Law and Order: "Two and Twenty" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 16, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 16) I watched three consecutive episodes of the Law and Order franchise in succession. The first was an episode of the flagship Law and Order series which had some interesting twists. It was called “Two and Twenty” and was about the murder of a hot-shot financier named Jon Geller (Tom Hammond), who was ambushed and clubbed to death with a new golf putter he’d just had custom-made and boasted, “This is going to change my life.” Jon Geller was married to a woman named Sara (René Zara) but when he was killed he was about to fly his private helicopter to a rendezvous for a weekend idyll with his Gay lover, Matt Thomas (David Edwin Williams). This sets up a couple of red herrings, especially when someone tells the police they overheard Geller on the phone with his wife threatening her and saying he’d already made his decision and she’d have to live with it. At first the cops assume that the news Jon had chosen to break to his wife was that he was leaving her to be with his boyfriend, but it turned out it was an argument between them over the education of their son Shane (Aaron Houser). Eventually the killer turns out to be Nick Rossi (Patrick Voss Davis), a staff member of Geller’s company, who was so relentlessly overworked and psychologically abused by Geller that his attorney, a heavy-set Black woman named Maria Cruz (Kimberly S. Fairbanks), tries to make a self-defense claim that Rossi was literally in fear of his life if he and Geller’s second-in-command, an African-American named Brad Addis (Alano Miller) who’d put up with Geller’s abuse for years on Geller’s promise that he’d name Addis the CEO of the company once he retired, then Geller reneged and gave the promotion to someone else (whom we never see), didn’t land an important acquisition deal that weekend. Ultimately, in the sort of spectacular cross-examination scene that happens quite often in movie and TV dramatizations of trials even though almost never in real life, Rossi breaks down on the stand and admits that the real reason he killed Geller is that he was angry with him and not that he was in fear of his life. It was a well-done Law and Order, though I wish they’d made more of the Gay subplot; at least Davis acted vividly in the final scene of his breakdown on the witness stand.