Law and Order: "Castle in the Sky" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 2, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Thursday, May 2) Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise returned to NBC after a one-week hiatus on all three remaining series: Law and Order; Law and Order: Special Victims Unit; and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The opening episode of the flagship Law and Order show, “Castle in the Sky,” was a doozy: it dealt with the insanely rich and monumentally dysfunctional Berkshire family, whose paterfamilias Callum Berkshire (Robert Farrior) is first seen at a reception getting a “Humanitarian of the Year” award and then getting into an argument with his ne’er-do-well drug-using son. The son is later found murdered in the penthouse of a new condo building Berkshire has just built; the son owned the penthouse at dad’s insistence because dad thought having a Berkshire in the building would impress would-be buyers. Only Berkshire fils never intended actually to live there, though he’d sent a coded message to his drug dealer the night he was killed asking the man to meet him at the penthouse to sell him cocaine. I suspect writers Art Alamo, Jennifer Vanderbes and Ajani Jackson (the last two were listed as story editors) were thinking of the Trumps when they cooked up the Berkshires, especially when Callum Berkshire casually insists that people who can’t afford the sky-high rents in New York should simply move somewhere else, and one of the cops investigating the murder of his son grimly comments, “Those are tough words coming from the Humanitarian of the Year.” The Berkshire building where the murder occurred had been built in the first place under a city subsidy for “affordable housing,” but Berkshire had set up a charter for the building requiring that two-thirds of the existing tenants approve any new resident, which made sure that no one who couldn’t afford to pay the full market rate would be allowed to live there at all.

One of the suspects the cops briefly investigate was a student activist who was organizing protests against the Berkshires to demand that they make units in their developments genuinely available to lower-income tenants, and he tells the cops that Berkshire fils had actually accepted their cause and pledged to intercede with dad to get him to sign on. Ultimately the killer turns out to be Ryan Marley (Bradley Snedeker), who moved into the empty penthouse and squatted there after he lost his job as a security guard for one of the Berkshires’ properties. He went broke paying private-school tuition for his deaf-mute daughter Alex (Alona Jane Robbins) and ended up homeless and sleeping in his truck – until Berkshire, Jr. had the truck towed away and Marley couldn’t pay the impound fees to get it back. The Marleys nearly get the charges against them pled down to time served and probation when Ryan testifies in court that it was Berkshire, Jr. who actually brought the gun and threatened to shoot Alex. To protect his daughter, Ryan lunged at Berkshire, Jr., They Both Reached for the Gun and in the struggle for it, it went off and killed the heir. Only Lt. Kate Dixon (Camryn Manheim), boss of Detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), catches Alex using American Sign Language (which Dixon just happens to know) to admit that the story was a lie: the gun was actually her dad’s and he had bought it for “protection,” and he started the confrontation. The jury convicts Ryan Marley of second-degree murder, and so the rich people win again. It did occur to me that the Trumps the writers may have been drawing on were not the current generation; at one point Callum Berkshire told his son he was “too soft” to succeed in the business world, and this might have been inspired by the relationship between Donald’s father, Fred Trump, and his oldest son, Fred, Jr. (Mary Trump’s dad), whom he groomed to take over the family’s real-estate empire – only Fred, Jr. wanted to be more than a coldly calculating money-making machine and so Fred, Sr. transferred his ambitions for the succession to Donald, froze Fred, Jr. out and ultimately drove him to alcoholism and suicide.