Nicole Wallace
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For the White House Communications Director, see Nicolle Wallace.
| Law & Order character | |
 |
|
| Nicole Wallace | |
|---|---|
| Time on show | 2002-??? |
| Preceded | N/A |
| Succeeded | N/A |
| First appearance | Anti-Thesis |
| Last appearance | Grow |
| Portrayed by | Olivia d'Abo |
Nicole Wallace is a fictional character on the TV drama Law & Order: Criminal Intent, portrayed by Olivia d'Abo. She has appeared in four episodes of the show as main character Det. Robert Goren's archnemesis. She is the first character in any Law & Order show to portray the role of the archnemesis in this fashion.
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[edit] Background and personality
A psychopathic con artist and thief, Wallace had 18 known murders to her name by the fifth season. She is an expert manipulator with a gift for rooting out every painful detail from a person's life and using it to control and/or destroy them.
Wallace's keen eye for detecting and exploiting weakness is borne out of her own dysfunctional childhood. She was molested and raped by her father, and responded to the trauma by resenting her mother as a rival for his affection. From childhood on, she was unable to see other people as anything more than tools to be used for her own ends; most people who fall into her machinations are discarded the moment they become a liability. The childhood abuse she suffered also bred in her an indifference to sex; she uses her lovers, both male and female, as pawns in her crimes, and either lets them take the fall or kills them herself once they outlive their usefulness.
As an adult, Wallace was imprisoned in Thailand with her then-boyfriend, a Charles Manson-like criminal svengali named Bernard Fremont, for helping him rob and murder eight men. She and Fremont were caught when Hilary Marsden, another of his lovers who was insanely jealous of Wallace, planted two of their victims' passports on them. While in prison, she learned to speak "low class" Thai. Upon returning to her native Australia, she supported herself as a prostitute. She eventually gave birth to a daughter, whom she may or may not have drowned at age three when she feared that she was becoming a sexual rival; to Wallace, who had internalized her father's excuse that she had been too attractive to resist, it seemed natural that the father would inevitably sleep with his daughter. The daughter's remains were eventually discovered and Wallace fled Australia before she could be linked to the crime.
In 2002, she came to the United States and got a job as a literature professor at Hudson University under the alias Elizabeth Hitchens (Wallace had killed the real Hitchens and assumed her identity as an Oxford University academic.)
[edit] Appearances
[edit] "Anti-Thesis" (season 2)
Wallace first crossed paths with Goren while he was investigating the murders of the president of Hudson University and his secretary. Wallace had manipulated a graduate student, with time running out on his Ph.D. thesis, into committing the murders, so that the recently opened job of Dean of American Studies would go to the woman she was sleeping with, who would grant her access to permanent employment and thus U.S. citizenship.
Almost immediately, "Hitchens" proved a formidable adversary, as Goren struggled to connect her to the murders. He was once again thwarted when she killed the graduate student (who was also her lover), by poisoning him when Goren brought him in for questioning, just before he implicated her in the murders. Goren eventually learned who she was and brought her in for questioning, but she threw him off by confronting him about his schizophrenic mother and his father, who had abandoned the family. Goren retaliated by deducing that she had been sexually abused, which she emphatically denied. She was arrested, but released during her interrogation after the university's lawyer secured her release on a writ of Habeas Corpus. Goren and his partner, Alexandra Eames, secured a warrant for Wallace's arrest, but by then she had emptied her apartment and vanished.
[edit] "A Person of Interest" (season 2)
Wallace eventually resurfaced, this time having gained citizenship as Elizabeth Hitchens by marrying Gavin Haynes, a wealthy businessman. She then murdered a young former Air Force nurse so she could steal a vial of anthrax from her to use in the set up of Dr. Dan Croydon. The psychological battle with Goren was even more intense this time, as Wallace set up Croydon, who had abandoned his family, to manipulate Goren's resentment of his father. Goren was too blinded with misdirected anger at his father to realize that Croyden was a feint. He finally apprehended her however, by proving only Nicole Wallace, and not Elizabeth Hitchens, had immunity to the anthrax; Wallace had received an anthrax booster in Australia, but there was no record of Hitchens having ever received such a vaccination. She was found not guilty at her trial, most likely because she used Haynes' money and legal expertese to poke holes in the thin case against her. (This was implied in the episode "Pas de Deux," which did not feature Wallace.)
[edit] "Great Barrier" (season 4)
She returned to plague Goren a year later as the brains behind a diamond theft ring, using a young Asian woman named Ella to take the fall. Wallace also had Ella make an attempt to kill Haynes, now her ex-husband, but the plot failed. She approached Goren and asked for a truce, and also belittled Eames for being a surrogate mother for her sister's baby, taunting Eames for having to give the child up. Goren was deeply shaken by her reappearance, but this time he did his own research and discovered the existence of her murdered child. Goren confronted Wallace with her past during an interrogation session; her cool, detached demeanor finally shaken, she vehemently denied the charges. Infuriated, she became bent on ridding herself of Goren once and for all, to prevent him from interfering with her new life with Ella, who was also her lover.
Goren and Eames could not find evidence to connect Wallace directly to the diamond theft scam, so Goren attempted to get to her through Ella, warning the young woman of Wallace's compulsion to use and destroy anyone close to her. Ella arranged to meet her at a certain pier, wearing a wire. Before police could intervene, however, Wallace found the wire, crushed Ella's trachea, and apparently jumped out of a window into the river below. A quart of Wallace's blood was left behind, and the medical examiner said she couldn't have survived in the water. Goren however, knowning Nicole's resourcefulness, had his doubts.
(In an alternate ending, Wallace is shot dead — onscreen — by Goren. East Coast viewers got the scene where Wallace lived, and West Coast viewers saw the one where she died, although both endings were made available on NBC's website. Viewers were given the chance to vote on which ending they preferred; the one where Wallace lived was chosen, and thus it is the only "official" ending.)
[edit] "Grow" (season 5)
Wallace found herself on Goren's radar yet again when the brother of a man she was dating was murdered. Goren discovered that the young daughter of Wallace's boyfriend would someday inherit millions from a trust, set up under a lawsuit concerning an improperly tested drug that left the girl highly susceptible to cancer; he theorized that she was going to kill the child by exposing her with toxic doses of estrogen (to induce cancer) that her lover, a medical examiner, would have access to. Goren confronted Wallace, but she angrily insisted that she was merely trying to get her life back together with the family she had always wanted.
Upon further investigation, Goren realized that Wallace's boyfriend was the one trying to kill the child in a plot to gain direct access to the trust fund, while Wallace was actually attempting to protect the daughter. Realizing his mistake, Goren approached Nicole and admitted that he now knew the truth, that Wallace was trying to atone for murdering her daughter. Goren tried one last time to reach his old foe, reasoning with her that she could never completely control her homicidal compulsions, making her a serious danger to anyone who trusted her. Goren also revealed to Wallace that the boyfriend was aware of her past, something she had kept hidden from him and the daughter, which meant that the boyfriend was in fact trying to set her up for his daughter's future murder.
Wallace incriminated her boyfriend in killing his wife and in trying to kill his daughter, and tacitly admitted to murdering the man's brother. She also admitted being responsible for her daughter's death (which she claimed was an accident), but refused to accept that she could not be a good mother. After her boyfriend was arrested (on evidence that she planted), she kidnapped his daughter and fled the state, but supposedly had an unprecedented attack of conscience and let her go, leaving the girl with an aunt in Arizona. She left an eerie message on Goren's voice mail cursing him for "taking away" her last chance at a real life, and disappeared.
[edit] "Slither" (season 5)
Wallace was last heard of as the suspected murderer of Bernard Fremont (episode: "Slither"). Goren and Eames were investigating Fremont and his two lovers for a string of robberies and murders in New York. Goren realized that Fremont was the boyfriend that Wallace had been imprisoned with in Thailand. Fremont and his lover Mala were ambushed as they emerged from a court room after being released on bail, and Fremont was killed with a poisoned syringe. Wallace did not appear in the episode, and the murder occurred offscreen; it was left open to interpretation whether it was indeed Wallace who had murdered Fremont. Goren seemed to believe that Wallace was responsible.
[edit] Comparisons to other characters
Just as Goren is often compared to Sherlock Holmes by fans of Criminal Intent, Wallace is compared to Professor Moriarty and Irene Adler, Holmes' nemeses.
