Law Order: Criminal Intent After...

Law & Order: Criminal IntentAfter all my griping about Vincent D'Onofrio earlier this season, I am gaining a soft spot for Goren with each passing episode. I think I subconsciously used him as a punching bag to compensate for the urggh-type crankiness I sometimes get when I'm trying to write these things at 10 pm on a Sunday. I don't know. Perhaps I should consult a shrink. Not Dr. Pynchon though. What looked in the beginning to be a Rear Window homage suddenly switched gears into an indictment of psychologists who use their talents for torture. Pynchon specialized in unnerving suspected terrorists at Guántanamo. Determined to reconcile the unethical nature of her stress-inducing special-ops past with her Hippocratic conscience, Pynchon decided she'd use torture to heal people. To me, this makes as much sense as using anthrax to disinfect my bathroom. With the best intentions, Pynchon paved a road to hell by using house music and isolation to program Robbie the computer geek into a sunken-eyed, string-bean version of the Hulk, only murderous and not as green. It's a testament to her gifts that she could make someone so wiry capable of flinging a soda dispenser down a flight of stairs just to squash someone for grooving to their iPod. (I have nothing against the house genre myself, although I think my guitar hero Jeff Beck wasted too many albums dabbling with it.) The pièce de résistance was Goren and Eames' own devious little setup in which they tricked Pynchon into thinking they were torturing a confession out of Robbie. It was a dynamite scene except for one quibble: If Pynchon was so concerned about Robbie, why didn't she just lift the blinds to see if he was okay? Maybe by that point the demented doc was too stressed out and wanted to be caught. Says Goren: "Evil changes everybody."