Law and Order: "Never Say Goodbye" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 29, 2026)

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

Last night (January 29, 2026) I watched Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. My husband Charles was with me all night but while the Law and Order episode was on he was in the bedroom on the phone with his mother, while during SVU he mostly sat in the kitchen and worked on (or played with) the computer. The Law and Order was about artificial intelligence, though that didn’t become clear until about 20 minutes into the running time. It begins with the farewell party for air traffic controller Mark Turner (Chamblee Ferguson) after 37 years of service, following which he’s stalked by another bicyclist as he biked home. He’s shot and killed (it’s typical of this show that we see somebody murdered just as we’ve got to know and like him as a character – I’ve said this about real-life murder victims as well: we’re always told after a murder how nice and wonderful the victim was, and I’ve thought, “Don’t assholes get themselves killed, too?”) by the other cyclist, who’s wearing a helmet and a dark outfit that makes it impossible for the police to identify them or even state their gender with confidence. After some of the usual red herrings, including Bodie Walsh (Tom Cioricari), a would-be partner in a venture with Turner who’d got himself beaten up within an inch of his life by Armenian loan sharks he went to for seed capital, the police finally identify the killer as Kate Leavy (Emily Bergi), who was bitter with Turner for having ruled that a helicopter crash that killed her husband, pilot Brian Leavy (Scott Adsit), was caused by pilot error. They go to Kate’s home either to question or arrest her, but they hear a man’s voice in the living room. It turns out to be Brian Leavy himself – or, rather, an AI ghost image of him created by a company that manufactures AI replicas of your dearly departed relatives and rents them to you for $49.99 per month. (I’m quite sure I would not want any such thing if Charles, goodness forbid, ever dies well ahead of me.) Kate is watching her late husband’s AI image on a big-screen TV that also shows her image as she communicates with him.

The police detectives on the case, Vincent Riley (Reid Brooks) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), get into hot water over it, Walker in particular because by accepting Kate Leavy’s invitation to pray with her and thereby get her to confess, Judge Paul Gifford (Daryl Edwards) declares that the confession was coerced and therefore is inadmissible. The cops and the prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), get in trouble again when, in order to establish motive, they seek to play Kate’s AI chats with her late husband in court – and Judge Gifford rules them inadmissible on the grounds of marital privilege, even though the entity on the other end of those calls wasn’t her late husband, but merely a computerized construct of him. (This plot twist suggests that real-life courts are going to have a hard time dealing with the challenges of AI, too.) With all the judge’s rulings going against them – a reversion to the early days of Law and Order, in which the entire theme seemed to be those pesky little due-process requirements that enable criminals to evade justice – the cops and prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) need help. They get it from an interesting source; Detective Walker hits on the idea of allowing Kate to contact her dead husband’s avatar from the jail computers, which she’d previously been barred from doing. Walker reconnects Kate with Brian’s avatar, either tweaking the algorithm or having it programmed to deliver a quite different message from the one it gave her before, and the result is that Kate insists in court on changing her plea to guilty of second-degree murder, admitting that Mark Turner was blameless, the helicopter crash was actually Brian’s fault, and therefore she killed an innocent man for no reason. These days I’m more concerned with the use of AI evidence to manufacture guilt; I’m still worried that in the future the Trump administration may tweak the videos of citizens being killed by Border Patrol or ICE agents through AI so they show what the government wants them to show (the citizens attacking the agents and the agents killing them in self-defense) instead of just lying verbally about what the videos show. But this Law and Order was an intriguing exploration of some of the other pitfalls that may arise as AI systems become more sophisticated and harder to tell apart from “real” reality.