Law and Order: "Only the Lonely" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November. 10, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I watched the three Law and Order shows in the regular Thursday night block, including a Law and Order flagship episode called “Only the Lonely” which turned out to be one of their better episodes in the current run. It’s about a woman, a so-called “crisis consultant” named Dana Clarkson (Francesca Fandany) is shown talking to a software magnate named Mark Zanford (Erid Engleman) on how to dea with his ex-wife Gabby (Elle Rigg), who’s making public allegations against him on the eve of his company’s initial public offering. Then Dana is found murdered, strangled to death with a high-end scarf. There’s not much mystery about who the killer is – he’s Devon Miller (Mark Feuerstein), a multi-aliased young man who makes his living preying on intelligent, professionally successful but lonely women and getting them to pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars. He’s counting on none of his victims being willing to report him because that would blow their image as intelligent, successful professionals if it became known publicly that they allowed themselves to be “taken” by him. Dana had decided to fight back, though, so Devon murdered her. The police and prosecutors, including Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevy), are in a quandary because Devon insists on acting as his own attorney (he attended Columbia Law School u9ntil he was expelled for cheating) and he manages to persuade the judge to invalidate the search that uncovered the scarf that proved to be the murder weapon.

It turns out the scarf was bought for Devon by Grace Pollard (Alysia Reiner), a well-known feminist attorney and fighter for women’s rights, but she doesn’t want to testify against Devon and we soon learn why. It seems that Grace was one of Devon’s victims, and the two of them had S/M scenes together with him as the dom and her as the sub. Naturally Grace Pollard doesn’t want the world to know that the Great Feminist Attorney and Apostle of Women’s Rights got off on being tied up and ordered about by a man, especially a con artist and killer. The writer, Rick Eid, created an intriguing character in her; it seems to be a gender-reversed version of the male in S/M fiction who runs a major corporation by day and likes to be dominated by night. In the end Grage reluctantly agrees to testify, even though that means that Devon can show the tape of them having sex and him humiliating her in open court as a means of impeaching her credibility. To make matters worse,the tape was made on the night Dana Clarkson was murdered, and Dana can be heard outside Devon’s door on the tape demanding to be let in – and Grace can be heard telling Devon to get rid of her so they can continue their scene. In the end, Devon is found guilty – but Grace sees a New York Post headline ridiculing her with the caption, “TIE ME UP!,” and she and we realize that the damage to her reputation has been done and for the rest of her career people are going to be snickering at her, or worse. It was a neatly done episode and a story that illustrates that people are a lot more complicated than their public personae and it’s entirely possible that a woman (or a man) could get off privately in ways that totally contradict their public roles. It’s what Erich von Stroheim meant when he compared himself to Ernst Lubitsch and said, “Lubitsch first shows you the king on his throne, then the king in his bedroom. I first show you the king in his bedroom, so you will know exactly what he is like when you see him on his throne.”