Law and Order: "Class Retreat" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 4, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, May 4) my husband Charles and I watched another three-show run of Law and Order episodes, beginning at 8 p.m. with an episode of the flagship Law and Order program called “Class Retreat.” Directed by Milena Govich from a script by old Law and Order hand Rick Eid with Keith Eisner, “Class Retreat” begins with a 50-something man being clubbed to death by an unseen assailant. The man turns out to be a Wall Street venture-capital firm CEO named Jerome Elliott (Joseph Will) who just fired a fellow executive after luring him to his company with promises of mucho profits if their companies merged. The police originally regard him as the prime suspect, but he has an airtight alibi. Then the investigation turns to the classmates of the victim’s daughter Sophia (Kylie Victoria Edwards) at an exclusive preparatory school. By chance, Lily Cosgrove (Alayna Hester), daughter of lead detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan), attends the same prep school as a scholarship student, and Lily draws her dad’s attention to a class retreat at which the school’s faculty and staff encouraged the students to tell derogatory tales about their families and off-school lives. During the retreat, Sophia Elliott had regaled her fellow students with tales of how her dad physically and psychologically abused her. Sophia is by all accounts a “good girl,” with a nice preppie boyfriend named Aaron Cole (Casey West Simpson), but she’s also been shacking up with a “bad boy” named Cooper Walsh (Benjamin J. Young). We know he’s a “bad boy” because he wears his black hair in an upswept comb and wears a black leather jacket, sort of like Henry Winkler as "Fonzie" on Happy Days in the 1970’s.

Though the comments at the class retreat are supposed to be strictly confidential, Lily Cosgrove has leaked some of them to Aaron, who decides that Jerome Elliott was somehow to blame for his daughter having extra-relational activities with bad-boy Cooper Walsh. Aaron blurts out a confession in the police station before his dad Lawrence (John Pigate) can arrive, but the judge rules Aaron’s confession inadmissible because it was made before his father got there. District attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) decides to try Aaron as an adult because the crime occurred days before his 17th birthday (the legal age of majority in New York state) and because his office has already tried three Black kids as adults for murders they committed just before their 17th birthdays and he’s worried he’ll be seen as a racist, and maybe even spark race riots, if he’s more lenient to a rich white kid. So the cops, Frank Cosgrove and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), have to reopen the investigation and collect more evidence of Aaron’s guilt – which they do by, among other things, doing a dumpster dive in the vicinity and recovering the murder weapon, a tennis racket with Jerome Elliott’s blood all over it. Frank browbeats Lily into taking the witness stand in Aaron’s trial, and Aaron’s lawyer offers an insanity defense. The prosecutors themselves are divided on how to proceed – Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) is ready to plead the case out because Aaron was a mixed-up kid who made a terrible mistake but shouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life in prison with hardened criminals, while Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) agrees with McCoy that Aaron’s crime was so heinous he should be tried as an adult. Eventually the prosecutors and Aaron’s lawyer agree to a plea deal in which Aaron will plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter and face a sentence of up to 10 years. But Lily Cosgrove is disgusted with her own father for having forced her to break the confidentiality of the class retreat and embarrass herself on the witness stand for no reason at all, once the case has been pleaded out. Though there have been much more interesting episodes of Law and Order over the years than this one, there are a few legitimately complicated moral dilemmas in this story of the kind that make Dick Wolf’s crime shows consistently more watchable than other people’s.