Some senator is murdered, so the Law and Order team -- despite having assured a civilian several episodes ago they treat all cases the same -- launch into this one with the fervor of a Doberman on a hot dog.
Soon, they discover a bald white guy is the prime suspect. Of course, he acts like he's dislocated from reality, so you know he's up to something. And he's nebbish-y, so he's either a teacher or a librarian. Derp derps, but Lurch has a moment where his acting rises above lumbering to try to show some compassion toward the guy.
But is that compassion misplaced?
Sam the Eagle comes out of his doorway to show up at a news conference. He doesn't unfold his arms, though. Now, Sam has always been kind of shaky. I wondered many years ago if he had Parkinson's because he shook his head so frequently when speaking. So, when he clasps his arms together so much now, I wondered if he does have the illness and is trying not to show it. I looked it up and saw that he does, so I'm going to just say now I understand why they don't put him under as much stress and strain and will be tempering any reviews accordingly. He's a champ for being willing to do his part in the reboot. I just wish they wrote his character better, like in the old days.
He does have to work with his daughter. The actress they chose is okay -- she actually is Waterston's daughter, Elisabeth -- but as with the actor they chose for Ben Stone's son, dry and bland. It would have been better had they gotten Waterston's other daughter, Katherine, to play the part. She's got more range and presence. If you're going to be a nepo baby, it would be nice if you also had talent.
The episode takes a kooky left turn into the land of PTSD. It turns out the shooter is a school shooting survivor, so his alleged motive for killing the senator -- who was a rabid and unapologetic tool for the gun lobby -- is tied to his mental illness.
There's a gratuitous scene where the Garden Gnome holds up a bloody wedding dress that looks soaked. The awful melodramatic music intrudes, as do so many melodramatic gasps from the court audience. Really, they're not taking any chances the audience who tunes in won't somehow realize the horror of what they're seeing without underscoring it with such camp.
Lots of weird legal illogic, too. McCoy's daughter goes around the ADA -- who should probably recuse himself because he's suffering from PTSD and it's clouding his legal judgment -- to bargain directly with her father, trying to use emotional blackmail to get him to see her client in a different way. At the very least, the NYC DA should be aware of the optics of all that, not to mention if the media learns of it. But in this incarnation of Law and Order, pesky realities like that don't get addressed so, instead, it's about the soap opera melodramatics of events. How L&O has so declined.
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