Law and Order: "A Price to Pay" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV,. aired February 27, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 27) I watched episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Elsbeth. The Law and Order show, “A Price to Pay,” starts with a young topless man being held up and threatened with a gun – only the camera pulls back to reveal that this is only a scene being shot for a movie. (I believe the first time this device was used in a movie was the 1937 film Something to Sing About, directed by Victor Schertzinger, but there might be a previous example.) The next scene shows one of the series’ current stars, Black Detective Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), attending a party being given in honor of his former police mentor, Darryl Jones (Demetrius Grosse), when he and his police partner Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) are suddenly called away to work the murder of one of the stars of the film sequence, Johnny Colvin (Colt Prattes), who was making tons of money and had already won three Academy Award nominations. Alas, he was spending it as fast or faster than he was making it, and his ex-wife complains that she’s about to lose her apartment because he keeps falling behind on his alimony payments. It turns out that Johnny has developed a hard-core addiction to the illegal drug ketamine, colloquially known as “Special K” and originally developed as an animal tranquilizer. Johnny has even run a so-called “rehab” clinic out of his apartment in which he uses ketamine to get people off other drugs. The police trace Johnny’s ketamine source to Dr. Simon Neagle (Bart Shatto), a psychotherapist who buys a lot of ketamine not only for his clients but for himself. The investigation leads the police to “Mama K.,” a woman whose real name is Diane Oliver (Amanda Jaros) and who markets herself with a lot of New Age cant as a “spiritual guide” offering people chemically enhanced “enlightenment.” The writers, Scott Gold and William Lapp, were obviously inspired by the real-life ketamine-related death of Friends star Matthew Perry – who’s actually name-checked in the dialogue – though Oliver and Dr. Neagle at least maintain a veneer of caring about Johnny Colvin whereas the real doctors involved in Perry’s fatal overdose wrote each other e-mails boasting of how much money they were able to make from this “moron.”

Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) get an indictment of Diane Oliver for murder, but their case is dependent on the testimony of Dr. Neagle. Unfortunately, though Dr. Neagle has won complete immunity for his own crimes as part of his deal to testify against Oliver, including a vague promise that he could keep his medical license at the end of all this, ultimately on the eve of the day he’s supposed to testify he deliberately commits suicide with an overdose of ketamine. It’s at this point that the two plot strands finally come together; Detective Shaw has spotted his former mentor Darryl Jones’s name on a list of Oliver’s ketamine clients, and Jones protests that ketamine offered him the only relief for his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by what he saw on his three tours of duty with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. Jones was scheduled to take his regular delivery of the drug the night Oliver killed Colvin, but when he arrived at her place she was in an agitated state and her shoes – a pair of blue tennis shoes of a make Riley and Shaw had already determined were worn by the murderer – were covered in blood. Price and Maroun are determined to get Jones to testify in Oliver’s trial because, with Dr. Neagle dead by his own hand, Jones is the only one who can definitively link Oliver to Colvin’s murder. But Jones doesn’t want to testify because that will get him dishonorably discharged from the U.S. military, all his veterans’ benefits – including his health care – will be cut off and he’ll be left without a pension and destitute. On the day Jones is supposed to testify, Maroun goes to pick him up and finds that he’s gone; Detective Shaw pulled strings with the U.S. military and got him reassigned to a base on Okinawa. While one would think that Price and Maroun could still have him testify via video link, in the end they cut a plea deal with Oliver in which she pleads guilty to second-degree manslaughter and gets a sentence of up to 10 years, though she’ll probably be let out in six. This was a tough, no-nonsense Law and Order episode, well done and effectively presenting Shaw’s moral dilemma – protect his former partner and mentor, or serve the interests of justice – even though I’d have liked a lot more about the probable fan reaction to so lenient an outcome and I was sort of expecting to see Brittany Weaver (Marissa Rosen), a bonkers Colvin fan whom he agreed to meet with the night he was killed if she’d promise never to seek him out again, kill Oliver out of revenge for the sweet plea deal she got from the authorities given that one of the witnesses against her had committed suicide and the other was safely out of the country.