Last night was the final night of new shows in the Law and Order franchise until April 23 – after a long hiatus that lasted most of March they’re taking two weeks off again in a schedule I think is inexplicable – and for once the flagship Law and Order series wasn’t the best of them. It was an episode called “Collateral Damage” and dealt with a cult called “Lodestar,” which like the real-life NEXIVM cult Lifetime did a TV-movie about recently (which is actually named in the dialogue by veteran Law and Order star Sam Waterston, playing District Attorney Jack McCoy) is supposed to be about empowering its women members but is really a cult run by a man, Zac Elfont (Jack Pritchard), who uses the cult as a way of getting adoring female followers to have sex with him. The opening shot shows a cult member in a spartan dorm room sneaking a cell phoen call to her parents, saying she wants to come out and meet them. The next scene shows her body being fished out of a dumpster, where the cult members dumped her after wrapping her up in a carpet. Police detectives Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) have the unenviable task of identifying her – though they were able to deduce that she came from a rich family since her mouth shows evidence of expensive dental work. Eventually they identify her as Amy Newhall (Abby SToffel), daughter of a financier and a news anchorwoman. One of the cult’s gimmicks was to video-record its members each confessing the most embarrassing secret in their lives, and in Amy’s case it was that her mother was having an affair with a male co-worker.
Lead prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) put Jocelyn Davis (Nora Dale) on trial for Amly’s murder – she died after the brand they inflicted on her with the Lodestar logo got infected and the cult didn’t let her go out and seek medical treatment – and they “flip” one of the other members, Sienna Barton (Sadie Veach), to turn state’s evidence agaisnt her. Only Sienna reveals for the first time in court that “Lodestar” is actually not only the name of the cult itself but the male leader, and in order to get Jocelyn to testify against him they offer her immunity. The cops arrest Elfont in the most embarrassing way possible – while he’s actually leading a cult service (a long-standing trademark on Law and Order) – and they make ready to put Elfont on trial for,among other things, statutory rape of some of the girls int he cult. Only they don’t need Jocelyn’s testimony because Elfont is quickly killed by a fellow inmate, and so they renege and throw Jocelyn under the bus. Eventually getting a 12-year prison sentence, much the way the authorities threw the book at Jeffrey Epstein’s second-in-command, Gislaine Maxwell, once Epstein supposedly “committed suicide.” (I find it impossible to believe that Epsteon’s death was self-inflicted, given how many powerful people, including at least two former Presidents, Bill Cliniton and Donald Trump, had to fear from his testimony against them.) This Law and Order was a grim tale of how the criiminal justice system greedily and unfairly exploits the people in its grasp out of a misguided sense of “justice.”
