[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Law & Order Season 24 Episode 5 “Report Card.”]
The latest Law & Order episode isn’t an easy one for Detective Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), as he’s faced with a tough decision and opens up about his own past.
Shaw and Detective Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) investigate after a teacher is murdered. A student, Anthony (Colton Osorio), had written a diss track about him, and the teacher threatened to report him; that would have violated his parole and would have sent him to juvenile detention. Anthony claims he just went to the teacher’s home to scare him, but the gun went off and he hadn’t known it was loaded. ADA Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) wants to try him as an adult, which Shaw is against, but then the detective learns Anthony’s prints are on the bullets; he knew it was loaded. He tells Price, who rescinds a plea deal he’d offered the teen.
Does any part of Shaw regret telling Price? “Yes and no,” Brooks admits to TV Insider. (Watch the full video interview above.)
Virginia Sherwood/NBC
“The dilemma that Shaw had at that moment was really a false choice because if he didn’t tell Price that the kid loaded the bullets into the gun, then Shaw is now putting Riley on the hook to keep his secret, right? So not only is he putting his own credibility on the line, he’s now putting Vincent Riley’s credibility on the line… It’s something that he’s going to struggle with,” explains Brooks. “It’s something that he lost some sleep over for sure. But I don’t know in the long run that he could live with himself if he’s not leading with truth and justice and morality and what I like to call human equity consciousness where he’s treating every single person the same way.”
He continues, “And I don’t believe he could have lived with himself in the long term had he not. It definitely added decades to this kid’s sentence—or presumably is going to add decades to this kid’s sentence. And he’s got to live with that.”
During the investigation, Shaw opens up to Riley about being in foster care with his brother while his mother was struggling with drugs. The family he’d been with made him leave one day, which has a major effect on a person.
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“Opportunities in life are rare to heal through your employment, and I would say that Shaw and I have a lot of the same traumas, and Shaw and I have some of the same backstory that triggers us into places of dissecting what we need to heal, and so I’m able to heal myself through Jalen Shaw,” Brooks reveals. “There’s a severe and deep abandonment wound there from family. And so I didn’t need to look any further than some parts of my own life.”
He adds, “Now he and I would express them differently. He and I have gone about healing them differently. I think I’m a lot more healed than he is. But in this character and playing that backstory, I was able to dissect some of the things that were still haunting me and cathartically have this experience through Shaw. … I think in that scene, you’re watching Mehcad Brooks heal in some ways.”
Looking ahead, SVU‘s Mariska Hargitay just crossed over in Law & Order‘s second episode. Are there more crossovers to come? Brooks isn’t aware of any but is looking forward to another. “Let me be frank,” he says. “When Mariska is on your set, you’re the guest star. It doesn’t matter what set you’re on, she can go to Bad Boys 4 or 5, whatever it is, Will [Smith] and Martin [Lawrence] are going to feel like guest stars.”
Watch the full video interview above for more from Brooks about this episode, Shaw’s decision, and his hopes for what’s ahead.
Law & Order, Thursdays, 8/7c, NBC
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