Law & Order Season 18 Episode Guide
Plot summaries for the eighteenth season of Law & Order, which aired on NBC from January to May 2008, featuring Det. Cyrus Lupo, Det. Ed Green, Det. Kevin Bernard, Lt. Anita Van Buren, Executive ADA Michael Cutter, ADA Connie Rubirosa and DA Jack McCoy.
- 1
Called Home
Det. Cyrus Lupo returns from four years overseas when his brother dies of a lethal injection, and a second assisted suicide points to the daughter of a paroled right-to-die doctor.
- 2
Darkness
During a citywide blackout, kidnappers kill a housekeeper and seize a hedge fund manager’s wife and daughter, and the search for the plot’s organizer uncovers a scheme to rig the power market.
- 3
Misbegotten
A package bomb leaves a pregnant security guard in a coma, and the bomber’s motive leads back to a scientist trying to detect a genetic marker for homosexuality before birth.
- 4
Bottomless
The killing of a young lawyer defending her parents’ dry-cleaning shop in a lost-pants lawsuit uncovers a retail executive’s affair and a company cover-up of poisoned toothpaste.
- 5
Driven
A fight over a basketball ends with two children shot dead near an Upper West Side playground, and both a Black father and a white mother face a jury for the deaths.
- 6
Political Animal
Three men are shot dead in a Manhattan apartment, and a trail that first leads to a closeted state assemblyman ends with a celebrated political fundraiser who is living under a borrowed name.
- 7
Quit Claim
A hit-and-run that kills a visiting mother and daughter uncovers a scheme to cheat struggling homeowners out of their houses, and a title closer who keeps slipping out of the prosecutors’ reach.
- 8
Illegal
A legal immigrant is killed by gunfire as police break up an immigration rally, and McCoy’s pursuit of the auxiliary officer who fired puts his own record on trial.
- 9
Executioner
A visiting doctor is beaten to death in a borrowed hotel room, and the intended target turns out to be a New York physician who quietly carries out executions in South Carolina.
- 10
Tango
A high school girl is raped and killed after straying from a Manhattan tow pound, and the case turns on whether a pimp or his drug-addicted girlfriend dealt the fatal blow.
- 11
Betrayal
When a psychiatrist who treats troubled teenagers is shot dead in his office, the evidence leads to his wife, who was his patient at 15, and she takes over her own defense to put his abuse on trial.
- 12
Submission
A dog-fighting bust turns into a murder case when one of the dogs turns out to have swallowed a woman’s finger, and a reporter romancing the suspect complicates Cutter’s prosecution of the missing woman’s husband.
- 13
Angelgrove
The stoning of a SoHo art dealer first points toward Islamist threats, then to her devout college-age son and the pastor of an extremist Christian youth camp, whom Cutter tries as an accomplice.
- 14
Burn Card
Ed Green shoots the suspect in a referee’s murder outside an illegal gambling club, and an Internal Affairs probe exposes his old gambling habit and lands him on trial for murder.
- 15
Bogeyman
A novelist’s staged suicide becomes a murder case against her husband, who blames a secretive self-help movement, and his lawyer turns the trial into an attack on the group.
- 16
Strike
A Legal Aid paralegal is run down on a picket line, the suspect is a man freed by DNA after nine years in prison, and the strike leaves Rubirosa defending him against her own office.
- 17
Personae Non Gratae
A car-stereo worker beaten to death had tried to expose his boss’s online romance with a girl whose messages were really written by her mother.
- 18
Excalibur
A gold refiner’s murder leads to his brother-in-law’s escort agency, and one of its clients turns out to be the governor who holds McCoy’s political future.