Law and Order: "Bend the Knee" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 23, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 23) I watched the three NBC-TV Law and Order showings in order, starting with an episode of the flagship Law and Order called “Bend the Knee.” It starts at a contentious meeting of the board of a prestigious law firm at which the partners are arguing whether to take an agreement with the Donald Trump administration to steer clear of clients Trump doesn’t like and donate $80 million worth of free legal services to ones Trump does like or face exclusion from all federal buildings, which will cost them about 30 percent of their business. Trump has put a number of real-life law firms in just this dilemma – play ball with us, or else. One partner named Roger Wallace (Trent Stone), who’s just completed a major merger-and-acquisitions deal that’s going to put a lot of people out of work (so he’s not entirely one of the angels) is dead-set against the deal. Needless to say, he’s found murdered in his own home shortly thereafter, and without him to argue against it the law firm makes the deal with the Devil – oops, with Trump. Various members of the firm’s upper echelon are suspected of the crime, including managing partner Kevin Bradley (Joshua Malina), but it turns out the killer was Nasser Al-Quasimi (Afsheen Misaghi), who worked for the firm but was also the son of the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the U.S. Because he’s the son of an ambassador, his attorney, Eric Ferguson (Hill Harper), claims he has absolute diplomatic immunity and can’t be prosecuted. District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) gets a visit from an old friend from the federal government, Jack Drell (Toby Leonard Moore), who insists that he must drop the murder prosecution against Al-Quasimi because the United Arab Emirates are working closely in the U.S. in a region of the world where the U.S. doesn’t have any friends. Drell tells Baxter that if he insists on prosecuting Al-Quasimi for murder, the UAE will cancel a $40 million deal to buy fighter jets from the U.S. and thousands of Americans who were supposed to build those planes will be put out of work.

At first Baxter and his assigned prosecutor, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), go full-steam ahead on the case. After all, they have a seemingly solid witness, Robbie Chilton (Tom Coiner), who ran into Al-Quasimi fleeing the scene of the crime, got a good look at his bloody face and body, and even helped fetch his cell phone, which Al-Quasimi dropped in his flight. But Chilton wimps out when it’s his time to testify, and Baxter and Price soon learn why: Drell sent an agent, a disbarred former attorney, to bribe him not to testify against Al-Quasimi. What’s more, though the next election for district attorney is two years away, Baxter has already set up a fundraiser for his campaign, to be held in a park location, and lined up some major donors to attend it and give him a major infusion of money. Only the case ends with a plea deal – Al-Quasimi pleads guilty to manslaughter and draws a 12-year sentence, which is likely to be only five to seven years of incarceration – which naturally doesn’t make Wallace’s girlfriend feel like justice has been done. What’s more, Jack Drell warns Baxter about the consequences of his insistence on prosecuting Al-Quasimi at all in the thug-like terms we’ve got used to from actual Trump administration figures – and Baxter learns that most of the donors who were supposed to attend his fundraiser have pulled out, and the National Park Service has canceled his lease on the venue. This was a quite good Law and Order and an effective dramatization of just how Trump’s authoritarian (actually totalitarian) tactics are warping the norms of American politics and jurisprudence. It also raises the fascinating question of just how far diplomatic immunity extends; can a protected diplomat literally get away with murder? Usually in the pre-Trump era a diplomat who killed someone would be declared persona non grata and, though not prosecuted for his or her crime, at least be thrown out of the U.S., probably forever. But in the Brave New World of Führer Trump, who boasted during his 2016 campaign that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and it wouldn’t affect his poll numbers any, if you’re on the right side of the administration you almost certainly can get away with murder if the Führer O.K.’s it.