Monsters of Television

“Maybe the thing to do here is to keep letting him think he’s clever.”

Last week it was horrorcore and oversaturation of violent media that were destroying America. This week it was graduate students that represent a threat to America’s moral fiber (thankfully, it was one from the social sciences, not the humanities (we’re harmless! (it’s why no one fears cutting our budgets…))).

The graduate student, while much maligned, isn’t exactly the villain of a 1990s period piece (we’re not paid enough to be really dangerous in any decade), like I discussed last week with the show. Instead, “Brilliant Disguise” offers an example of an idea that would’ve probably been better served by being on Criminal Intent instead of on Law & Order. This boils down to the differences in the two show’s formulas, and what characters and stories feel more at home on which show.

At first the episode seems to be leading us to the idea that Internet “rub down girls” (as Lupo so eloquently says it) are what need to be extinguished from society. Lupo and Bernard do the necessary legwork (why does Bernard get to do all the computer stuff?), talking to suspects, sorting through clues to figure out who killed the murdered and hog tied hooker. The show plays its game of red herrings — It’s the lab assistant! The supposed murder is really just a harmless scientist! The fiancée is in on it! — until we discover that the at least one of the supposed red herrings is actually a kipper (though by the episode’s end, two of the herrings turn out to be kippers).

So the detects finally arrest the graduate student, Alex who is raging narcissist according to Skoda (J.K. Simmons returning for another quick scene) who became entranced by the sexual deviance he was exploring academically (happens to the best of us). The problem is a complete lack of hard evidence that could be used to convict him. Cutter, with a raging ego of his own, thinks he can break the Alex on the stand. He does, of course, leading to the court room denouement, and Alex’s overly-obsessive  fiancée revealing her tattoo of the grad student’s name near her breast in court, with the standard fade to black quip, “Love’s a bitch.”

The episode plays up Alex as a crafty one (“This is going to be fun,” he tells Cutter after rejecting a plea bargain), but we never get to really see it. Scenes of him at the murder, worming his way around the lab, telling his fiancée to seduce the shifty Juror #7 to swing the vote would really drive home this idea. Instead, Cutter breaking him on the stand occurs a little too quickly, and while the episode tries to direct us to Cutter not having a chance (even McCoy is doubtful), there’s no real suspense to it.

But these are things that we would get on Criminal Intent. Alex’s brilliant narcissism would come through full force as we’d see him trying to figure out ways to outwit Nichols or Goren. On top of that, we’d get more satire about grad school life since I’m sure Nichols or Goren would have some handy tidbits about it (or gave it a shot at some point) as they interrogated Alex, breaking him down slowly, piece by piece. It would’ve provided a more satisfying conclusion to the episode than Cutter’s seemingly too easy deconstruction of Alex’s psyche.

Ultimately, with Criminal Intent now in the wings, really clever (or think they’re clever) criminals start to feel out of place on Law & Order, their arcs and personalities being better served by the former’s formula of peeking in on the suspects and then their eventual breakdown at the hands of cleverer detectives (with their own issues, of course). That we locate the cleverer detective in the cleverer EADA isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but Law & Order doesn’t give Cutter enough room to really show off his cleverness. Start doing that, and I’ll start believing it.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• Lupo is way too good at cybering. Not that I can really evaluate how good someone is at it. A friend told me.
• Cutter’s jackassery at mentioning Rubirosa’s own jury tampering was not kosher, but if Rubirosa’s okay with it…
• It’s always a pleasure to see Timothy Busfield in anything.
• Feel free to tell me if that red herring/kipper thing didn’t work for you. I thought it was clever. But I am graduate student…