I haven’t finished the most recent episode, Mammon, of the newest season of Law and Order yet, as I am in the middle of watching it on streaming and Jeopardy is almost on. But I do have one complaint, and I thought I might as well write about it.
For the most part, I’ve enjoyed the reboot. I like the detectives’ interactions, and I particularly enjoy the Nolan Price and Samantha Maroun characters along with Jack McCoy in the legal segment (being a lawyer myself, I would). The first season seemed a bit too obviously “ripped from the headlines”, but I think they’re starting to settle down and find their groove now.
One thing I’ve noticed is that in just about every episode of this new season, Detectives Cosgrove and Shaw go to question someone, the person makes them as police, and they immediately start running. The detectives promptly chase them down on foot, the suspect is caught, and they may or may not be the actual murderer, and the episode proceeds from there. But there’s always a foot chase.
That’s not really my complaint, though; that’s more something to be expected, like how every episode of the original Walker, Texas Ranger had a car chase and a fist fight at the end between Walker and the bad guy of the week. No, my trouble is this. In the particular Law and Order episode I’m watching tonight, the legal side comes to suspect a prominent pastor of murder for hire. So they send Detectives Cosgrove and Shaw to arrest him.
Now, I’m not and never have been a policeman, but if I were, and I found myself tasked with arresting a pastor, particularly one known in the community, I would probably handle it with some delicacy. I might, for example, wait until a weekday afternoon when the guy is working in the church office or out running errands by himself. The pastor might be upset, but at least the situation is handled relatively calmly.
Is that what these guys do? No. They arrest the pastor literally mid-sermon. They come right in the middle of a packed congregation, right down the center aisle, and arrest the guy, to the protests of the shocked churchgoers. That’s just dumb.
I do not know at this point how the episode turns out, neither do I want to make any broader points, political or otherwise; just as a storytelling device, it doesn’t work for me except as an obvious way to create drama. Either the officers are doing it deliberately for the shock value, which the episode hasn’t written them that way so far, or they’re tactically inept, which doesn’t entirely make sense in the L&O world either.
I don’t know. Maybe they did it that way because it was in the script. It’s a theory, anyway.