Law & Order: His Hour Upon the Stage (1991)
Season 2, Episode 11
6/10
Human Popsicle
23 November 2012
Warning: Spoilers
Two garbage men find a well-dressed dead body in a dumpster. The body has three bullet holes in it and has been frozen for five years.

The man was a big shot in the production of plays in New York. Ceretta and Logan untangle the diverse and often conflicting narrative threads behind the murder and present Stone's office with half a dozen suspects who might have been directly or peripherally involved.

All of them lie at first, of course, and it takes a lot of wheedling to get the truth out of them. In the end, justice is served.

There's nothing exceptional about the episode, meaning that it's quite good and up to the usual standards. The nucleus of the plot to eliminate the powerful but jealous producer is Finn Carter, the blond who was the dead man's fiancée and exploiter. She's sleek and sophisticated and desirable enough to kill for, or at least maim for. She's like one of those crystals that, dropped into a supercooled liquid, immediately freezes its surroundings into a solid and purposive mass.

But there were times when the plot was complicated enough that I got a little lost. I think there may have been three people involved in actually owning or driving the limousine in which the murder took place, perhaps more. At least one of the named was killed in prison.

Stone is given a cute little exit speech about the blond villainess, about how she never felt any real emotions. Everyone was only an actor on her stage and the victim wasn't really murdered. He just made a convenient exit. This is an established school of analysis in sociology, where it's known as the dramaturgical approach. One of its founders was the literary theorist and philosopher Kenneth Burke (1897 - 1993), q.v.
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