It’s unclear to me when, or even if, Law & Order became wacky. The subject matter became more charged and the serial numbers were less filed off and more “covered with scotch tape” for ripped from the headlines cases, but the wackiness and absurdity, the nonsensical plot twists, were always the province of Special Victims Unit. Even from the start, that show was doing Internet danger (with the inaccuracy that phrase promises) in Season 1. If you want an off the beaten path Law & Order episode, one in which even the characters within it question the premise, “Corpus Delicti” will fulfill your needs. It really made me wonder why Law & Order: Horse Crime never took off. It seems a much more fruitful endeavor, a more bountiful subject, a more meaningful dialogue between show and audience than Law & Order: Trial by Jury and Law & Order: What If Los Angeles. As Zoo and Luck will tell you, horses are good for two things: fucking and racing. Fortunately, “Corpus Delicti” deals with the latter. NBC wasn’t ready for Benjamin Bratt to flopsweat about his sick wife after committing infidelity by mounting a horse. It’s ready for that shit now. If a static shot of Budd Dwyer’s brains pouring out his nose like the Niagara Falls could win the 18-34 demographic they’d put it on, have Neil Patrick Harris introduce it and have the corpse host SNL the week before to build up hype. But enough about how terrible NBC is at doing its job, we’re here to discuss Law & Order. “Corpus Delicti” is smack dab in the middle of Season 6, when Orbach and Bratt are still working on their chemistry. Granted, Orbach has chemistry with anyone and anything (see that movie about that monstrous creep who forces a woman to love him… it’s got a lot of people who look like household objects… oh! Right. Dirty Dancing.), but their dynamic was still in flux by this point. Benjamin Bratt represented something newer, sexier, more ethnic; hell, his character’s “thing” for a while was he knew how computers worked whereas Old Man Briscoe and Old Woman Van Buren kept on asking “why do we need to click on the rat?”. I wouldn’t say this episode represents a turning point in the two detectives’ relationship, but at the very least shows the growth. Kind like the growth of a horse’s cock when it becomes erect. I swear I’ll eventually lay off the horse cock comments. Cockments.

Always a good sign.

Briscoe and Curtis are just wrapping up firearm practice (some nice banter about Lennie’s “antique” compared to Curtis’ semi-auto) when they’re called to the stables to investigate the death of Mister Wickets. “What’s his first name?” “His first name is Mister” replies the woman who made the 911. He’s a h-h-h-h-horse! I’ll give the writers this, they really lean into the belief that adding “horse” to something is funny. “We’re not the horse police”, “maybe the horse died of horse disease”, etc. The writers of this episode (two TV vets, one of whom still writes SVU scripts) know exactly what this is supposed to be, a welcome change from the ridiculous, half-serious, confused nonsense to come out of SVU for the last decade. I mean, you’ve got Jerry fucking Orbach putting on a Mr. Ed voice when Curtis complains he didn’t sign up to investigate dead animals. Nonetheless, Van Buren forces them to do their due diligence and what do you know, they find a conspiracy at the heart of this. A horse conspiracy. Horsepiracy! Mister Wicketts belonged to businessman Richard Brandson (with a ‘d'; not the Virgin guy…I think), who bought the horse for his daughter with the intent of said horse being competitive. He wasn’t, but the daughter loved him anyway. “We communicated through our bones” she says of them, which I thought was weird until I remembered that scene from Cruel Intentions 2. Remember, they tried doing a prequel TV series for FOX and then FOX was like “even we can’t put two twin sisters making out naked in the shower on network television yet” so it became a DTV production? And now a Cruel Intentions TV show is on the bubble. How times have changed…

“Look, kid, if you’re that out of sorts I’m sure dad can buy you a vibrator…”

The detectives figure Brandson, despite his daughter’s bond with the equine, had the horse killed for the insurance money, but that avenue of investigation dries up when he cancels that claim. They still got him on intent to commit insurance fraud so that takes them to his horse trainer, Lyle Christopher, who denies involvement despite his alibi inadvertently proving there was some sort of conspiracy between Brandson, Christopher and some dude named Mr. Brown, Mr. White and several other beloved Reservoir Dogs characters and Nice Guy Eddie. Record checks indicate Christopher has committed fraud, horse or otherwise, in several other states and this is part of a pattern. Of course, he’s smart enough not to get his hands dirty with the actual task of putting these underperforming horses down. (Someone in the episode does invoke “the glue factory”, by the way. Of COURSE.) Mr. Black/Brown/White/etc., who looks like Michael Chiklis if drawn by Jack Kirby, gets swept up in a sting that uses Brandson as bait. I admire how willing Kirby Chiklis is willing to flip on his supposed buddy; it shows an admirable pragmatism. Come on, all he does is kill horses through electricity or maybe ping pong balls. (There is a lot of discussion on the various ways to kill a horse in a way that makes it look like natural causes. I wonder if a rash of horse deaths coincided with the airing of this episode, like how people bought terriers because of Frasier.) It’s not like he fucks them.

Steven Hill was the original voice of Marge Simpson before it was determined they wanted a less gravelly voice.

The case becomes less about the horse assassinations and more about Christopher’s dalliances with widowed women who have a boatload of cash. He has a thing of getting romantically involved with them in addition to guiding their investments. Now, I’ll be honest. I’m not working with master tapes with this show. I don’t even have the DVD. I’m watching what had aired as a rerun on the Hallmark Channel that I received through means I’d rather not divulge. So it might be because the picture quality on my copy isn’t stellar, but I don’t get why all the girls want to fuck Lyle Christopher. Frankly, he looks like JFK if he had survived the assassination and his years of being him caught up to him. Wait…I just figured it out! He’s Donald Trump with Kennedy hair. That’s how he’s gonna win the fucking election! Gravedig Jr., synthesize the perfect toupee in the lab and he’s got all the fucking swing states! It’s so brilliant yet so simple. So his latest lover, Ruth Thomas, is supposedly on a cruise, but when they call the cruise line they’ve no record of her ever getting on the boat. I guess that’s better than being Natalie Wood’d, but not by much. The prosecution wants to prove that Lyle Christopher killed his wealthy girlfriend but that is difficult considering there’s no body. That’s the legal dilemma of the day, and Jack McCoy is not rewarded for rolling the dice on a murder case without proof of any actual death. Hence the title. The phrase Corpus Delicti refers to the notion that you must first prove a crime occurred before someone can be convicted of said crime.

Here’s something I like about classic Law & Order: the cops and attorneys aren’t always on the same page, and they have differences of opinion that aren’t resolved by one side browbeating the other into doing what they want done. (Hello, SVU!). The two sides are aligned, but they’re not that close despite what that awesome group walkin’ scene in the opening credits may indicate, so it’s not uncommon for Jack McCoy to treat Rey Curtis like shit or cast aspersions about Lennie’s character. It makes sense that sometimes there is tension, and the actors do well with this episode’s wellspring. Jack’s case is pretty much fucked from the jump, having to rely on incomplete evidence. There’s a history of fraud or intention to commit fraud, but horse killer Tibor Nichols’ word doesn’t sway the jury. Come on, I’m sure he’s an upstanding citizen besides that whole, uh, aspect of his life!

He’s gonna build a wall around the horses and make them pay for it, etc.

Christopher’s lawyer isn’t adept at preventing from Jack McCoy to mentioning at length his client’s prior criminal activities, no matter how many times the judge warns McCoy to shut the hell up. One of McCoy’s special skills is that if he yells hard enough he can provoke a mistrial, and that’s exactly what he does when all of his evidence gets explained away or disregarded, like the woman’s blood in the car being chalked up to a corkscrew accident gone horribly wrong. (I’ve opened…Christ, probably several hundred bottles in my time, but I’ve never broke the skin. Just thought I’d mention it.) Law & Order plays the maneuver well in that you don’t immediately get that that’s what Jack is doing. Sam Waterston plays the role so self-righteous and over the top sometimes his grandstanding doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. He could’ve brought a horse puppet to the stand and had it ask “Why did you let me die, Mr. Christopher?” and I’d say “well, that’s about a 5 on the McCoyometer”. The gambit works, and a month later Adam gets a call that they found Ruth Thomas’ body. It does make me wonder: how often does the Manhattan DA receive phone calls in his own office that some fisherman dredged up a body off the shore of Long Island? More than you’d expect, I guess. Loved the closing line with Sam Waterston dismissing that Christopher’s attorney will successfully accuse him of mistrialing. “You know how emotional I get.” We ALL know how emotional you get, dude. Two episodes ago you were throwing empty bottles of Jim Beam at jury members who “looked funny”.

Tibor Nichols looks like Scott William Winters if he had leukemia.

Other details I appreciated: Van Buren’s precinct is so strapped for cash she can’t afford pencils with erasers on them so damn sure she’s not paying for a fancy horse autopsy. She rarely does a lot in an episode, but she’s always good for a few one-liners subtly denigrating his subordinates’ competency. She’s like Steven Hill in the way, albeit she comes from the style of a matronly black woman instead of a ninja turtle in a trenchcoat. Lennie gets the pre-credits zinger “New York really is a rough town for tourists”. I’m gonna start keeping track of these pre-theme one-liners. Claire has a good line where she tells Jack she doesn’t have a transporter beam to get to work faster and he just lays into her for telling jokes while the case is going south. By this time in the season I’m pretty sure they’re having sex, and knowledge of that lends added dimension to the scene. It also makes you realize how much of a fucking drama queen McCoy must be in the bedroom. One casual remark about his chicken wing shoulder blade and he’s sulking for days.

Seriously how many fucking Law & Order actors have to resemble turtles

“Corpus Delicti” features an all-star cast of Law & Order players, as the guys who play Brandson, Tibor Nichols and Lyle Christopher each logged 4-6 appearances over the course of the franchise, all in different roles. It makes sense why they’d stay in the rotation, they know how to do the job without becoming too noticeable to not reappear as a judge or a truck driver a few years later. The only modern comparison I can make is how the cast is recycled for subsequent seasons of American Horror Story and American Crime, but even then that’s the principal actors and not the bit parts nobody remembers beyond “hey he looks familiar, wasn’t he a pedophile two years ago”. Here’s the most important guest actor of all: Jill Hennessy, Claire Kincaid’s actress, was filming part of a Homicide: Life on The Street crossover and couldn’t leave Baltimore for New York. So her twin sister Jacqueline filled in for her in some of this episode’s court scenes. I have to say, she’s excellent at sitting at a table. I’m not sure what jobs you can get with that skill set, but Wikipedia tells me she is living a fine life.

She’s like a reverse Rory Calhoun!

This is based on something that really happened, thus the disclaimer at the top of the show. Helen Brach was a rich widow who became involved (financially) with a man named with Richard Bailey. She disappeared sometime between going to the Mayo Clinic and taking a flight back to Chicago. Richard Bailey didn’t get convicted of killing her because they never found a body, but he nonetheless went to prison for defrauding her in, yes, some ill-conceived horse purchases. As you can tell, “Corpus Delicti” stays close to the inspiration while providing more closure than real life can occur. I prefer that than the more recent trend of conflating two popular incidents like, say, [insert contemporary police shooting of an unarmed black male here] and Hulk Hogan saying racial slurs on tape. Still, it’s a bit of a cop out that in the last couple minutes they eventually find the body. More true to the show would be Jack getting the amount of justice he could prove, rather than what he wanted. It just veers into fantasy, Aaron Sorkin-like “we’d try this shit CORRECTLY!”. “That glove WOULD fit O.J.!”

“If you go to prison, you will have to turn in your mustache.”

Apologies for the approximate five month delay between installments. Who do I think I am, a comic book publisher? I am hopeful that this is but the first of a series I’m calling “Scandals and Animals”, in which I address episodes within the Law & Order universe that deal with animal crime, be it crime committed by animals or crime committed to animals. There are a LOT more of those than you’d think. Really, though, I’ll be honest: this is just a Trojan Horse so I can talk about that goddamn Special Victims Unit episode where Big Boi’s eaten by a tiger. It will prove to have been well worth the wait.