Law and Order: "Remedies" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 5, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, March 5) I watched Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on NBC and Elsbeth on CBS. The Law and Order episode, called “Remedies,” opens with a successful alternative-health entrepreneur and influencer named Emily Starr (Tess Marshall) leading a seminar and book-signing event at her wellness center. She “made her bones” in the wellness community by claiming she cured herself of cancer through entirely “alternative” methods, including diet, exercise, cleansings, enemas, and the like. Unfortunately for Emily, she’s cornered on the street and shot with a .22 pistol that turns out to have identical ballistics with a gun used in a robbery six years earlier. The police detectives investigating the case, Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and his commander, Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), trace the gun to the original robber, who served his time for the crime but has just been released after a six-year term. Unfortunately, while he was in prison his girlfriend pawned the gun, and the cops trace it first to a gun-store owner who has the usual Second Amendment twitchiness about being questioned by police but then lets them know it was a couple in New Jersey who bought that particular weapon. The police find surveillance footage of the alleged killer but can’t determine how old they are, what color they are, or even what gender they are. The killer turns out to be Mrs. Massey (Stephanie Szostak), whose attorney concedes in court that she did kill Emily Starr but she did so under the “imminent harm” exception to the laws against murder that says you can kill someone if that someone else is about to commit murder themselves or another crime so heinous it justifies terminating their own life to make sure it doesn’t happen. Mrs. Massey claims that Emily Starr was essentially killing her daughter Lauren (Georgia Waehler), who had cancer, by convincing her to cut off the standard treatments (radiation and chemotherapy), putting her on her regimen, and telling her to cut off all communication with her family and anyone else who might offer “negative thoughts” about her condition.

Only after Emily Starr’s death does Lauren return to standard care, where an MRI shows her cancer has spread. Within a month she’s in partial remission from the standard treatments, and in the trial she follows her mom on the witness stand and credits her mother with saving her life by killing Emily. The two prosecutors on the case, series regulars Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), have strong disagreements about how to handle the case, and at one point Price is ready to offer Mrs. Massey a plea deal to a lesser charge because he’s worried that the jury might have so much sympathy for her she might get acquitted. This episode reminded me of a similar one from the years Christopher Meloni was on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, “Retro” from October 28, 2008, which I remember horrified me at the time because it was a slashing attack on the AIDS dissident movement in general and my friend Christine Maggiore in particular. I later talked to her about it and she said there was an organization called “Hollywood and Health” that was lobbying the producers and staff members of TV shows like Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit to do episodes that would dramatize public health controversies and propagandize for the mainstream views. Ironically, Maggiore herself died in December 2008 while I was waiting to publish the second half of my interview with her in Zenger’s Newsmagazine (her death, like that of her daughter 3 ½ years earlier, was widely blamed on AIDS and led a lot of AIDS dissidents to turn away from the movement), and I made the second half a memorial to her. “Remedies” also took a strong stand against alternative medicine and for conventional treatments, though if I were confronted with an invasive cancer diagnosis I’m not sure myself which route I would take or whether I’d attempt to combine both. (I did have a mild colon cancer diagnosed through a colonoscopy, for which I underwent surgery to remove part of my colon, and a later colonoscopy showed no remaining trace of cancer.)

Aside from presenting the dilemma in a dramatically effective way, “Remedies” ends with Mrs. Massey’s murder conviction and a rather prissy statement from Nolan Price that murder is still wrong even when good people commit it for at least understandable, if not entirely sympathetic, reasons. The show’s script by Jennifer Vanderbes also throws in a few complications, including the five-figure sums Lauren was paying Starr for her treatments (her mom found out about her excursions into alternative health in the first place by seeing the charges on the family’s credit-card statements), and the prosecution’s discovery late in the trial that Emily Starr wasn’t actually a cancer survivor at all; she was either pretending to be one to justify her treatments or genuinely believed she’d beaten cancer when she really hadn’t. Price briefly considers disclosing this to Mrs. Massey’s attorney as potentially exculpatory material under the Brady rule, but Maroun talks him out of it. My long-time involvement with alternative health movements gives me a rather mixed view of this story in which I can identify with both sides, while at the same time I’m concerned about the loonier aspects of alternative health, including particularly its skepticism towards vaccinations that has led, among other things, to a recurrence of measles; this morning, as I accompanied my husband Charles to a doctor’s appointment, I was struck that in addition to the expected posted warning signs about flu and COVID-19, there were ones for measles.