'll play a prosecutor. See this story.

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.

15.2 The Dead Wives Club

Uh oh -- they're only on the second episode and the season already has taken a turn for the worse.

In this episode (15.2), a woman whose firefighter husband left her for a 9/11 widow kills the widow by pushing her off the Staten Island ferry moments before it crashes into the dock. Fontana and Green investigate, and McCoy prosecutes with more ardor than Southerlyn cares for.

This episode is one of the most exploitative and insensitive in the show's history, and I can't believe they would air it at all, let alone this close to the 9/11 anniversary and this early in the season.

If you live in NYC, you will immediately recognize two plot elements "ripped from the headlines": the Staten Island Ferry crash, which killed 10 people, and the phenonomenon of firefighters leaving their wives to marry the widows they grew close to after 9/11. The episode gives short shrift to the ferry crash story, and portrays 9/11 widows exclusively as either deranged murderers or money-hungry home-wreckers. It's a lazy and insulting episode.

The episode begins at a ferry dock. A couple of guys are talking about an MP3 player (that looks like an iPod), and one is asking how the other can afford it when he still owes him $100. iPod guy gets something from a vendor, and gets upset because he gets a Canadian quarter back as change. As he starts to dispute this, the ferry crashes into the dock, a calamity somewhat effectively captured on screen.

Fontana and Green show up and learn that there are many injuries, and one DOA, a white woman named Donna. A DOT investigator shows up and gives the detectives a hard time for investigating the case. A uniformed officer turns up some gin in the ferry's pilot house, and then they learn the DOT guy let the pilot/captain slip away.

The detectives head over to the captain's house, and the feds are already there. The captain isn't at the house, either, and the feds claim jurisdiction of the case, which Fontana and Green don't seem to mind too much. Fontana conveniently notices some boat paint in a trash barrel and from that deduces that the captain is seeking refuge on a boat somewhere. Off camera, they determine that his wife owns a boat, and they head to the marina, where they find the captain on his boat, dead. Apparently he shot himself.

Fontana gets all upset because his expensive Italian shirt got ruined by the captain's blood -- he mentions it about 10 times -- and they get back on the case, trying to figure out how the woman, Donna, died. They talk to a witness from the ferry who says he heard a scream, a splash, and then the ferry crash. This is strange, they say, because you'd think the crash would be first. It seems to me that a person might jump off a boat they thought was going to crash, but who knows.

Anyway, they check in with ME Rodgers, who says the victim was alive when she hit the water, but had bruises on her body and a severe head injury from hitting a railing on the way down. They begin to surmise that she was pushed overboard. But by whom?

They talk to her husband, Mr Ed McClean, an ex-firefighter who was at the WTC on 9/11. When one of his daughters calls him "Ed," Fontana brilliantly deduces that the child is probably his step-daughter, as opposed to his natural daughter. They look into it and learn that Ed married Donna sometime after Donna's husband Joe was killed on 9/11. Naturally, they want to see what's up with Ed's ex-wife, Collette.

They go to visit her, but she's not around, so they end up talking to her neighbor. In the episode's only decent scene, the neighbor invites them inside and tells them how the neighborhood has fallen apart since 9/11. She says families got torn apart on that day but also in the aftermath, as people became too stressed out to deal with each other. She explains how some firefighters encouraged to console the spouses of dead firefighters got too involved, and ending up leaving their own wives. This subject has received a lot of coverage in the local NY papers in the last few years. Her own husband, she says, has been incapacitated by leukemia, which she says he got from the toxic environment at Ground Zero, where he spent several weeks. But she never got any 9/11 settlement money because they can't prove the connection.

She goes on to explain the "Dead Wives Club," a group of women who have received sizable financial settlements as a result of 9/11 and who, she says, parade their money and act better than everybody else. She says the dead woman, Donna, was one such woman.

In case you've gotten confused by this point, as I did, let me recap: Donna was married to Joe. Joe died. His best friend, Ed, also firefighter, left his wife Collette and his twin sons and married Donna. Collette and Donna were also best friends once.

They talk to Collette and she says she isn't bitter. She has a fractured wrist, which she says happened when she fell in a subway station. They talk to forensics who says they have DNA from a palm print they believe belongs to the murderer, but they need a sample from the murderer to match it against.

Van Buren and the dets talk things over and they marvel over Fontana's fancy car (Mercedes?). (I wonder if Fontana's mysterious source of wealth will become an issue later.) They suspect Collette is involved in the murder, so they talk to her again. Trying to get her to open up, Fontana lies to her and says he has two teenage sons, Eric and Taylor. She looks like she might break soon, but she says she's innocent.

They talk to a medical worker who treated Collette's wrist fracture. Without going into specifics, she says that Collette's fracture did not happen the way she said it did. They go out to the ferry to re-enact the murder, and determine that Collette left the palm print of the ship's railing and then probably fractured her wrist after falling backwards and bracing her fall during the ferry crash.

They bring Collette in for questioning and try to bluff her by making up witnesses, but just as they're starting to get somewhere, her lawyer enters. Her lawyer is Ms. Galliano (Roma Maffia), who is very loudmouthed and obnoxious and unpleasant for me to watch. Galliano prevents them from getting a DNA sample from the coffee cup Collette was drinking from.

The big issue in the case then becomes trying to get a DNA sample from Collette. After a bunch of boring legal decisions, they finally trick her into unknowingly giving them a sample via a mailed-in payment for parking tickets.

Once it's inevitable that the DNA evidence will be admitted, Loudmouth says Collette's new defense will be Extreme Emotional Disturbance because of PTSD caused by 9/11. Fine. So she talks to Skoda, who says yeah, she's really stressed out, and because she can't fight terrorists, she killed her homewrecking best friend.

McCoy talks this over with SS and Branch, who both seem sympathetic to the defense, which leads to what may be the most outrageous Serena Southerlyn moment in history. McCoy says, Don't forget this woman just killed the mother of two young girls, who already lost their father on 9/11. And Southerlyn goes --- get ready --- "Don't you think there's some room for leniency here, Jack?" Oh god, she is toooo much. Southerlyn is like the Nora Lewin for the new millennium. (Lewin, Branch's predecessor, was always angling to get serial killers off because they got spanked when they were younger.)

At trial (46'), McCoy gets Collette to break down and basically admit that she was in a complete psychotic daze every time she lied to the police, so that pretty much invalidates her EED defense.

SS is upset over McCoy's harsh cross-examination of Collette (more table-setting for SS's imminent departure from the show), and Jack tells her to go back to the office if she can't deal with it.

Unsurprisingly, the jury returns a verdict of guilty.

I'm really stumped by the writers' decision to paint such an unflattering portrait of 9/11 widows. It's like they were thinking, let's put these women through even more hell than they've already been through. And to do such a poor job handling the ferry crash, too, just makes matters worse.

The episode's title comes from a New York magazine article about 9/11 widows moving on with their lives, which itself is a pun on the book First Wives Club.

12.2 Armed Forces

In this episode (12.2), a down-on-his-luck Vietnam veteran is murdered by some of his fellow soldiers because he threatened to expose their massacre of civilians in a village during the war. Briscoe and Green investigate, and McCoy and Southerlyn prosecute.

The episode begins inside a fancy restaurant's kitchen, where a manager is yelling at everyone to do things better. An Asian dishwasher (who looks Vietnamese to me), drops a tray full of glasses, and as he cleans up, takes his mess outside, where he comes across the body. Briscoe and Green arrive, and Green chastises a police officer for yelling at the Asian kid. Green says of the white officer, "When is he going to realize he's the minority in the city."

They look over the body, and with ME Rodgers help back at the office, determine the man is a shoeshiner. They visit Foley Square, talk to a beat cop who points them to a guy at a deli, and they get a partial ID on their victim: his name is Joe, and he lives in Queens. In his shinebox, which he had left with the deli owner, they find some expensive glasses. They trace the glasses to their rightful owner, but he's not much help, but he does say that Joe got mugged by some Asian gangmembers. They track down a girl who was also mugged by these guys, the Mott Street Ghost Shadows, and she identifies one of the men who robbed her by recognizing him in a wanted poster.

They bring in this wise-ass gangmember, Kenny Eng, for questioning. He says he saw Joe talking to two older white guys next to a dark blue Mercedes sedan.

Cordova helps them ID their victim as Joseph Eastman, and tells them he is an army veteran. They search his apartment, and find a package containing his service medals: two purple hearts and a bronze star. He was a war hero. They talk to his old uncle, who sent him the package, and he says Joe was diagnosed with a terminal illness and recently expressed interest in the items from the war.

They check his medical records, and learn one of his listed contacts is Nolan Tinsdale, an oil company executive, and Joe's lieutenant in the army. They question him at his office. He doesn't drive a Mercedes.

They track down another old contact of Joe's: Mr Fletcher, now mayor of a New Jersey town. He is more curt and evasive than Tinsdale. And he drives a Mercedes matching the one seen by Kenny Eng.

They talk to Joe's psychiatrist and learn he had suicidal thoughts and was troubled by something having to do with a village. He also had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. They visit the Veterans Administration and learn he recently sought information about returning his medals.

Southerlyn talks to Tinsdale, in front of his wife, to find out why. It makes no sense for SS to have taken over the investigation at this point, but whatever. Through Tinsdale, she gets interested in another army guy, Steven Morehouse. In the meantime, Tinsdale's wife offers a weak alibi for her husband.

SS heads to the Vietnamese embassy and the man there says that his country's records indicate that the event for which Joe received his medals was actually a massacre of civilians. He found a 50-year-old woman in Vietnam to tell the story. SS and McCoy visit Morehouse in Somerville, MA. He gives some vague indication he's not comfortable with the army's official version of events. He also says that Tinsdale and Fletcher met with Joe the night of his death.

They arraign Tinsdale and Fletcher (41'), and the defense soon moves to suppress any testimony about what happened at that village. The theory of the crime is that Tinsdale and Fletcher killed Eastman to prevent him from triggering an investigation into the massacre. At a motion hearing to determine inadmissibility, the Vietnamese woman speaks and discusses how her close relatives were killed. However, she did not see these events as they happened with her own eyes -- she was fleeing the village -- so her testimony is ruled inadmissible, a fact which understandably upsets her greatly. In Vietnamese, she says, "Thirty years and you still can't tell the truth."

During this proceeding, an official looking Army person enters the courtroom. He later talks to McCoy and says he doesn't want to blemish the reputations of these good men through an investigation. He basically asks McCoy to be careful in his investigation so as to spare the Army and these men any bad press related to the war. I found it strange that he's so concerned about the court case making the massacre public, given that all testimony related to it has just been suppressed. Anyway.

Everybody gathers in the family conference room, and Mayor Fletcher and Tinsdale seem ready to continue stonewalling. But then SS dramatically brings Morehouse into the room, and he makes it clear that he will testify against them -- both regarding the village and the murder of Joe. In the face of this, Tinsdale confesses, against Fletcher's objections, and takes a deal for Man 2.

In the epilogue, we see McCoy, Briscoe, and the old uncle attending Joe's tiny miltiary funeral, where "Taps" is played on a boombox.

Character background: Van Buren asks Briscoe whether he keeps in touch with any of his army buddies. He says not really.

This episode is pretty decent...slightly better than average, I guess. It holds your interest and doesn't get boring, although it creeps into the land of the not believable every now and then.

Note the correlation between the teaser (with the Asian dishwasher) and the rest of the episode.

Street in New York renamed for L&O

NYC officials have renamed a street on the west side of Manhattan "Law & Order Way" in honor of the show. The street is near Pier 62 (down around 23rd Street), where the show's officers and -- I think -- the studio are. I'll go over and take a picture of the sign soon.

13.18 Maritime

In this episode (13.18), a dead woman is found floating in the East River. Investigation indicates she died along with two men, and that the brother of one of the men is responsible. Briscoe and Green lead the investigation, and McCoy and Southerlyn prosecute, twice.

The episode begins with two men (also brothers) discussing the marital difficulties of one of them. He's become involved with a yoga instructor, apparently. His brother cautions him to stick with his wife. As they discuss this, one notices a body floating in the river.

Green and Briscoe arrive and learn the body has been in the water for some time, and has a gunshot wound to the head. She has no ID, but ME Rodgers shows them a toe ring from the victim inscribed with the letters of Psi Kappa Gamma, a sorority. A sorority sister IDs the victim as Julie, who graduated several years earlier.

They talk to her parents, who put them in touch with her job, where they learn her boyfriend was a sports agent named Adam. They visit Adam's job and learn he's gone missing, too, and that Adam's big client is a famous recently-retired football player named Daryl. Daryl apparently decided to give up football to pursue other interests, and he is said to be intellectually curious. Daryl is missing, too. No one's seen him since a boat trip to the Hamptons. They also learn there was a break-up looming between Adam and Julie.

They talk to Daryl's family. His dad is a little too calm, and says all kinds of "Not my son!" things in response to questions about Daryl's possible drug use. Daryl's brother, Sean, is also present. He is in the background, acting shifty. He was on the boat during the trip, during which there was a party.

They get a call: the Coast Guard has found the boat, docked in Pt Washington. Know-it-all forensic technician Beck is already on the scene, and eventually established that the blood of three individuals is on the boat, and that judging from the splatter pattern, one of them was prone when shot.

They talk to a female rare book dealer who was friends with Daryl. For some reason, it comes out that she's a lesbian. She points the dets to Daryl's girlfriend. She was at the party but got off the boat before everything went wrong. She says she saw Daryl and Sean arguing about money.

They talk to the parents again. The dad dislikes Sean and plays them a voice message he left for his mom, saying he didn't do it but he isn't coming back anytime soon. Sean has a prior arrest record, so they track him down via his drug dealer, whom he was once arrested with. Green shakes down the dealer and he points them to the Battery Hotel on 23rd and Lex. Why it's called the Battery Hotel is beyond me, since the Battery is much further downtown than that. Anyway, they get there and find that Sean has OD'd on heroin, but he's still alive. (19')

He wakes up (off camera) and they arraign him on murder charges. McCoy and SS visit him and his lawyer, Matt Wolchesky, at Rikers. He asserts his innocence and won't take a deal. Blah blah blah the trial starts (29'). It's suspiciously early in the ep for a trial to start, so you know that the future holds either (a) further twists or (b) and extremely tedious trial.

Beck testifies about the DNA evidence, and is addressed as "Dr. Beck." The girlfriend testifies about the fight. It's obvious things are going poorly for Sean, and his lawyer seeks a deal with McCoy. He takes the deal (Murder 2, maximum sentence) and allocutes. But we're only 34 minutes into the episode!

So Sean's lawyer, Matt, approaches McCoy in a bar and tells him that Sean's family's check to him bounced. Somehow he knows that $4 million was moved out of the account a couple days earlier, a fact which he said surprised the family. It looks like Daryl staged his own death, and then transferred his money somewhere.

So why did Sean confess if his brother is still alive? Matt gives McCoy some BS about how Sean is extremely "susceptible to pressure." Skoda examines him and gets a big sob story about fatherly abuse and broken dreams and so on, and agrees. Skoda says he's stuck in this family role where he has to be the scapegoat all the time. The judge (off camera) throws out the plea bargain she had already approved. What a load of crap.

So then they have to go prove everything all over again. They determine that Daryl didn't transfer the funds. It was his mother, trying to make it look like he was alive so she could cover for Sean. This is established with the aid of that annoying red-haired forensic computer lady who runs a traceroute program and says stupid anthropomorphic things to her computer like, "Come to mama..." Oh she drives me crazy. Anyway, they trace the transfer to a computer with the IP address of 392.163.1.104. Digits in IP addresses only go up to 255, but who cares at this point. She says that IP address belongs to a computer in Short Hills, NJ, the town where Sean/Daryl's parents live.

They have a big Family Conference and McCoy threatens to prosecute the mom for obstruction because of her deception with the money. To protect her from this, or something, Sean decides to stand trial again, after a big fight with his angry father.

He goes to trial (54'), where he tells a wide-eyed, rambling story about the party on the boat and how maybe Adam was mad at Daryl because Daryl was flirting with Julie, but Sean got off before anything happened. On cross, McCoy questions him about his earlier record for assault, and Sean admits that in that case his defense was also that someone else did it. Apparently, this undermines his credibility, because the jury finds him guilty of Murder 1 in all three murders.

This episode, like many from the 13th season, is pretty tedious and unbelievable at times, and not very pleasant to watch, despite a decent performance from the guy who plays Sean.

Character background: Briscoe mentions his daughters both left home shortly after high school, but always asked him for money. Branch says his nephew Andy played football with Daryl on "the Gators," presumably a reference to the University of Florida football team. Also, ME Rodgers says she never wore lipstick when she was older, to which Briscoe responds that it looks like she has the hang of it now. She acts flustered by his flirtiness, which is unusual for that character.

Casting notes: Lawyer Matt Wolchesky is played by Tom Mason, who has appeared on the show tons of times, but never as the same character.

3.10 Consultation

In this episode (3.10), a woman from Nigeria dies after one of the 60 heroin-filled condoms she swallowed bursts in her stomach on her way to a drug dealer in Harlem. Briscoe and Logan discover that a Nigerian tribal chief with diplomatic immunity is behind the smuggling scheme, but Stone and Robinette struggle to charge him.

The episode begins with the woman riding in the back of a taxi cab from the airport to Harlem. She begins looking ill and distressed, so the cab driver takes her to the hospital, where she dies. It turns out she had something else in her belly: an unborn son, who also died.

After talking to the doctor, the detectives track down the cab driver, who gives them the intersection where she was supposed to drop the woman off. They go there and find an African restaurant, where the proprietor is familiar with the woman's extended tribe, the Yoruba. They talk to another Yoruba man, but it's a dead end. They track down the person who paid for her plane ticket, though, by visiting an African travel agency where Logan sweettalks the travel agent (Beverly Johnson, in the first of her two appearances on the series). The ticket was paid for by Mr Marietta, who heads up the management of a Nigerian-American petroleum company. He says he sponsored her to come over and work for them, as he has done with many workers. He gives them contact information for the woman's husband, who had already been living in the states for some time.

They talk to the husband and he is devastated. He appears to be unconnected to the drug smuggling operation. They check with Immigration, and a funny, idiosyncratic INS technician deciphers her computer records and determines that the woman was sponsored to enter the country by Marietta and a Nigerian tribal chief.

They visit the chief, who is dressed in a three-piece suit and lives in a big mansion. They talk to him and he polite but evasive. They look into the chief's background and learn he has two arrests for fraud, but charges were dropped in both cases. He had swindled a bank out of repaying some loans. But these loans connect him to Marietta and the oil company.

Through the INS tech, they learn of another worker who was sponsored by the two men. They figure this worker probably smuggled drugs in, too. They bring him in for questioning, and he pleads, "Don't flog me." Apparently, that's how they get answers in Nigeria. Briscoe says, "We won't flog you...yet..." and he starts talking. He rolls on Marietta, whom they arrest (28').

Marietta lawyers up with a guy named Jacob, but he won't give them the dirt on the chief. Prints in the hotel room where the woman was headed lead to another man, a driver for the chief, so this connects him to the operation, but it's a thin case, which bothers Schiff. "It's the Supreme Court of New York, not Romper Room," he says.

Robinette talks to the woman's husband to try to get him to roll, but he won't speak against his chief. Nonetheless, they arrest the chief on charges of Criminal Facilitation 2 (40'). He gets a lawyer, too, and they tell the police what we've suspected: he has diplomatic immunity. They kick him loose until they can get a better case.

Stone and Robinette discuss taking the case before the World Court at the UN, but then Schiff calls them in and introduces them a the legal attache from the Nigerian embassy in DC. The attache is disgusted with the tribal chief, and wants to dissociate him from the Nigerian diplomatic contingent.

The ADAs and the attache meet with the driver and pressure him by suggesting they will extradite him to Nigeria where he will face trial and a certain death sentence. He then decides to roll on the chief. They also make a deal with Marietta to roll.

At the chief's trial (52'), they catch the original victim's husband in a lie -- he knew the driver even though he said earlier he didn't -- and he produces a letter from his wife saying the chief said she just had to do what that other swallower had done. This is the evidence they need to link the chief directly to the smuggling ring.

It becomes time for the verdict, but the chief is nowhere to be found. He's flown to Nigeria. They check the travel papers, and learn the Nigerian legal attache authorized them, in order to prosecute him in Nigeria, using the court record from America. Stone angrily confronts the attache and they discuss justice.

Casting notes: The Nigerian chief is played by Wendell Pierce, and the legal attache is played by Roscoe Lee Brown, a recognizable character actor who has been around forever.

Character background: Briscoe mentions he has a 17-year-old daughter who comes up from Florida every summer. He also talks wistfully about the days when he could sweettalk women, too, over "two cuba libres."

This is the 275th episode summary I've written about the original series -- only 50 more to go!

5.13 Rage

In this episode (5.13), Courtney Vance turns in a great performance as a cocky Wall Street trader who kills his boss and then uses "black rage" as a a defense. Briscoe and Logan investigate, and McCoy and Kincaid prosecute against this novel defense.

The episode begins with a young couple approaching a big townhouse. From dialogue we learn that the woman is excited to introduce the man, her boyfriend, to her father. The enter the home and walk upstairs, and discover the father dead, with a shotgun in his lap and blood splattered all over. Looks like killed himself, but the daughter insists to the detectives that he didn't. ME Rodgers agrees, saying that based on the way the blood inside his body settled, she concludes he was strangled from behind, laid out on the floor, propped in the chair, and then shot, post-mortem.

They visit the victim's place of work and learn he was very wealthy, earning at least $15 million last year at his firm. They talk to some of his employees, who didn't like him very much, and they keep mentioning Bud Greer, a hotshot employee who some say was not hounded as much as they were. They find Greer (Courtney Vance) in a surprisingly run down apartment in Hell's Kitchen. He says he's in it for the power, not the money. He has an alibi, but not much of one.

The dets talk to the company car service, and the driver, who is black, says Vance told him "I'm not your brother" and got dropped off at the victim's home on the night of the murder. This seems to contradict what Greer implied to the detectives earlier. They also learn that Greer was once arrested for assault back in the 1980s.

They search Greer's apartment, and don't find any direct evidence, but do find a memo to the victim saying a record of all of Greer's recent trades was attached. They conjecture that Greer was making fraudulent transactions, his boss found out about it, and Greer killed him to keep the secret from getting out.

They bring Greer in for interrogation. He is very arrogant. When they learn there's a partial fingerprint from Greer on the victim's sink, they arrest him (21'). But the judge tosses the financial records evidence, saying that they weren't in plain view and weren't directly relevant to the elements of the crime, since motive isn't an element.

Kincaid then has to do some further investigation, so they can get that memo back in by arguing "inevitable discovery." She talks to Greer's father and his best friend from childhood, a (white) doctor who has some interesting ideas about race, Greer, and Greer's attitudes about race.

CK also talks to Greer's first employer after MBA school, who says Greer was an underperformer and was eventually let go. He only became a star trader at his second job, where it appears he did so fraudulently. Based on this unusual record, McCoy argues they would have found out about his trading practices eventually, and the judge agrees.

Greer then gets an additional lawyer: Mr Bryant, who is an acclaimed civil rights attorney whose work McCoy is aware of. Bryant says he is going to argue that Greer killed his boss because of "black rage," and he has an expert to testify about this condition, wherein a black person gets so fed up with racism, they eventually lash out violently.

Olivet examines Greer, and Greer speaks out against affirmative action and says that racist actions in part arose from white men's efforts to "protect" white women from black men. Olivet is sympathetic to Greer's place in society but concludes he wasn't insane.

At trial (50'), the expert testifies about black rage, and McCoy accuses her of giving people an excuse to be racist and fearful. Greer testifies and says the victim said racist things (N-word, etc) to him the night of the murder after finding out about the bogus trades. Greer says he doesn't remember killing him.

The ADAs regroup with Schiff, and they debate how this defense will play with the jurors, 8 of whom are black. Schiff says something like it will go well with "this jury," and CK sharply questions him, implying he's being condescending, and he retorts with what may be one of the worst lines in the history of the show: "Nobody's condescending here, young lady." I have seen this scene many times, and I cannot figure out what the deal is. Is Steven Hill just missing the irony in the line as he delivers it, or did the writers not realize that the line itself is condescending? I just can't tell. Anyway, that line drives me crazy every time I see it. Schiff calls CK "young lady" several times throughout his tenure, but this is definitely the worse instance.

Anyway, Schiff, per usual, tells McCoy to seek a deal. McCoy offers one, but Greer gives McCoy a big speech about how McC pretends not to be racist but really is, and that McC will be afraid of black men in suits now that he knows how they have all this rage built up inside of them. McCoy withstands this verbal assault, pretty much, and replies that Greer is just a common thief and murderer who hides behind his race.

So the verdict comes back: Guilty of Murder 2. Hurray for blind justice.

In the epilogue, CK and McCoy step outside to catch a cab, and as one stops to pick up McCoy, CK points out that it just drove right by a black man who was hailing it and picked up McCoy instead.

The episode is notable because of Courtney Vance's performance, one of the best guest appearances in the history of the show. Vance, of course, went on to land the regular role of Ron Carver on Criminal Intent several years later.

Another casting note: Mr Bryant is played by Wendell Pierce, a recognizable character actor who has appeared prominently in two other episodes: Disciple, and Consultation (woman dies by swallowing heroin-filled condoms), which is probably the next episode I am going to write about.

4.13 Breeder

In this episode (4.13), a young woman blackmails would-be adoptive parents by threatening to abort the babies she agreed to turn over to them. Logan and Briscoe investigate, and Stone and Kincaid figure out what to prosecute her for.

The episode begins in a hospital waiting room, where someone comes across a woman who appears to be dead. It turns out she isn't dead, juts very sick. Her name is Deborah Elkins, 22. She gave birth very recently, the doctors say, but the baby is nowhere to be found. She says she gave birth in a taxi cab, and that's all she remembers. Van Buren is skeptical. They track down the cabbie, and he says she was sick, but doesn't know anything about her having a baby.

Logan and Briscoe discuss baby matters, and Logan mentions he had a girlfriend who had an abortion.

They track her back to the hotel room where she was staying. There's blood all over the bed. They then learn about the woman's boyfriend, Steven Shaw, who was present at the birth, but they can't find him. They talk to Elkins and confront her about lying to them about giving birth in the cab. She remains evasive.

They hear from an attorney, Wendell, who is representing a married couple who had an arrangment to adopt this baby. Keep in mind the baby is still missing. They talk to the parents, who say they gave Elkins, who said she was a student at Hudson University, some money to take care of herself during her pregnancy. They finally find Shaw at the Lowry Hotel, where he is staying with the baby.

The dets talk to Debbie and again mention their anger with her. She mentions something about "the last time" she was pregnant, and you get the sense something is very wrong with this girl. But AVB says there's no crime here, so they have to move on.

And then: the baby really is kidnapped, this time from the foundling hospital where it was staying. The nurse on duty says the kidnapper had very official looking papers. They track down this woman: her name is Dorothy Hemrich aka Dorothy Baxter, and she's a nurse.

The detectives talk to Deborah, who leads them to Hemrich and her husband, Mr Baxter. They find the baby at Baxter's sister's house. During interrogation, Dorothy's lawyer, Hoffman, announces that Dorothy had a contract with Elkins for the baby, too. This means Elkins had promised the baby to at least two couples.

Mr Baxter says they were pretty desperate, having tried four times in six years to get a baby this way. Olivet examines Mrs Baxter and determines she is obsessed with babies and family. (Olivet reveals during this conversation she's never been married.) Baxter is upset because she's had several miscarriages.

The ADAs talk the case over with Schiff. Schiff says his son, Josh, had troubles adopting a child. Shortly thereafter, Baxter pleads guilty to a minor charge of custodial interference. But Kinciad is not satisfied: she still wants to go after Elkins for conning everybody.

She investigates the case by talking to the prospective parents and learns that many of them gave a lot of money to Elkins. Schiff says there is no law against selling your baby. Stone says that she conned them, though, so maybe they can get a charge of Grand Larceny 2.

Elkins lawyers up, getting a woman named Jane to represent her. She reveals that one of the couples, the Savits, have adopted the baby now. It looks like Elkins may have made this arrangement to keep the Savits from testifying against her. Stone and Kincaid discuss the case while Stone buys a copy of the New York Review of Books. Stone thinks they might be able to charge Elkins with extortion, since she told the prospective parents she would abort the baby if they didn't give her money. Judge Sanderson allows this charge to stand.

At trial (44'), Mr Savits gets some courage and testifies against Elkins, saying she extorted money from them. Elkins under pressure cuts a deal with Stone: Grand Larceny 2, 4-12 years.

Character background: Olivet reveals she never married; Schiff says he has a son named Josh; and Stone buys the New York Review of Books.

Mariska Hargitay Gets Married

See this story from E! Online for details.