Law and Order: "Property" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 29, 2026)

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

The Law and Order episode my husband Charles and I watched last night (Thursday, October 29) was considerably better than the SVU that preceded it. It was called “Property” and was written by Jennifer Vanderbes and Will Lapp (the latter credited as “staff writer”). It begins with an auction of expensive Middle Eastern and Indonesian artifacts organized by a not bad-looking young man named Andrew Carson (Matt Leisy, who for some reason looks a lot hotter in his imdb.com head shot than he did on the show). For some reason Carson is late to his own auction, and later he turns up dead, murdered in his apartment by being clubbed to death with one of his own statuettes. Vanderbes and Lapp first give us a couple of red herrings: an Afghan-American professor, Abdul Ahad Farhadi (Sevan), who was upset with Carson for selling a statue of the Buddha that had been looted from Afghanistan by the Taliban and would thereby be able to finance their inhumane regime; and a Black rapper who accused Carson of selling him an ancient Egyptian mask that turned out to be a fake. The police, in the persons of detectives Theo Walker (David Ajala) and Rob Calvino (James Badge Dale), then turn their attention to the two women in Carson’s life (at least the two women we know about; we’re told that he was an inveterate womanizer and that was at least part of the reason his marriage broke up): his ex-wife Caroline Sanders (Kate Siegel) and his current girlfriend Lucy Butler (Vivian True). The episode’s story takes a weird right turn in the second “Order” part of the story; Caroline Sanders turns out to have killed her husband and faked an elaborate false alibi to cover for it. But her motive was to protect the frozen embryos she and Carson had conceived via in vitro fertilization either just before or just after she got cancer and therefore could no longer have children the normal way. She was waiting for her oncologists to declare her cancer-free so she could have one or more of the embryos implanted and thereby fulfill her lifelong dream of being a mother. Only Andrew had meanwhile unilaterally decided not only to leave her but to have the embryos destroyed because New York is a “two-party state” in regards to IVF: the embryos could only be implanted if both biological parents agreed to it. Yet the embryos were being stored at a facility in Pennsylvania, which only requires one-party consent for any decision involving embryos, frozen or otherwise.

The meetings between Andrew and Caroline that had derailed his participation in his final auction weren’t about a potential reconciliation, as the cops had at first assumed; rather, they were battled royal over the fate of Andrew’s and Caroline’s embryos. In court Caroline and the heavy-set African-American attorney representing her, Theresa Roland (Roslyn Ruff), acknowledge that she did indeed kill Andrew, but did so to protect human life: in this case, her frozen embryos whom Andrew had threatened to kill. Caroline presents herself as a committed Roman Catholic who truly believed that life begins at conception and therefore the destruction of her embryos would be murder, but the police and assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) uncover evidence that in college Caroline had been an active feminist, had participated in defending abortion and women’s health clinics against anti-abortion protesters, and had had an abortion herself. I was waiting for Caroline and her lawyer to argue that it was precisely the trauma of going through an abortion that convinced her she’d been on the wrong side of the abortion issue all along, but instead – after Price yields to the suggestion of his assistant Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) that the jury would find this line of cross-examination more tolerable if it came from a woman, and after Samantha announces that she went through with the embryo implantation after all and is now pregnant with twins – the jury finds Samantha guilty. The sense the writers want us to leave with is that New York’s citizens have been spared the sticky wicket of a court verdict that would establish the precedent that embryos are human beings deserving of the same full legal protections as everyone else. I’m strongly pro-choice on the abortion issue (and my ex-girlfriend actually got pregnant and had an abortion while we were together, so I’m as personally close to this issue as any male can be), but I was still not happy with the overly pat resolution the writers of this episode gave it, just as I’m still miffed at the previous episode in which a Black Gay man was convicted of murdering Bisexual men out of resentment that they could always go back to their wives and children while he, being totally Gay, could not. (The mistake I thought the writers of that one made was not acknowledging that bisexuality is a perfectly legitimate sexual orientation and instead portraying both the killer and his victims as Gay men.)

The meetings between Andrew and Caroline that had derailed his participation in his final auction weren’t about a potential reconciliation, as the cops had at first assumed; rather, they were battled royal over the fate of Andrew’s and Caroline’s embryos. In court Caroline and the heavy-set African-American attorney representing her, Theresa Roland (Roslyn Ruff), acknowledge that she did indeed kill Andrew, but did so to protect human life: in this case, her frozen embryos whom Andrew had threatened to kill. Caroline presents herself as a committed Roman Catholic who truly believed that life begins at conception and therefore the destruction of her embryos would be murder, but the police and assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) uncover evidence that in college Caroline had been an active feminist, had participated in defending abortion and women’s health clinics against anti-abortion protesters, and had had an abortion herself. I was waiting for Caroline and her lawyer to argue that it was precisely the trauma of going through an abortion that convinced her she’d been on the wrong side of the abortion issue all along, but instead – after Price yields to the suggestion of his assistant Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) that the jury would find this line of cross-examination more tolerable if it came from a woman, and after Samantha announces that she went through with the embryo implantation after all and is now pregnant with twins – the jury finds Samantha guilty. The sense the writers want us to leave with is that New York’s citizens have been spared the sticky wicket of a court verdict that would establish the precedent that embryos are human beings deserving of the same full legal protections as everyone else. I’m strongly pro-choice on the abortion issue (and my ex-girlfriend actually got pregnant and had an abortion while we were together, so I’m as personally close to this issue as any male can be), but I was still not happy with the overly pat resolution the writers of this episode gave it, just as I’m still miffed at the previous episode in which a Black Gay man was convicted of murdering Bisexual men out of resentment that they could always go back to their wives and children while he, being totally Gay, could not. (The mistake I thought the writers of that one made was not acknowledging that bisexuality is a perfectly legitimate sexual orientation and instead portraying both the killer and his victims as Gay men.)