Law and Order: "Fate's Cruel Joke" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 2, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 2) I watched the most recent episodes of the two remaining shows of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: Law and Order itself and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order episode was a really quirky one, “Fate’s Cruel Joke,” in which a young woman’s body is found rotting in a suitcase in a new condo building whose units are mostly owned by absentee landlords who are holding them for speculation and don’t live in the city – or, in some cases, even in the United States. The police, led by Detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala) and their immediate supervisor, Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), have the devil’s own time just identifying the corpse, especially since the medical examiner’s estimate as to the time of death was several months before the body was found (by a homeless person who had sneaked into the storage garage looking for a place to sleep, and his dog who actually sniffed out where the body was hidden). Ultimately they learn that the victim was a young girl in her late teens or early 20’s and a potentially star gymnast who had actually been adopted by her coach once her mother died when the victim was nine. The police trace the coach and he turns out to be a merciless dictator who drives his athletes relentlessly. He explains that the dead girl was someone who’d had a promising career as a gymnast until she tore a shoulder muscle during practice and therefore could not continue in the sport – but she was still legally the coach’s “family,” so she had to suffer the indignity of watching from the sidelines as he continued his career with other promising young gymnasts training for the life she’d hoped to lead. She responded by running away from home a lot, and hooking up with less than savory boyfriends – including the one who actually did her in: Benjamin Hoffman (Declan Eells), who though he’s only 17 is already a star influencer on the Internet with $7 million in savings and a major podcast for which he films himself on the streets of New York doing skateboarding tricks.

The plot complications heat up when, while tracing this young man whom he recognizes by the unique design of sparkled-colored shoes he wears, Detective Riley runs down a bystander named Crosby and severely injures him. Crosby is taken to a hospital and it’s touch and go as to whether he’s going to survive. Meanwhile, when the cops finally track down Hoffman after Riley’s wild-goose chase, he’s already got a hot-shot attorney, Cordelia Travers (Jane Lynch), in tow when the cops arrest him, and she warns him to say absolutely nothing to them. The case goes to trial with a fair amount of evidence against Benjamin, including his partial fingerprints on the suitcase that turned out to be the victim’s coffin and a receipt for buying the suitcase made out to Benjamin’s friend and drug dealer, Cory Mason (Raye “Rain” Hollitt). Midway through the trial Cordelia actually makes prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy, who like former Fantastic Four star Ioan Gruffudd is actually Welsh-born but has done an excellent job suppressing his native Welsh accent and learning to speak American English) a plea deal that in exchange for a much lighter sentence he’ll plead guilty to a lesser charge and tell Price exactly what happened to the girl. Meanwhile, especially once Crosby dies – he survives the operation but ends up brain-dead and his wife Sandra (Molly Samson) agrees to pull the plug and let him die – detective Riley falls off the wagon and goes on a drinking binge out of guilt. We get to meet his wife in this episode and she urges him to go to “a meeting” – if it was ever established before that Riley is a recovering alcoholic and an Alcoholics Anonymous member, I’d forgotten about it – but instead he drank and emerged quite a bit worn and disheveled. Price had decided that he needed Riley’s testimony to establish that Benjamin had fled the scene rather than allow the police to take him in for questioning, but when he sees Riley in the shape he’s in he realizes he can’t count on the jury believing him as a witness. So he decides to accept Cordelia’s plea deal as long as another charge can be added to it.

In exchange Cordelia presents Benjamin for a proffer meeting in which he says that the girl died at a drunken, drug-fueled party for which Cory had supplied an extensive amount of cocaine. The girl was showing off some of her old gymnastics moves on Benjamin’s bed when she suddenly fell and hit her head on the floor so hard it fatally injured her, and rather than risk calling in the authorities and getting busted for all the drugs at their party, Benjamin sent out Cory to buy the suitcase and leave it in the storage unit assigned to his apartment and thereby cover it up. It was a quirky ending and the real tragedy was Riley’s spectacular fall off his own wagon – as often happens in Law and Order, the actual murder victim kind of gets lost in the circumstances – but at least it’s a chilling tale of youth irresponsibility and the kinds of trouble young people can get into when they’ve already made huge fortunes but haven’t lived long enough to accept the responsibility that comes with major amounts of money. (Then again, a lot of rich people grow to advanced ages and still behave with the maturity, or lack thereof, of teenagers or even younger people – does the name “Donald Trump” mean anything to you?)

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Vivid" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 2, 2026)

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

By chance, the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, “Vivid,” that followed Law and Order’s “Fate’s Cruel Joke” on Thursday, April 2 was also about a podcaster who’s attained a major following on the Internet. She uses a cartoon avatar as well as a screen name online but she’s really April Deieso (Sarah Desjardins), and the Special Victims Unit gets interested in her when she narrates a recovered memory of a rape that supposedly happened to her five years previously. So does a free-lance group of vigilantes that are sort of #MeToo on steroids, led by an argumentative and incredibly self-righteous woman named Elaine Marquez (Annette Arnold) and her self-effacing to the point of neuterdom partner, Harrison Kuo (Zack Palombo). They and two other people literally gang up on a middle-aged man who they believe was April’s rapist, who actually had nothing to do with the crime. It turns out April is a patient in a long-term study of the effects of psychedelic drugs in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. The research is being funded by a minor drug company whose CEO, Rosalie Fuentes (Jamie Ann Romero), is hoping to steer the company to major status on the basis of the success rate with a particular psychedelic. The doctors in charge of the study are Jonah Catmull (John Schwab) and Austin Severson (Breckin Meyer), and as part of the protocol they’re both supposed to be in the same room with the patient for as long as the effects of the drug last. We eventually learn that April was indeed raped, but not five years ago; she was raped during one of the psychedelic “therapy” sessions, and her rapist was Dr. Severson. He had sent Dr. Catmull out of the room on some pretext and was alone with April, whom he had blindfolded on the ground that the lack of distracting visual stimuli would make the treatment more effective. Supposedly each session was video-recorded, but it turns out Dr. Fuentes never bothered to look at the recordings, and neither did anyone else at the drug company.

When Dr. Severson is found out, he shocks prosecutor Dominic Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) by immediately pleading guilty to all charges and meekly accepting a 15-year prison sentence and the loss of his medical license. Carisi suspects he’s essentially falling on his sword to protect the drug company for which he worked and the whole idea of psychedelic drugs as a valid treatment for mental illness. Carisi becomes determined to shut down the entire company as an illegal and dangerous enterprise, and he gets the go-ahead from New York state attorney general Philip Esquivel (it was a bit of a shock to see a male New York attorney general when it’s well known that the real New York attorney general is a woman, Letitia James, who because she dared to prosecute Donald Trump on civil fraud charges is now in the cross-hairs of his Justice Department revenge machine; the real reason Trump just fired Attorney General Pam Bondi is she was unable to make charges stick against James, former FBI director James Comey, California Senator Adam Schiff, and the six Senators and Congressmembers who jointly posted an online video reminding American servicemembers that they not only have the right but the duty to refuse to obey illegal orders) to serve as a special prosecutor against the company. Only the judge in the case wimps out and allows the company to remain in business as long as Rosalie Fuentes steps down as CEO. Screenwriter Roxanne Paredes seems to be presenting this as a “victory” for the enlightened use of psychedelic drugs as mental therapies, but as a child of the 1960’s who saw all too many of my peers literally or figuratively destroy their lives on those drugs (I didn’t personally know anybody who jumped out of a multi-story window under the LSD-induced delusion that they could fly, but I heard enough stories about that happening I believed them), I’m horrified at the blithe acceptance of those drugs as anything but monstrous harms to anyone of the human race who takes them.

Elsbeth: "Deadutante" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired April 2, 2026)

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

After two rather dark episodes of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on Thursday, April 2, the Elsbeth show I watched afterwards (on a different network, CBS), “Deadutante,” was a slice of campy relief. The episode centered around the annual New York Empire City Debutantes’ Ball, hosted by an imperious middle-aged woman named Isadora “Izzy” Langford (J. Smith Cameron), who makes Miranda Priestly, Meryl Streep’s character in the two The Devil Wears Prada movies, seem all sweetness and light by comparison. Izzy is insistent that Plum Barlowe (Danielle Kotch), daughter of the thrice-married tycoon Sterling Barlowe (John Bedford Lloyd) – though it’s not clear which of Barlowe’s wives is Plum’s mother; his current wife is Gwen (Katie Ross Clarke); his embittered first wife is Paulina (Anna Holbrook), whom we see rejoicing at his death; and we don’t get to see or hear from the woman he was married to between them – will not be allowed to make her début at Izzy’s ball. Only a $2 million check donated to Izzy’s favorite charities changes her mind, or seems to. Plum accordingly is named one of the honorees at the next year’s ball, only Izzy has a plot up her bejeweled silver sleeve. She’s worked out a scheme to murder Sterling with a sword – swords used to be a routine part of the ball’s accoutrements, as were fires in fireplaces, but they were eliminated out of safety concerns until Izzy decided to bring them back – and to frame Brando Wild (Jordyn Owens), son of a famous movie star and the sort of man who seems to think with his dick rather than his brains, for the crime. (I wonder if writer Erica Larson deliberately purloined his name from actor Brandon DeWilde, who was a child star in the 1950’s and went on to a brief young-adult career in the 1960’s; he was the obnoxious kid who kept calling, “Come back, Shane!” in the 1953 film Shane.)

Under the cover of photographing Plum and Gwen with Plum’s phone, Izzy sends a text to Brando offering to meet him for some sexual shenanigans in a private room at the hotel. The text tells Brando to strip completely and wait for her in the nude, only Plum never shows up and instead Izzy uses the opportunity to steal Brando’s sword and kill Sebastian with it, then returns it to Brando’s outfit so Brando will have the sword with Sebastian’s blood on it. Though we see Izzy kill Sebastian on screen (as I’ve noted before, Elsbeth follows the formula of the 1970’s/1980’s TV cop show Columbo, both in letting us the audience know who the killer is from the get-go and in having Elsbeth use Columbo’s strategy of annoying the murderer into confessing), it’s not until midway through the show that we learn her motive. It seems that in 1982 she was heading for a début of her own at the same ball, only she couldn’t afford a gown for the big event. So she stole a credit card from her father and bought a sale gown at 50 percent off the retail price – only Sebastian saw the “Half Off” sales tag on the gown, cut its straps off to humiliate her, and ever afterwards referred to Izzy by the nickname “Half Off.” What’s more, when her dad drove to the store where she’d bought the gown with his credit card to return it the next day, dad had a fatal heart attack on the way and Izzy blamed Sebastian for her father’s death.

There’s an intriguing subplot about Izzy’s theft of a pair of gloves belonging to someone’s “Aunt Jackie,” which she wears when she kills Sebastian and then burns – though the pearls on the trims of the gloves survive the fire and it later turns out that “Aunt Jackie” was in fact Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the legendary Presidential widow and all-around do-gooding pain in the ass. There’s also the episode’s most fascinating character, Izzy’s husband Haydn Langford (Don Stephenson), an endearing child-man of appalling immaturity who spends all his time in the basement with a model train set. The irony is that his family made its fortune in the first place running a real railroad, only too much wealth and too little responsibility over too many generations has reduced them from running real trains to playing with electric models. Ultimately Elsbeth and the official New York police arrest Izzy after Izzy keeps threatening to have Elsbeth arrested for allegedly stealing the priceless “Jackie O.” gloves, much to the continuing irritation of Elsbeth’s direct superior on the New York force, Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce). While I missed Elsbeth’s Gay son and his partner, who’ve figured in previous episodes and have helped make the show even more watchable, this Elsbeth was a nice, campy piece of entertainment – and it helped that there wasn’t an Internet podcaster or influencer anywhere near the dramatis personae!

Project Hail Mary (Amazon MGM Studios, General Admission, Lord Miller, MGM, Open Invite Entertainment, Pascal Pictures, Waypoint Entertainment, 2026)

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

Last night (Wednesday, April 1) my husband Charles and I went to the AMC 18 movie theatres in Fashion Valley to see Project Hail Mary, which turned out to be a quite compelling if sometimes flawed movie. It was also an ironic reflection of the current Zeitgeist because, in an age when the U.S. population is being conditioned by our government to hate and fear undocumented immigrants as so-called “illegal aliens,” it’s basically a friendship story between a human, molecular biologist turned middle-school science teacher turned reluctant astronaut Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and a literal alien, Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz). The science-fictional premise is that a microorganism from space called an “astrophage” is menacing life on a large number of solar systems, including ours and that of Rocky’s home planet, Erid. The way it does that is it sets up a line, called a “Petrova line” after the person who discovered it, between the star it’s targeting and a nearby planet with an atmosphere mostly of carbon dioxide, where it can breed and ultimately eat up the star. An international scientific team led by a German woman, Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, who looks like she’s from the previous generation to Grace but is actually just two years older than Ryan Gosling), recruits Grace to their research division because he’s an expert microbiologist, even though his one big theory aroused a lot of opposition and he turned out to be wrong. Grace figures out that the astrophage is a single-celled organism that literally lives off light, and as it consumes light and destroys the star source it’s feeding off of, it also releases a burst of energy that represents its, shall we say, “excreta.” The team has discovered that one star in the known universe, Tau Ceti, is immune from consumption by astrophages, though they don’t know how or why. To find out, they recruit a team consisting of a commander, engineer, and scientist to travel to Tau Ceti on a spaceship literally powered by astrophage shit, that precisely because the astrophages store so much energy will be able to travel at near-light speeds.

Only just before the ship is supposed to depart, some of the astrophages being studied at the base camp cause an explosion that kills the scientist on the crew, and after asking for permission and not getting it, Stratt and her crew decide that Grace will replace the scientist on the ship. They give Grace an injection that puts him into a medically induced coma, and when he comes to he’s already on board the ship on a one-way mission to Tau Ceti since the ship is large enough to carry enough astrophage fuel to get there but not to return. When the ship arrives at Tau Ceti Grace sees a giant spacecraft already in orbit around it. It turns out the spaceship is from Erid and, like Grace’s own craft, is inhabited by just one living crew member; the other 20 who left with it all died under mysterious circumstances, as did the other two crew members of Grace’s Earth ship, pilot Yáo Li-Jie (Ken Leung) and engineer Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub). From that point the film becomes a quite moving tale owing a lot to Robinson Crusoe (indeed, it’s a considerably better movie than the actual 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars, with which it shares some of the same tropes; I wrote about that one at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/12/robinson-crusoe-on-mars-aubrey-schenck.html), as Grace and Rocky (the latter a name Grace gives the Eridian because he resembles a pile of animate rocks, sort of like The Thing in the Fantastic Four comics only considerably smaller) form an uncertain bond, overcome their problems – including that each breathes an atmosphere totally toxic to the other, as well as how to communicate with each other (to human ears, Rocky’s native language sounds like wind noises) – and finally realize they have to make common cause to save both their planets. The friendship between Grace and Rocky (all the more moving because of the sheer weight of the barriers between them) and the extent to which Grace has to learn navigating skills and the ability to do space walks to obtain the all-important samples of the bacteria, native to Tau Ceti’s fifth planet, which neutralize and kill the astrophages is the core of this movie and more than makes up for its problems.

For one thing, the movie is too damned loud; instead of the long stretches of silence that punctuated Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (still the best science-fiction film ever made, and arguably the best film ever made, period), we get a continual din from Daniel Pemberton’s music score and Erik Aadahl’s oppressive sound design. The one time directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (who previously have been known only for animated comedies and camp-fests like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) and screenwriter Drew Goddard (who wrote the script for The Martian, the last major movie based on a novel by Andy Weir) let us have a moment of silence to symbolize the vastness of space, it got ruined by a sonic bleed-through from a movie being shown in the adjoining theatre. (That’s one of the eternal down sides of watching films in multiplex theatres.) There’s also the unlikelihood of representatives from the world’s nations coming together to deal with the astrophage threat; Justin Chang’s review of Project Hail Mary in The New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/23/project-hail-mary-movie-review) lampooned this. “One of the film’s most casually poignant touches is its matter-of-fact vision of international cooperation and competent leadership,” Chang wrote. “Talk about science fiction.” If an astrophage invasion actually happened and caused the sun to cool down to an extent that would threaten to annihilate all life on earth within 30 years, Donald Trump would probably say, “Great! Now all those environmentalist wackos will stop bothering me about global warming!” (With his total self-absorption, he’d probably also figure that at age 79 he’d be dead before it actually became a problem.) I also had a problem with the film’s sheer length, 156 minutes, though some of the younger members of our audience actually were sorry that the film wasn’t even longer. (This is the generation that binge-watches a 10-hour TV miniseries in a single “streaming” sitting, which has led me to joke that 1920’s director Erich von Stroheim, who got ridiculed for wanting an audience to sit through a 10-hour movie, is in heaven thinking, “Now is when I should be alive! Technology has finally caught up with me!”)

There are also those jarring flashbacks to Grace’s life pre-launch; the film actually opens with scenes of Grace coming to inside the spacecraft with a full growth of beard that makes him look like the Unabomber, and the idea, at least according to Chang, is that his memory of past events is coming back to him in dribs and drabs that just happen to flash back to him in chronological sequence. (I’d have liked it better if he’d had one long flashback giving us the full exposition in one go.) Rocky and Grace name the planet from which they harvested the astrophage-killing bacteria “Adrian,” after Rocky’s partner back home on Erid – which made me wonder briefly whether Eridians have a gender binary at all, and if so is Rocky female or are Rocky and Adrian a same-sex couple. Ultimately Rocky is able to restock Grace’s ship with enough astrophage to get him back to Earth – the scenes in which Rocky talks Grace out of meekly accepting his death en route are among the most poignant and moving of the film – only there’s another wrinkle in the plot. Grace realizes that xenonite, the mineral out of which Rocky’s ship is made (on Earth xenon is a gas, but apparently on Erid it’s a solid), is vulnerable to the astrophage-eating bacteria which Rocky and Grace have loaded onto the spacecraft. So Grace has to detour back from his route back to Earth to save Rocky’s spacecraft and enable Rocky to save Erid. Before he turns back and heads for Erid he sends the bacteria that will save Earth in four pods labeled “Ringo,” “George,” “John,” and “Paul” (and in case we didn’t get the point, the soundtrack blasts us with The Beatles’ song “Two of Us”). Ultimately Grace ends up stranded on Erid, teaching science to a bunch of young Eridians, while Eva Stratt (ya remember Eva Stratt?) celebrates Earth’s redemption by leading her crew in a karaoke performance of Harry Styles’s song “Sign of the Times.” (It’s not her fault that Harry Styles has to compete with The Beatles – even a lesser song from their catalog – and inevitably loses.) But the elements I found oppressive about Project Hail Mary pale beside the ones I liked about it, particularly the friendship between Grace and Rocky. It’s particularly ironic given that Project Hail Mary was produced by Amazon MGM Studios, the same enterprise that gave us Melania, the $75 million ($40 million in production costs, including $18 million in rights payment to Melania Trump herself) ego-suck to Donald and Melania Trump. Now it looks like Jeff Bezos is going to make back all the money he sunk into Melania with a bona fide commercial hit that runs against everything the Trumps stand for: love between species, self-sacrifice, international cooperation, and an overall breakdown of the barriers between people and, in this case, other sentient life forms as well.