r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago, on September 29, NBC ran three episodes of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: the original Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order episode, “:Battle Lines,” was actually quite good; it’s one of Dick Wolf’s ripped-from-the-headlines specials in which a teenage woman is walking alone through a New York park at night. She gets accosted by various unsavory types, including gang members and others who mean her no good, but ultimately she’s chased down and tries to run away by crossing a bridge, only she’s pushed off it and dies. The young woman turns out to be Rebecca “Becca” Carter (Angelina Boris), daughter of Texas Governor Ron Carter (Ric Reitz). The Carters – Ron, his wife Barbara (Sally Murphy) and their son Blake (Jim Schubin) – all show up at the police station to identify the body and take custody of it, but it turns out that Blake Carter went to New York days earlier, while his sister was still alive. Becca left Texas in the company of another woman, Drea Clark (Liza Bennett), and the two of them headed for New York.
At first the police, detectives Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks, whom I like but I miss the chemistry Donovan and Anthony Anderson had together even though I give kudos to Dick Wolf and his writing staff for keeping Donovan’s occasionally racist character with a Black partner) and their supervisor, Lieutenant Kate Dixon (Camryn Manheim, whom I got to know first as the villain in the Lifetime movie Cruel Instruction so it’s a bit hard to take her as a hero) – thnk the women were a Lesbian couple fleeing the wrath of Becca’s father, a Fundamentalist Christian who’s built his whole political brand on opposing abortion and Queer rights. Later it turns out that Becca actually got pregnant by her boyfriend, Tyler Robbins (Liam Obergfolt), and Drea was a volunteer with a group called “Project Circe” aimed to get women seeking abortions out of Texas and to a friendly state where women still have control over their own bodies (at least until Republicans are again in power in Washington, D.C. and can pass a ban on all abortions nationwide, as Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham have already signaled they will do).
Blake flew to New York to stop his sister from having her abortion, but he arrived too late to stop her. In a fit of rage, Blake cornered Becca on the bridge and pushed her off it. When he’s prosecuted for the murder, his family flies in a defense attorney who says that it was actually Drea Clark who murdered Becca when she had second thoughts about the abortion and tried to get out of having it. Drea tried to back out of testifying at the trial for fear of being prosecuted for violating the Texas law that makes it a crime to help a woman travel out of state to secure an abortion, but when Blake fingers her as the killer Drea realizes she has to testify. Blake is duly convicted and Drea is offered a police escort to leave the courthouse by the back door to avoid the anti-abortion protesters in front – but she insists on marching strong and proud out the front door and through the crowd. In a finale I could have done without even though it’s a trope the Law and Order writers have used quite often before, Drea is accosted by an anti-abortion protester with a gun (Kara Rosella) and is shot, though it’s unclear at the end whether she ilves or dies. Personally, I’m hoping she lives; she’s just too good and interesting a character to lose, and Dick Wolf’s writers (in this case, Art Alamo; in the previous case, Rick Eid and Gwen Sigan) have already killed off an utterly fascinating character in the person of Vince (Andrew Yackel) in the opening crossover episode of all Wolf’s New York-based shows this season.
