Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 14, 2022
I’ve been following along with this season of Law & Order, and I have been increasingly pleasantly surprised. After a painfully messy and occasionally laughably bad first season of the reboot, the second season is starting to settle in.
Yes, the L&O crossover episode was bad, and the second episode couldn’t quite leave well enough alone, but last week’s episode explored an interesting area of the law and posed an ethical debate.
This week’s episode was straightforward and was as close to a classic episode of L&O as we’ve seen from the reboot. Granted, the little glimpses into the home lives of the characters are slightly jarring — like Nolan Price running into an ex-girlfriend last week — but in this week’s episode, opening in Detective Cosgrove’s home, where he is seeing his daughter off to school, ultimately set the stage for a later scene that worked for both the character and the series.
The murder victim this week is a burgeoning novelist who — we later learn — is murdered in a way that matches a pattern in some other unsolved murders. There’s a red herring — a chef whose restaurant the author trashed in her book — but the investigation ultimately leads Cosgrove and newcomer Detective Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) to the work of Detective Jerry Ryan, a close friend of Cosgrove’s who also happens to be his daughter’s godfather. Ryan thinks that the victim’s murder matches a pattern of other killings around the country (and in London), and they’re eventually able to connect the pattern to an actor, Niles Harper.
They have a lot of circumstantial evidence against Harper, but nothing concrete. After questioning Harper on the set of one of his projects, Ryan decides he wants to search Harper’s car before Harper can remove any evidence. He has no basis to do so, so he makes up some story about seeing blood inside the car to justify the search, where they find a bloody earring. The earring leads to a warrant to search Harper’s house, which uncovers more evidence.
It’s a good old-fashioned Fourth Amendment case, and the judge rightfully tosses the evidence found in the car and the subsequent evidence found in Harper’s apartment as fruit of the poisonous tree. Despite the fact that Harper is an accused serial killer, the judge gives them only a few more days to find some hard evidence before cutting Harper loose. Detective Ryan, who is thirsty to catch a suspect he’s long been investigating, plants some evidence — a necklace belonging to the victim — at the scene without Cosgrove and Shaw’s knowledge.
Though Ryan adamantly denies it — “I do good police work” — everyone knows that the necklace has been planted by the time the trial rolls around. The defense knows it, too, and Ryan lies under cross examination. Cosgrove is furious. He’s faced with an old-fashioned dilemma: Rat out his daughter’s godfather for planting evidence — without evidence — and watch a serial killer go free, or sit on his hands and fume.
Cosgrove opts for the latter, although he’s not happy about it. It is, indeed, a tough situation: If he tells ADA Price that Ryan planted evidence, a serial killer could return to the streets and murder again. Also, it probably wouldn’t make a difference: Ryan already lied under oath, and obviously, the prosecutor is not going to treat Ryan as a hostile witness in an effort to exclude the only piece of hard evidence the prosecution has.
The jury buys Ryan’s lies and convicts Harper. But when Detective Ryan comes over to Cosgrove’s house with a bottle of expensive booze to celebrate, Cosgrove kicks the crooked cop out.
It’s not a flashy episode. There are no twists, and so far as I know, it rips from no headlines. It’s a dirty-cop case, and the question here is: How complicit is Cosgrove for (begrudgingly) looking the other way? And does the fact that it probably prevented future murders justify it?
Solid episode.
