Law and Order: "Snowflakes" and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Purity" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 8, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, January 8) my husband Charles and I watched the welcome return of the two major shows from the Law and Order franchise, Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. They were united in a so-called “crossover episode” in which the Law and Order show was called “Snowflakes” (referring to the leftover frozen embryos remaining after in vitro fertilization) and the SVU half was called “Purity” (relating to a corporate mega-rich guy who’s using his money to breed a genetically superior strain of white people to take over the world). The shows had the same director, Jean de Segonzac, but different writers: “Snowflakes” was written by Scott Gold while “Purity” was the product of Kevin Deibolt and Brant Engelstein. “Snowflakes” opens with a recent Ukrainian immigrant named Nadiya Tecun (Anastasiia Zahrai) stumbling around the streets of New York. She’s picked up by police and taken to a hospital, and she seems to be on her way to recovery when she’s told by the hospital staff, “Your brother is here to see you.” She bolts from the hospital when she hears that news, and we assume that the “brother” is actually a criminal out to kill her. Nadiya is later traced to the streets of New York and is again picked up by police, only she’s ambushed by the supposed “brother,” really a hit man named Sergey Volkov (Vesselin Todorov-Vinnie), and shot to death while still in the police car. This time the cops who picked her up are the usual Law and Order leads these days, Detective Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), who’s been working as his partner until they find him someone permanent. Nadiya literally bleeds out on Brady, and this gives her a particular hard-on to solve the case and find the shooter. An autopsy on Nadiya’s body reveals that she’d recently been pregnant but the baby had died inside her and been crudely extracted with forceps, and the remaining genetic tissue of the dead fetus reveals that she wasn’t the biological mother or any kin to the fetus at all. The cops ultimately trace her to a crude medical clinic located inside an abandoned warehouse where a gang of organized criminals were running a scam in which young Ukrainian women were recruited to serve as surrogate mothers for in vitro embryos, charged a hefty sum to come to America and give birth, and then their babies would be turned over for adoption.

Among the most pathetic (in the good sense) characters were an affluent straight couple who adopted one of the babies and then found out from the cops that their new child was part of an illegal scheme. The adoptive parents naturally freak out at the prospect that their baby, whom they’ve grown to love as their own, will be taken away from them, and the cops have to obtain a court order ensuring that that won’t happen before the couple will provide evidence. The cops ultimately corner the attorney for the corrupt enterprise, Derek Hobbs (Jess Prichard), as he’s on his way to take his daughter to a basketball game in which she’s playing. Hobbs’s evidence allows the police to find Sergey Volkov and his domestic partner, Sara Tandon (Colleen Foy), but it’s later thrown out of court because Lieutenant Brady crossed the line legally in threatening to grab Hobbs’s daughter to get him to talk. The cops trace Sara’s phony charity, which began as a legitimate operation to assure religious participants in IVF that their leftover embryos would not be destroyed but would be donated to other childless couples (a big deal among members of the anti-abortion Right, who regard all fertilized human eggs as fully human people whose destruction constitutes murder) but was soon converted into a baby-making enterprise. At least two attempts to raid the group behind all this end up in explosions, including one that wounds SVU detective Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane). At the end of part one the cops raid a compound that is full of C4 explosive and other bomb-making components, and they also see a flag with the emblem of the Vandals, one of the 5th Century A.D. German tribes (along with the Visigoths and the Huns) that picked the carcass of the Western Roman Empire clean. The Vandal emblem has recently been picked up by white supremacists who fly the flag to indicate their struggle for a whites-only kingdom in all or part of the current United States.

It turns out that the mastermind behind all this is Joseph Dahlsonn (Tom Lipinski), a tech billionaire and white supremacist who used Tandon’s charity to create white embryos (he specifically stated, “No Muslims or Jews”) which he would then genetically tweak in his labs to create a super-race, have adopted by would-be mothers in a whites-only community he’d set up in upstate New York, and use them to ensure the survival of the Caucasian race in the face of the “Great Replacement.” (The “Great Replacement” is a strand of white nationalist conspiracy-mongering that holds that, by deliberately reproducing faster while discouraging whites from reproducing at all, people of color and their leaders, the Jews, are plotting the total destruction of the white part of the human race.) The police arrest Dahlsonn for violating the anti-eugenics laws passed in New York state in the wake of World War II – eugenics had been a program of selective breeding of humans that was quite popular in the early 20th century until the Nazis gave it a bad name – and also confiscate his genetically engineered embryos. But ultimately they have to dismiss the case against Dahlsonn and let him go because, with the evidence from Derek Hobbs ruled inadmissible, Dahlsonn is the only person who can establish that Sara Tandon was part and parcel of the illegal operation and blow out of the water her defense that she was an abused woman whose husband forced her to participate in illegal activity out of fear for her life. Dahlsonn demands the return of his embryos, but the way writers Deibolt and Engelstein treat him, it’s obvious they’re setting him up for a sequel in which he’ll finally meet his comeuppance. As things turn out, that happens (to a degree) even before the episode is over; a coalition of the biological parents of those embryos bands together and files a lawsuit demanding that they get the embryos instead.

The judge in the case rules for the families and thus Dahlsonn is forced to relinquish control, though there’s one final irony: the judge rules that the embryos be destroyed, the very result both Dahlsonn and the families that created them in the first place were trying to avoid. To me Dahlsonn’s impassioned defense that the embryos are his “intellectual property” was the scariest part of this show: one can easily see a future court case in which the clear prohibition in the Thirteenth Amendment of one human being owning another runs into the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1970’s precedent that lower-level life forms could be patented – and I’m not sure how the current Right-wing Supreme Court, with its ideological opposition to abortion and sympathy for the Christian Right versus its inclination to let businesses do pretty much whatever they like to make money, would rule on that. This was a pretty sprawling Law and Order but the two episodes combined effectively despite the different writing teams, and it raised some pretty major issues even in the context of a policier thriller – as this show has sporadically but effectively done throughout its history. The late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. recommended that people watch Law and Order for an education in just how the guarantees of the Bill of Rights work in practice.