Panic

As someone who lobbies for the banning of the panic defense in criminal cases, this Law And Order story has some serious flaws. No way is this story about panic defense.

The claim is usually made against and LGBTQ individual that somehow they came on to them and that this was a threat to masculinity and therefore rage took over and I had to kill this individual. Both in my private life and when I worked for New York State Crime Victims Board I saw this defense used, sometimes sadly successfully and sometimes not.

Tom Berenger is married to Carolyn Edmond and both are FBI agents. He's arrested for murder when he shot and wounded Ruthie Henshall, a lesbian mystery writer who started an affair with Edmond after she and her husband were consultants on a book she was working on. An innocent man who was with Henshall was killed.

Gerry Bamman who was Berenger's defense attorney had to know that this so much bull as Sam Waterston demolishes the defense. It was improperly used however as I well know. Yet there is more to this story than what I have told you.

It's a topic near and dear to me and I wish I could do better by this episode, but I can't.

Season 10 was actually a very solid season, with a vast majority of the episodes being good to outstanding. Albeit with two episodes that were slightly above average and also two that never clicked with me. It's not the consistently great quality that the Season 10 of 'Criminal Intent' was, but it is infinitely better than that for 'Special Victims Unit', which was a very slow starter, succeeded by moments of greatness in its mid period and then ended badly.

"Panic" is the second of the two 'Law and Order' Season 10 episodes that didn't click with me. The other being "Merger", for fairly similar reasons but "Panic" gets the slight edge when it comes to talking about which was worse (a large part of it being because of the defense argument and because the premise didn't gel). This was an example of an episode where it started off quite well but actually went downhill in the legal scenes, when often it's the legal scenes where an episode gets better.

By all means, "Panic" is not a bad episode. Photography while very close up doesn't come over as too static or filmed play-like, while the production values are typically solid and have subtle atmosphere while not being drab and keeping things simple. When the music is used it is haunting and has a melancholic edge that is not overdone. The direction has enough momentum and breathing space.

The acting is very good from all the regulars, particularly Sam Waterston. Very interesting seeing a younger Ruthie Henshall. Tom Berenger does a very good job as the defendant.

For all those good things, there are things that didn't work. The second half is a bit too over-complicated and tries to cram in too much in too short a space of time. The episode also felt rushed and jumping about-like and motivations and connections could have been fleshed out more as they are vague.

What ruined "Panic" was that the premise was not an easy one to swallow and even more so the truly ridiculous, very one-sided and borderline improbable defense argument that most would find easy to dismiss within a heartbeat. Unfortunately the episode relied a little too much on it and it made it difficult to take the story at face value, which saddens me considering that it is an important and personal topic that is not explored very well. Also the ending felt rushed and felt like it should have been introduced earlier and that would have helped make some of the case more fleshed out.

In summary, watchable but not great. 5/10.

For me at least, it wasn't hard to guess who the real killer was in Panic. Two FBI agents aren't likely to have left such a critical clue at the scene of the crime.