Hindsight (Season 25, Episode 2)
Premise: When a 10th-grade boy is stabbed in Central Park, the trail leads to the girl whose doctored nude photo he shared, and Price’s case comes to depend on her psychiatrist, the woman he is seeing.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 25, Episode 2
- Detectives
- Det. Vincent Riley (Reid Scott)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), ADA Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), DA Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn)
- Guest stars
- Abigail Rhyne as Cassie Moore, Kerry Bishé as Grace Hall, Tawny Cypress as defense attorney Erin Grassley, Graham Rowat as Ken Moore, Noa Leah as Nora Coleman
- Ripped from the headlines
- The case appears to draw on the spread of AI-generated fake nude images among teenagers and on the Tarasoff case, in which the California Supreme Court held that therapists must act to protect people their patients threaten.
- Director
- David Grossman
- Writers
- Scott Gold & Will Lapp
Summary
The Investigation
“Hindsight” begins with Price on a walk with Grace Hall, a psychiatrist he is seeing, who tells him about a teenage patient so afraid of phone calls that he turned down a college interview. That evening, 10th-grader Todd Feldman, a trumpeter in his school’s marching band, is stabbed three times in the upper back in Central Park on his way home from rehearsal. His phone is gone, a bead lies by the body, and the medical examiner finds the wounds oddly shallow for so sharp a blade.
Adderall hidden in Todd’s room leads to classmate Dylan Colavecchio, who bolts, is caught and admits selling the pills, then points to Todd’s feud with bandmate Nora Coleman over a trumpet solo. Nora has an alibi and says Todd passed around a nude picture of a girl at school, Cassie Moore. Cassie, tracked down after skipping school, claims she lost the matching bead from her bracelet two years earlier, but a ride-share record puts her near the park minutes after the killing, with an urgent stop at a diner. Detectives sort through the diner’s trash and find a bloodied credit-card-sized blade.
With Cassie’s father, Ken, out of the room, Lt. Brady shows her that a message calling the photo fake went out from Todd’s phone after he was dead. Cassie confesses: Todd, an old friend, had turned her swimsuit selfie into a fake nude to impress popular boys, and she waited for him on their usual route home.
The Trial
The office charges Cassie as an adult. Grace, her psychiatrist since her mother died of COVID, begs Price to reconsider and testifies for the defense, but the court rules for the prosecution. Price persuades Baxter to offer first-degree manslaughter and 12 years; Cassie and her father refuse, and defense attorney Erin Grassley gets the confession suppressed by arguing that Brady deliberately questioned the girl alone.
The defense turns to self-defense. Cassie testifies that Todd choked her when she threatened to go to the police and that she carried the knife for protection; on cross-examination she is asked why she took his phone and posed as him instead of calling for help. With the jury leaning her way, prosecutors find a hidden Instagram account Cassie used to message Grace on her way to the park. Grace admits Cassie said she meant to kill Todd. Called as a hostile witness, she testifies under the duty-to-warn exception that Cassie vowed to make him pay and that she answered only with advice to breathe and talk the next day.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury finds Cassie guilty of second-degree murder. Afterward Price waits alone at a restaurant and leaves a message for his dinner companion, until someone arrives apologizing for being late.
Why it stands out
- With no regular partner for Riley after Shaw’s departure, Lt. Brady works the case in the field and draws out the confession herself, a confession the court later throws out.
- Kerry Bishé plays Grace Hall, the psychiatrist Price is dating, who ends up as a hostile witness against her own patient.
- The verdict turns on a therapist’s duty to warn, the exception that lets the jury hear what Cassie told her psychiatrist before the killing.