Law and Order: "Façade" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 21, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, March 21) I watched a three-episode run of Law and Order shows on NBC, and my husband Charles joined me midway through for the last half of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and all of Law and Order: Organized Crime. The flagship Law and Order series episode was called “Façade” and was directed by Michael Smith from a script by Art Alamo and Ajani Jackson. It opens with a chilling prologue in which a woman on her way home late at night on the New York subways first has a homeless man burst out at her from his encampment in a subway station. Then she’s approached by three young thug-type men and she changes to another car, where she runs into a Black man named Ellis Joyner (Tyler Thomas Moore). In the next scene we see the police detectives Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) and Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) arrive on the scene, only when they pull back the cover on the dead body it’s Ellis Joyner’s corpse we see, not the woman’s. It turns out that Ellis was a) a Black stand-up comedian, b) an asthmatic and c) a closeted Gay man. The police initially investigate an older Black comic, Malcolm Paige (SaMi Chester), whom Ellis had “dissed” in his act (were the writers thinking Hamilton Burress and Bill Cosby here?), but Paige has a solid alibi. Then they zero in on a white man, Brandon Arnou (Daniel Marconi), who trains at a gym run by Domhnall Kovac (Kevin Makely). Arnou is taking a class Kovac teaches on “urban combat,” which not surprisingly turns out to be a front for white supremacism and urban terrorism. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi, an Israeli actress playing an Arab-American) indict Arnou for Joyner’s murder, but just when they appear to have the case won the defense attorney springs a surprise witness on them. (“Surprise witnesses” are a staple of crime fiction but almost never occur in real life because the rules of courts require that each side notify the other in advance of all the witnesses they intend to call; if you want to add an extra witness in mid-trial you have to petition the judge for permission and have a good explanation of just why you couldn’t have mentioned this person in previous proceedings in the case.)

The surprise witness is Rebecca Lasky (Ashlyn Fitch), the woman in the prologue, who insists that she was being attacked by Ellis Joyner and Brandon Arnou was a hero who came to her rescue and saved her from the proverbial Fate Worse Than Death. Price does the best he can to rehabilitate his case in cross-examination, including getting Rebecca to concede that what she interpreted as him grunting like an animal in anticipation of raping her might have actually been him having an asthma attack, but he also sends the cops out to Kovac’s gym to see if he can uncover evidence that Brandon was a racist and he attacked Joyner out of prejudice. They find it, all right, but the person who offers it to them is an undercover agent for the federal government (probably the FBI, though we’re not told for sure) who’s been infiltrating Kovac’s operation for nine months and has just got wind of a major terrorist attack they’re planning in New York City. Unfortunately, having him testify against Brandon Arnou on the Joyner murder case would blow his cover, and Price and his boss, District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), agree not to call him for the “greater good” of stopping the terror plot. So Brandon Arnou is acquitted, and the last shots are of him, Kovac and their cronies high-fiving each other outside the courtroom as they get to go home. Usually Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners would end an episode like this with a hint that the bad guys were arrested anyway and put away for long stretches for their terrorist activities, but this show didn’t go there and instead left the story chillingly open-ended with a shot of Ellis Joyner’s partner, Michael Zane (Kameron Kierce), obviously devastated that Ellis’s murderer got off scot-free on grounds of “justifiable homicide.”