Law and Order: "Time Will Tell" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 7, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, November 7) my husband Charles and I watched the remaining Law and Order shows, Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, before switching channels from NBC to CBS to watch the surprisingly interesting Elsbeth. The Law and Order episode, “Time Will Tell,” was yet another tale about the frantic and increasingly unscrupulous competition among young high-school seniors desperate to make their futures by getting into elite colleges and universities. The murder victim is Meredith West (Lisa Howard), who gets caught in the middle between affluent parents desperately trying to get fake diagnoses for their student children to allow them to take longer on the standardized tests than anyone else. A new campus administrator, Vanessa Keller (Maureen Sebastian), has been assigned to crack down on the abuses of this privilege, but in the process she catches a scholarship student, Emily Dumont (Carmen Flood), and denies her the extra-time request even though Emily has a genuine mental illness, anxiety disorder, which among other things makes it difficult for her to be in large crowds. Emily’s mom Lisa (Cara Buono) gets angry when Dean West denies her daughter’s request for additional time on the test and/or to be allowed to take it in a smaller room with fewer people. By the time we and the police detectives investigating the case, Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), learn all that, Meredith West has been found dead, killed by three blows to the head from the proverbial blunt object.

After a brief, perfunctory investigation by the police, all parties decide that Emily Dumont killed her teacher and mentor out of anger that she wouldn't be given the longer time limits. So she grabbed the nearest weapon in hand – a field hockey stick she’d just been using in a game practice – and hills Dean West. At least that’s what we think is the situation until the case goes to trial, with assistant district attorneys Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) prosecuting the case, until Emily’s mother Lisa makes a sudden outburst in court during Emily’s testimony under direct examination saying she, not Emily, was Dean West’s killer. Emily had previously confessed in one of those grim scenes in which the police, led by Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), told her she could go home if she confessed, then double-crossed her and arrested her instead. But the judge in the case, Evelyn Boyd (Diane Ciesla), threw out that confession as illegally coerced. Faced with a dilemma, Price and Maroun, with the support of their boss, District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) – who’s on the board of the prep school himself and seems mainly concerned with making sure the school doesn’t get a bum rap from the scandal and that it gets hushed up – offer mom a plea deal of 10 years in prison for manslaughter and the daughter, who actually killed the dean, gets off scot-free. It’s a chilling ending to a show that makes the point that no matter what they do, people with enough money get all the breaks and have enough clout they can escape all accountability (can you say “Donald Trump”?), while those without money and influence have to pay the full price for the crimes they may commit or anything they do that’s wrong. (And to think a lot of people who voted to return Trump to the Presidency actually saw it as a blow against the system, when Trump literally paraded the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, in front of them as a validator of his bona fides!)