Fluency (Season 15, Episode 14)
Premise: During a flu vaccine shortage, patients who believed they had been immunized start dying, and detectives follow a chain of black-market middlemen to a counterfeiter who filled the vials with salt water.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 15, Episode 14
- Detectives
- Det. Joe Fontana (Dennis Farina), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Alexandra Borgia (Annie Parisse), DA Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- Rob Sedgwick as Elliot Peters, Xander Berkeley as defense attorney Clay Pollack, Kelly Coffield Park as Joanne Citron, Michael Marisi Ornstein as Sklar, Scott Decker as Mike Bass
- Director
- Matthew Penn
- Writers
- Nick Santora
Summary
The Investigation
“Fluency” begins when 10-year-old James Citron dies of the flu three weeks after a flu shot. The medical examiner finds no antibodies in his blood or in six other recent flu victims who were supposedly vaccinated, and suspects they were injected with sterile saline. With vaccine scarce, black-market vials are selling for hundreds of dollars.
James’s pediatrician, Dr. Wasserman, admits he bought his supply from a colleague, who got it from a new drug rep. She says a handsome man calling himself David Kolbrenner of a Canadian drug company offered it under the counter. A broker that sells lists of drug reps names its recent buyers, among them Mike Bass, whose shirt bears the monogram DK, and the rep identifies him. By then nine deaths have been linked to the fake vaccine.
New ADA Alexandra Borgia, an experienced trial lawyer new to homicide, meets the squad and refuses Bass’s demand for full immunity, threatening to charge him with every future flu death. He takes a fraud plea and names his supplier, a counterfeiter named Sklar. A planned buy at Sklar’s warehouse ends in gunfire, and Sklar is wounded, but there is no vaccine there. From his hospital bed, Sklar sends the detectives to a garage in Red Hook, where they arrest the source, career con man Elliot Peters.
The Trial
Defense attorney Clay Pollack argues that saline is harmless, but Peters is held without bail on manslaughter counts. The judge then suppresses the vials because the warrant named garage seven while the door searched was marked 14. The prosecutors then learn the garage is rented by Peters’s sister, so he has no standing to object, and the evidence is reinstated. To blunt a causation defense, they narrow the case to at-risk victims, leaving out the healthy James, and Borgia promises his mother that he will still be represented.
An expert testifies that a real vaccine would almost certainly have saved the victims, while Pollack gets the medical examiner to admit that the flu is listed only as a contributing condition on the death certificates. Peters testifies he is a counterfeiter, not a killer, and doubts anyone dies of the flu. McCoy cross-examines him with the Ferris wheel scene from The Third Man, casting the victims as dots Peters never saw.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Peters of second-degree manslaughter. Over Pollack’s objection that the sales were one scheme, McCoy argues each was a separate act, and the judge imposes 15 years per death, to run consecutively. Borgia thanks McCoy for keeping her promise for her, and he tells her not to make another.
Why it stands out
- This is Annie Parisse’s first appearance as ADA Alexandra Borgia.
- McCoy’s cross-examination borrows the Ferris wheel scene from The Third Man, in which Orson Welles’s black marketer sells diluted penicillin.
- Peters gets consecutive 15-year terms for 16 manslaughter counts, a potential 240 years for selling saline.