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?)