30 (Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode)

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“30”

Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode

Episode no.

Season 6
Episode 127

Written by

Charlie Rubin
Warren Leight

Directed by

Andrei Belgrader
Jean de Segonzac

Guest stars

Chris Bauer
Miriam Shor
Lee Tergesen
Stephen Beach

Original airdate

February 27, 2007

Episode chronology
← Previous	Next →
"Brother's Keeper"	"Players"

30 is a sixth season episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

1 Synopsis
2 Criticisms
3 Background
4 References

[edit] Synopsis

Logan and Wheeler investigate when Mike's old friend Josh Lemle, (played by Lee Tergesen), a business reporter friend who had backed Logan after he had gotten himself exiled years earlier, comes to Major Case to report his own murder by radioactive polonium poisoning. Logan agrees to help his friend find out who used Polonium-210 to poison him, but Lemle is reluctant to reveal the whole story to Logan because not all of it is pretty. Both Hazmat and the FBI get involved as the search turns city wide, with both the mayor and Homeland Security wanting answers.

At first, Logan and Megan suspect one of Lemle's sources, a self-styled Russian spy, for leading the killer to Lemle or of being the killer himself. However, the polonium is traced to a restaurant where Lemle last dined with a woman named Rebecca, another reporter and Lemle's extramarital lover. It turns out that Rebecca was the actual target, but when Logan and Wheeler go to question her, they hit a wall engineered by the FBI. Logan presses Lemle for more information, and he reveals that Rebecca was working on a story concerning the death of an American teacher with Palestinian sympathies by an Israeli tank. When Rebecca is found dead, Ross wrestles the truth from his friend, a lobbyist for an Israeli-American political action committee. Rebecca's story was much more explosive than originally thought: the American teacher, Sarah Myers, was killed as a result of a false tip allegedly leaked to the Israelis by the Palestinians themselves; furthermore, Myers was actually a Mossad agent, and thus the Israelis killed their own spy. Logan confronts a dying Lemle with this new information, pleading with him to share what he knew about Rebecca's story, but Lemle simply remains silent.

As detectives Logan and Wheeler follow the trail of clues all over the city, they find themselves digging deeper and deeper into Middle Eastern intrigue. They learn that Sarah Myers, an American school teacher who had moved to Palestine to show solidarity with the Palestinian people, was really a mole for Mossad, and that her death was the result of a betrayal by the Palestinians, who had given a tip to the Israelis that a suicide bomber would disguise herself as a blond American woman in order to get closer to troops. The detectives eventually decide that the polonium was actually meant for Rebecca Slater (Miriam Shor), a reporter who was about to release the story, but never learn whether it was the Syrians, Hamas, or the Israelis who were responsible.

[edit] Criticisms

The episode was widely criticized for portraying Israel in a harsh and unbalanced light and appearing to promote anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as disloyal citizens. The episode shows Israeli bulldozers destroying a Palestinian school and a Jewish police captain who agrees to cover up for Israel by shutting down a criminal investigation at the urging of the head of the local pro-Israel group. In one scene, after Capt. Danny Ross tells his officers to halt their investigation, Det. Mike Logan confronts him and asks, "Are you a Jew first and a cop second?" When one character draws distinctions between the actions of the IDF and the terrorist targeting of civilians by Hamas, Logan cuts him off, implying that it is also common IDF practice to target civilians.^[1]