Law and Order: "Impossible Dream" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired March 3, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 8 p.m. I began running the block of three shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: a reboot of the original Law and Order at 8, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (continuing its run of 23 seasons as the longest-lasting scripted drama series on American prime-time TV) at 9 and Law and Order: Organized Crime at 10. The Law and Order episode, “Impossible Dream,” was actually quite good. It was loosely based on a true story – the rise and fall of Theranos, a Silicon Valley startup headed by one Elizabeth Holmes, which claimed to offer non-invasive medical tests that would require only a small amount of blood instead of the repeated and massive blood draws (when I was in the hospital recently they took so much blood out of me they closed up the vein in my left arm and for a while I got to go through what long-time junkies experience after repeated injections).

The real-life Holmes was convicted of four counts of fraud (there’s a good account of the case from the BBC on her conviction, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58336998), but that wasn’t enough for the Law and Order writers: they had to make her a murderess. The person based on the real Elizabeth Holmes is called “Nina Ellis” and she’s played in an appropriately icy manner by Rachelle Lefevre. The person she’s accused of killing is her former chief operating officer and also her lover, Kyle Morrison (listed on the credits as being played by Brendan Reardon even though we don’t see him as a live character, just as a corpse in Central Park stumbled on by a young straight couple as guest body-finders), who got word that the company’s supposedly cutting-edge medical technology didn’t work. The rather grim joke was that the accuracy rate of the test’s cancer screening was only 50 percent, not the 96 percent Nina claimed in her official filing for papers with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – inevitably at least one of the characters joked that you could get equal results just by flipping a coin: heads, you have cancer; tails, you don’t.

The police cycle through a list of suspects, including a disgruntled ex-employee who got fired and signed a non-disclosure agreement. He refuses to talk even after the police tell him the enforceability of the NDA ended when one of the parties to it got killed, and it turns out he was the source of the warning that Nina’s much-vaunted technology didn’t work. Nina first attempted to frame him by throwing the gun she used to kill Kyle in a sewer and then calling in a tip to a police line that she saw someone in a blue Tesla (the car the ex-employee drives – he would drive a Tesla!)​ throw away a gun there. Midway through the trial Nina changes her plea from not guilty to self-defense, saying (as the real Elizabeth Holmes did, too) that her fellow executive and lover was physically abusing her. She claims that she had to go to a hospital because three months previously he broke her arm, but the assistant district attorney, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), tells the cops on the case to re-investigate.

The police, detectives Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson, repeating the role he played on the last two seasons of the original Law and Order before he went off to play the paterfamilias on the TV sitcom Blackish) and Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan), go to the hospital and find that Nina really was treated for a broken arm – but the next thing we see is her horseback riding teacher testifying at the trial that she got the broken arm falling off a horse, not from an abusive partner. Rather than show us the woman attorney Nina has hired cross-examining the woman, the script (by Rick Eid, credited with developing the revamped Law and Order, and Pamela Wechsler) cuts to the jury foreperson delivering the guilty verdict. There are some interesting interchanges between Price and his female assistant, Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), in which she pleads with him to go easy on Nina during his cross-examination lest he attack the credibility of the #MeToo movement and in particular its precept that women who make accusations of sexual abuse against powerful men are always telling the truth. Much to his credit, Price doesn’t buy that for a moment and doesn’t think a higher social purpose is served by letting a woman who’s obviously guilty get away with murder because of her unbelievable and frankly preposterous claim of sexual abuse at the hands of the long-term lover she killed.

That’s how I feel about the “#MeToo” movement, also; I don’t automatically assume that every claim made about “believe the women” is true and I don’t automatically assume it’s not true, either; I look at each proffered case and judge it on the basis of my usual standards for determining credibility. That’s why I believed Christine Blasey Ford’s account of having been sexually abused by future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh: she gave telling details but not so many details as to make her story seem fabricated after the fact. The two key details that led me to believe her story are her statement that she had gone late to the party where he attacked her and hadn’t had time to change out of her bathing suit – she just put on her party dress over it – and this turned out to be a lucky break because it saved her from him out-and-out raping her; and the patronizing laughter he gave her during the incident, as if he were telling her correctly that there was nothing she could do about it. He was part of the rich and powerful people that really run things in America, and she was a piece of trash he could use and discard any way he wanted to. In fact, one of the reasons I watch Law and Order is to see stories about holding the rich and powerful accountable precisely because that so rarely happens in real life!