FindLaw | Legal News & Information

ER and Order

The idle rich and their idle hands, to use Detective Green's phrase, show how strong a motive greed can be. And, in case a daughter's attempt to kill her mother is not depraved enough, the show throws in a sick sex video for added unpleasantness.

Joan Moore, a decidedly upper class dame from an upper floor of an apartment in an uptown neighborhood, is in a coma. Her husband found her and brought her to the hospital, so naturally he's the most likely suspect for attempted murder, especially after the doctors find a needle mark in her left buttock. She's in insulin shock, which is odd because she's not diabetic. Detective Lennie Briscoe's comment, to close the opening sequence of the show, is one of his better lines of the night: "A little jab will do ya."

Since this is a rich people episode, the detectives' initial sources of information are Mrs. Moore's doorman and her houseboy. Poor people don't have doormen and houseboys, so in the poor people Law and Order episodes, Briscoe and Green usually have to break illegally into a few apartments to get their investigation going. Because the rich have rafts of people who observe their comings and goings, no state-sponsored breaking and entering is necessary. (And besides, B&E is difficult when you have to get past a doorman.) Consequently, there are no good Fourth Amendment issues for me to write about. In addition, the rich usually have good lawyers (even on TV), so there are no lawyer screw-ups to criticize.

The detectives learn that Mrs. Moore is on her second marriage, comes from lots of money, and has a daughter. Some digging into her medical history suggests that she has Parkinson's disease. Looks pretty straightforward: Mr. Moore injected his wife with insulin to hasten her death and curtail her suffering.

Mr. Moore rolls over and agrees to plead to assisting a suicide. ADA Abbie Carmichael, however, is not so sure about this deal. She's right to be suspicious - we're only 20 minutes into the show, and there hasn't even been a twist. There is. While investigating where the insulin came from, Carmichael and ADA McCoy learn that the Moores, and several of their equally wealthy friends, have some bizarre sexual habits. The men inject the women with insulin to put them in temporary comas. This, for some reason I cannot fathom, is erotic, and the men enjoy it so much they even trade partners. (Why it would matter whether the corpse-like body is your own wife or someone else's is beyond me, but there's a lot here I don't understand.) In case the description of this practice is not sordid enough - and because this is television - the couples videotape these episodes and share the tapes. So that we viewers are not left out, the show includes a screening of a tape of Mr. Moore injecting his wife. I can't help thinking that the show would have done fine without the video, but sex means ratings.

So twist #1 is that Mr. Moore did not assist a suicide, but rather may have attempted a murder (or a not-quite-murder). Mr. Moore had been injecting his wife with insulin for the sex game for weeks, ADA McCoy theorizes, so he knew exactly how much to give her. If he injected too much insulin, it must have been on purpose. This scenario looks particularly likely when the detectives learn that all of Mrs. Moore's money goes into a trust for her daughter if she dies, but stays under Mr. Moore's control if she is incapacitated. Mr. Moore's lawyers, funded by Mrs. Moore's fortune, promise McCoy that he will have "briefs coming out of his ass." (Personally, I like the Tom Cruise version of this line from A Few Good Men better: "I'll file a motion in limine seeking to obtain evidentiary rulings in advance, and after that I'm gonna file against pre?trial confinement, and you're gonna spend an entire summer going blind on paperwork because a Signalman Second Class bought and smoked a dime bag of oregano.")

To make sure Mr. Moore can't spend all his wife's money defending himself on attempted murder charges, McCoy and Carmichael get a civil court to terminate his rights over Mrs. Moore's finances and give control to Mrs. Moore's daughter, Debbie Mason. This turns out to be a big mistake, as Ms. Mason is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Her coffee table book business wasn't going so well (a purposeful Seinfeld rip-off, or did the writers run out of jobs to assign characters?) and Mommy had cut off all support nine months earlier. She clearly had a motive to try to kill her mother, but what about the opportunity? The cops speculate that maybe there was something going on between Mr. Moore and his stepdaughter. After all, if Mr. Moore were injecting his wife with insulin to get off, an affair with her daughter would be run-of-the-mill. This theory does not pan out, however. (Maybe, like rats and lawyers, even rich people set some limits on what they will do.)

A search of Debbie Mason's apartment leads the cops to twist #2. She has a ziploc bag containing residue of a rare drug, MPTP, that creates Parkinson's-like symptoms. Now it looks as though Debbie has been poisoning her mother for months. The Parkinson's symptoms were induced by the MPTP, and the insulin comas are just a red herring. The problem for the attorneys is that they can't prove how Debbie got the MPTP or how she administered the MPTP to her mother. I would explain the answers to these two questions, but I'm not sure what they are. All I could figure out was that Debbie Mason was having an affair with slick neurologist Dr. Richard Shipman, who was treating Mrs. Moore and hence was able to dose her with the nightmare drug. Beyond that, I was hopelessly lost for the last third of the show.

After all, I have a law degree, not a medical one, and we got heavily into Quincy, M.E. territory. Also, I missed how the MPTP shots had anything to do with the insulin (if, in fact, they did), or how and why Mrs. Moore was going to see the neurologist in the first place.

Suffice it to say that Debbie Mason and her weird friend Dr. Richard Shipman needed money - she for the coffee table books, he for Jekyll and Hyde research - and figured that killing Mrs. Moore was the best way to get it. Debbie tried to back out at the end, but the bad doctor was not as squeamish. In clear violation of a Hippocratic oath, he administered a near lethal dose of MPTP to Mrs. Moore.

Twist #3, and the most depressing of all, is that Mrs. Moore might not really be in a coma. She might just be "frozen." That is, she may be able to see, hear, and feel, but not to move or communicate in any way. The doctors learn that a shot of L-dopamine could reverse the deep freeze, and McCoy and Carmichael realize that, out of the coma, Mrs. Moore could testify against her daughter and Dr. Shipman. Ever the sensitive humanitarians, McCoy and Carmichael go back to civil court to get an order allowing such treatment. They win the legal motion, but the medical treatment doesn't work. Mrs. Moore remains incapacitated, Dr. Shipman pleads guilty to attempted second-degree murder, and Debbie Mason gets three years for assault.

Other Reviews  West Wing  The Practice  Ally McBeal  Ed

At bottom, this is another episode about sick rich people. Obviously Debbie Mason and Richard Shipman are sick, as they tried to kill Debbie's mother. But Mr. Mason and his rich friends, with their affection for their own and each other's comatose wives, are a pretty odd group, too. Indeed, this whole sordid sideline is just that: a detour unnecessary to the plot that provided a gratuitous sexual angle to the story. It also supported Law and Order's recurring message that people who have too much money on their hands can be very weird.

Class criticisms aside, this episode did have a very moving human side. Most poignant, in my view, is that Mrs. Moore learned, as she lay motionless in a hospital bed, that her daughter's greed and an ambitious and unethical doctor put her there. Matricide, deeply disturbing in and of itself, is even more tragic when seen from the perspective of the mother who realizes that her daughter tried to kill her.

Past Law & Order Reviews | Message Boards