Law and Order: "Do No Harm" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 12, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Just about any story after Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: “Obedience” would have been a tough follow-up, but Dick Wolf and his writers (Art Alamo and Thomas Wong) came up with a lulu for the Law and Order episode that followed “Obedience” on November 12. It was called “Do No Harm,” after the Hippocratic Oath, and was about a 24-year-old medical student named Grace Zhou (Emily Song) who’s found dead in her apartment by her roommate, Ryleigh McAdams (Lisa Naso). The ultimate cause of death is suffocation with a pillow, but the medical examiner finds three puncture marks, one on one arm and the other two on the others, indicating that she received injections just before she died. The drugs in her system from the injections included a saline solution, rocuronium bromide to induce paralysis, and potassium chloride to stop the heart and kill – the same sequence as is common practice in lethal-injection executions. The investigation by police detectives Theo Walker (David Ajala) and Rob Calvino (James Badge Dale) turns up a number of actual or seeming red herrings, including Grace’s ex-boyfriend Curtis Foster (Jake Goodhart) and two doctors she worked with as a medical student, Aekansh Reddy (Sorab Wadia) and Anton Visser (Travis Laughlin). The cops initially think that Grace was having affairs with either or both these men, especially when they discover a silent surveillance video of Grace in a major argument with Dr. Visser over something. It turns out that Grace had been working with Dr. Visser on a clinical trial of a supposed new anti-depressant that worked differently from existing ones, but the trial had found that the new drug was ineffective. The argument came over Dr. Visser’s determination to write a research paper saying that the study was “inconclusive” rather than the drug didn’t work at all, and later we learn that Grace had a personal reason for hoping the drug would work. In the opening scene we’d actually seen Grace seem upbeat and happy, but later we learn that she’d suffered from long-term depression since age 13 and had decided to kill herself. She’d already made two suicide attempts, one five years before and one two years before, and in both cases her parents Henry (Michael Tow) and Eleanor (Deborah S. Craig) had signed her into the hospital and therefore knew about it. Her killer was her ex-boyfriend Curtis Foster, who agreed to help her die in her own apartment, though in the end the lethal injection drugs didn’t work (the recent case of Christa Pike, sentenced to death by lethal injection in Tennessee for a murder committed 30 years ago but who survived the experience, albeit in intense pain, is actually mentioned in the script) and Curtis had to kill her by smothering her with a pillow.

One of the interesting twists in the Alamo-Wong script is that the attitude of Henry and Eleanor Zhou does a 180° during the trial, from the desire for vengeance to seeing Curtis as a good friend of their daughter who only wanted to help her relieve her suffering. The case also arouses an emotional conflict between the two prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi). Samantha is five months’ pregnant (though this is something of a surprise since the Law and Order screenwriters have not previously mentioned a husband, partner, significant other or even a one-night stand that might have knocked her up), and in one scene in a corridor of the courthouse Eleanor Zhou confides in her that motherhood is a burden as well as a satisfaction. It’s an odd bit of connection between a woman who’s just lost her only child and a woman who’s about to become a mother for (presumably) the first time. Samantha’s impending motherhood is making her feel sorrier for the Zhous and more sympathetic to Curtis Foster, to the point where she actually pleads with Price to arrange a deal and allow Curtis to plead to manslaughter. Price in turn is fearful that if Curtis is allowed to plead down, or even worse is acquitted by the jury, it will open the floodgates. He notes that the New York legislature passed a right-to-die law but specifically limited its effect to terminal physical illnesses, and in fact put a provision in that the person seeking legal permission for an assisted suicide must be of “sound mind.” If Curtis Foster gets away with killing Grace Zhou, Price warns, just about everyone suffering from long-term depression will grab the opportunity to enlist doctors or health professionals (or, in Curtis’s case, wanna-be health professionals) in helping them off themselves. Curtis’s defense counsel, Rebecca Fuller (Hettienne Park), calls Grace’s psychiatrist to the stand, and she testifies not only that untreatable depression should be considered a terminal condition within the right-to-die law but that Grace’s seemingly good spirits in the last week of her life should be interpreted as gratitude that her ordeal would finally end soon. This is not an easy show to write about or to watch; it’s Law and Order at its best, where we’re not sure either how we want to see it end or whether justice would be best served by Curtis’s acquittal or conviction – though in the end [spoiler alert!] Curtis is found guilty of murdering Grace, largely because in the end when the lethal injection drugs didn’t work he killed her with the pillow instead of calling 911 to have her rescued.