Law and Order: "Balance of Power" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 14, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, March 14) I watched an unusually good run of shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise, including an episode of the flagship Law and Order called “Balance of Power.” This episode dealt with a multi-millionaire (his fortune was over $250 million) named Jonah Barlowe (Andy Christopher) who’s found clubbed to death in his own apartment. Jason made a huge fortune overnight by promoting the stock of a video-rental company at a time when video rentals looked like history and the big Wall Street money was selling the stock short (obviously writers Art Alamo and Ted Malawer were thinking the real-life Gamestop stock bubble). It also turned out that Jason was a big-time submissive in BDSM scenes, which had earlier led his wife Elizabeth (Natalie Smith) to leave him (though she was still emotionally attached to him). At first he went for garden-variety scenes in which he called on women to dress in underwear, tase him and torture him while calling him a worthless piece of garbage who didn’t deserve his good fortune, but later he branched out into “fin-dom” scenes. “Fin-dom” apparently means “financial dominance” and it involves literally ceding control of your money to another person for a short time and allowing them to spend it however they like – only Jonah’s killer, Melissa James (Piper Patterson), took advantage of him and ripped off $23 million from his account, sending it to a secret bank in Panama which refuses to cooperate with the New York Police Department’s subpoena for the records. Melissa visited Jonah in his apartment and refused to return the money, whereupon Jonah threatened to call the police on her and she responded by picking up a gold statuette of Atlas and walloping him with it until he died. (I wondered if the writers were doing a deliberate reference to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged here.) Unfortunately, the police accidentally blew a big part of the case against Melissa when they grabbed her cell phone without a warrant, and while they only had custody of it for three seconds, nonetheless the judge in the case, Thomas Hatcher (William Charlton), rules any evidence from the phone inadmissible as the fruits of an illegal search.

The show also featured the new New York District Attorney, Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), who comes in figuratively with both guns blazing, determined to assert control over the office, ranging from redecorating it in modern colors instead of the dark wood panels his predecessor Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) favored to repairing good relations with the city’s mayor which McCoy had blown in a previous episode. (Inevitably he reminded me of Donald Trump’s similarly ultra-aggressive takeover of the Republican Central Committee.) Barred by the judge’s ruling from using any of the evidence on Melissa’s cell phone, including the texts back and forth between her and Jonah that established her motive, the police go looking for a previous victim of Melissa’s, whom they find in Derek Parker (David L. Townsend). Derek is the ultimate reluctant witness; though Melissa scammed him of much less money than she stole from Jonah, she threatened to reveal all his personal peccadilloes to his family and his employers if he went to the police, so he kept quiet until the trial. Melissa’s attorney offers a plea deal in which Melissa will reveal evidence that a major movie star is actually a serial rapist – supposedly he revealed this to her in BDSM sessions she recorded and filmed, including one we get to see a clip of in which he boasted that he was able to stab his victims in parts of the body which the camera wouldn’t show. DA Baxter wants lead prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) to take the deal, but when Melissa’s attorney balks at the 10-year manslaughter sentence Baxter insisted on as the minimum his office would accept, the deal falls through, the trial continues and Melissa is found guilty of second-degree murder. Part of Price’s reluctance to accept the deal is that he can’t verify any of it: the star himself is out of the country filming a movie and Melissa can’t or won’t name any of the alleged victims – which leads a thoughtful viewer to wonder if the “rape” scenarios were just role-playing between the actor and Melissa and the crimes hadn’t really existed. Certainly my knowledge of the BDSM community, such as it is, leads me to doubt that the same person would be a rapist of women and a submissive to a dominant woman!