Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Obedience" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 12, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, November 12) my husband Charles and I watched episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the flagship Law and Order. Law and Order: Special Victims Unit has become the longest-running (it’s into its 28th season) scripted series in prime time, and last night’s episode, “Obedience,” was its 600th. Executive producer Dick Wolf and line producer Michele Fazekas decided to commemorate the anniversary by bringing back Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, my greatest celebrity crush of all time; he’s now considerably older and more grizzled but that fabled basket is still intact, and since he was wearing blue jeans throughout the episode I got to see a lot more of it than when he was an SVU “regular” and that great bod was frustratingly encased in Armani suits) and having him and Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) rework and old case. It dealt with the rape and murder of a nun named Sister Benedicta (her pre-ordination first name was Clare but I don’t recall her last name) in 1998 (a year before the show actually went on the air). A young Black man named Charles Greene (Chukwudi Iwuji) with a history of crack addiction and petty crime to support it was convicted of the murder and has served 28 years in Attica for it. But Gwen Sharpe (J. Smith-Cameron) of an Innocence Project-like organization approaches Benson and asks her to reopen the case. Greene claims he merely found Clare’s body after she’d already been stabbed, and he tried to pull the knife from her chest only to have her blood splatter all over him. He was convicted after a test of the bite marks on her shoulder matched his and after Stabler’s interrogation, which was not videotaped. Stabler is at first super-reluctant to reopen the case because he’s convinced he got it right the first time, but after certain details don’t add up and Benson points out that bite-mark evidence is no longer considered scientifically credible, he turns around. As part of the re-investigation Stabler and Benson interview Sandra Garza (Laura Innes), who left the order of nuns at the center of the case and has led a secular life ever since. Garza tells the cops that there was a corrupt priest at the convent named Father Anthony Lazzaro (William Sadler) who took advantage of the nuns’ sexual naïveté to molest them, including both performing oral sex on them and making them suck him. He was able to get away with it because many of the women in the convent had never had sex even before they took the vow of chastity and therefore were easy prey for his assertion that having sex with him would bring them closer to God.

The cops try to trace Father Lazzaro but have to maneuver through the church hierarchy to do so. First Stabler and Benson interview an African-American priest, Father Dave (Darrell Morris, Jr.), who’s running Father Lazzaro’s old parish, but he can’t (or won’t) tell them Father Lazzaro’s current location. Then they’re told by church attorney Peter O’Sullivan (a marvelously smarmy performance by Jim Gaffigan, usually known as a stand-up comedian) that he’s not allowed to tell them where Father Lazzaro is. The cops demand the information and get swamped with irrelevant and useless documentation which they have to go through for the few nuggets of important information – a classic strategy used by big bureaucracies both sacred and secular to evade responsibility for their actions. Stabler and Benson also interview the Mother Superior of the convent, Mother Eusebia (Kathleen Chalfant), who acknowledges that she knows where Father Lazzaro is. He’s at a so-called “therapy” camp in upstate New York which the church maintains for priests accused of sexual sins so they aren’t actually punished for their crimes. Instead he and his fellow residents are being kept in that relatively nice environment, and when the cops show up to arrest him not only for Clare’s murder but that of another nun named Christine (whose corpse they exhumed from the basement of Father Lazzaro’s old church and discovered not only she but her unborn baby had been killed, and they were able to extract enough DNA from the surviving skeleton to prove that Lazzaro was the father), he’s alone in a canoe rowing for relaxation at the facility’s private lake. The director of the “treatment center” (Brian Sgambati) calls Lazzaro to come in from his rowboat outing and talk to the cops, and he’s initially combative until they mention Christine. The assistant district attorney assigned to SVU, Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), takes charge of securing Greene’s formal exoneration and release despite Greene’s fully understandable bitterness that he was robbed of 28 years of a normal life he could have had if he hadn’t been busted and convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. Writer Michele Fazekas did a nice job of conveying both the antagonism and affection between Stabler and Benson as they reunite to solve a case they initially got wrong, and there’s an especially poignant moment when Stabler acknowledges that one of his initial errors in the investigation was not interviewing Father Lazzaro at all. When Benson asks him what would have happened if he had, Stabler says, “He’d have denied it all, and I would have believed him because I’m a Catholic myself and we believe the priests are close to God.”

Law and Order: "Do No Harm" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 12, 2026)

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

Just about any story after Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: “Obedience” would have been a tough follow-up, but Dick Wolf and his writers (Art Alamo and Thomas Wong) came up with a lulu for the Law and Order episode that followed “Obedience” on November 12. It was called “Do No Harm,” after the Hippocratic Oath, and was about a 24-year-old medical student named Grace Zhou (Emily Song) who’s found dead in her apartment by her roommate, Ryleigh McAdams (Lisa Naso). The ultimate cause of death is suffocation with a pillow, but the medical examiner finds three puncture marks, one on one arm and the other two on the others, indicating that she received injections just before she died. The drugs in her system from the injections included a saline solution, rocuronium bromide to induce paralysis, and potassium chloride to stop the heart and kill – the same sequence as is common practice in lethal-injection executions. The investigation by police detectives Theo Walker (David Ajala) and Rob Calvino (James Badge Dale) turns up a number of actual or seeming red herrings, including Grace’s ex-boyfriend Curtis Foster (Jake Goodhart) and two doctors she worked with as a medical student, Aekansh Reddy (Sorab Wadia) and Anton Visser (Travis Laughlin). The cops initially think that Grace was having affairs with either or both these men, especially when they discover a silent surveillance video of Grace in a major argument with Dr. Visser over something. It turns out that Grace had been working with Dr. Visser on a clinical trial of a supposed new anti-depressant that worked differently from existing ones, but the trial had found that the new drug was ineffective. The argument came over Dr. Visser’s determination to write a research paper saying that the study was “inconclusive” rather than the drug didn’t work at all, and later we learn that Grace had a personal reason for hoping the drug would work. In the opening scene we’d actually seen Grace seem upbeat and happy, but later we learn that she’d suffered from long-term depression since age 13 and had decided to kill herself. She’d already made two suicide attempts, one five years before and one two years before, and in both cases her parents Henry (Michael Tow) and Eleanor (Deborah S. Craig) had signed her into the hospital and therefore knew about it. Her killer was her ex-boyfriend Curtis Foster, who agreed to help her die in her own apartment, though in the end the lethal injection drugs didn’t work (the recent case of Christa Pike, sentenced to death by lethal injection in Tennessee for a murder committed 30 years ago but who survived the experience, albeit in intense pain, is actually mentioned in the script) and Curtis had to kill her by smothering her with a pillow.

One of the interesting twists in the Alamo-Wong script is that the attitude of Henry and Eleanor Zhou does a 180° during the trial, from the desire for vengeance to seeing Curtis as a good friend of their daughter who only wanted to help her relieve her suffering. The case also arouses an emotional conflict between the two prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi). Samantha is five months’ pregnant (though this is something of a surprise since the Law and Order screenwriters have not previously mentioned a husband, partner, significant other or even a one-night stand that might have knocked her up), and in one scene in a corridor of the courthouse Eleanor Zhou confides in her that motherhood is a burden as well as a satisfaction. It’s an odd bit of connection between a woman who’s just lost her only child and a woman who’s about to become a mother for (presumably) the first time. Samantha’s impending motherhood is making her feel sorrier for the Zhous and more sympathetic to Curtis Foster, to the point where she actually pleads with Price to arrange a deal and allow Curtis to plead to manslaughter. Price in turn is fearful that if Curtis is allowed to plead down, or even worse is acquitted by the jury, it will open the floodgates. He notes that the New York legislature passed a right-to-die law but specifically limited its effect to terminal physical illnesses, and in fact put a provision in that the person seeking legal permission for an assisted suicide must be of “sound mind.” If Curtis Foster gets away with killing Grace Zhou, Price warns, just about everyone suffering from long-term depression will grab the opportunity to enlist doctors or health professionals (or, in Curtis’s case, wanna-be health professionals) in helping them off themselves. Curtis’s defense counsel, Rebecca Fuller (Hettienne Park), calls Grace’s psychiatrist to the stand, and she testifies not only that untreatable depression should be considered a terminal condition within the right-to-die law but that Grace’s seemingly good spirits in the last week of her life should be interpreted as gratitude that her ordeal would finally end soon. This is not an easy show to write about or to watch; it’s Law and Order at its best, where we’re not sure either how we want to see it end or whether justice would be best served by Curtis’s acquittal or conviction – though in the end [spoiler alert!] Curtis is found guilty of murdering Grace, largely because in the end when the lethal injection drugs didn’t work he killed her with the pillow instead of calling 911 to have her rescued.

Godzilla Minus Zero (Toho Studios, Robot Communications, GKIDS, 2026)

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

Last night (Tuesday, November 10) my husband Charles and I joined about eight other members of Bears San Diego for a showing at the AMC Mission Valley theatres of the 2026 film Godzilla Minus Zero. This turned out to be a direct sequel to the 2023 film Godzilla Minus One, made by the Japanese Toho company (which developed the character of Godzilla in the first place for a 1954 movie called Gojira which I’ve previously hailed as one of only two truly great giant-monster movies, the original 1933 King Kong being the other) once they recovered the rights to him from Legendary Entertainment, the U.S. company affiliated with Warner Bros. that had made a four-film sequence in the so-called “Monsterverse” that paired Godzilla with King Kong and various other giant-monster characters. I went into the theatre not knowing that this was a Japanese production or that the film was (except for a couple of brief scenes featuring American military characters speaking English) in Japanese with English subtitles. I give a lot of credit to the largely youthful audience for being willing to sit through a film with subtitles, though one critic noted that young people growing up in today’s Internet- and social-media-saturated world are used to reading text on their screens. What surprised me most about the film was that it may well be the grimmest Godzilla movie ever made since the 1954 original. It takes place in 1949, just four years after Japan’s defeat in World War II and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time the U.S. was still ruling Japan directly as an occupying power, under the direction of General Douglas MacArthur, which continued until the U.S. and Japan signed the Treaty of San Francisco on April 28, 1952.

As in the 1954 Gojira (the first Godzilla movie and still the best of the ones I’ve seen, far better than the brutally re-edited and largely re-shot version the U.S. got from American International two years later), Japan in this movie seems to be going through a nationwide post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from the loss of World War II and in particular the obliteration of much of their urban infrastructure first from the fire-bombing raids that had pounded Tokyo and other cities and then from the atomic attacks. The central characters are Kôichi Shikishima (Ryūnosuke Kamiki), a would-be kamikaze pilot whose suicide bombing raid was interrupted during the war by a mechanical problem with his plane; his wife, Noriko Ôishi (Minami Hamabe), who during the events of the 2023 Godzilla Minus One got contaminated with some of Godzilla’s DNA and therefore has a mysterious telepathic ability to communicate with him; their pre-pubescent daughter (the Wikipedia page on the film describes her as adopted but that wasn’t clear in the movie itself) Akiko (Sae Nagatani); and various scientists. Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) heads an agency called the Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau, which publicly pretends to be in the business of responding to natural disasters but is really in existence to ward off attacks on Japan by giant monsters. The coastal city of Matsumoto is attacked by a giant creature that looks a lot like Godzilla except that it can fly.

An embittered scientist named Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka), who lost a son at Hiroshima (the poor kid’s burned body becomes a recurring image during the film), and his assistant, Akira Hagiwara (Kô Maehara), work on the response to this new monster, depicted as an arrival from outer space. The scientists name it “Ghidorah” as a mash-up of the words for “chimera” and “hydra” (as the original Japanese name for Godzilla, Gojira, was a mash-up of “gorilla” and “whale,” which was what the creature was supposed to look like originally until director Ishirô Honda decided to make it a dinosaur instead). With the reluctant support of American authorities (there’s one rather bitter scene in which the insignia of a U.S. plane is painted out and replaced with a red sun, the emblem of Japan’s air force, so the U.S. can maintain plausible deniability that their aircraft are being used to hunt down giant monsters), an aerial expedition against Ghidorah is undertaken. The fact that all the planes in this 1949-set film are still being moved by propellers instead of jets adds to the retro atmosphere of this movie. Shikishima’s two colleagues are killed in the attack against Ghidorah, but he successfully launches a new sort of fuel-air bomb intended to kill the monster. Only it has the opposite effect; instead of doing him in it transforms him into something even more lethal, complete with three heads and two tails as well as the ability to lift and destroy buildings with a gravity beam. The authorities eventually decide that the only way they can defeat Ghidorah is to revive Godzilla, who sank in the sea at the end of the 2023 film, and to do that they invent a device called a “resonance wave amplifier.” (The fact that the electronics of it are powered by vacuum tubes instead of transistors, which the U.S. invented but Japan most successfully exploited commercially, also adds a nice retro feel to this film’s tech.)

They test this contraption by turning it on and immediately causing a flock of nearby crows to fly into their building, a sequence that reminded Charles of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Unfortunately, they need Noriko Ôishi to operate this machine to revive Godzilla and turn it against Ghidorah, and this puts a strain on her already weakened (by its infection with Godzilla’s DNA) body. There’s an odd fantasy sequence in which the embittered Murakami envisions sending the revived Godzilla to the U.S. to destroy the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge, which reminded me of the 1932 film Chandu the Magician and the similar sequence in which that film’s villain, Roxor (Bela Lugosi), fantasizes using his bizarre machines to destroy several world capitals, including Paris and London. Meteorologist Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa) has figured out where Ghidorah is likely to turn up next by examining the weather patterns around Japan. The scientists running the response effort select the Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo as the location where they want Godzilla and Ghidorah to have their big fight scene, since Godzilla already obliterated most of it in the 2023 film. The plan is to let the two monsters weaken each other and then kill the one that survived. They first attack Ghidorah with liquid nitrogen to make its body brittle and frozen, and then they drop a heat bomb on it, only instead of going on to kill Godzilla after they’ve finished off Ghidorah, the crew receives orders (from whom we’re not sure) to keep him alive after all in case he’s ever needed to ward off another giant-monster threat. In the finale Kôichi Shikishima and Noriko Ôishi decide they literally know too much to allow the government to let them remain at liberty. At first they threaten to leave their daughter Akiko behind with their next-door neighbor, orphanage operator Sumiko Ôta (Sakura Andō), but she’s all too aware that the other orphans were all told that by their parents, who were mostly killed in the war. At the end Shikishima and Ôishi let Akiko get on their motorcycle and flee with them.

I liked Godzilla Minus Zero a good deal better than I’d thought I would, mainly because it duplicated the sense of social pain better than any Godzilla movie I’ve seen since the 1954 Gojira. I’ve never seen the 2023 Godzilla Minus One but I’d like to (even though there are a lot of movies on my must-see list ahead of it). Another thing I like about this movie is the writer/director, Takashi Yamazaki, wisely kept Godzilla and Ghidorah off screen through much of the movie; though that made much of the plot exposition more ponderous than it might have been, it also had the Val Lewton-style effect of making the monsters more menacing precisely because they weren’t being pounded into our faces every minute. I was also impressed by the musical score by Naoki Satô, even though it was mixed awfully loudly in the manner of most modern movies aimed at the teen audience. I even liked the surround-sound effects (this was apparently the first Japanese film made in the IMAX format), even though some of those low-frequency rumbles seemed to go back to the late 1970’s and Universal’s “Sensurround” process. Still, I had a better time watching Godzilla Minus Zero than I was expecting!

Battlestar Galactica: "Saga of a Star World" (Glen A. Larson Productions, Universal Television, ABC-TV, aired September 17, 1978)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 8) my husband Charles and I watched “Saga of a Star World,” the first episode (of 24) in the short-lived ABC-TV series Battlestar Galactica, a really obvious knockoff of Star Wars produced by Universal Television. I got interested in this when Fanfare magazine sent me a boxed set of eight CD’s in a five-volume package containing Stu Phillips’s original scores for the Battlestar Galactica show. I’ll also never forget the hype that surrounded Battlestar Galactica when it was first aired, or the bad luck that beset ABC the night the show was scheduled to premiere. It was September 17, 1978, also the night then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter announced from Camp David near Washington, D.C. that he had successfully brokered a peace deal between Israel and Egypt. The opening of Battlestar Galactica was pre-empted so we could see the ceremony and hear a lot of promising talk from the principals – Carter, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat – about what a great deal they’d made with each other and how peace would finally come to the Middle East at last. That was a really strange lead-in to a TV show whose whole plot is based around a peace treaty that goes horribly wrong and allows an attack that wipes out virtually all of the human race. Set many centuries in the future, Battlestar Galactica posited that Earth had colonized a string of nearby planets in other solar systems, only this had happened so long ago that the people living in these colonies had only dim and distant memories and legends about their true origins. The bad guys in Battlestar Galactica are the Cylons, who have been fighting a war with the colonists for 1,000 years and seek the utter annihilation of the human race (sort of like Hitler with the Jews).

The Cylons are actually robots; they were originally invented by a race of sentient reptiles but, like the robots in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (the pioneering 1920 science-fiction play that not only invented the concept of artificial humans but actually coined the term “robots” for them; Čapek took it from the Czech word Robotnik, meaning “worker”), they rebelled against their makers, killed them en masse, and took over. It’s as if George Lucas had decided to make everybody in the Star Wars Evil Empire look like Darth Vader, though I wondered if Battlestar Galactica creator Glen A. Larson had taken the concept from the Daleks of Doctor Who, also killer robots who wanted to annihilate the human race. (Charles cited another possible source for this plot element: Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series, about a universe whose killer robots, which like the Cylons obliterated the race that created them, seek to eliminate not only human beings but all biological life forms, Saberhagen first introduced this universe in a 1963 magazine story, published his first book using it in 1967, and continued until 2005, two years before his death, so it was still running when Battlestar Galactica was made.) When the “Saga of a Star World” episode begins, the Cylons have sued for peace after 1,000 years of war against humanity, and President Adar (Lew Ayres), leader of the Council of Twelve that rules the various human colonies, has gladly accepted the peace offer. Only it’s a Cylon trap and, as the humans are resting and taking it easy thinking there will be peace at last, they will launch their genocidal attack and eliminate humanity once and for all. There seems to be something uncomfortably ironic about the casting of Ayres, real-life conscientious objector during World War II, as the President whose appeasement policy leads to humanity’s near-extermination, as if series creator Glen A. Larson and casting director Mark Malis were telling Ayres, “You were wrong then and you’re wrong now.”

The one member of the Council of Twelve who sees through the Cylons’ scheme is Adama (Lorne Greene, once again playing a single father with a number of adult kids as he did on his star-making role on the Western TV series Bonanza), who’s also the commander of Galactica, one of 12 “battlestar” spaceships that are the main defense force of the colonists. He sends his most trusted pilots, his son Captain Apollo (Richard Hatch, the only actor who appeared in both the original Battlestar Galactica and its 2004-2008 reboot) and Lieutenant Starbuck (Dirk Benedict), who’s dating Adama’s daughter Lt. Athena (Maren Jensen) but also has, you might say, a girl on every planet. Unfortunately, Starbuck bails at the last minute to give Apollo’s brother Zac (Rick Springfield, whom Charles immediately recognized even though at the time he’d only appeared as an actor on General Hospital; his brief but spectacular career as a singer would come later) a chance to fly his first patrol. The Cylons attack them and Apollo escapes but Zac is killed. The Cylons also destroy all the other 11 battlestars, including the Atlantia, which kills President Adar, as well as virtually all the colonized planets and their inhabitants. The federation organizes a Dunkirk-style evacuation of as many survivors as they can find and fit in on a ragtag batch of leftover freighters that made it through the Cylon attack. The rest of the show is a pretty dreary succession of battles and near-misses as the evacuees are understandably upset that they’re on spaceships without food or water. They call the fleet command and get only evasive answers that what’s left of the federation’s leadership is aware of the situation. The Galactica and the freighters make it past the Nova of Madagon, their only route to safety, by sending advance fighters out to detonate all the mines the Cylons have planted there.

Ultimately they land on a planet called Carillon, where there’s plenty of food and drink. There’s also a major casino whose players seemingly never lose, and a deposit of tylium, the fuel needed for the federation’s spaceships. Previously the federation had set up a tylium mining operation, but Count Baltar (John Colicos, an actor who’d worked with Igor Stravinsky; in 1962 in Canada he and Stravinsky had recorded the five-minute mini-cantata “Babel,” which Stravinsky had written for the multi-composer piece Genesis Suite in 1945), a traitor in league with the Cylons, had falsely reported that the mine didn’t contain enough tylium to be economically viable. Starbuck gets distracted by one of the evacuees, Cassiopeia (Laurette Spang), a “socialator” (a legal but not socially accepted prostitute), only their attempt at a tryst is caught by his girlfriend Athena, who fills the cabin they’re in with steam so he's badly burned when he makes the all-important trip to disarm the Cylon mines. There’s also a single woman and her son, an obnoxiously cute kid named Boxey (Noah Hathaway), whose dog was killed in the Cylon attack on their planet, though the federation scientists make him a robot replica (essentially Battlestar Galactica’s equivalent to R2-D2 on Star Wars) with which he falls in love. Eventually, and not surprisingly, the planet Carillon turns out to be yet another trap; its inhabitants, the Ovions, are in league with the Cylons and have set up that casino where nobody ever loses to lure the surviving humans to the planet so they can be either destroyed or turned into slave laborers to mine tylium for the Cylon war fleet. There’s also a three-being vocal group called the Tucanas, who look like normal Black women with sky-high Afros except that their facial organs are doubled: four eyes, two noses, and two mouths. Starbuck sees them perform in the film’s equivalent of the Star Wars cantina and immediately wants to sign them up and make money off them (though how he can do this in an era in which almost the entire human race has been destroyed, along with almost all of its infrastructure, is beyond me).

There’s also another traitor, Council of Twelve member Sire Uri (Ray Milland), who cuts a deal with the Cylons by which they will voluntarily disarm and prove to the Cylons that the human race (or what’s left of it) means them no harm by destroying the Galactica and all its weapons. The treaty is supposed to be announced at a ceremony in which Apollo and Starbuck are going to be given the highest human award. Once again most of the humans fall for it but Adama sees it as a trap; he realizes that the Cylons mean to get all the human warriors together so they can destroy them in one fell swoop. So he and his second-in-command, Col. Tigh (Terry Carter) concoct a plan to dress as many of the battlestar’s support staff as possible in battle uniforms to fool the Cylons into eliminating the wrong people. Starbuck catches on when he sees people he recognizes in uniforms they don’t normally wear. Ultimately the good guys win when they target a Cylon base star and send it crashing into Carillon, where it sets off a tylium explosion that literally blows up the planet. Then the fleet sets off on its long-delayed search for the legendary planet Earth, the only place in the universe where they can hope to be safe. Battlestar Galactica, seen at this remove, is alternately frustrating and campy. 20th Century-Fox, the production company that made Star Wars, sued Universal for plagiarism, noting 34 points of similarity between Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, though when Charles read that on the Battlestar Galactica Wikipedia page he thought it was rich of anyone connected with Star Wars to sue anyone else for plagiarism when Star Wars creator George Lucas himself ripped off so much of Star Wars from previous stories. Universal countersued and claimed that Lucas had ripped off the Buck Rogers serials from the 1940’s and their 1972 film Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull, who’d worked on the famous psychedelic ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the light show at the end of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Lucas also sued John Dykstra, who’d built the spaceship models for both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars, for having left his company, Industrial Light and Magic, to work on Battlestar Galactica. (Dykstra was acknowledged with a producer credit on the show, and when the National Lampoon parodied Battlestar Galactica they called it Battlestar Dykstra.) Charles and I were watching “Saga of a Star World” on a DVD (not Blu-Ray) from Universal, part of a multi-disc box containing the full initial run of the show (24 episodes from September 17, 1978 to April 29, 1979). It presented the show in the original 4:3 TV aspect ratio (not the cropped 16:9 widescreen version that was briefly released as a theatrical movie), and it was a lousy transfer. Some scenes looked relatively clear but others were intensely grainy, and it also didn’t help that the soundtrack was mono (Battlestar Galactica was made at the dawn of the stereo TV era) and that Stu Phillips’s score was muddy and mixed far too softly. Phillips’s score, the main reason I was watching this (I had received a five-volume, eight-CD boxed set of the music from Intrada Records via Fanfare for review purposes), was about what you’d expect. In a project that from the get-go was intended as a knock-off of Star Wars, Phillips knew that he’d have to go after John Williams’s sound as much as possible. He responded with lots of loud brass fanfares accompanied by strings and plenty of pounding percussion, though occasionally the scripts offered him opportunities to write more quietly and lyrically. Battlestar Galactica was a flop on its initial TV run and ABC canceled it after just seven months on the air, largely because it cost so much to produce (Universal spent $8 million on the pilot alone), but it developed a cult following and Universal revived it for a new series that ran from 2004 to 2009 and produced 74 episodes, considerably more than the 24 of the original show.

Breakdown (Pegasus Productions, Realart Pictures, 1952)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 7) my husband Charles and I watched an unusual film on Turner Classic Movies: Breakdown, a 1952 boxing melodrama directed by Edmond Angelo (whose only film this was) and written by Robert Abel based on a play of his called The Samson Slasher. (That title had me dreading that there’d be a plot complication along the lines of the 1940 James Cagney vehicle City for Conquest, in which he played a prizefighter billed as “Young Samson.” His enemies are gangsters who spike his eye medicine with poison, thereby blinding him like the Biblical Samson. Fortunately, Abel didn’t go there.) This came at the end of an odd run of movies including two co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and Diane Warren, who probably did more than any other single person to rehabilitate professional songwriting as a career path. The irony is that one of the films she was co-hosting was A Hard Day’s Night, whose stars, The Beatles (John Lennon and Paul McCartney in particular), had been instrumental (pardon the pun) in destroying non-performing songwriting as a musical career because not only did they rely on their own material, their manager, Brian Epstein, promoted that about them. (The other film Mankiewicz and Warren co-hosted was Born Free, an O.K. movie with a quite memorable theme song by John Barry and Don Black that won the Academy Award and became a huge hit.) Between A Hard Day’s Night and Breakdown TCM showed a 20-minute short in the MGM series Crime Does Not Pay: The Public Pays (1942), about an attempt by gangsters to set up an extortion racket targeting dairies in the fictional “Claiborne City.” Directed by Errol Taggart and written by John C. Higgins, The Public Pays was a pretty straightforward little film (some of the Crime Does Not Pay shorts had intimations of film noir about them, but this one didn’t) whose main distinction was casting Cy Kendall, usually an oily villain, as the hero: John Carney, the Claiborne City police chief who partners with Paige Creamery CEO Charles Paige (Ivan Miller) to bust the extortionists by infiltrating his officers into Paige’s workforce and having them pose as milkmen. (In an earlier Crime Does Not Pay short, 1941’s Coffins on Wheels, he’d played a cynical used-car dealer who sells unsafe cars to teenagers.)

The 1952 Breakdown is a truly unusual movie, at once boxing drama, gangster movie, romantic melodrama, and film noir. Terry Williams (William Bishop) is a promising young boxer who runs afoul of the big-city political machine when he intervenes to stop them from roughing up a public speaker who’s trying to oppose them. In the course of the melee one of the machine’s enforcers gets killed accidentally, and Williams is convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison for 10 years. The judge in the case, Sam Hannum (John Vosper), has been bribed by the political machine to ensure Williams’s conviction by the promise of a major political career, including the state governorship. Meanwhile, machine gangster Nick Sampson (Sheldon Leonard) and his brother Pete (Wally Cassell) are looking for a potential championship contender, and they find him in Williams when they watch Williams and a sparring partner fight in a ring set up in the prison’s exercise yard. (Fortunately we get a lot of yummy shots of William Bishop in his boxing togs, with plenty of chest hair. For years Hollywood had forbidden men to have chest hair; if they had to go topless and they weren’t chest-hairless au naturel, they had to shave it.) Love, or at least sex, enters the story in the person of June Hannum (Ann Richards, who’d got a big star buildup at MGM but abruptly quit the business to marry director Angelo; she hadn’t made a film in four years and this would be her last). She’s not only the niece of Judge Hannum, she’s also Nick Sampson’s girlfriend, though she’s only reluctantly with him and she quickly gets the hots for Williams. Terry Williams works his way up as a boxer through a series of fights, in each of which he wins by a knockout in the first round. Unlike the heavyweight contender in Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall (1956), an inept boxer who’s carefully built up through a series of fixed fights, Williams is genuinely talented in the ring. Though writer Abel doesn’t come right out and say Williams’s opponents are being paid to take dives – he has one of the characters say that his adversaries have been carefully selected – the monotonous similarity of the outcomes certainly leaves that impression.

At least two characters in the film, Harry “Punchy” Adams (Richard Benedict) and “Longshot” Maginnis (Joe McTurk), serve as warnings of the long-term consequences of a prizefighting career. They both work as ill-defined assistants in Pete Sampson’s gym, and “Punchy”’s ex-girlfriend Candy Allen (Anne Gwynne) is so angry at the sport she pleads with Terry to give it up while both his looks and his brains remain intact. (He’s so far gone he literally has no idea who she is when they see each other at the gym.) In fact, before one bout Terry is told to look carefully at the face of his opponent to determine how much experience that man has had by the number of scars he’s carrying from previous bouts. If nothing else, Breakdown is a particularly vivid film in terms of dramatizing the toll boxing takes as a career on its practitioners; in some ways it anticipates The Raging Bull (1980) in this regard. Even previous films like The Set-Up and Champion (both 1949) didn’t go as far as this one. The movie reaches its climax when June Hannum puts pressure on Terry to agree to a championship fight against reigning titleholder Joe Thompson (Hal Baylor) to benefit the Milk Fund charity (“Milk Fund” was an all-purpose nonprofit for which to raise money in classic-era movies). Pete Sampson insists that Terry isn’t ready for a championship fight and won’t be for another year or so, but the other characters pull rank on him and convince him to do it. Once the bout actually begins, Pete Sampson turns out to be right; Terry is totally outclassed and is beaten so badly by the champ one wonders why the referees don’t stop the fight. I’m guessing the reason is that for his anti-boxing message Robert Abel needed Terry not only to lose but to be beaten so badly he needs hospitalization by the time it’s all over, and he’s literally carried out of the arena on a stretcher. Director Angelo gives us plenty of close-ups of Terry’s previously pristine face as it’s been hammered into near-oblivion by Thompson’s blows, though at least June (ya remember June?) stays with him at the end and is presumably going to remain a part of his life, no matter what he does with the rest of it.

Breakdown is a quite accomplished movie even though it had a rock-bottom production budget and an 11-day shooting schedule. It was filmed at Republic studios even though it wasn’t a Republic release (it was produced by a collapsible outfit called Pegasus Productions and released through Realart, which was usually a reissue label for Universal but also released a few originals like this), though the special-effects credit to “Consolidated Film Laboratories, Inc.” is a giveaway. Consolidated Film Laboratories was Republic’s parent company; Republic was founded in 1935 by Consolidated’s owner, Herbert J. Yates, who offered to forgive the debts Mascot and Monogram had run up to him for processing their film if he could take control of their companies. Yates paid off both Nat Levine of Mascot and W. Ray Johnston of Monogram. Johnston banked his money and, after a falling-out with Yates, re-started Monogram in 1937; Levine blew his on bad horse-racing bets and had a catch-as-catch-can existence until his death in 1989 at age 90. As for Edmond Angelo, after Breakdown (and after a lawsuit against Realart because he claimed they had sold the film to TV too soon after its theatrical run), he left the movie business (as well as the theatre, where he’d produced plays before his brief foray into filmmaking) to become, of all things, a rocket scientist for a California aerospace firm. Richards pursued a career as a writer and poet but mostly just stayed out of the public eye and stayed married to Angelo until his death in 1983 (she died in 2006).

The Enchanted Cottage (RKO, 1945)

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

Last night (Friday, November 6) my husband Charles and I watched an alternately intriguing and frustrating film from RKO in 1945 called The Enchanted Cottage, based on a play by British dramatist Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, who premiered it in 1920 and called it “a fable in three acts.” It was first filmed in 1924 by First National with Richard Barthelmess as star and John S. Robertson (best known today for the 1920 John Barrymore silent version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) as director. Not surprisingly, the original play took place in Sussex, England in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II). In 1945 RKO remade it with John Cromwell as director and Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire as stars. They were coming off the success of a 1943 film called Claudia, about the trials and tribulations of a young newlywed couple adjusting to married life, which McGuire (though not Young) had previously done on stage as a play. RKO’s producer, Harriet Parsons (who nearly lost the assignment to Dudley Nichols and had to fight the studio brass to stay on the film), and her writers, DeWitt Bodeen and Herman J. Mankiewicz (who came on for a last-minute rewrite just before the shooting started), moved the story to the U.S., to New England, and set it in an otherwise destroyed or ruined mansion of which only a cottage survived. The property’s former owner had made it a practice to rent the cottage to newlywed couples on their honeymoons, allowing them to stay as long as they liked, but the current owner, Abigail Minnett (Mildred Natwick in quite a good performance), has ended the practice. Previous couples have etched their names and dates when they lived there onto the cottage’s windows. The latest tenants are Oliver Bradford (Robert Young) and his fiancée Beatrice Alexander (Hillary Brooke, who frankly is too strong a personality for the nothing role she’s playing here; I liked her a lot better as the black-hearted villainess and partner of Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes film The Woman in Green, made the same year with Basil Rathbone as Holmes, Nigel Bruce as Watson, and Henry Daniell as Moriarty). When Oliver borrows the engagement ring he’s given Beatrice and tries to use it to etch their names on the window, the stone falls out and Mrs. Minnett tells them they’re not supposed to do that yet since they haven’t actually married.

The date is December 7, 1941, and when the Pearl Harbor attack happens that very day Oliver becomes a pilot with the U.S. Army Air Corps (it wasn’t until 1955 that the U.S. Air Force became a separate service branch of its own). Mrs. Minnett is herself a war widow; her husband was killed in the Great War and she’s kept her desk calendar set to April 6, 1917, the date the U.S. formally entered World War I. The whole story is framed as a flashback narrated by Major John Hillgrove (Herbert Marshall), who was blinded while serving in the Great War and took up piano playing and musical composition as part of his recovery process. I couldn’t help but note that Marshall is playing a man who became disabled as a result of World War I when the war had disabled him in real life as well, though instead of going blind he’d lost his left leg in the Second Battle of Arras, France. (To add to the irony, Marshall’s war injury occurred on April 9, 1917, just three days after the date on Mrs. Minnett’s calendar.) Oliver returns to the cottage a year later with his face badly scarred by an accident from when his plane was shot down in combat in the Pacific theatre. There he takes up with Laura Pennington (Dorothy McGuire), a homely woman whom Mrs. Minnett had hired years before as a maid. The two not-quite-attractive people are gradually drawn together and ultimately fall in love and get married, despite each of them having anxieties that the other has married them only out of pity. Hillgrove regularly visits the cottage with his nephew, Danny “Taxi” Stanton (Alec Englander), leading him. As he would the next year in the ponderous Tyrone Power vehicle The Razor’s Edge, Marshall as Hillgrove is the voice of sanity in this rather mixed set of emotions and frequently prattles on about spirituality and the life beyond this one. Laura and Oliver announce that they’ve gone through a physical transformation that’s made them both beautiful, or at least conventionally attractive – only the sudden appearance of Oliver’s mother, Violet Price (Spring Byington), and stepfather Frederick Price (Richard Gaines), breaks the illusion and their images in the movie revert to the ones we’ve been seeing all movie.

Hillgrove narrates all this in flashback during a party which he’s giving in Oliver’s and Laura’s honor and at which he’s going to play a piano reduction of the new tone poem, “The Enchanted Cottage,” which he’s written in their honor. Unfortunately they’re late coming to their own party and Hillgrove has to fill in for them by narrating their story and playing the piece (with Max Rabinowitz as his piano double). Ultimately Oliver and Laura etch their names on the window of the cottage and then show up at Hillgrove’s party declaring their undying love for each other. I looked up the Wikipedia page on Pinero’s play and learned not only that the original was set in England (as I had guessed from the fact that no one drinks coffee in the film; all the characters’ hot drink of choice is tea) but it had a much greater supernatural element. In the original play we never get to see Oliver (whose last name is the clunkier “Bashforth”) before he’s disabled, and his injuries are quite a bit more severe. According to Wikipedia, “In the stage directions, Oliver is described as an emaciated wreck of a man, broken by the war. The dialogue reveals that he was wounded in the neck and that it is painful to straighten his left leg, but he says his ‘head,’ meaning his mind, is the worst. In the 1924 film, his body is contorted, he walks with a cane, and he cannot put his right foot to the ground. In the 1945 film, most of Oliver’s face is scarred, and he has completely lost the use of his right arm and hand. He can walk without aids and there is no visible impairment of his lower body.” (I must say I didn’t notice that his right arm was disabled.) Also in the play Mrs. Minnett is actually a witch, albeit a beneficent one (one would think that just six years after MGM filmed The Wizard of Oz a “good witch” wouldn’t have been an unfamiliar concept to an American movie audience), and there’s a long dream sequence for Laura in the second act in which she dreams that both she and Oliver are good-looking people.

In the dream they’re attended by Mrs. Minnett and at least one other witch, along with three other married couples, three bridesmaids, and assorted cherubs, imps, and children. (In 1920 audiences for the original play had had a problem reconciling the supernatural plot elements with Pinero’s previous reputation as a rom-com writer, just as James M. Barrie is thought of today mainly as the author of Peter Pan even though most of his works were rom-coms, too.) Alas, in this film writers Bodeen (who’d done a much better job balancing realistic and supernatural elements in his script for the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur Cat People three years earlier) and Mankiewicz can’t get the supernatural plot elements to work at all. When we first see Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire in full Hollywood makeup and Herbert Marshall’s character proclaims it a “miracle,” all we can think is, “God must be a really good plastic surgeon.” The Enchanted Cottage is one film from Hollywood’s classic era I’d never seen before, and I’m not sure what to make of it now. Charles said he thought he might like it better on later reflection than he did when we were actually watching it. Curiously, there was an attempt to remake The Enchanted Cottage in 1973 and the would-be producers wanted Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire to be in it, Young in Marshall’s role and McGuire in Natwick’s. Young, who was on record as saying this was the best film he ever made, was eager to do it, but McGuire watched the earlier film and said, essentially, “You can’t go home again.” The Enchanted Cottage wasn’t remade until 2016, with Richard Hatch (not the same one who won the first season of Survivor; this Hatch said, “We forget there are other people with our name, and somehow we feel an ownership with our name. Honestly, this is one of the strangest experiences that's ever happened in my life, and I'm having to deal with it”) and Sarah Navratil in the leads and three credited directors (Joshua Arcadi, Ryan Del Nero, and Andrew Fisher), not a good sign.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Forsaken" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 5, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, November 5) I put on NBC for the latest two episodes of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. They’re showing them in reverse order these days, with SVU first, to make room for that abominable “reality” show The Traitors they’ve scheduled for 8 p.m. The SVU episode was called “Forsaken” and opened at a much-publicized wedding of a major male comedian who’d been living with the same woman for years but had finally got around to tying the knot legally. At first I assumed that the comedian would be the principal perpetrator and it would be a story about how he raped a woman to get his rocks off one last time before he got hitched, but writer Justine Ferrara took her plot in a quite different direction. The victim is Chloe Davis (Lauren Cole, turning in an impressive performance), who’s found lying unconscious in a pool of her own blood at the wedding party. The investigating police detectives, including Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), have to deal with Chloe’s overbearing mother Monica (Jessalyn Gilsig) and even more overbearing stepfather Rick (Bill Heck). Chloe gives a description of her assailant as a young man in his 20’s, tall, white, and with red hair. As things turn out, a man matching that description, Scott Germon (Harrison Ball), was actually at the event and is arrested for the crime, but he turns out to be innocent. We don’t feel too badly for him, mainly because he was at the wedding party to sell cocaine to one of the other guests and there was already a bench warrant outstanding on him for violating his probation on a previous offense.

It turns out that the Davises are a monumentally dysfunctional family even by SVU standards: they consist of Rick, Monica, Chloe, her stepbrother Tyler (Sam Cusson), and her seven-year-old half-brother Evan (Emmett Moss). Evan is the only direct offspring of both Rick and Monica; Chloe is Monica’s daughter by her previous partner (who’s in prison for a long stretch of his own) and Tyler is Rick’s son by his earlier wife. So Tyler and Chloe have one of those weird sort of relationships that is psychologically incestuous even though it isn’t literally (sort of like Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza in Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein, who grew up together as virtual brother and sister even though they were not biologically related). What’s more, Tyler is literally a psychopath and Rick has been actively covering for him, intimidating the rest of the family into endorsing his evil. It turns out that Tyler was Chloe’s assailant, and he attacked her for revenge after another woman whom he was cruising at the wedding party turned him down. Prosecutor Dominic Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) has the problem of convincing the trial jury of this, particularly since Rick Davis was a quite persuasive witness for Tyler’s defense. Monica offers to break spousal privilege and testify for the prosecution about what’s really been going on in their household, but Carisi decides that she’s changed her story so often that she won’t be credible to the jury.

Instead he calls seven-year-old Evan, and after the usual rigmarole involving a child witness as to whether or not they will be “swearable” – whether they understand the difference between the truth and a lie well enough to comprehend the oath – Evan testifies. While his son is on the witness stand Rick stalks out of the courtroom, and that’s where Dick Wolf and Justine Ferrara end it. We don’t see the jury return a verdict either way, and we are left with a sense of dread as to just what’s going to happen to the other Davises after Evan broke Rick’s omertà about Tyler’s psychopathology. I’m guessing they’re setting us up for a sequel. The most remarkable aspect about this episode is Sam Cusson’s chilling performance as Tyler. He’s of medium height and has an angelic face reminiscent of the young David Cassidy (he’s close enough he’d be good casting for a biopic, especially if he could sing), and he projects just the right sort of affect (or lack thereof) I’ve seen in TV documentaries about real psychos. Incidentally this was the 599th episode of SVU, and afterwards they announced that Christopher Meloni is going to return for the 600th episode next week. That will be a treat, even though he’s become too old and grizzled to do much for me the way he did when he was on SVU for its first 12 seasons and I literally lusted after him (as, I suspect, did much of Gay male America; when he was on the show I used to joke that SVU had two different fan bases: Gay men who thought Christopher Meloni was hot and straight men who thought Mariska Hargitay was hot).