Law and Order: "Bad Apple" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 21, 2024)

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

Last Thursday, November 21, NBC showed the last two episodes of the Law and Order series franchise shows they’re still running, Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, for 2024. The Law and Order show was actually a quite good one: “Bad Apple,” in which a well-regarded police officer was shot in the back and killed, ostensibly by a major drug dealer named Eddie White (Bernard Gilbert) whom the police were raiding just before the officer was murdered. But the police detectives on the case, series regulars Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), check out White’s claim that the police executing the raid stole a duffel bag containing $50,000 in drug money and a handgun with which the officer was shot. By reviewing video footage they realize that White’s story was true and the officer was likely killed by one of his own, his partner Miles Brandt (Mike Vogel). It seems that the officer saw Brandt steal the duffel bag and threatened to report him to his superiors for corruption, only Brandt decided to make sure that didn’t happen by shooting his partner dead in the back with White’s gun. When his initial cover-up unravels, Brandt stashes the gun in a storage locker rented by fellow officer Travis Melcher (Juan Javier Cardenas) and tries to set up Melcher for the killing. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) indict Brandt for the murder but can’t find any police officer in Brandt’s unit who will testify against him because of the so-called “blue wall of silence,” the bond between police officers that they never testify against each other even if one of them has killed another of their own. The attempts by the prosecutors to find even one officer who will break the “blue wall” take on an air of pathos as well as Kafkaesque frustration.

They even go to Brandt’s superior officer, Captain Greg Stockwell (Travis Lehne), who protests that he’s just about to retire anyway and if he admits in open court that Brandt had a reputation for skimming drug money in raids and everyone in his unit knew about it and looked the other way, he will be accused of corruption himself and lose his status in the department as well as his pension. He’s old and visibly about to retire, and he doesn’t want any trouble that will derail his retirement plans. Ultimately the case is saved when Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), immediate supervisor of Detectives Riley and Shaw, testifies in the trial regarding Brandt’s corrupt reputation. She learned about it because she had previously served in Brandt’s precinct before transferring over to the one in Law and Order, but her courageous act leads her to be the subject not only of visible shunning from her fellow officers but an Internal Affairs investigation against her. “Bad Apple” is an intriguing moral tale in which one of the subsidiary characters is the slain officer’s brother, an activist for defunding the police which in his case means exactly that: not just taking money away from police departments to use for crime-prevention programs (which is what most people who say “defund the police” actually mean) but downright abolishing the police altogether. One wonders how he feels when his brother, who tried to be an honest cop and got killed for his pains, is murdered by a member of his own department (though we don’t get to find out because writers Rick Eid and Scott Gold never return to him) in a coverup of corruption. Even after nearly 35 years of this program, Dick Wolf and his writers still have the knack of coming up with interesting and disturbing tales and dilemmas that have no easy answers, no obvious rights and wrongs. And for a show Wolf deliberately began as an answer to Perry Mason and the other series about heroic defense attorneys winning acquittals for the unjustly accused – he wanted to present a show in which the cops and the prosecutors were the good guys and a lot of the due-process rules put in place by the U.S. Supreme Court and others in the 1960’s just got in their way – Law and Order has become a quite good program and a genuinely ambiguous one morally. The late science-fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. recommended watching Law and Order as a study in just how the Constitutional guarantees of due process work out in real life.