Law and Order – Season 23 Episode 10 Recap & Review

Inconvenient Truth

Law and Order Season 23 Episode 10 begins with Chef Jordan Bryant being murdered at his short-term pop-up restaurant. 

He got into an argument with someone earlier that night. Jordan knew a man that went by the nickname “Cheese” who wanted to hang out with him. However, Jordan told him it wasn’t a good time, which caused Cheese to make a scene that forced Jordan to throw him out. Cheese was later identified to be called Nick Perez, who had a history of violence. He becomes the prime suspect despite not matching the description of a man running from the scene. A waiter at the restaurant left Jordan for twenty minutes to buy cigarettes and came back to find Jordan bleeding out on the floor.

He heard someone leaving and chased them, but they got away in a black BMW. He gave a good description of the suspect, who was average height, with Perez being very tall. 

Perez was fresh out of prison and had visited Jordan because they grew up together. Perez wanted something from Jordan. Turns out, Jordan had been wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of a ten-year-old girl, with DNA exonerating him. 

He spent ten years in prison and wanted a fresh start. His original name was Jordan Walker before he changed it. He received ten million dollars in a settlement from the city when he got exonerated, and people who couldn’t bother to visit him in prison suddenly started showing up looking for handouts.

Jordan tried to ignore them and never parted with any money. However, he broke this rule for his only child, Veronica, by paying off her student loans. She was one of the few people who actually tried to stay in contact with Jordan and never believed he was guilty.

The cops visit Veronica to break the news of her father’s murder and question her about her father’s enemies. She mentioned that her father was arguing with his business partner Charles quite a lot, as he wanted to bring in more profit, while Jordan just wanted to cook and bring people together. Charles felt he had spent too much money on pointless things. However, Charles has an alibi for the murder and informs the cops that Jordan had a few disagreements with the father of the 10-year-old girl he was accused of killing.

Turns out, the father couldn’t accept Jordan’s innocence at first, and the cops talk to him and find out he’s since made peace with the fact he identified the wrong man. And he even loaned Jordan money to help him through his financial problems when he was broke. Despite getting the ten million payoff, he only saw one million of that money, with his lawyer, Keith Palmer, taking the rest.  

Jordan went to the board about Palmer, and was planning on accusing him of stealing over three million dollars from him. This couldn’t have come at a worse time for Palmer because he was about to be appointed as a judge.

In a twist, Palmer matches the description of the suspect, and he drives a black BMW. The cops focus in on Palmer as the new prime suspect as he has the biggest motive. Palmer is arrested, and his trial gets pushed up because the judge didn’t want him in prison for too long.

Palmer’s defence attorney claims Jordan was violent and made enemies in prison. They say that one of them could have killed Jordan, but Price wasn’t keen on that insinuation, but the judge still allowed it.

Veronica refused to let them paint her father as a violent man and insisted he did what he had to do in prison to survive. He took cooking courses and earned his associate degree behind bars and was positive about the future. In addition to this, Price gets the prison warden to go on record about that.

However, Price couldn’t predict the traffic ticket coming up. Palmer was photographed driving through a red light on the night Jordan died. Three minutes after the murder, he was driving uptown and claimed he was heading to his holiday home upstate. The defence attorney proved the eyewitness that saw him leaving the scene had smoked weed that same day and was unreliable. The cops drove that distance several times at night around the time of the murder and deduced that it was possible that Palmer still could have committed murder and ran the light.

The episode ends with Price deciding not to take the chance of wrongfully convicting another man so he dismisses the charges against Palmer. However, he also bugs Palmer’s phone because he suspected he might’ve known the real killer. The real killer was his wife: Amanda Palmer. She was found guilty after they got enough evidence to convict her.

The Episode Review

An interesting episode of Law and Order sees a few twists and turns that are quite entertaining.

It’s still very formulaic with very little opportunity for the characters to shine, and reveal motivations and backstory, but the cases are strong, and the same can be said for this episode, which sees a chef murdered in cold blood.

The outcome isn’t as expected, and despite being a little bit far fetched, it was fun to watch.