Law and Order: "Chain of Command" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 17 ,2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 I watched the last run of new Law and Order franchise episodes for three weeks. All three series in Dick Wolf’s franchise are going on hiatus for the rest of the year except for another round on December 8 (also the 42nd anniversary of the death of John Lennon) which will apparently end Kelli Giddish’s tenure as Detective Amanda Rollins on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Last night’;s Law and Order episode was unusually good: it was called “Chain of Command” and began with the victim, George Lockett, decorated Army officer (he won the Distinguished Service Medal for his service in Iraq) who left the military 10 years earlier and took a job with a department-store chain that is suffering the usual problems with the Interblob, receiving a midnight caller. We don’t see who it is but it’s definitely a man. Police detectives Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) investigate the murder, and though they chase a few suspects , including the victim’s girlfriend (he and his wife had divorced 10 years earller and he’d started a new relationship four months prior to his death) and his boss, who had ordered him to do an underhanded financial transaction with the company’s money, ultimately they learn from the victim’s daughter Meliinda (Laura D’Andre) that his Distinguished Service Medal was missing even though nothing else was taken from his apartment. This leads the detectives to conclude that Lockett’s murder had soemthing to do with his military career. They soon learn that he officiated at a court-martial at which a servicemember in Lockett’s unit, Reimer, was convicted and given a dishonorable discharge, which disqualified him from VA benefits. The cops suspect Reimer, but when they trace down an address for him they learn that he killed himself a day before Lockett’s death. The cols then locate two other men who served with Reimer, Vincent Martinez (Kenneth Trujillo) and Luke Fallon (The bearishly handsome Trevor Peterson), and they learn that both Reimer and Fallon were suffering from respiratory diseases caused by exposure to toxic fumes from open-air burn pits used in Iraq to dispose of medical waste. In Fallon’s case it was the almost invariable fatal cancer called glioblastoma (the bizarrely beautiful name for the horrible cancer that killed John McCain).

Midway through the trial of Fallon for murdering Lockett, his attorney changes his plea from straight-up not guilty to not guilty by reason of insanity, chaining that the cancerous tumor in his brain calsed him to lose impulse control and therefore he’s not legally responsible for Lockett’s death. Then a neatly suited and trimmed man from the Army legal department shows up with a file about an incident during the war in which Fallon shot and killed an Iraqi civilian during an investigation of alleged terrorism. District attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston, hwo’s the only cast member from the original Law and Order series still on its current incarnation now that Anthony Anderson has left0 overrules his lead prosecutor, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and orders him to use the evidence at trial, but Martinez testifies that the incident was actually a legitimate military raid on a suspected terrorist target, only due to faulty intelligence (something there was a lot of in the second U.S.-Iraq war!) the targets turned out to be innocent civilians instead. Fallon takes the stand himself and testifies that he went to see Lockett merely to ask for an apology for the distress he and the others in his unit suffered from the toxic fumes from the burn pits, but in the end the prosecutors find a letter Lockett wrote when he retired from the military 10 years earlier. The letter said that the reason he was quitting was precisely over his disgust that he was still being ordered to burn waste in open pits instead of incinerating it in closed furnaces. Price uses this to convince the jury that had Fallon been in Lockett’s apartment merely to seek an apology, he would have got one; instead he went there specifically to murder him, and Fallon is found guilty after he’s ordered to read Lockett’s letter on the stand and cries when he realizes too late that Lockett was one of the good guys on the issue. Though Charles questioned just how Fallon would know when Lockett’s apartment door was open and he could get in, I didn’t notice that credibility glitch because I was so taken with the overall power of the story and its implicit denunciation of the whole idea of a chain of command and the military’s cardinal rule that just about everything is justified if you were “just following orders,” a phrase that has taken on chilling overtones since World War II and its aftermath.