Law and Order: "Sins of the Father" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 1, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, May 1) I watched my three usual TV shows on Thursday nights, Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on NBC and Elsbeth on CBS. The Law and Order episode, “Sins of the Father,” was a chilling story that might as well have been called “Sins of the Fathers” – plural – because there are three intrigues, all revolving around young people trying to do their best to atone for the various crimes their fathers have committed, and in at least one case are committing. The show opens in an auto garage, with a young, slightly built Chinese immigrant named Sunny Zhen (Eddy Lee) working there and running afoul of a middle-aged white customer who accuses both him and the garage’s owner of screwing up his camshaft repair. Sunny patiently tries to explain to him that the problem isn’t with the camshaft but with the watered gasoline he bought at a cheap local station. The car owner leaves in a huff and threatens to report Sunny to ICE. The next scene shows Sunny shot execution-style, lying in a pool of his own blood. The police detectives, Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), soon learn that Sunny Zhen was actually a research assistant in chemistry at “Hudson University” (read: Columbia) until he was fired after the university got a letter accusing him of selling the results of his research to China. He was in great need of money because his father had embezzled $400,000 from a fund to help Chinese-American immigrants and then high-tailed it back to China with his ill-gotten gains. Sunny had committed to repaying the money his father had stolen, and to do that he’d taken an illegal job working in the fentanyl lab of drug dealer Antonio Ruiz (Jamie Paul Gomez). While it was unclear whether Sunny had his crisis of conscience when he learned what Ruiz had hired him to do, or actually participated in manufacturing fentanyl and quit in disgust when Antonio Ruiz actually started killing people as unconsenting test subjects to see how strong he could make the drug, Sunny walked out on his lucrative underground gig and Ruiz decided to have him killed.

The actual hit man was Omar Nuñez (Argenis Hierro), but he tricked Ruiz’s son Ernesto (David Castro), a high-school teacher who’s deliberately avoided any involvement in daddy’s business, into driving him to Sunny’s garage by saying that Sunny stiffed the family selling them jewelry that turned out to be fake. Later Nuñez himself is killed by another one of Antonio’s seemingly ubiquitous hit people, a convict who was paid to have him do the murder through an anonymous deposit into his sister’s bank account. With no one else available, the cops arrest Ernesto Ruiz and threaten to throw the book at him unless he rats out his dad. Assistant district attorney Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) has qualms about doing this to Ernesto, who by all accounts is a wonderful guy and a great teacher who goes way above and beyond the call of duty to help his students, because she herself was raised by a father who ran an illegal business out of the back of his home, and that’s how she got the money to go to law school. Ultimately Ernesto agrees to wear a wire to a party his father is throwing, but only “to prove you wrong,” since in a scene that reminded me of the final confrontation between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep Ernesto admits his father is in the drug business but can’t believe that he’s actually ordered people killed. The cops have already traced Antonio’s drug business to a series of trailers in a specific storage facility, but they need Ernesto’s information to connect the storage rentals to Antonio. Ultimately Ernesto absents himself from the party, ostensibly to use the restroom but really to search his father’s secret office for papers, one of which is an invoice for rental space at the storage yard. The cops have already searched the yard and found a living space, a working fentanyl lab, and cement weights used to dispose of the bodies of 15 of Antonio’s test subjects who died of his drugs. Antonio catches Ernesto in the act of stealing a paper from his files, but the noise of Antonio’s attack on his son alerts the police and they go in and arrest Antonio. Then they offer Ernesto witness protection, including moving to a new city and assuming a new identity. He says to be allowed to speak to his mother before he’s whisked away to wherever he’s going to wind up, but she refuses to take his call. This Law and Order was unexpectedly good, avoiding the traps the show has occasionally fallen into (like making the villains too obvious); it’s clear there are real family bonds between Antonio and Ernesto, as there were between Sunny and his absent dad and between Maroun and her criminal father.