Law and Order; "Unintended Consequences" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 8, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, February 8) I watched the usual Thursday marathon of three episodes of various series in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise. The cycle opened with an episode of the flagship Law and Order called “Unintended Consequences,” in which writers Gia Gordon and Pamela J. Wechsler worked overtime to lard on the complications but still came up with a script that offered various ethical dilemmas in the guise of a standard policier. (The late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. once cited Law and Order as a show you should particularly watch if you were interested in how the procedural guarantees of the Bill of Rights actually work in practice.) The murder victim is Andrea Fenton (Julia Yorks), a high-end realtor in New York City who’s also the star of a video podcast selling her realty services. She’s found dead alone in the apartment of Max Quattro (Darin Heames), and the cops investigating the case, Detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Shaw) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), find the usual number of red-herring suspects. The first they investigate and then dismiss is rival realtor and podcaster Stephanie Wagner (Brittany Laurelle), who issued a seeming death threat against Fenton for allegedly poaching her clients, but turns out to have an unshakable alibi. They then check out Fenton’s associate and protégé, Luke Hines (Zeus Taylor), a young man from an ultra-privileged background whose super-rich parents have shielded him from any consequences for his actions. Luke persuades them that he was having dinner with his parents on the night Fenton was killed. Then they suspect movie star Robbie MacDougall (Mark Ryder), who’s in New York making a movie that’s a knock-off of James Bond and who was caught on camera having sex with Andrea Fenton just an hour before she was killed. Robbie at first denies having had an affair with her, but after the video surfaces online he says the reason he lied earlier was he’s trying to reconcile with his wife. (Having extra-relational activity with your hot young realtor is really going to make your wife want to take you back – not!)

The police finally solve the case based on the testimony of Noah Gilmore (Bret McKee), who worked for the security company that supposedly protected Max Quattro’s apartment – but hacked into the system and made the video of Fenton and MacDougall having sex so he could sell it to a gossip Web site. Noah says he kept the cameras on after he made the sex tape but didn’t record what happened after that, which was that Luke Hines had an argument with Fenton, grabbed a gun from her purse, and shot her. (His motive was he regularly stole prescription opiates from homes she was showing to feed his own habit, and she caught him and was about to turn him in.) He also bribed the waitress at that fancy restaurant to give him a false alibi. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) indict Hines and take him to trial, but there’s a big problem with their star witness. It turns out he also uses his hacker skills to record child pornography, taking videos of underage girls and apparently building his own personal collection of them. On the day he’s supposed to testify in Hines’s trial, Gilmore is arrested and charged with possessing child porn, and he won’t testify against Hines unless the New York D.A.’s office agrees to give him total immunity on the porn charges. After a lot of soul-searching and anxious discussions with their boss, New York District Attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston, who’s scheduled to depart the show in the next episode two weeks from now), they agree and Gilmore describes what he saw in court.

Hines’s attorney gets him to admit on the stand that he’s a pedophile and a pervert, but Price gives him a redirect examination to establish that he told the New York police the story about Hines killing Fenton before the child-porn allegations against him surfaced. Hines is ultimately found guilty and Gilmore escapes scot-free – an ending that surprised me because in previous Law and Orders they’ve worked in a deus ex machina. I was expecting either a parent of one of Gilmore’s victims walk up to him on the courthouse steps and shoot him, or else FBI agents would come in and claim evidence that he sent images of child porn across state lines, thereby breaking federal law and committing a crime for which his deal with New York for state and local immunity wouldn’t apply. Instead Gordon, Wechsler and director Martha Mitchell had Gilmore walk out of court with his head held high and a dreadful you-can’t-catch-me smirk on his face, symbolizing his victory.