Law and Order: "Freedom of Expression" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal,, NBC-TV, aired January 18, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 18) Dick Wolf’s three Law and Order crime series – Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime – blessedly made their returns to NBC’s airwaves following the months-long delays of the writers’ and actors’ strikes. The Law and Order episode was a doozy, reflecting Dick Wolf’s ongoing obsession with creating stories “ripped from the headlines,” as NBC used to say about his shows (and Warner Bros. before them said of its films during the 1930’s, often quite well-done melodramas like Bullets or Ballots and Black Legion). This time the headlines Wolf and his writers, Rick Eid and Pamela J. Wechsler, ripped from were the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas fighters on southern Israel and Israel’s no-holds-barred response to it. The show starts with Hudson University President Nathan Alpert (David Denowitz) walking past a kiosk for “Cohen’s Bagels” on which some graffiti artist has spray-painted a Star of David (as if anyone would expect a business called “Cohen’s Bagels” not to be Jewish-owned?). The graffitist has at least used a stencil to paint it instead of doing it free-hand the way the Nazis did when they terrorized Jewish communities before and during World War II. While he’s walking, Alpert is also on his cell phone, talking to his wife, when suddenly he’s attacked by an unknown assailant in a dark hoodie and stabbed to death with a kitchen knife. So his wife, Rachel Alpert (Sharone Sayegh), has to deal with the horror not only of her husband being murdered but having to listen to it happen in real time. It turns out Alpert was in the middle of a controversy surrounding the Palestinian student group on campus, whom at first he had tried to protect against the demands of donors to Hudson who wanted it shut down. Then they put on a film screening of pro-Palestinian documentaries that allegedly were so extreme as to constitute anti-Semitism, and Alpert yielded to the pressure from Hudson’s donors and the Jewish community on campus to close it. Only one member of the group is a young movie star named Chloe Esper (Alexa Wisener) who has gone back to college (were Eid and Wechsler thinking of Jodie Foster here?). Because she has family in Gaza, the assault on it from Israel is a personal issue to her. She’s being mentored by the group’s faculty advisor, Professor Kendra Nasser (Tehmina Sunny), who gives ardently pro-Palestinian lectures to her classes and makes it clear that she regards Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians in Gaza as genocide (as do I).

Ultimately the police on the case, Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) from the last two seasons and his new partner, Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), identify the killer as Cam Lawson (Braxton Fannin), a young student in Professor Nasser’s class. The prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi – given the topic of this episode I had more admiration than usual for her, an Israeli, to be playing an Arab character), tie the murder to Professor Nasser because she invited Cam to her apartment, gave him wine (this part of the episode reads like she’s “grooming” him to seduce him, though since this is the flagship Law and Order and not Special Victims Unit the writers stop short of actually depicting them as lovers) and handed him a knife from her kitchen to use to kill President Alpert. Nasser and Chloe Esper hold a pro-Palestinian rally at a park off campus, but Chloe is shot and killed there by Hudson professor Phillip Klein (Jason Babinsky), an ardently pro-Israel staff member whom Alpert had just fired for being too hard-line in his support for Israel and his demands that the Palestinian student group be banned. The police go to arrest Klein, but when they catch him he refuses to put down his gun and knife, and Detective Shaw is forced to shoot and kill him in what’s come to be called “suicide by cop.” Lawson is offered a plea deal – a 10-year sentence in exchange for his testimony against Professor Nasser, whom the prosecutors regard as ultimately liable for Alpert’s murder – but in a surprise twist the jury acquits Nasser even though she testifies that once Lawson returned to her home after killing Alpert, she told him she was proud of him. The idea behind this episode is that the mutual hatred between Israel and Palestine is so great and so overwhelming that even people living as far away from the conflict zone as New York City are vulnerable and likely to have their own blood spilled on the New York streets. A depressing thought indeed, especially since every Palestinian or Israeli killed in this pointless conflict that could be relatively easily resolved (either by the so-called “two-state solution” of separate nations for Jews and Palestinians, or – my preference – for a one-state solution in which Israel would be replaced by a majority-Arab Palestine with ironclad protections for the Jewish minority, much like the deal that ended South African apartheid) just ramps up the bitterness on both sides and makes the conflict harder to solve.