Law and Order: "Severance" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NbC-TV, aired May 5, 2022)

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

At 8 p.m. I watched the reboot of the original Law and Order and then the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime shows that followed it. The Law and Order episode, “Severance,” was quite good; it was about the murder of a top official, a woman, at a high-tech venture capitalist firm otherwise run by men. The woman was found strangled in her apartment by someone she knew – we know that because he buzzed in her door, she turned off her security system, and when he came in she said, “Oh, it’s you,” and we saw all this in a prologue even though we weren’t shown who he was or what their connection was. The lead detectives, Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson, the heavy-set African-American actor who was one of the two returnees from the cast of the original Law and Order from 2010) and Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan), work their way through a plethora of suspects, including the man who had thought he was in line for the promotion the woman got instead; a person she was seeing who was an investigative reporter to whom she was leaking information on the toxic sexual culture within the company – like Harvey Weinstein (who’s actually name-checked in the dialogue), he put on a big front of being progressive but he was really a sexist pig given to acting “inappropriately” with his employees; the CEO himself, the seventh richest man in the world, who gave the cops a B.S. alibi because he was actually with his girlfriend, an employee, at the time; a disgruntled CEO of a solar-power company the venture firm was supposed to acquire until the victim looked at the numbers and decided was overvalued; and the man who ultimately turns out to be the killer, an attorney who’s desperate to make partner at his law firm. He was the one who made the mistake of overvaluing the company in the first place, though he said he went to the victim’s place only to see if she would negotiate and still buy the company at a lower price.

She said no, the deal was dead and she wasn’t going to resurrect it, and he snapped and killed her because he thought it would throw him off the fast track towards partnership at his law firm if his bosses realized he’d made such a major mistake in his job. Then he and his defense attorney,. A woman, throw a curveball into the case by announcing that in his previous job at the State Department he had served at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba and had been a victim of the so-called “Havana Syndrome,” a high-intensity microwave blast aimed at the U.S. and Canadian diplomats in Havana. According to the Wikipedia page on Havana Syndrome, “Some U.S. embassy workers have experienced lasting health problems, including an unidentified diplomat who now needs a hearing aid. The U.S. State Department declared that the health problems were either the result of an attack or due to exposure to an unknown device and declared that it was not blaming the Cuban government and would not say who was to blame. Affected people described symptoms such as hearing loss, memory loss, and nausea. Speculation centered around a sonic weapon, with some researchers pointing to infrasound as a possible cause.” The defendant in the case changes his plea in mid-trial from not guilty at all to “not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect,” and the lead prosecutors think he’s lying.

His testimony visibly moves the jurors to tears and district attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston, the other original Law and Order cast member who’s returned as a regular on this iteration) urges his lead prosecutor, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), to allow the defendant to plead guilty to a lesser charge. McCoy makes this recommendation after a long-time friend, an associate director of the CIA, complains that the defense has subpoenaed him in the case and asks McCoy to make it go away. Instead Price insists on completing the trial, and in the end the defendant is acquitted because the jury finds his “not guilty by mental disease” claim credible. It’s highly unusual, though not unknown, for a Law and Order episode to end with an acquittal, but in this case we can readily understand both the sympathetic figure the defendant played to the jury and Price’s conviction, expressed in a remark to his co-counsel Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), that “I still think he’s lying.”