Law and Order: "The Enemy of All Women" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 22, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 22) my husband Charles and I watched the usual Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episodes on NBC and another Midsomer Murders show on PBS. The Law and Order was called “The Enemy of All Women” – though it’s a good thing they don’t flash the episode titles in advance because that would have been a giveaway of the entire plot. It begins with a long tracking shot that follows a young woman, Amelia Hardage (Ren Montero), through New York City as she heads home, and is told from the point of view of all the surveillance cameras that are recording her on her walk, including her own as she enters the townhouse in which she lives. Then a shadowy figure we don’t get a good look at points a gun at her and kills her with one shot to the head. After the corpse is discovered, the detectives of the New York Police Department routinely order copies of all the surveillance footage as well as Hardage’s e-mails – only to find them all literally disappearing as they attempt to load them. From this, and from what Hardage did for a living – she worked for a company that amassed huge amounts of surveillance data on every individual in the area and then sold those data caches to the highest bidder – detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala) and their boss, Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney) deduce that the culprit is a person with an ultra-high level of expertise in computerized record-keeping and major hacker skills to erase all recorded data that might implicate him. This leads them to the victim’s boss, Marius Cole (Ennis Esmer), and also to her best friend, Vanessa Barrett (Virginia Kull), who had helped her get her current job and then had quit the same company and gone to work as information technology specialist for a women’s health care clinic. It turns out from an interview with Hardage’s psychological consultant, Sean Morris (Mathais Goldstein), that she had been raped one month previously. Sean had been trying to persuade her to report the crime to the police, which she’d been unwilling to do, until the day before she was killed, when her rapist returned to finish her off forever and thereby escape accountability. The cops briefly suspect Sean of murdering Hardage until he convinces them that he’s too ethical to do that and also that he’s Gay. (Presumably, since he’s not a licensed therapist, he’s not bound by the confidentiality regulations that would likely have been invoked by a professionally licensed person even though their client was dead.)

The cops take Marius Cole to trial before a tough woman judge, Angela Dillow (Eileen Galindo), only even before the trial begins Marius’s attorney makes a motion to dismiss the case because Marius has used elaborate AI software to manufacture himself an alibi. (This is one of my main concerns with the future of politics in this country; the use of AI to manipulate video footage so it no longer shows what actually happened, but what the government wants people to think happened. It won’t surprise me at all if the next time ICE agents kill an innocent bystander like they did with Renée Good, the authorities not only tell people they didn’t see what they actually saw in the video, they use the raw footage to create an AI version in which the victim actually was threatening to kill the ICE agent and he shot her in self-defense.) Marius, who like Harvey Weinstein has made a lot of big donations to women’s rights organizations to cover his tracks as a sexual abuser, presents a sympathetic figure and seems to be on his way to acquittal until the cops and the prosecutors – District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and his associates on the case, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) – guess that Vanessa Barrett was also raped by Marius Cole, only she signed a non-disclosure agreement and didn’t come forward. The prosecutors point out that NDA’s can’t be used to cover up a crime, but she still doesn’t want to come forward and testify because she’s afraid that her career in women’s health will be over if people find out she was a rape victim and did nothing about it. Then Nolan Price works out a stratagem; at first he offers Marius and his attorney a plea deal, which they turn down. Then he brings Virginia into court, and the mere sight of her seemingly about to testify scares Marius into agreeing to cop a plea after all and accept a 20-year prison sentence for second-degree murder. DA Baxter asks Nolan what he would have done if his trick hadn’t scared Marius into a cop-out – would he have risked destroying Virginia psychologically by making her testify? I suspect Ennis Esmer as Marius Cole is too good a villain for the Law and Order writing crew to let disappear; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he manages to engineer an escape by hacking into the prison’s computers and generating AI footage of himself in his cell while he’s really outside. While this was more like a Special Victims Unit story than one for the flagship show, it still worked really well even though in the real world people like Marius Cole don’t get held accountable for their crimes; they get themselves elected U.S. President and all the charges against them magically disappear.