Law and Order: "Enemy of the State" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 16, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 16) NBC resumed weekly telecasts of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit following the one-month holiday hiatus. Both were uncommonly interesting and provocative programs. The Law and Order episode was called “Enemy of the State” and began with the murder of a young Black man, Raymond Clark (Jevon Donaldson), who’s pushed onto a New York subway track and is run over by a train. Surveillance camera footage reveals that the killer was someone more or less Clark’s age, white or Asian, and dressed in the obligatory hoodie worn by most TV killers these days. The cops, detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), originally chase down a red herring: Luke Bragg (Josh Hooks), who runs a boxing gym that’s really a front for a radical-Right terror group. Clark was in Bragg’s operation until Bragg expelled him – there are hints that the group is white supremacist but then what was a Black person doing there at all? – for not being enough of an “Alpha” for them. But Bragg has an ironclad alibi, and the finger of suspicion next turns to Noah Turan (Carlin James), a troubled young man of Uyghur descent. Uyghurs are the Turkic Muslim minority in China who have been targeted by the Chinese government, which has been accused of launching a genocidal campaign against them including forced sterilization, forced labor, and incarceration in concentration camps. Noah works for his mother, Rida Turan (Lydia Gaston), doing food deliveries for her restaurant. It turns out he and Raymond Clark were boyhood friends until Noah got recruited by a man identifying himself as “Karim” to strike a terrorist blow against the Chinese government on behalf of the Uyghurs. The New York cops ultimately track down “Karim,” only to discover that he’s really an undercover FBI agent named Joshua Haddad (Haaz Sleiman) who was running a sting operation aimed at recruiting potential mujahedin and getting them involved in what they thought were terrorist activities. The police trace Noah to an event at the Brooklyn library in which a high-level figure in the Chinese government is coming to discuss anti-terrorism activities with American civilian and military officers.

On Haddad’s urging, Noah has made a bomb with which to blow up the Chinese official and just about everyone else at the event. When Clark tries to stop him, and Haddad told Noah to “do what must be done” and therefore prove he was a “real man,” Noah responded by shoving Clark into the path of a subway train, killing him. Noah’s attorney arranges a plea deal in which he agrees, in exchange for a lighter sentence, to lead the cops to the higher-up to whom he was reporting. It’s only when the cops make the arrest that they learn Haddad was an FBI agent. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) win a 10-year prison sentence for Noah and then use his testimony to indict Haddad for manslaughter, saying that Noah would have never tried to commit an act of terrorism if it weren’t for Haddad entrapping him and threatening his family if he did not. While the “bomb” Noah was trying to plant was a fake – Haddad provided the materials for it and made sure it would be a dud by supplying blasting caps with no gunpowder and “C4” explosive that was really carpenters’ clay – the plan had been for the FBI to arrest Noah and confiscate his non-working bomb as soon as he planted it. Only the New York Police Department blew their carefully planned sting by tracing Noah with their own evidence. The trial of Haddad turns on whether he followed standard FBI guidelines in his dealings with Noah or went wildly overboard, including threatening Noah’s family and pressuring him to kill Clark when Clark tried to stop him from planting the phony “bomb.” In a pretty bizarre bit of coincidence-mongering from screenwriters Scott Gold and Ajani Jackson, it turns out that the current New York district attorney, Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), personally wrote the guidelines for the sting program Haddad was supposed to follow, and Price and Maroun have to call him as a witness to testify that Haddad went well beyond the guidelines in recruiting Noah and persuading him to commit what he thought would be a terrorist bombing. Eventually Haddad is found guilty by the jury, and director Alex Hall gives us heart-rending close-ups of both Noah’s mother Rita and Raymond Clark’s mother Samantha (Charlotte Haynes Hazzard) sitting in the spectator section of the courtroom and no doubt feeling the sadness that, under the cover of protecting America from further terror attacks, that rogue FBI agent ruined the lives of both their sons.