Law & Order/The Wire mashup

Sets up the spin-off, nicely

 

The way I recall it, Elisabeth Rohm tells McCoy and DA Branch that another gun buy/bust has gone haywire, with shots fired. McCoy asks how the officer is, and Rohm says something like, "She's fine, but the two suspects are in the morgue." And Branch says something like, "Well, at least we don't have to worry about prosecuting them now."

I didn't think that the cop in the incident was supposed to be the female officer who had just testified, but another one altogether. I took it to be a final reminder that these gun-buy-busts are inherently dangerous, and putting away the people responsible for one of them that went bad isn't going to solve that larger problem.

 

Denis O'Hare played an acquitted vigilante twice -- once as the suburban militia leader and the other as the guy in the neighborhood group who cripples a crack addict and, at one point, threatens Ben Stone from the witness chair. As has been said, he also played a schizophrenic murderer who defends himself in court,
Sorvino's name was Phil Cerreta.
I thought bringing Paul Robinette back as a defense attorney was a terrific move.
My favorite Ben Stone Era episode was the one where Cerreta gets shot during the investigation of some drug cartel-related murders, and it ends with all of the witnesses being killed. All the DA's are in Schiff's office when he gets the call. Finally, Stone asks him what happened to the young daughter of the original victim and Schiff says she was picked up at school by her uncle.
"She doesn't have an uncle," says Stone.
The look on Schiff's face is chilling.

 

Best ending ever. I really dug Moriarity as the lead ADA, he wasn't a particularly likable character, he was kind of a slimy prick, but was "our" slimy prick. His clashes with Robinette were some of the best the show has ever had.

 

They had one episode where they touched on a controversial subject and the ending was "we the jury find the defendant...." and then the end credits. Never have I been more angry at a ending of a show in my life.

 

Without a Trace has done that a couple of times, once when a black mother and a white mother were about to find out which daughter was found, and another one when it didn't let us know if someone was executed or not.

 

I hate that shit, you are a TV show, your job is to entertain me and part of the entertainment is a resolution.

 

A classic.

You know it's coming . . . and it's classic, anyway.

 

I think in those cases, a resolution is beside the point. The lead-up is the message (that we shouldn't give missing whites a higher priority than missing blacks; that it's not so hard to imagine lots of people being wrongly executed.)

 

I can see that. There isn't much that L&O does that I have not liked. I have never seen Without a Trace.

 

Once everyone started sleeping with each other on Without a Trace, I checked out.

 

My mom claims the one reason she can't get into L&O is that the episodes are entirely self contained and we know very little of the private lives of the characters. That is part of the reason I like the show so much.