r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 p.m. I watched the three weekly episodes of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order ffranchise, starting with an episode of the flagship Law and Order program, “Vicious Cycle” (though the updated imdb.com page for the episode lists the title as “Camouflage”) in which a mass shooter takes over a Ne wYork subway car and methodically targets people who look Asian even though the car is filled with the usual ethnic mix of people who ride the New York subways. Assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy, a British actor who does a marvelous job suppressing his normal accent and talking like an American) happens to be in the scene – he had just finished a lunch date with his girlfriend de jour and was heading towards the subway station when he sees a whole bunch of people running in the opposite direction. He saves the life of Kimmy Hsu (Emily N. Rudolph), a young Asian woman whom he spies bleeding out on the station platform, and uses his tie as a tourniquet to stop her bleeding until a uniformed officer arrives. After a few red herrings – including a homeless man who picked up the gym bag with one strap torn that the killer used to carry his guns and ammunition – the police finally arrest the killer, John Nelson (Ian Bell), on a tip from his girlfriend, Jessica Farrell (Tru Collins), who’s married to someone else but has not only been in an ongoing relationship with Nelson but had a deaf-mute daughter by him.
The problem is Jessica wants Price to assure her that she’ll never have to have her name revealed or testify in open court – only the judge in the case, Arnold Pappas (Tyrone Mitchell Henderson), orders her to appear in court on a motion from Nelson’s attorney, Andrea Rankin (Claire Coffee), challenging the legitimacy of the search that uncovered Nelson’s murder weapon. This poses a crisis of conscience for Price as he had to agree, in order to retain jurisdiction of the case against the U.S. Department of Justice, to seek the death penalty for Nelson despite his personal opposition to capital punishment and his work, before he became a prosecutor, with Andrea on the Innocence Project designed to get people wrongly sentenced to death either new trials, outright acquittals or at least communtations of their sentences to life imprisonment. Time and time again Andrea reminds Nolan of his true feelings about the death penalty, including quoting him a law review article he wrote declaring it barbaric. Midway through the case Andrea changes her defense and calls in an expert witness, Dr. Stanley Thibodeau (Brad Haberlee), to testify that John Nelson did indeed kill people based on their race or ethnicity – but he’s not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect because he was raised by his dad to hate Asians and his prejudice went into hyper-drive by the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread blaming of it on China. Fortunately the jury sees through this B.S. and convicts Nelson of mass murder – and gives him the death penalty in the second phase of the trial – but Nolan is left feeling ashamed of the way he worked hard to get even a heinous monster a death sentence when he’s morally opposed to the idea of execution. It was a good Law and Order, but they’ve done better crisis-of-conscience episodes than this and I would have liked to see more about John Nelson himself, particularly about how someone so nondescript and seemingly harmless could be a vicious killer.
