Law and Order: "Hindsight" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 2, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 2) I watched a run of three consecutive shows in the Law and Order franchise: the flagship Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order episode was called “Hindsight” and was directed by David Grossman from a script by Scott Gold and Will Lapp. It was a chilling tale that begins with a confrontation at an elite private high school between two 15-year-olds, Todd Feldman (Cade Tropeano) and Nora Coleman (Noa Leach), over who gets to play the big trumpet solo in that weekend’s marching-band competition. The band director (whom we never see) awarded the solo to Todd, and Nora was quite put out about it. In the next scene we see Todd Feldman lying dead on a deserted stretch of Central Park, and obviously Nora is suspect number one, but she turns out to be a red herring – as does Dylan Colavecchio (Atticus Elsass), who sold Todd illegal Adderall because Todd didn’t have a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) but thought the drug would help him get through his rough schedule of college prep classes, extracurricular activities, and band practices. His killer turns out to be Cassie Moore (Abigail Rhyne), who’d been his friend since kindergarten – only she’d texted him a photo of herself in a red two-piece swimsuit. Todd had used artificial-intelligence software to turn the photo into a nude, and had sent it to all his friends along with a note that said he’d taken it the night they had sex. They hadn’t – Cassie was still a virgin and determined to remain that way for a while – but the effect on her was predictable. She lost all her friends and got slut-shamed by her fellow students. Cassie demanded that Todd take down the photo and send a note to all and sundry admitting that it was an AI fake, but he refused and she ambushed him. She waited for him in that corner of the park because it was a route they’d taken together often on their way back home from school and stabbed him in the back three times with a pocket knife that’s made to look like a credit card; it opens to reveal a blade and was marketed mainly to women needing “protection” when they’re out alone at night. (This business of women needing “protection” when they go out alone reminds me of the late Susan Brownmiller’s assertion that “rapists are the shock troops of the patriarchy” – that men instill the fear of rape in women to circumscribe their activities and tell them where they can and cannot be, and how they should and shouldn’t dress.)

Where the script turns odd is it features the assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) dating a woman psychotherapist, Grace Hall (Kerry Bishé), who just happened to have Cassie Moore as one of her patients. District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) insists that Price prosecute Cassie as an adult even though she’s only 15, and much to Nolan’s obvious discomfiture Grace gets called as a witness by the defense, where she testifies as part of the hearing to determine whether to try Cassie as a juvenile or an adult that 15-year-olds in general aren’t as well developed mentally as adults, and Cassie in particular is a “young 15” because she’s still getting over the trauma of having lost her mother to COVID-19 in 2020. Indeed, on the night of the murder, September 4 (it was a little disconcerting to me to have the date of the murder be my birthday!), Grace was actually out on a date with Nolan when Cassie called and announced that she was about to kill Todd. Grace told her to calm down, think it over, and promised her a special therapy session (either in person or by phone) the next morning. The title “Hindsight” refers to Grace’s own sense of guilt that she didn’t take the threat seriously enough to report it to the police under the “duty to warn” exception to doctor-patient omertà. Instead she went ahead with her date with Nolan while Cassie went to the park, lied in wait for Todd, and killed him. What’s more, Cassie’s lawyer decides to base her case on self-defense, and Cassie herself is a terrific witness who seems to have the jury persuaded that she was literally in fear of her life and the only reason she killed Todd was that Todd was strangling her and would have killed her if she hadn’t killed him first. In order to refute this, Nolan has to call his girlfriend Grace as a witness and force her to testify to the secret Instagram account on which Cassie had messaged her that she did fully intend to kill Todd. Cassie is duly convicted and the case becomes just a minor hiccup in Nolan’s relationship with Grace; the last scene shows him waiting for her at a fancy restaurant and blowing off the waiter who wants him to order something besides drinks. At first we think she’s decided not to see him anymore, but eventually she shows up – she was just late for normal human reasons – and they give each other at least a guarded embrace at the fade-out. This was a quite powerful Law and Order, though I could have done without the coincidence-mongering of having the prosecutor’s girlfriend turn out to be the key witness in his case.