Law and Order: "The Meaning of Life" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 24, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 24) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of unusually literate episodes in the Law and Order franchise, a Law and Order show called “The Meaning of Life” and a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit piece called “Constriction.” “The Meaning of Life” was about Dr. Sarah Heartwood (Erica Sweeney) and her husband Christopher (Michael Gladis). The show opens with the two of them walking home from some event or other. They seem to be having a mini-argument and at first both Charles and I thought they would simply be guest body-finders stumbling on a corpse who would turn out to be the victim whose killers the cops would go after. Only it turns out Sarah is both the intended and actual victim; after they arrive home Christopher announces that he’s going into their garden to pick herbs as spices for their dinner, and Sarah enters the kitchen to start cooking. She notices a white gift bag, left there on purpose by their housekeeper after it was delivered by an African-American homeless person who was given $100 to drop it at the foot of the Heartwoods’ brownstone. The cops first suspect a Muslim plumber named Ibrahim Sami (Danyal Budare) because he had an altercation with Christopher at a book signing – Christopher had written a nonfiction book arguing that all religions are B.S. fantasies believed in by people who can’t come to grips with their own mortalities (a common argument among real-life atheists as well). They interrogate Sami at his home and there are bits of detritus of plumbing supplies on his table that at first look like bomb components, but his alibi checks out and it turns out he was merely fixing an air cooler for a friend. Then they trace the Black man who actually delivered the package and find that the man who paid him the $100 was white and pretty nondescript.

But later they uncover an anti-choice group headed by a woman, Ellen Rafferty (Jennifer Fouché), whose boyfriend Patrick Wayne (Chase Ramsey) turns out to be the real bomber after the Black delivery man he paid to drop off the bomb identifies his photo. (Coincidentally – or maybe not – Patrick Wayne was also the name of one of John Wayne’s sons.) The dilemma facing prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) is that Sarah Heartwood is technically still alive; she’s in an irreversible coma and being kept alive on life-support machines, and Christopher clings to the memory of her and can’t bear to have the medical people pull the plug on her. The prosecutors decide that indicting Patrick Wayne for attempted murder isn’t good enough because he’ll be out within a few years and can continue killing doctors like Sarah Heartwood and Donald Travers (Carman Lacivita), another potential victim he targeted (in Travers’ case the cops were able to find the bomb in time before it went off) who are engaged in in vitro fertilization treatments. So they indict him for murder on the grounds that even though she’s still technically alive, in any functional sense she’s already dead because she can’t do anything. Patrick Wayne’s attorney calls a fringe practitioner named Dr. Matthew Calhoun (Claro Austria, who despite his name looks Asian) who insists that on rare but significant occasions people have spontaneously awakened from comas even after their doctors diagnosed them as having had brain death. The twist is that Sarah Heartwood actually had a “do not resuscitate” order in place which her husband doesn’t seem to have known about. and so just before Price is about to give his closing argument, Maroun tells him that it’s academic anyway because Sarah is now dead in every conceivable sense of the term. I quite liked this episode, directed by Leslie Hope from a chillingly written script by Jennifer Vanderbes, especially how it artfully explored the title topic, “The Meaning of Life,” from both ends: how people are born and how (and when) they die.