Stream It Or Skip It?
Season 24 of Law & Order ended on a cliffhanger, which is relatively rare for the series. Then again, there had been hints of it coming throughout the season, involving Odelya Halevi’s character, ADA Samantha Maroun. Could she have murdered the man who killed her sister 12 years prior? We find out as Season 25 starts.
LAW & ORDER SEASON 25: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important, groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.” DUN-DUN!
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The Gist: After the acquittal, then the shooting death, of Carter Mills (Jordan M. Cox), executive ADA Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) wanders around at a loss. What he’s most concerned with, which he mentions to his boss, Manhattan District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), is if colleague ADA Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) had anything to do with it. After all, Mills killed Maroun’s sister twelve years prior, and the acquittal shook her to her core.
The next day, Maroun denies she shot Mills, but is still shaken by the fact that Price didn’t go far enough — in her opinion, anyway, to secure Mills’ conviction. Price maintains he did everything he could within the law, even though it ended up not being enough.
Det. Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney) investigate, and when a witness says he heard a female voice say “You deserve this” before shooting Mills, Brady goes to Baxter and Price and tells them they need to question Maroun. It becomes especially pressing when Brady learns that Maroun owned a .38, the same kind of gun that shot Mills. Maroun, none too happy that her police colleagues are questioning her, tell them to get a warrant to search her apartment. The police get the warrant but find no gun; they do grab a hoodie similar to what the shooter wore.
Maroun admits to Baxter that she threw her gun in the East River that night, as she took it to shoot Mills herself, but insists she’s not the killer. When Brady, Riley and Det. Violet Yee (Connie Shi) do arrest a suspect, Maroun insists on being Price’s second chair, reassuring him that she can look at this like a prosecutor, not the sister of one of Mills’ victims.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Law & Order, Seasons 1-24.
Our Take: Season 25 of Law & Order resolves a rare season-ending cliffhanger, but the story of Maroun’s sister’s death had pervaded much of the previous season, so this actually resolves a rare season-long arc for the series. That being said, both were resolved in a very L&O kind of way, which is to say somewhat perfunctorily and in a way that even a first-year law student would find questionable.
Because the first case of the new season involved Maroun, the “Law” side of the ledger was involved in more of the episode than usual, but we still get plenty of Brady and Riley (David Ajala will join the cast as Riley’s new partner a few episodes into the new season) questioning people and being snarky — at least in Riley’s case.
We weren’t exactly sold on Reid, best-known for Veep, as a hard-edged NYPD detective, but he seems to double down on it in the new season, talking in a low monotone that would make Will Arnett jealous. It seems to work, but it could also be because he has a full season of playing Riley under his belt. Tierney is what she usually is, which means she looks like she’s been playing Brady for years instead of just going into her second year on the venerable franchise mothership.
Things go a little sideways when the episode transfers to the the DA’s office. There’s no way that Maroun could be second chair on this case, given who the victim is. As much as Price tries to prove that the person on trial is guilty of murder and not manslaughter, even trying to have the victim’s murder trial disallowed, the evidence they seem to have against the alleged shooter feels thin. And then when the signature ethical dilemma rears its head, it’s also resolved in a weirdly anticlimactic way.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Price thanks Maroun for admitting she heard the shooter say something that could have made her situation worse, had they chosen to use it in court.
Sleeper Star: Even though Odelya Halevi’s Maroun is a main character, we’re still going to give this to her because of the way she flared her nostrils in anger and sadness as she heard the accused shooter testify about what happened between her and the victim earlier that same day.
Most Pilot-y Line: “I’m good, Nolan. I can do it. I need to do it,” Maroun says to Price when he asks her if she can be an effective second chair on the case.
Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re hoping that now that we’re past the Season 24 cliffhanger, Season 25 of Law & Order can get back to what it does best, because the resolution to the cliffhanger was pretty unsatisfying.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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