Darkness (Season 18, Episode 2)
Premise: 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.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 18, Episode 2
- Detectives
- Det. Cyrus Lupo (Jeremy Sisto), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Michael Cutter (Linus Roache), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston)
- Guest stars
- Tom McCarthy as John Conlan, Valentina DeAngelis as Katie Conlan, Patrick Stump as Marty Dressler, Brad Calcaterra as Roy Barkin, Peter McRobbie as Judge Walter Bradley
- Ripped from the headlines
- The legal fight centers on an Enron-style scheme to manipulate electricity prices.
- Director
- Michael Dinner
- Writers
- William N. Fordes & David Slack
Summary
The Investigation
“Darkness” begins as a kidnapping in a blackout. Soon after the power fails, intruders enter the Manhattan home of hedge fund manager John Conlan, cut the throat of housekeeper Isabel Paez, and take his wife, Alana, and daughter, Katie. A security system reconstruction shows the attack, and paint left in the garage points to an old Chevy cargo van. Van Buren runs the response with dying radios and old-fashioned police whistles.
The kidnappers demand $15 million by midnight, and with the banks shut, Conlan offers cash and jewelry. At the drop, a man on a bicycle grabs the bag and dies after hitting a cable strung to a store generator. The bike leads to Nick Costas, whose father, now suffering from Alzheimer’s, once ran a pet shop in Astoria. When Judge Walter Bradley refuses to sign an emergency warrant for the shop, Cutter tells Green to go in anyway. The detectives find Alana Conlan dead, pull Katie from the van, and arrest Nick’s cousin Roy Barkin.
Katie heard her captor blaming a partner for the plan, and a garage-door tool bought two days before the outage suggests the kidnappers knew it was coming. Cutter learns that Energyne ordered its New Jersey plant offline at peak demand, forcing New York to buy power from DelphPower at four times the normal price. Both firms are controlled by Conlan’s fund, Mattawin Capital. Rubirosa links Nick to Marty Dressler, an IT worker in Conlan’s office who hacked his e-mail.
The Trial
McCoy learns that the search had no warrant, and Cutter offers to take the fall. Dressler has erased the hacked messages, so Cutter needs Conlan to testify about his orders to Energyne vice president Paul Kleist. Conlan refuses, fearing prison and losing his daughter, and federal prosecutors will not give him a deal. With suppression motions due, Cutter subpoenas Katie and, in open court, moves to dismiss the charges against Barkin and Dressler while reserving the right to bring them again.
As the two men walk free, Cutter tells Katie that her father caused the blackout to push up prices and is withholding evidence that could convict her mother’s killers. Katie tells her father she will not live with him unless he tells the truth.
Spoiler, the ending: Conlan takes the stand and admits he had Kleist shut down the plant so another company he controlled could charge inflated rates, and that Dressler stumbled onto the scheme. The episode ends as cross-examination begins, so no verdict is shown.
Why it stands out
- Fall Out Boy lead vocalist Patrick Stump guest-stars as Marty Dressler.
- Cutter sends the police into the hideout without a warrant after a judge refuses to sign one, a decision that later forces him to drop the charges against the kidnappers.
- To pressure a reluctant witness, Cutter dismisses the case in front of the victim’s daughter and then tells her why her mother’s killers are going free.