Law and Order: "Report Card" (Dick Wolf Enterprises, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 31, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 31) I put on the two remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: Law and Order itself and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order episode, “Report Card,” was unexpectedly good, and until a regrettable surprise twist at the end from writers Ajani Jackson and Pamela J. Wechsler it came as close as this show ever has to a story in which none of the characters are demonstrable heroes or villains, but rather legitimately complicated human beings with mixed motives who do even criminal things for understandable reasons. The episode opens with a young straight Black couple getting into a ride-share vehicle being driven by another Black man, Walter Rhoades (Brian Simmons). The two passengers get into an argument with each other and Rhoades threatens to call the police on them, but the male passenger pulls out a gun and shoots out the driver’s dashboard camera. Then the driver is found murdered about half an hour later. It turns out he was a middle-school teacher and a Gay man married to another man, investment broker Terry Clausen (Mike Doyle), who had been after him for years to join him in the finance industry and not waste his time on a job so unremunerative as teaching that forced him to drive ride-shares on nights and weekends.

Police detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) run through the usual set of red herrings, including the man in the car that night – who turns out to be a rapper about to leave on a major European tour – and also Lawrence French (Markuann Smith), who had reported Rhoades to the school board for allegedly molesting his son Justin (Chance K. Smith) and “turning him Gay.” His evidence for this was a meeting Justin had at the school with Rhoades in which Rhoades broke school policy by closing the door while he was alone with Justin – but Justin himself tells the cops that nothing sexual happened between him and Rhoades. He was just seeking the teacher’s help because he’d already realized he was Gay and thought Rhoades could give him some advice on how to come out to his dad. Then the cops trace a rap track online dissing Rhoades and threatening to “hammer” (i.e., shoot) him. They find the man who made the beats for it and he explains he just records beat tracks and sells them to people who want to rap lyrics over them, and it turns out the lyrics were by 13-year-old Anthony Turner (Colton Osorio), who’s been in and out of multiple foster homes and has already started building up a criminal record when he made the track. Ultimately Turner confesses to the cops that he shot and killed Rhoades so Rhoades wouldn’t report him to juvenile authorities and get him sent back to a detention facility, and prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) decide to try him as an adult.

Later they change their strategy when they discover that the school’s principal (Rockmore Dunbar) had intercepted Turner in the school hallway while he was carrying the gun in his backpack – the gun itself was a so-called “community gun” left lying around in an abandoned building to be picked up by anyone who wanted to use it – but had done nothing. Price and Maroun decide to put the principal on trial and give Turner a 10-year sentence in exchange for his testimony against him. Terry Clausen, Rhoades’s widower, is understandably upset that Turner won’t be punished to the full extent of the law and instead the prosecutors are going to use him to nail someone else who wasn’t the shooter. But the trial proceeds and Turner testifies, among other things, that he didn’t know the gun was loaded when he picked it up – “Bullets are expensive,” he says – and just took it to threaten Rhoades, not kill him. Then, in the unfortunate plot twist I mentioned above, the cops do fingerprint testing on the remaining bullets in the gun and find Turner’s fingerprints on them, indicating that he did too intend to kill Rhoades and bought and loaded bullets for the gun for that purpose. Ultimately the prosecutors get a plea bargain from the principal – who had earlier testified in court that he didn’t intervene because he’d previously been investigated and threatened with being fired for physically searching a student and he didn’t want to do that again – and refile the full adult murder case against Turner because he lied under oath on the witness stand. Among other things, this had me thinking of just my reaction would be if Charles were murdered for no particular reason – just as I remember reacting to real-life mass shootings in grocery stores with particular fear and hurt because that could have been my husband getting shot – and it also had me feeling sorry for the principal, who was literally damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. In order to keep his job, he bypassed the chance to stop a homicidally inclined student who’d already targeted someone with a rap track the principal knew about – and lost not only his job but several years of freedom for having not reacted.