Series / Law & Order: Criminal Intent

"In New York City's war on crime, the worst criminal offenders are pursued by the detectives of the Major Case Squad. These are their stories." DONG DONG

The second Spin-Off from the popular Law & Order series, Criminal Intent shows the viewer what is happening from the criminal's perspective as well as the ongoing police investigation. Basically, what happens when Sherlock Holmes is brought into the Law & Order universe, complete with a quirky genius detective - Robert Goren (Vincent D'Onofrio), a twitchy, anti-social detective in the NYPD Major Case Squad who has a very sharp mind for piecing together details and lateral thinking. Together with dryly sardonic partner Alex Eames (Kathryn Erbe), they investigate the most serious crimes that occur in New York (most of which seem to be murders or end up in murders), whilst the show also gives us the perspective of the people responsible for it (or at least people who are connected to the people responsible for it). They first serve under Captain James Deakins (Jamey Sheridan) and then Danny Ross (Eric Bogosian). The second season establishes Nicole Wallace (Olivia D Abo) as a recurring villain, the Moriarty to Goren's Holmes.

In 2005, Mike Logan (Chris Noth) - formerly of the original series - joined the cast when D'Onofrio began to suffer from exhaustion. The episodes alternated between Goren and Eames one week, and Logan and his partner the other from that point. Logan was first partnered with Carolyn Barek (Annabella Sciorra) and then Megan Wheeler (Julianne Nicholson), with Nola Falacci (Alicia Witt) filling in for Wheeler while Nicholson was on maternity leave. In 2009, Logan was replaced by Zach Nichols (Jeff Goldblum), though Wheeler stayed. In 2010, Goren and Eames left the show at the conclusion of the second half of season 9's two-part premiere, along with Ross and Wheeler. The remainder of the season focused on Nichols and his new partner Serena Stevens (Saffron Burrows), with the Major Case Squad being led by Zoe Callas (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio).

The show was renewed for a tenth season that brought back D'Onofrio and Erbe for eight final episodes. This time they were joined by Jay O. Sanders as Capt. Joseph Hannah and Julia Ormond as Goren's therapist Paula Gyson. Criminal Intent aired its finale on June 26, 2011, ending its run after ten years and 195 episodes.

In 2024, a Canadian version of Criminal Intent aired in Canada known as Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent.

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Provides examples of:

A - D

• Abusive Parents: An abundance of them, most of them seen to be something other than physically abusive and who usually end up being a Karma Houdini:
  • Psychological abuse: "The Saint," "Shibboleth," "Magnificat"^note although this one is primarily directed at the other parent, "Diamond Dogs".
  • Neglect/Indifference: "Shrink-Wrapped," "Tru Love."
  • Verbal abuse/Preferring one child over the other: "Beast," "Wrongful Life," "Unrequited", "Bedfellows," "Saving Face."
  • Sexual abuse: "Death Roe," "Playing Dead."
  • Other: The father from "Homo Homini Lupis," who embezzled from his company and took money from a loan shark to pay it back... which caused his family to be kidnapped for collateral and his elder daughter to be raped. He wasn't abusive per se (he clearly loved his family), but his actions proved him to be incredibly irresponsible at best.
  • The biological parents from "The Good Child," who killed their daughter's adoptive parents and then tried to kill her as well so that they would inherit the payout from the adoptive parents' life insurance.
  • Goren’s older half-brother, Frank, is implied to have been relatively scarce for most of his now-adult son's life.
  • Even if she was sick with schizophrenia, it was still implied Mrs. Goren was this to her younger son, namely psychologically abusive and neglectful, in spite of him being the one who cared for her in her final months.
  • Logan's first episode as a main cast member makes reference to him having been physically abused by his alcoholic mother, a fact that was established in the original series.
• Accidental Murder: A variation in "Albatross". During a reenactment of the Hamilton-Burr duel, a sniper was supposed to take out one of the two men, the obnoxious and psychologically abusive husband of a Senator, but the actors ended up switching roles at the last minute (and the sniper was too far away to make out the features of the pair, so he was basing his target on their costumes), so the other guy ended up being killed instead.
• Age-Stereotypical Food: "The Good Child" plays with this. At one point, the detectives are looking for a missing teenaged girl who was a witness after the murders of her adoptive parents. Upon speaking with another witness, an older athletic woman, about the girl's whereabouts, they notice both a bag of cheese puffs and a bottle of Yoo-hoo left out in the open and order her to come out of hiding, which she does. Turns out, the witness was her biological mother and one of the killers of her parents.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: The killer in "Badge" upon learning that they were going to be arrested for the quadruple murders done in the episode, cries out to the detectives before breaking down in tears "Please don't take me away from my girls!" (their daughters). To this, Goren spares no mercy saying how the same hands they use to tuck their daughters in at night brutally strangled two children the same age as them.
• All for Nothing: The killer from "Neighborhood Watch" killed the victim because he always wanted to know what it was like to kill someone, but ended up deeply regretting it, not because it was wrong to do, but because of what a hassle the aftermath of the murder was.
• All There in the Manual: Although some fans believe it to be of the Ass Pull variety, Kathryn Erbe revealed in an interview from 2001 that Eames had a husband who was killed in the line of duty but that she believed that it would never be brought up in the series.
  • Nichols' official bio, as shown on the USA channel website, mentions that the character's (ultimately temporary) departure from the police force was prompted by the September 11th attacks. This fact is never mentioned in-series.
• All Women Love Shoes: From "Ex Stasis":
  Eames: "No woman with a 40-slot shoe rack willingly walks around in a pair of crappy shoes."
• Always Murder: Even though the real Major Case Squad does not handle murders. (At least not directly; it does handle bank robberies and kidnappings, both of which can certainly end in murder.)
  • Subverted in one early episode, where the case is a kidnapping.
• Anachronistic Clue: In "Trophy Wine", the counterfeit wine was an excellent forgery, but George Washington's initials had been machine etched, not hand etched, on to the bottles.
• And Another Thing...
• And I Must Scream: Several times, there's someone who is in a dire medical situation to which there is no hope of recovering. "Phantom" (suspect strangled and left in a coma), "Conscience" (a woman suffers cardiac arrest and is left in a coma for several years), "Acts of Contrition" (a man viciously beaten by three thugs and left with permanent brain damage.)
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Starting with Season 5, there were episodes that focused on a secondary team within Major Case. Goren and Eames usually don't appear in episodes starring them. Season 9 totally focuses on this secondary team, as Goren and Eames leave at the end of the season premiere.
• And Starring: The first five seasons have Courtney B. Vance as ADA Carver.
• And the Adventure Continues: How it all ends.
• Anger Born of Worry: Eames had this towards Goren in "Purgatory". Understandable, as the latter was sent to do authorized undercover work that she didn't know about herself this time and came this close to shooting him in the head during a police raid.
• Animal Assassin: The Victim of the Week in "Inhumane Society" is beaten up, drugged and dumped in a pen containing vicious attac dogs that maul him to death.
• Antagonist Title: Criminal Intent refers to the Villain of the Week and their motivation for their crimes.
• Anywhere but Their Lips: In the season 9 opener, after Goren is fired, he and Eames are saying goodbye as partners for the last time. They full-on embrace for the first time in the series, and right beforehand Goren presses a rather intense kiss to her cheek for several seconds.
• Armed Blag: "Astoria Helen" opens with a gang knocking over an armoured car that is delivering cash to ATMs. Major Case get involved months later, when one of the gang starts picking off his accomplices
• Armor-Piercing Question: Used all the time to break perps.
• Ashes to Crashes: A subverted and Played for Drama example happened in "Senseless". Three honor students were murdered by a sociopathic gang-member and his two mooks, a pair of brothers who lost their father years ago. When trying to tie the homicides to them, the detectives soon discover the gun used in the crime hidden inside of the urn of their father's ashes, to their mother's absolute horror.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Subverted in "Contract," where the victim is a gossip columist who was blackmailing a Bill O'Reilly-esque newsman when he was killed. After the credits, we learn that he only turned to blackmail to provide for his kid sister. It eventually turns out that he was murdered for trying to expose the man who raped her.
  • The manipulative hustler from "Collective" who caused the main victim to be accidentally killed by the police ended up being asphyxiated halfway through the episode.
  • In “Ten Count,” a killer and attempted rapist ends up beaten to death by the murder victim’s brother.
• The Atoner: A suspect from "Acts of Contrition", a nun who saves prostitutes from their pimps, is atoning for her youth for being a delinquent who slept around and hung out with racists.
  • In "Amends", the man who actually killed Eames' husband left the gang life and became a doctor in an attempt to make up for what he'd done.
• Autopsy Snack Time: In "Lonelyville", Logan is eating a sandwich in the morgue while Dr. Rodgers explains the autopsy results. Rodgers takes the sandwich off him and dumps it in the garbage.
• Awful Wedded Life: This was the relationship between the Police Commissioner and his wife in "The War at Home". Sadly, they were so distracted by their marital woes that they weren't there for their daughter, who went missing.
• The Baby Trap:
  • In Dollhouse, a woman uses her toddler son as a pawn to blackmail wealthy men.
  • Pulled off by a third party in "Ill-Bred". Her husband was having an affair with his wealthy boss's wife, so she secretly poked holes in his condoms so the boss' wife would get pregnant and they could then use the child's paternity (which would be evidence of the affair) to blackmail her.
• Badass Adorable: Eames is five-foot-two, adorable, and blonde. And she is just as terrifying as Goren when she gets going, if not more so.
• Bait-and-Switch: Nichols displays his talent for the piano to a suspect in "Rock Star", implying that he too tried to pursue a career in music and didn't make it in spite of his skill. While the suspect insults him for not having the guts to do what it takes to become famous, Nichols then tells Wheeler when she asks why he's a cop instead of a musician, he says because he enjoys it and is good at it and his pianist skills are just a hobby.
• Ballet Episode: In "Delicate", Nichols and Stevens investigate a murdered ballerina, whose killer may be a member of her elite school community.
• Based on a Great Big Lie: What allowed Jojo Rios, the main suspect in "Legion", to manipulate his young followers into doing his bidding: he told them that he was the lone survivor of a group of people sailing for America on a tiny, ramshackle boat from Cuba. In reality, he came to the country with his rapist father, and had been placed in foster care while his father was sent to prison. When the kids learn the truth, their loyalty to him is instantly broken.
• Batter Up!: The Victim of the Week in "Love on Ice" is a washed-up ball player who gets whacked over the skull with one of his lucky bats.
• Beard of Sorrow: Goren began to sport a few throughout season seven, as a symbol of his growing despair and decreasing sanity at the time. Interestingly, past that season while he still did wear beards, they took on a completely different meaning.
• Beastly Bloodsports: The career of a promising young boxer is derailed when authorities discover he's at the center of a dog fighting ring in "Inhumane Society".
• Beauty Equals Goodness: The one suspect from "Depths" was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed bombshell that was able to use her looks into misleading the investigation into thinking that her ex-husband and Middle Eastern colleagues were the real criminals.
• Because I'm Good At It: In "Rock Star", after Nichols demonstrates a little of his own abilities on the piano, Wheeler asks him why, with that kind of musical skill, he's a cop. He replies, "Because I like it, and I'm good at it... and that kid's a killer."
• Believing Their Own Lies:
  • "Homo Homini Lupis" had a woman and her two daughters, who had survived a harrowing ordeal of being kidnapped, having their lives threatened and the elder daughter being raped, insisting the event never happened to the point of both forgiving the husband/father who caused them to be kidnapped for collateral and refusing to identify their attackers. They eventually came to admit it, with Goren’s help.
  • "Folie a Deux", as the title suggests, had a couple lose their daughter through kidnapping in a hotel and continuously stonewall investigators about her whereabouts and even her very appearance. Turns out, the little girl died accidentally from being left in a hot car with failed air conditioning months earlier and the father had already buried her on some property owned by his rich, elderly aunt. The father was aware of the truth, but the mother had felt so guilty about what happened (she was the one who put the baby in the car) that she began to believe the story they'd concocted to fool his aunt.
• Best Friend Manual: Eames for Goren.
• Berserk Button:
  • Never, ever, ever threaten or harm Eames. Goren will hunt you to the ends of the earth.
  • Word of advice: Do not mess with Goren's mother or he will rip your head off.
  • Don't disrespect your own mother in Goren's presence, either.
  • And though it's not seen nearly as often, hurting Goren where Eames can get so much as a whiff of it is not a safe place to stand.
• Big "NO!":
  • Done by Goren while interrogating Nicole Wallace and trying to get her to admit the truth about her past and her involvement in a recent murder.
  • Logan also had one in "To The Bone" after learning that someone he thought was a thug pulling a gun on him and had shot in self-defense was an undercover cop, who later died.
  • The murderer from "Inert Dwarf" shouted a few of these upon being arrested, seeing how he just lost his family, his freedom and his reputation in one fell swoop.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: Goren is pretty much the only member of his family who's both relatively stable and a decent human being. The only other person who might qualify is his nephew (although even he seems to have some minor mental health issues), and said nephew grew up largely away from any of Goren's other relatives (including his own father, Goren's brother).
  • The main characters in "Reunion" are revealed to be this when it comes out that Jordy is Milo's father, making he and Sylvia his parents.
  • "In The Wee Small Hours" ultimately ends with a judge, his wife, and his teenage son all in prison: the son for negligent homicide related to a girlfriend's death by overdose, the father for statutory rape on another of his son's conquests, and the mother for killing said conquest because she knew her son was involved and didn't want him mixed up in the scandal that would result if her husband was accused of rape. Everyone pretty much agrees that the father was the source of most of his family's problems, but they still have to hold the mother and son accountable for their actions.
• Bitch Alert: The daughter-in-law from "Proud Flesh", while at her sister-in-law's birthday party, wears a very unconvincing smile and "compliments" her on the "Moo-Goo-Gai-ese" she speaks at the age of three (the young girl is from the second marriage of the father to a younger Chinese woman, and for further posterity, the girl is turning four.)
• Blackface: Attempted but ultimately averted in "Gemini". While the suspect would have framed his mentally ill brother as both a White supremacist and a killer, he would fly off to the Carribbean and disguise himself as such using food coloring and cold cream.
• Black Gal on White Guy Drama: Inverted in "Mad Hops", as the White coach had romantic feelings for his one player's Black mother, only for her to reject him and want only for her son's future.
• Blackmail: The driving force behind the actions of the killer of "Tuxedo Hill".
• Blatant Lies: In "Dramma Giocoso", Logan and Barek discover that a woman at the center of their case ended up in an emergency room, but the ER doctor can't talk to them about a patient, so Logan suggests they hypothetically discuss a scenario where his "poor, sweet mother" came in with the same symptoms. This description is so far from the reality of what Logan's mother was that Barek noticeably hesitates on the adjectives when asking a follow-up question.
• Body in a Breadbox: The victim in "Semi-Detached", a controversial shock jock host who suffered from depression, ended up committing suicide via walking into a steam closet on a ferry while the entire chamber filled up with carbon monoxide. The detectives soon found his body waiting for them.
• Bound and Gagged:
  • The killer in "Blind Spot" does this to her victims while subjecting them to Cold-Blooded Torture.
  • In "Please Note We Are No Longer Accepting Letters of Recommendation from Henry Kissinger", a distraught woman takes over a preschool. She ties the director and a teacher to chairs and gags them. They are in the room as Goren attempts to talk her down.
• The Boxing Episode: "Ten Count."
• Brains and Brawn: Funnily enough, Eames is the muscle in her partnership with Goren. She's no slouch in the intellect department - she's shown to be much more computer-savvy than her partner - but she's physically very tough despite her size.
  • Though it must be said that Goren himself, being both a police officer and a former military man, has proven to be more than capable of handling himself in a fight.
• Break Them by Talking: A favorite tactic of Goren's is to either play psychological mind games or confront the perp of the week with evidence of what a truly pathetic and inadequate person they really are until they crack.
  • Another variation by Goren. Some of the perps and suspects have learned to rely on their loved ones or on close partners. Goren either reveals that the loved ones had already betrayed them or that they had plans to betray them. The despairing or infuriated perps quit trying to maintain secrecy, and reveal incriminating information while screaming.
• British Brevity: The eight-episode tenth season is highly unusual by American TV standards, but greatly resembles the seasonal offerings of shows created across the pond.
• Broken Bird: Alex's husband was a cop killed in the line of duty. Downplayed as she seems to handle it pretty well most of the time; the only time it really becomes an issue is when she has to actively deal with the case, as opposed to just the fact of his death.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • What Goren eventually comes to think of his mentor, Declan Gage, and with damn good reason: not only did his cold, unloving behavior towards his daughter, Jo, and early exposure to his violent casefiles turn her into a Serial Killer who kidnapped and tried to kill Eames, but also he himself murdered both his brother, Frank, and Nicole Wallace in an effort to "improve" his life.
  • The son from "Shibboleth" idolized his biological father who abandoned him and always wanted a relationship with him in spite of the man having no redeeming qualities, to the point that he almost went down for several of the father's murders.
  • Wheeler has a slight one in "Blasters" after viewing that one of the actors of a show she liked in her youth was a Jaded Washout who was stonewalling their investigation. She even said to Ross at one point "I can't believe that I used to have a crush on this guy."
• Brooklyn Rage: Usually downplayed with Goren, but he'll sometimes adopt an exaggerated Brooklyn accent if he thinks it'll help with his Perp Sweating.
• Car Cushion: In "Boots on the Ground", the Victim of the Week is thrown off the roof of a building and lands on a cab that has stopped underneath.
• Car Fu: The victim from "Graansha" is killed this way, having been ran down by her own brother due to allowing outsiders to learn about the world of their exclusive Irish sect.
• Career Not Taken: Det. Zack Nichols originally went to college to become a doctor, but ultimately became a cop instead. He has also sometimes mentioned his regrets about not becoming a pianist.
• Carpet-Rolled Corpse: In "Three-In-One", the kidnapper cum killer is a painter who carries the bodies of his victims out of building wrapped in a drop cloth.
• The Cast Show Off: In "Rock Star," Jeff Goldblum's first episode, he has a scene where he gets to demonstrate his skill as a pianist.
• Category Traitor: “Silencer” revolves around a group of deaf rights activists. One character is considering cochlear implant surgery, which some view as betraying the deaf community.
• Catfishing:
  • In "Faith", a publisher is killed because he and the editor were catfished into believing in "Erica", an inspirational author and blogger who suffers from ALS. It turned out to have all be a scam by the apparent "foster parents", and the editor killed the publisher rather than have to accept that "Erica" was fake.
  • In "Legacy", a boy creates a fake profile to lure a teenaged girl into an online relationship, as part of an elaborate scheme to take revenge on the boy's mother.
• Characterization Marches On: Goren was initially seen as a brilliant detective with the ability to read people, comprehend situations better than most, solve the case and maintain his high clearance rate and spoke several languages. After the first season, however, in order to give him a few flaws and make him feel more relatable, he was given a troubled past, including a schizophrenic mother, junkie brother and less apt when separated from his partner. He still had his former characteristics, but the latter ones overtook his persona.
• Character Name Alias: In "Identity Crisis", a Con Man turned murderer leaves behind a wallet on the body containing a social security card in the name of Victor Lustig: the con man famous for selling the Eiffel Tower.
• Cheated Death, Died Anyway: The victim of "Reunion" was the Sole Survivor of a plane crash (that also killed her son's father when he was a young child or rather who he thought was his father), and later beat breast and lung cancer at different times only to be bludgeoned to death by a champagne bottle.
• Chekhov's Gun: Actually, Chekhov's brick in "Untethered", as part of Goren's plan to get into Tates.
• Children Are Innocent: Subverted in "Grow". After the drug-related death of her Uncle, the little girl told the detectives that he basically was weak and died trying to dull the pain of life — after her father makes it clear that he was intentionally not telling her much about her uncle's death. It's the first clue that there's someone else in her life giving her guidance.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Carver and Barek both left the series after season 5 without explanation, and each were mentioned exactly once afterwards.
• Church of Happyology: The villain of "Con-Text" runs a variation of this, which he calls GraceNote. An unusual example in that there's no overtly religious component; it's presented more as a self-help program. (It is still, however, very much a cult dynamic.)
• Clear My Name: The season 7 finale has Det. Goren being framed for the murder of his brother by his Arch-Enemy Nicole Wallace and mentor Declan Gage.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • Goren's mannerisms really give this impression (especially when he tilts his head).
  • Nichols is Jeff Goldblum doing his Jeff Goldblum thing, so he counts too.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: Goren and Nichols' methods, bizarre though they are, are often very effective in solving their cases.
• Coattail-Riding Relative:
  • A suspect from "The Pardoner's Tale" was this to his sister, a high-ranking city official. Goren even compares him to Roger Clinton and Billy Carter.
  • A non-relative version happens in "The Unblinking Eye", with the one friend, an aspiring actor, riding his more talented friend's coattails, while at the same time resenting said friend's quicker rise. He even went to so far as to deliberately sabotage what could have been his friend's big break (a small role in a major movie) by making himself sick with ipecac poisoning the night before so his friend would spend the night sitting up with him, causing him to be tired the next day and make so many mistakes that he was ultimately replaced.
• The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes:
  • In "Shrink-Wrapped", the killer turns out to be the daughter of a psychologist and a psychiatrist. Both are extremely narcissistic (to the point where they once abandoned the girl in a restaurant on her birthday) and borderline psychotic in the masochistic games they play with each other. She is driven to kill simply to attract their attention.
  • When Goren's mentor, a skilled if bizarre criminal profiler, comes to town to catch a killer he's been stalking for years in "Blind Spot". Turns out the murderer isn't the one he was looking for after all— it was his own daughter, warped into copying a serial killer because it was the only thing that would hold his attention, and she thought that if she could set herself up as part of the case, he'd finally pay attention to her. In a later episode, he kills nearly everyone Goren cares about (including himself) so that Goren can keep his mind on the job. Truly a paragon of sanity.
• Coffin Contraband: In "Love on Ice", the killer disposes of the murder weapon by placing it in the coffin of the Victim of the Week.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Plenty of the Serial Killer episodes qualify as well as some basic, non-multiple killings. A memorable episode (and by "memorable", it's meant to be "horrifying") was "Blind Spot" where Eames was kidnapped and listened as the killer brutally tortured and murdered their victim. More disturbingly, the killer was a woman.
• Cold Opening
• Comatose Canary: Subverted in the episode based on the Terry Schiavo case.
• Complexity Addiction: Several of the perps seem to suffer from this. For example, the killer in "Consumed" kills three men and frames her neighbor, a cop with a sleepwalking problem, for the murders, just so she could get information from one of them regarding money her ex-husband was withholding from her. And then she didn't even go after the money; she destroyed the information so neither of them could access it. Oh, and on top of all of that, the frame job didn't stand up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny.
  • Nicole Wallace sometimes edges into this, as she frequently tries to hide not only her identity, but the fact that her victims were murdered at all.
• Continuity Snarl: This was a common complaint of the later seasons given the Genre Shift and rotating characters/blurry character motivations, but a prime example would be the season 8 episode "All In." To follow, it was an ostensible continuation of the season 5 episode "Cruise To Nowhere," but unless the slight similarities were pointed out, most fans missed the connection. This was because the character's name was unnecessarily changed from Joey Frost to Josh Snow; additionally, characters, plot lines and personality between both episodes were either left murky or forgotten all together (like Joey/Josh becoming more methodical and aware instead of just street smart with little to no skills at being an adult and no mention of the mother from before), and the character went from being in his early 20s initially to being in his late 20s to early 30s in the later episode.
• Contraception Deception: In "Ill-Bred", a wife spikes her husband's chewing tobacco with fertility drugs while simultaneously sabotaging his condoms to ensure that he knocks up his employer, with whom he is having an affair, in an elaborate variation of the Baby Trap.
• Convicted by Public Opinion: Dr. Peter Kelmer in "The Good Doctor". The manipulative tactics of the police and badmouthing of his wife's family led in the public turning against him, forcing him to take the stand in his own defense and being convicted almost solely because he wasn't the nicest of people.
• Cop Killer: Occasionally dealt with. In particular, Alex's first husband was a police officer killed in the line of duty.
  • The couple from "Stray" who murdered two undercover cops also killed around seven other people.
• Corrupt Politician: Representative Peter Bellingham in "Wasichu", who uses a proposed Native American casino as an excuse to go on lobbyist-funded "fact finding tours" around the world. On his orders his driver breaks into a lobbyist's house and winds up killing the lobbyist's Secret Service agent wife.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: In "Three-In-One", the killer, who suffers from dissociative identity disorder, paints on the wall in his victims' blood, and one of his personalities writes messages asking for help.
• Crazy Cat Lady: The two elderly sisters in "Bombshell", in spite of their wealth, are shut-ins who live with their numerous cats. The said cats even crawl on Logan and Wheeler when they're interviewing them and when one of them nuzzles in the former's lap, the women remark that it likes him.
• Creepy Souvenir: The one suspect from "Semi-Detached" was able to give her ex a keychain with his initials. What was believed to be "shiny black thread" was in actuality the hair of his favorite DJ, who she had killed because he censored his calls and took his hair when he,was a patient at the hospital that she worked at.
• Crime Time Soap: Though perhaps not as much as Special Victims Unit, although many would agree that it became this since Rene Balcer left after season 5.
• Crocodile Tears: Lampshaded in "The Unblinking Eye", by a suspect who held a press conference to show the world that he was "grieving" his slain fiancée.
  Eames: There's nothing like watching a crocodile cry.
• Crossover: With the original series, three times in the first season.
  • One episode had a brief cameo by the lead character from In Plain Sight. Captain Ross later sarcastically says that a suspect's actions was perhaps a product of having watched too much CSI.
• Crazy People Play Chess: The villain in the season 4 episode "Gone" was this.
• Crippling the Competition: In "Delicate", a shard of broken glass is inserted into a ballerina's shoe that causes a lingering injury that threatens to derail her career.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: "The Healer" (two women asphyxiated in plastic, life-sized cocoons), "Faith" (man set on fire with the accelerant being nail polish remover), "The View From Here" (man attacked with a circular saw), "Shibboleth" (women are hog-tied and if they attempt to free themselves or leave their intricate position, they strangle themselves), "Blasters" (a man is systematically hanged by a group of mafiosos and then left to rot in a park), "Beast" (the victims poisoned with dioxin, which is difficult to come by and make), "Great Barrier" (a suspect has their trachea crushed then drowned), "Scared Crazy" (a victim crushed by a falling vending machine), amongst others.
• Cycle of Revenge: This is basically what drove the killer in "Acts of Contrition". His brother was brutally beaten in a racially-motivated attack that left him with permanent brain damage several years earlier and he went looking for one of the people responsible, but ended up killing an older woman because she wouldn't tell him where the woman he was looking for was.
• Da Chief: Captain Ross is rather obviously outclassed by Goren, though he isn't shy to call Goren out on more blatant shenanigans.
• Damsel out of Distress: Eames escapes the ordeal in "Blind Spot" on her own.
• Dark Secret: In "Monster", a parolee's mother finds evidence that, in addition to the crime he was convicted of, her son committed a rape that a group of boys was serving time for. The cop who worked the original case didn't want it coming out that he had essentially browbeaten the boys into false confessions, so he killed the mother to keep her quiet.
  • The funeral home in "Dead" had one: they would charge grieving families for the services, only to oversell them for fake ashes and hide the bodies on their grounds.
  • "A Murderer Among Us" began with a woman committing suicide in an elaborate way which leads detectives to discover that her husband was a serial killer of Jewish men in the same way she died; she did it to get him arrested for the murders and to protect their daughter from him.
  • Goren's mother had a several-years-long affair with a man who turned out to be a serial killer, which ended only when he snapped one day and violently assaulted her. What's more, the timing of the affair was such that she was never sure whether Goren was her husband's child or the product of her affair. A DNA test ultimately reveals him to be the latter.
• Dead Animal Warning: Goren receives a dead rat in his drawer at the end of "Purgatory" in response to both calling out a fellow officer wrongfully identifying Eames' husband's killer in "Amends", causing the man to lose his job and his pension and for busting two other dirty officers who were involved in drugs and murder in the former episode.
  • Also happens to Eames in "Blind Spot". The killer frees and kills her bird before kidnapping her.
• Dead Hat Shot: In "Contract", a gossip columnist is killed by an explosive charge planted in the headrest of his car seat. After the explosion, there is a close-up of his bloodstained fedora lying in the street next to his car.
• Deadly Doctor: More than a few killers in this show have had schooling and training in various fields of Medicine and Psychology/Psychiatry, one even in the Medical Examiner’s Office.
• Dead Man Writing: Played with in "Palimpsest". Two men are found dead, having apparently killed each other in a struggle, and one of them had left a message saying that he was planning to confront the other man, who was blackmailing him, and that if he was found dead, the other man would probably be to blame. By this point, Nichols has already determined that the scene was staged, but the video ends up being relevant anyway; it turns out that the real killer had been the person to whom the victim entrusted the video, and that person had watched the video and then staged the scene to match the prediction.
• Deadpan Snarker: Detective Eames is made of this trope.
  • Goren has his moments.
  • And Wheeler gets her moments as well.
  Detective Nichols: "How's the, uh...how's the body?"
  Detective Wheeler: "Dead."
• Dead Person Impersonation: Subverted in "Mis-labeled"; the one being impersonated wasn't dead, but for all intents and purposes could be considered such; he had been in a semi-vegetative state since overdosing on Ecstacy four years prior.
  • In "Identity Crisis", a man has been hiding from his past by assuming the names of a group of students from the college he had worked at who had died in an accident.
• Death by Cameo: Joan Jett in "Reunion."
• Death by Falling Over: One of Victims of the Week in in "To the Boy in the Blue Knit Cap" dies after he hits his head on a pinball machine during a fight with his brother.
• Death by Despair: Discussed by the missing little girl's great-Aunt in "Folie a Deux". She said that the little girl was the only thing keeping her alive and she knew that she was dead and that her nephew and his wife had killed her.
• Deer in the Headlights: Lorelai Mailer in the episode "Bombshell."
• Defective Detective: Goren was brilliant at his job, but socially awkward and at times obsessive. Logan had anger-managenent issues, and a distrust for authority figures.
• Delayed Diagnosis: One episode deals with a mild-mannered, middle-aged accountant who fell into crime because his odd behaviors repelled people and made it difficult for him to hold down a regular job. When Goren suggests that he might have Asperger's syndrome (which, at the time, had only been recognized for maybe a decade or so), he's almost relieved that there's a name for it.
• Denied Food as Punishment: After going into solitary confinement in "Untethered", Goren is denied water by the guards for three days.
• Depraved Bisexual:
  • Nicole Wallace. To be fair to the show, her bisexuality isn't actually portrayed as a negative, and they make it clear she's just plain messed up, period. Also, it appears her only confirmed lesbian relationship may have been simply a means to an end rather than due to any actual desire.
  • Karl Atwood, the bad guy in the very first episode ("One"), had a girlfriend and an old prison buddy with whom he was intimate. Goren theorizes that he uses anal sex as a means of dominating others, but the girlfriend refuses to comment.
  • Leanne "Lee" Baker, the defense attorney from "Lonelyville", manipulated everyone throughout the episode, including her client Tammy to get money and blackmail her clients into silence or expose their cheating. She was even fired from a previous law firm for sexual harassment against a female coworker.
• Detective Drama
• Detective Mole: In "Broad Channel", Nichols and Stevens investigate the murder of a Dirty Cop in an isolated island community. They are forced to work alongside a detective from the Dirty Cop's home precinct. This detective turns out to be a Dirty Cop himself and the one who orchestrated the murder.
• Deteriorates Into Gibberish:
  • In "Blind Spot", criminologist Declan Gage plays a tape of someone being tortured by a serial killer, pointing out to Goren how the victim's speech grows increasingly incoherent as the pain and panic overwhelm them.
  • In "Untethered", Goren is bound to a table and denied water for two days. He grows increasingly incoherent as the dehydration nearly kills him.
• Determinator
  • "Consumed" is about two married Determinators going head-to-head during their divorce. The husband has hidden fifteen million dollars in an offshore account. In order to avoid giving any of it to his wife, he spends six years in jail for contempt of court, which Goren says is a record for New York. The wife, meanwhile, has a secret life as a private investigator trying to track down the money. Goren and Eames find a storage unit (which Goren calls her "Batcave") filled with disguises, photography equipment, and even adult diapers that she uses on stakeouts because she can't risk missing anything. The detectives are stunned at the lengths to which these two will go to get the better of the other. (And it turns out the wife, by committing the murders that open the episode, had gotten access to the money, but she burns the notebook with the bank account numbers because she doesn't care about the money; beating her husband was all that mattered anymore.)
  • In "The Saint", Stephen Colbert plays James Bennett, a man who spent thirty years setting up the religious group that "took advantage" of his mentally unwell mother. He's smart enough to fool historical experts, and could've succeeded in pretty much any intellectual field. Goren says that if the foundation hadn't screwed over Bennett's mother, he would not have been so determined, which he seems to accept.
• Deus Angst Machina: Goren qualifies, if anyone does. Let's see... his schizophrenic mother hates him, even though he's the only one who takes care of her; his drug-addicted brother gets all the love from their mother; his father - who treated him like shit anyway - turns out not to be his real father; and his biological father turns out to be a murderer, who then gets executed, which on the show NEVER HAPPENS. He gets persecuted by the FBI, ends up in a mental hospital, and gets (temporarily) fired, not to mention his health and good looks go to shit, too. This is only a partial list of all the shit that goes down. If anyone can be accused of provoking the wrath of the writer-deities, this character would be definitely be it. The unrelenting, unceasing suffering that occurs was enough to make many fans stop watching the show, out of sheer disgust. Quite literally, Goren's relationship with his partner (however you choose to interpret it) is the only thing he has going for him — no wonder she's his Berserk Button! If anyone earned a happy ending they never got, it's Goren. Shoot the Shaggy Dog, already.
  • Even his relationship with Eames was messed with. When Goren goes undercover in season 7 (without her knowing beforehand), Eames almost shoots him in the face when the police raid the apartment. The resulting shouting match puts a strain on their partnership for a long time, though they eventually recover.
• Did You Actually Believe...?: Used in "Eosphoros" when the lone survivor of a killing spree confronted the killer who used her for grandmother's money and said he'd never be with her because she was obese.
• Dies Wide Open:
  • The victims from "Con-Text" were found to be this. Naturally, Goren, while investigating their murders, began to poke at their open eyes...which ended up being a clue to how and when they died.
  • Frank Goren also died this way after being shoved out a window.
  • A screenwriter named Wes Banyan who was decapitated in "Slither" ended up this way. The accompanying look of terror left on his face implies that he didn't go peacefully.
  • One of the killers from "Yesterday" was found this way after falling from a high-level construction site. Even though his life was in shambles and he was about to be arrested for the crime, detectives knew that he didn't commit suicide.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: This is what got the victim in "Blasters" killed. He sold bootleg DVDs of not yet released movies, which horned in on a similar racket that a foreign mafia was working on, resulting in his murder.
• Dirty Cop: Aplenty: "Badge" (an NYPD school security officer), "Monster", "Untethered" "Purgatory" and "Broad Channel" have their fair share.
• Dirty Harriet: Detective Stevens poses as a High-Class Call Girl in order to get an interview with the madam of an exclusive escort service in "Gods and Insects". The squad room breaks into applause when she returns still in her outfit.
• Disability Alibi: In "In the Wee Small Hours", Goren and Logan discover that their main suspect is innocent of at least one of the murders because a shoulder injury means that he could not have lifted his arm to deliver the overhead blow that killed the victim.
• Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery: Most of the deaf people in "Silencer." Not only did they consider themselves superior to hearing people, but one man, considered a "hero" by his deaf students, was nothing more than a bitter, antagonistic asshole who hated when one of "his" people associated with those who could hear.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Happens from time to time, but a stand out episode is "Frame" which begins with Frank Goren's murder, that along with Declan Gage's poisoning, was attributed to Nicole Wallace, but then she is killed midway through the episode and it was discovered that Declan had machinated everything all along, including his own arrest for her murder to improve Bobby's life.
• Distaff Counterpart: Carolyn Barek was a female version of Goren.
• Donut Mess with a Cop: In one episode, terrorists leave a bomb in a donut box on the seat of a car, rigged to explode when someone opens the door. Nichols breaks out a window instead, confirms his suspicions, and tells a cop on-scene to call the bomb squad.
• Door Fu: The verbally abusive mother in "Unrequited" ends up being incapacitated this way, with the force knocking one of her front teeth out, was dragged back into her apartment and ultimately smothered by her assailant.
• Downer Ending: Plenty of times, but "Untethered" is a prime example. After going undercover without authorization to rescue his nephew, Donny, from a corrupt prison after being manipulated into doing it by Frank, Goren not only almost starves himself to death by the guards, but ends up being suspended from the force and gets Eames and Ross in trouble in the aftermath. Then after learning that Donny managed to escape from prison himself by faking a burst appendix, Goren angrily confronts his brother, who not only couldn't care less about his brother's suspension or his missing son, but also suggests that he should sleep with Eames to get out his aggressions. And to top it off, he never did locate his nephew.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Several in-universe examples in "Seizure."
  Eames: Serial killer groupies... And I thought I was pathetic with my ABBA fan club card.
  • "Monster" also features a convicted murderer with a fan following.
• Driven to Suicide: Averted in "D.A.W.". As the suspect attempts to kill himself by slicing his throat with a steak knife in front of his wife and their guests at a dinner party after the detectives are about to arrest him, Goren wrestles it away from him, saying "You don't get off that easily."
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Captain Ross.
• Drugs Are Bad: Seen a lot, but especially in the case of Frank Goren. Had he not been busy getting high, he would have noticed Declan Gage and Nicole Wallace stalking and then killing him by throwing him out a window.

E - K

• Eat the Evidence: A suspect in "The Unblinking Eye" stole the engagement ring of a shooting victim's boyfriend and swallowed it offscreen. When the detectives located him, he admitted to consuming it, but ultimately was proven not to be guilty of the murder. The boyfriend was the real killer and the ring he bought on a loan plan so he could return it.
• Education Papa: The father from "Bright Boy" was this; he believed that his young son was a genius and pushed him to all ends to succeed at his studies, pushing him to attend an elite school for child prodigies, and killed a social worker he thought was standing in the way. It turns out she wasn't; the boy was miserable to the point of suicidal and didn't know how to say no to his father directly, so he claimed the social worker was going to reject him in hopes that his father would drop the matter.
• Electrified Bathtub: In a flashback in "Identity Crisis", a young boy seemingly kills his abusive, schizophrenic mother by pushing an electric heater into her bath. It was actually an accident, but he took responsibility for it.
• Empty Cop Threat: Carried out. A killer Goren interviews (who is later proven to have been his biological dad) is later executed. However, the execution takes place in Pennsylvania, where it was still legal.
• Engineered Public Confession: Often used to get one suspect to turn on another. Mostly accomplished by use of the one-way mirror in the interrogation room.
• Enhanced Interrogation Techniques: "Stress Position" involves a group of prisoners being held under the Patriot Act. Since they're not on any official rosters and don't have any contact with the outside world, they become the targets of a power-hungry guard.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: One suspect from "Badge" may have savagely murdered a family of four, including two children, but she genuinely loved her daughters and elderly mother.
  • "Dead" has a brutal contract Serial Killer who is Happily Married and a loving father.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Downplayed in "Delicate" with diva ballerina Alona (not exactly evil, but a very abrasive person to say the least. However, though she may have had a fierce rivalry with Jessalyn, she was horrified to learn that Paulette put glass in Jessalyn's shoes to give Alona the edge. Unfortunately for Alona, Jessalyn, who Paulette then switches her loyalty to, is a subversion.
  • In "Frame," Goren's old mentor Declan Gage commits a murder and sends Goren on a wild goose chase meant to "free" him of the negative people in his life. He is, however, appalled by Goren's suggestion that he might have killed Goren's nephew Danny and insists that he wouldn't have touched him even if he'd been able to find him.
  • In "Homo Homini Lupis", a Loan Shark willingly turns over information to the detectives after he finds out the guy he hired to collect money owed to him raped the daughter of the man who owed him money.
  • Ella Miyazaki, Nicole Wallace's one-time girlfriend, from "Great Barrier" had no problem robbing jewelry stores disguised as different Asian ethnicities and helping to dispose of her male accomplice, but turned on Nicole once she learned that she murdered her own toddler daughter years earlier because she viewed the girl as competition.
• Everyone Has Standards: Even for all of Eames' cranked-up snarkiness in "Cruise To Nowhere" (where she even made quips about the victim over his body while at his autopsy), she was genuinely disgusted that the suspect's mother traded him in as a child to her slain husband's bookkeeping partner for a maid and $10,000. She even told her partner, "I wanted to smack that woman!"
• Evil Former Friend: Deakins encounters one in "On Fire", which culminated in him resigning from the force.
• Evil Matriarch: The mother from "To The Bone," who was also a Manipulative Bitch as well, to the point of manipulating one of her sons to commit suicide at the end of the episode to prove his "loyalty" to her.
• Executive Meddling: In-universe example in "Faith," in which an autobiography written by a Littlest Cancer Patient had to be tightened up a bit by an editor for publication. It's eventually revealed the editor did more to improve the story than even she realizes, which gives Goren the psychological tools he needs to manipulate her into confessing to the episode's murder.
• Explosive Leash: "Pas de Deux."
• External Combustion: A variation happens in "Contract". The Victim of the Week is killed by an explosive charge hidden in the headrest of his car seat; detonated when he activates the cigarette lighter.
• Fair Cop: Eames, all of Logan's partners, arguably, Stevens and Capt. Deakins.
• Fake Aristocrat: In "Chinoiserie", Goren and Eames encounter a man masquerading as a British nobleman. Goren and Eames pick him as fake immediately as his accent keeps jumping around the British Isles. He turns out to be an actor who thinks he is in a piece of performance art. He is actually an unwitting dupe hired to help establish a false provenance for Chinese antiquities.
• Fake Faith Healer: One episode involved Logan and Barek investigating a young woman who appeared to be able to cure people with voodoo. They managed to prove that she was a fraud, though not before she nearly convinced Logan that she'd put a curse on him.
• False Confession: In "Stress Position", the Victim of the Week was a prison guard who was murdered by his shift supervisor who was worried that he might be about to spill the beans regarding the mistreatment of the 'off-the-books' prisoners in the secure wing. He then gave enough information about the killing to make a believable confession to an ex-con he knew to be a serial confessor, and pointed Goren and Ames at the ex-con as someone who had beef with the guard. The ex-con immediately confesses when Goren and Ames confront him, but Goren gets suspicious because the man was packed up and ready to go back to prison before they arrived at his apartment.
• False Flag Operation
• Fatal Method Acting: Happens In-Universe in "Icarus". The actor playing Icarus in a Broadway show has his flying rig sabotaged and he plunges to his death on stage as he is supposed to be soaring towards the sun.
• Fat and Skinny: The murderers from "Yesterday" by chance; one a skinny, self-made millionaire, the other a fat, aimless addict.
• Finally Found the Body: "Yesterday" had the victim's remains discovered buried underneath a house after being missing for twenty years.
  • "Folie a Deux" had the victim's body found in a field months after they died, though this was in large part because it took most of that time before the "disappearance" was reported.
• Finger in the Mail: Inverted/subverted in a season finale episode when Goren receives a human heart while investigating the death of his brother Frank and possible kidnapping of his nephew. Turns out it actually belongs to serial killer Nicole Wallace, who had killed Frank and was subsequently killed by Goren's unhinged mentor, who wanted to remove himself, Nicole and Frank from Goren's life in one fell swoop.
• Flanderization: Both Goren and Logan went through this is different ways. Whereas the former was initially seen as an intelligent and quirky detective who could read people who devolved into someone with mental issues with inconsistent social skills the latter, who was seen as Cowboy Cop who lost his cool from time to time in the first series, denigrated years and a division change later into a regular hothead and troublemaker.
• Flaw Exploitation: In "The Saint," this is the criminal's motivation. He believes that a religious organization is taking advantage of his mentally ill mother, who insists on donating everything she can to their cause - to the point of completely cleaning out their bank account because she thinks the organization needs the money more.
• Focus Group Ending: A blatant and unashamed example in the episode "Great Barrier." Viewers were asked to vote on which would be the true ending on NBC's website. The losing non-canon ending had Goren shooting his nemesis Nicole Wallace.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Two of the suspects from "Tomorrow": one sister was an angry Broken Bird with a criminal record and obvious mental instabilities and the other was a soft-spoken, gentle girl who was Happily Adopted. Subverted when it turns out that the supposedly responsible girl was actually in on her sister's schemes.
  • Robert and Frank Goren. The former is a brilliant detective who served in the armed services and still found time to care for his dying mother. The latter is a manipulative drug addict and absentee father.
  • The father in "Bedfellows" clearly sees his two sons as this, but it's arguably a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy; if his behavior with his grandchildren is any indication, he probably categorized them as such from the time they were young children, and they developed into the men they were based on those expectations.
• Foreign Remake: Paris enquêtes criminelles, a French version of the series. There's also a Russian version called Закон и порядок. Преступный умысел. Unfortunately, neither show lasted as long as their inspiration.
• Former Child Star: The victim and his friend in "Blasters" both starred in a teenage sitcom when they were younger. Neither live a particularly happy existence; the victim is living hand-to-mouth in a decommissioned ice cream truck and has done nothing of relevance in the years since. His friend himself has delusions of grandeur and is stuck living in the past.
• Freudian Excuse: The killer from "The Posthumous Collection" kills women and poses them in elaborate, grotesque poses as a revenge fantasy towards his abusive mother, grandmother and three older sisters. The victims had physical similarities to his family members.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: The culprit of "Please Note We Are No Longer Accepting Letters of Recommendation from Henry Kissinger" gunned down people to get her own son into a prestigious daycare after snapping because of the pressure and verbal abuse of her mother-in-law. During the final confrontation, Goren sympathizes with the culprit to prevent them from harming their hostages. When the culprit gives him the gun, he immediately roughly restrains them and has them arrested. When the culprit, sounding hurt, says she did it all for her child, he retorts that the people they murdered also had children.
• Friendly Local Chinatown: "Chinoiserie."
• From Bad to Worse: Goren's mentor kills nearly everyone he knows and loves because he thought Goren would have fun trying to find out who did it. It was also done so Goren would be "free" of the two biggest burdens in his life: his druggie brother Frank and Nicole Wallace.
• Funny Background Event:
  • During the questioning of a witness in "Suite Sorrow," Goren casually snaps a picture of himself and Eames. What makes it even better is Eames' complete lack of a reaction to the photo being taken. As they're leaving, he slips the picture into his pocket.
  • In "Legion", when Eames is first questioning Jojo Rios, Goren can be seen wearing headphones and dancing in the DJ booth behind them for a few seconds before he joins the conversation.
• Gaslighting: Done to Goren in "Frame", which Eames lampshades.
• Gilligan Cut: In the episode "Weeping Willow." "Who's going on camera?"
• Gold Digger: "Phantom" and "Wrongful Life" had two women who ended up being this. The former was a traditional social-climber who got mixed up with a man who, unbeknownst to her, was leading a double life, and strangled her and left her for dead when it seemed his secret would come out. The latter was more of the scheming variety; she became pregnant by a wealthy man, and after one obstetrician suggested there might be a defect (ultimately turned out to be spina bifda), she went out of her way to find a doctor who wouldn't advise her to abort because she wanted the father to marry her. Though the father truly loved that child (as well as the son that they had later), the mother saw them only as a means to an end, and after the father died, she refused to take care of her physically disabled daughter.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: In the episode "Untethered," Goren experiences isolation while undercover. He's strapped to a metal table and deprived of food and water. However, it is unclear whether he truly broke or if some of it was part of his undercover persona.
• Good Adultery, Bad Adultery: The suspect and victim from "The Good Doctor" both had affairs in their marriage, but since he was portrayed as a Jerkass and abusive (apparently), his cheating was much worse than hers was, in spite of her being an addict with mental health issues. She could have easily ran off on her husband, though the episode had no conclusive evidence on her fate.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: Goren and Eames love to play this, switching roles as needed. You can tell that Goren is winding up to be the bad cop when he adopts a really exaggerated Brooklyn accent. Eames, meanwhile, is liable to take on a Straw Feminist persona.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Averted in "The Third Horseman". The killer's former girlfriend became pregnant by him, but she ended the pregnancy. He really wanted to be a father.
• Greed: The one suspect from "Eosphoros" killed his cohorts in crime one by one, just so the large amount of ransom money wouldn't have to be split up between them.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Used as plot devices in "Delicate", "The Unblinking Eye" and "Dramma Giocoso".
• Guile Hero: Arguably the entire premise of the show. The criminals are the most extraordinary collection of magnificent bastards and chessmasters you can imagine. But when Goren's on the case, they don't stand a chance.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: The fate of the victim in "Mis-labeled".
• Halloween Episode: The episode "Masquerade" not only takes place around Halloween (as evidenced by decorations in the background), but the victim was murdered on Halloween night 1992.
• Handy Cuffs: Used at least twice:
  • A former military suspect asks to be cuffed in front out of respect for his family. He then grabs a gun off one of the officers and kills himself. This is immediately after attempting to kill himself and being stopped by the officers who arrested him. One wonders why they thought that was a good idea.
  • Justified when the police handcuff a deaf man with his hands in front, since handcuffing him with his hands behind his back would be akin to gagging him.
• Has a Type: The killer in "Jones" is attracted to small, petite women, namely because he himself is of average height and build. Naturally, he flirts with petite Eames, and tall, strapping Goren had fun interrogating him, even bragging about his own size-13 shoe size.
  • Bernard Fremont from "Slither" has a thing for beautiful and fit younger blondes. If they weren't already blonde, he would arrange for their hair to be dyed as such.
• He-Man Woman Hater: Played for Drama in "Baggage" where the victim was a female supervisor at an airline who was undermined and bullied by her jealous male subordinates in a way that even a grade schooler wouldn't stoop to, including explicitly discussing rape fantasies, sending her lewd drawings and pouring urine in her locker. Though they were trying to force her to quit, as she was threatening their lucrative smuggling operations.
• Heroic BSoD: Poor Goren suffered from this throughout season seven, eventually coming to a head in the season finale "Frame".
• Hidden Wire: Subverted in "Legacy", where the suspect destroys what he thinks are a cord and a CD recording his confession, only to find that neither were the real thing.
  • Horribly played straight in "Great Barrier", where Nicole Wallace discovered Ella had one and brutally murdered her as a result.
• High-Class Call Girl: The Victim of the Week in "Rispetto" is a young call girl who poses as a college student and advertises on a website headed 'Generous Gentlemen Only'. The detectives find $5000 in cash and a rack of high-end designer dresses in her apartment.
• Hollywood Atheist: A suspect in "Brother's Keeper" was seen as this. He had long since given up his faith in God and turned virulently against religion because his son was born mentally disabled. Turns out, he had killed the victim (a former friend and love interest), because she had told her televangelist husband about this. The husband used the information as a platform to explain God's "ultimate plan", and the atheist felt betrayed.
  • Averted with Nichols, who was merely raised atheist. It's only mentioned once and he never expresses strong feelings on the subject of religion.
  • Also averted with the atheists in "Eosphoros" (a woman, her son, and her other son's daughter), who never suggest that they're atheist for any specific reason, it's just the belief system they happen to have.
• Hollywood Blanks: The culprit Josh Snow in "All In" was using these with his manually-loaded revolver to intimidate people for collections when he was down on his luck in his gambling. Then a shot kills the victim of the episode, and Josh claims it had to be a live round or muzzleloader situation to frame him up by the guy he's in debt to, Lou. Lou himself realistically assumes Josh fired too closely, which can still kill a person. In reality, Josh himself pulled off the muzzleloader trick via sleight of hand he learned with his bad gambling habits to cause a kill and cover up the incident as an accident so he could get Lou arrested for Revenge, manipulating his love interest and partner of an eyewitness, and the audience into thinking it was Lou with the trope's usual expectations. It takes Goren understanding not only Josh but also his hand tricks to crack the case.
• Hollywood Game Design
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The killer from "Slither" is the one who taught Nicole Wallace about the art of succinylcholine poisoning. At the end of the episode, she ends up poisoning him when it looks like he's going to get away scot-free for the murders he and his "family" committed.
• Honor-Related Abuse: The victim in "World's Fair" was beaten to death by her own brother to restore the family's honor after she engaged in a relationship they disapproved of.
• Hooks and Crooks: The Victim of the Week in "Ill-Bred" is a veterinarian done in by a bale hook through her throat.
• Hope Is Scary: Implied at the end of "Silver Lining" when the murderer, a career criminal, is being led away in a squad car, he assures Goren that this will be the last time that they would meet. He replies "I hope so", but the man’s mother, who's pretty fed up with dealing with her son and his ways, quips back to him "Hope is for losers, Detective."
• Hospital Visit Hesitation: In "Beast", the mother of a suspect explains that when she tried to visit her long-deceased, favorite daughter in the hospital who was sick with a then-unknown disease which left her with horrible lesions on her face (later revealed to be caused by dioxin poisoning), she was terrified of the state of her ravaged beauty and only visited her once.
• Hot for Student: The teacher in "Tru Love", who was having an affair with a teenage student of hers and his father.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: The 6'4" Goren is much, much taller and brawnier than the petite and slender Eames.
• I Ate WHAT?!: Downplayed in "The Unblinking Eye". While the detectives are speaking to a witness at a bar, Goren is eating a bowl of peanuts...only for the witness to admit that a young woman had stuck her hand in the bowl while she had some sort of ointment on top of a burn.^note Which raises the question as to why she would leave the bowl out even after that? He responds to this by silently sliding the remaining peanuts in his hand back into the bowl.
• I Gave My Word: "The Pardoner's Tale" has the detectives promising a woman not to bring charges to her husband, a crooked executive currently on the run, only for Carver to demand they break their deal. It's one of the few times in the series that Goren and Eames were angered by the antics of the prosecutor instead of vice versa.
  • A similar incident occurs with Nichols in a Season 9 episode.
• Incriminating Indifference:
  • "The Good Doctor" had the missing woman's husband acting aloof in regards to her disappearance because he believed that she had run off and so he can move on with his mistress. This attitude angered her family and eventually caused the investigators to consider him a suspect.
  • "Beast" had a dentist who was more concerned with himself and his practice than in finding out who killed his wife. Turns out, he wasn't guilty of killing her, but his former girlfriend killed her with the same poison she correctly believes he had killed her sister.
  • In “Poison” one woman’s rather flippant attitude about her husband dying from medication tainted with cyanide sets off alarm bells. Turns out she had poisoned the medication herself and planted other tainted bottles in stores, resulting in several other people dying, so she could sue the company that made the medicine and use the money to open a children’s clothing store.
• Informed Judaism: Captain Ross is all but outright stated to be Jewish in "30", during his first season on the show. Three seasons later, we see his sons wearing yarmulkes at his funeral.
• Insane Troll Logic: The killer from "A Murderer Among Us" had this, believing that not only that his mother being "raped" by her Jewish boss when he was a kid had destroyed his family and caused his father to become abusive towards them ^note or he was told by the father she was raped, although in reality, they had a mutual affair, but that her ovarian cancer was the boss' fault, too, due to the affair.
• Insufferable Genius: "Folie a Deux" (a successful author), "Inert Dwarf" (a college professor) and "The Good Doctor" (a plastic surgeon).
• Interchangeable Asian Cultures: Invoked in "Great Barrier" as the Chinese-American jewelry thief disguised herself as a Japanese woman and a Singaporean woman to avoid detection. Goren picked up on the atypical mannerisms in the surveillance system, and was able to discover the suspect's true identity.
• Interrogation by Vandalism: Downplayed and Played for Laughs in "Collective" where Goren was interrogating a witness who had received some of the victim's stolen goods, among which was an elaborate toy gun with multiple features such as a rocket launcher and pretend machine gun. The witness became so agitated by him treating a collector's item like a toy that he finally gave the detectives some needed useful information.
• In the Blood: Eames comes from a family of cops.
• I Read It for the Articles: While investigating the murder of a magazine editor in "Traffic", Nichols comments that his father used to read it and remembers an article featuring Ursula Andress in a brassiere that fired bullets. When Stevens wryly asks "Your father read it?", he admits it was shared, then adds there was always a fight over the crossword.
• It's All About Me: Many suspects, but "The Unblinking Eye" in particular has the suspect kill his so-called fiancée because she was getting more acting gigs than he was, try to pin the blame on a "jealous" ex-girlfriend (on whom he cheated with the victim) and both sabotage his best friend's chance to be famous and manipulate him into doing the actual murder, all so he can be famous.
  • The suspect from "Blink" is a professional gambler and thrill-seeker who constantly risks his own life to the point that it shocks his heartbroken wife into thinking that he could be killed any day. He ultimately decides that it would be best to get police protection from the dangerous people he has been involved with, not for his wife and their son, but for himself.
• I Take Offense to That Last One: In the episode "Rocket Man", Goren describes the suspect, an astronaut, as 'angry and obsessive'. Captain Ross retorts with, "So am I, so are you." Afterwards, as Goren and Eames leave the observation room:
  Goren: [to Eames, in a quieter voice] Do you think I'm angry?
• It's Personal: The episode where they finally solved Joe Dutton's^note Eames' husband murder.
• I Warned You: Subverted at the end of "Betrayed":
  Goren: Captain...?
  Ross: Not now, detective. Not one word.
• Jaded Washout: The record producer in "Rock Star" was a man still living on his past glories of being a hit in The '60s and having the third-longest set at Woodstock. When he tries to bring up the impact he had and his musical talent, Nichols shuts him down by telling him that his band was terrible. Nichols states that he was on the stage at Woodstock so long, because they wouldn't get off the stage in spite of the crowd's negative reaction. Nichols even declared his Grammy to be a joke, stating how even Milli Vanilli has one.
• The Jailer: In "Stress Position", a group of prison guards are holding a number of 'off-the-books' prisoners (held under the Patriot Act) for the Justice Department within the protective custody wing of a state prison. They decide this gives them the right to torture and abuse the detainees as they see fit. When one of their number who has misgivings gets another job, the leader of the guards murders him so he cannot talk.
• Joggers Find Death: Happens from time to time. A subversion happened in "Want"; a couple was out walking their dog, only for said dog to run off and find the victim's body. Played straight in "Death Roe" where two joggers discovered the initial victim's body after they noticed that her blood was dripping onto one of them.
• Jurisdiction Friction: Goren, Nichols, and Eames vs. the FBI during the investigation of Captain Ross' murder.
• Just in Time:
  • Logan and Wheeler in "Blasters". They arrived within seconds of the second potential victim dying from being hanged. Still, Wheeler still had to perform CPR on him and he had a deep rope burn on his neck for the remainder of the episode.
  • A suspect that stole the engagement ring off of the victim's body in "The Unblinking Eye" was discovered by the detectives and had already consumed the ring. As they were interrogating him, Goren explained to him that it needed to be extricated immediately due to the fact that since it's a diamond, specifically of a marquise cut, it has jagged little saw-like edges that will cut him from the inside out. Worse, it became evident that he was already sick from the effects of swallowing it. After hearing that, he admitted to his crime and even though he was in trouble for being in possession of it, at least he'll survive.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Since one of the sons in "To The Bone" ended up killing himself after being tricked into doing it by a criminal mastermind of an adopted mother, she ends up walking on at least eight different murders due to lack of evidence.
  • Nicole Wallace. Repeatedly. And loving to brag about it to Goren. The day her Karma Houdini Warranty (apparently) expired would have been cheered more if not for the fact that Declan Gage (the guy who did it) was acting out of some really twisted version of "They Were Holding You Back" aimed towards Goren... and that this meant Frank also had to go.
  • Paul Whitlock from "Magnificat" was clearly the one who pushed his already-struggling wife over the edge with his unceasing emotional abuse, leading to her decision to kill herself and their children, but because he wasn't involved in the murder itself, he couldn't be held criminally responsible for any of it. (Doubles as a case of There Should Be a Law for both Carver and Goren.)
  • The Insufferable Genius world-famous conductor from "Dramma Giocoso". He was eventually proven innocent of the crime, but he still cared little about the long-suffering victim of the episode, stonewalled detectives in the case and ultimately abandoned his newlywed wife, the victim's mother and murderer, after it comes out that she has a debilitating medical condition that he wants no part of.
  • The killer in "Proud Flesh" gets off the charges after his son confesses to protect him.
• Karmic Death: In "Inhumane Society", a man who trained pit bulls for dog fighting ends up mauled to death by a pair of them. It's a shame the dogs had to be put down afterward, all things considered.
• Kill It with Fire: "The Fire This Time", "Faith", "Cherry Red" and "Contract" had the victims all die from being set on fire.
• The Killer Becomes the Killed: In "Slither", serial killer Bernard Fremont ends up killed at the end of the episode by Nicole Wallace, who used the same poisoning technique he taught her to kill him out of revenge. Oops.
  • Nicole Wallace in "Frame".
• Knee-capping: The M.O. of the killer from "A Murderer Among Us"; he would use a metal bar to club the victims in the knee to bring them down, then strike them in the head with enough force to either kill them instantly or within a few days.
• Knights and Knaves: Goren sets this puzzle for his psychiatrist in "The Consoler". His version has a disguised angel guarding the doorway to Heaven, and a disguised demon guarding the doorway to Hell. The Angel tells the truth and the demon lies.

L - R

• Last-Name Basis: For whatever reason, it's much more common here than in other Law & Order series.
  • Though she's not entirely adverse to using his first name, Eames generally calls her partner "Goren". Goren, however, almost never calls his partner Alex, to the point where if he does, it's an indication that something's out of the ordinary.
  • Logan is generally called by his last name, but both Barek and Wheeler still call him Mike once in a while. He, on the other hand, exclusively calls his partners by their last names. (In fact, Barek's first name is spoken exactly once in the series, by Barek herself.)
  • Wheeler tends to go back and forth between first and last name for Nichols, though she leans more towards his last name earlier on and starts using the first name more as they become closer over the course of the season. For his part, he manages to go an entire season without calling her by any name, at least onscreen.
  • Averted by Nichols and Stevens; the pair very rarely address each other by name at all, but on the rare occasion they do, it's with first names. Nichols is also the only Major Case detective to ever call Ross by his first name, likely a lingering habit from when they used to be partners.
• Later-Installment Weirdness: A particularly prominent example. After the original showrunner, Rene Balcer, stepped down after season five, the series went from being "a series that showcases crimes from the criminals' perspectives and was solved by a brilliant detective that had the ability to read people" to something between a composite of CSI, SVU and your average Police Procedural.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In "Purgatory" during an argument with Goren, Eames screams at him, "No, you're the great detective and I'm just supposed to carry your water!" While some fans loved her for calling him out on this, others were thinking "Well duh, Eames! What else did you think your role on this show was supposed to be?"
• Legacy Seeker: Spencer Durning, the Villain of the Week in "Cold Comfort", is a humanitarian who intends to leave his mark on the world. Not only does he want his son to have a bright political future, but Spencer himself even intends to be cryogenically frozen, effectively making himself "immortal". However, Spencer's desperation to cure his son's early onset Alzheimer's takes him to the point of murder and blackmail in order to acquire the corpse of a man who had somehow managed to beat Alzheimer's by a fluke. In the episode's climax, Goren gives one of his trademark tirades, tearing into Spencer for his obsession with wanting to be remembered over his love for his own son, and that, for all his humanitarian work, he doesn't actually care about people.
• Lighter and Softer: As far as the Law & Order universe goes; while the crimes are no less shocking, it gives perspectives on who the criminals are and what makes them tick and why they resorted to the actions they did. Also, many a criminal end up with a Villainous Breakdown or tearful confession and true monsters are rare (but still exist), and the cases rarely touch upon the prosecution that would have to follow besides as a matter-of-fact need for evidence throughout the case, often leaving the audience with at least a positive assumption of conviction.
• Like Brother and Sister: Goren tells his season 10 therapist that this is his relationship with Eames. (The therapist doesn't seem convinced.)
  • Vincent D'Onofrio has also stated that this is the real life relationship between himself and Kathryn Erbe.
• Littlest Cancer Patient: In "Faith"... except she's not actually real. (It's based on the story of Anthony Godby Johnson.)
• Lipstick-and-Load Montage: In "Lady's Man", there is a scene showing the killer slowly putting lingerie and makeup. It is actually a Villainous Crossdresser.
• Locking MacGyver in the Store Cupboard: A serial killer binds and gags Eames and locks her in a basement with an electronic door lock. She escapes using wire, nails, electricity, and a giant hook left laying around the place.
• Loss of Inhibitions: Played for Drama in "Frame", where Goren's former mentor, criminal profiler Declan Gage, begins suffering dementia. Never the most stable person to begin with, Gage's loss of self-control progresses from eating expired food to alienating his mentally-ill daughter to collaborating with serial killer Nicole Wallace in a plot to drive Goren into a nervous breakdown, which then goes even more awry when Gage murders Wallace and boasts about it to an utterly-horrified Goren.
• The Lost Lenore: Literally and seemingly invoked with Lenore Abrigaille in "Palimpsest", although she's actually a subversion. She's not dead, but Nichols had to leave her after her schizophrenia developed to a point where she couldn't function much outside her antiquated home. Inside it, she relives the same day every day, over and over again.
• Mad Artist: The killer from "The Posthumous Collection."
• Mafia Princess: In "Maledictus", the victim's book and testifying against her father sent him to prison for life on multiple murders.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: "Proud Flesh" has a wealthy, middle-aged white media mogul marry a younger Chinese woman and have a daughter with her. Everyone around her, from her stepchildren to their families to even the husband himself disapprove of the wife and their daughter.
• Manchild: One suspect from "Cruise To Nowhere" is this. Unfortunately, it's seen that he was intentionally kept this way; after his father was murdered as a child, his mother slipped into alcoholism and was paid to give him up to her bookie husband's partner, who trained him to be a talented bookie instead of properly raising him to be an adult.
• Mandatory Motherhood: Implied in "Silver Lining". The suspect's girlfriend becomes pregnant, but isn't too happy about it. Even as she's about to be sent to prison, she still will have access to maternity care, making her situation worse.
• Man Bites Man: A suspect ended up painfully biting Goren in the arm before he was taken out by a sniper.
  • In "Revolution", a banker being kidnapped attempts to escape from the thug holding him at gunpoint by biting him on the arm. Although he makes the thug drop the gun, he still gets shot by one of the other kidnappers.
    • Actually, he made things worse for himself. His attackers intended to hold him hostage and trade him for a ransom. His attempt to resist got him and his driver killed.
• Manipulative Bastard: The husband from "Magnificat". He ignored his wife's post-partum depression and refused to allow her to seek professional help or medication to the point of thinking that if she did, she would be weak and felt that the only "therapy" she required was to have even more responsibility piled on her and to be further cut off from the rest of the world, removing what little support system she had. After she killed three of their four sons, he still saw that as a sign that she was a bad parent. In the end, while he hadn't done anything illegal, he is likely to lose custody of his surviving son.
• Manipulative Bitch:
  • The therapist from "Scared Crazy". She methodically drove a patient of hers crazy by forcing him to stay up all night in the dark while listening to techno music as a part of her medical studies, which led him to kill someone. After tricking her into thinking they were torturing him the same way she did interrogation, the detectives got her to confess and then arrested her for obstruction and accessory after the fact.
  • The mother, Barb, from "Faith" who created a false story about a terminally ill young girl to bilk millions of dollars out of unsuspecting people and to elicit sympathy. As a result of this, an innocent financial backer who doubted the girl's existence ends up being killed by a social worker. By the end of the episode, she and her husband are arrested for their role in the crime and they find out that they're not entitled to any of the money they finagled.
  • The political leader in "Assassin". She is being frequently targeted for death due to her many causes and outspoken nature only for her loved ones to be killed instead, but she was the one who had the "botched" assassinations play out to look like a martyr and to enhance her international power and influence. And her victims included her brothers, as she wanted a bigger share from her family's wealth.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: The murderer from "Slither," who is a well-read, well-dressed, well-off Silver Fox British man who manipulates beautiful women half his age to kill.
• Marilyn Maneuver: Lorelai Mailer is briefly seen performing a Marilyn Maneuver in "Bombshell," complete with the famous ballooning white dress.
• Marrying the Mark:
  • Downplayed in the episode "Astoria Helen"; a charming con man Joe Gallagher gets into a serious relationship with a woman so he can use her computer and get the schedule for an armored truck, which he and his associates then rob. However, somewhere along the way he actually developed some level of feelings for her and her son, as he is genuinely concerned when the boy is kidnapped.
  • In the episode "Grow", Goren's nemesis and notorious con artist and murderer Nicole Wallace was actually the victim of this trope - her latest husband knew her real identity and history and was intending to kill his daughter for her trust fund, and frame her for the murder.
• Master Forger:
  • The episode "Art" has the detectives covering a murder case involving art forgery has a renowned forger as a supporting character. His work is considered so impeccable that a number of his forgeries are still hanging in museums undetected.
  • The episode "The Saint" has a Catholic charity fall prey to an expert forger who seeks to discredit its patron saint because he blames the charity for taking advantage of his mentally-ill mother.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Played with in "The Healer" when the detectives interviewing a suspect's ex-husband, who shortly after their divorce came down with a mysterious illness that gave him a curious rash and made him lose twenty pounds due to being sick and then Logan himself ends up with a rash of unknown origins after being in contact with her. That and other information about her and those involved with her ending up dead, sick or in some other form of misfortune lead them to believe that she really did have magic powers. Logan's condition turned out to be innocuous, as she merely exposed him to poison ivy. What happened to the husband is not clear; while there's presumably a mundane explanation, the detectives, and therefore the viewers, never learn what it is.
• Meaningful Name: Mr. Devildis, the insane fundamentalist Christian, crosses the Despair Event Horizon and tries to save his family and friends by murdering them. Hilariously, no one comments on his name.
• Medication Tampering:
  • In "In Treatment", a psychiatrist gives one of his patients an antidepressant that he knows is contraindicated with the antidepressant he is currently taking. The combination causes a variety of side-effects, including delirium, which causes the patient to commit suicide.
  • The killer from "Semi-Detached" had tampered with the victim's anti-depressants while working as a nurse at the rehab center he was staying. She switched his medication with placebos.
  • A truly despicable example was in "Malignant" where a pharmacist was watering down chemotherapy drugs and the like (because he was struggling to make ends meet and could get more profit for his expenses that way). To the point that a woman who was given a strong chance of surviving her cancer died because she wasn't getting the treatment she needed. Eames pointed out that they may as well been treating the patients with water instead.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Doubled. Murder is hardly a minor crime, but the reasons behind it always end up being far more complicated than was hinted at in the opening sequence. In at least one episode, a female business executive is framed for murder. The murder and the frame-up were minor details in a vast conspiracy at her corporation. It would have made the crooked CEO much wealthier, and would have bankrupted nearly everyone who had invested in the company.
• Missing White Woman Syndrome: Lampshaded. In one episode, the media doesn't become interested in a series of murders until a white girl is killed. The mother of one of the other victims coldly tells a journalist that she is aware of this trope, and she'll still accept their help, but they are not to mistake her desperation for any kind of gratitude.
• Mistaken for Pedophile: The victim in "Crazy" was set-up to look like one, leading to his death.
• Mistaken for Racist: One suspect in "Gemini", a schizophrenic man, is set up to look like one by his sociopathic brother by portraying him as a Neo-Nazi who sent hate messages to various people and even tricking him into dyeing his hair blond. When confronted by the detectives, the man is horrified by this notion, at one point telling them almost to the point of tears that he liked Jewish people.
• Monochrome Casting: An unintentional example. After ADA Carver was written out in 2006, the remaining five years of the show became this, unlike the other series in the Law & Order universe (or at least, the English-speaking ones, and no, Jeff Goldblum does not counter this trope).
• Monster Fangirl: From "Seizure":
  Eames: "Serial killer groupies... And I thought I was pathetic with my ABBA fan club card."
• Morality Pet: We learn that Nicole Wallace actually had one in "Grow," in the form of a preteen girl named Gwen Chapel, the daughter of a man that she was seeing. She was the one person with whom Nicole was in contact that she didn’t kill, try to kill, send to prison, or otherwise ruin. Instead, she actually tried to protect Gwen from her father's attempts to kill her (in order to get his hands on her trust fund), and, after the father went to prison, ultimately left Gwen in the care of a relative, after Goren helped her see that she couldn't truly trust herself not to hurt Gwen.
• More than Mind Control: This is the M.O. of two different villains, Randall Fuller in "Con-Text" and Bernard Fremont in "Slither." (Scarily, both are at least partially based on real people.)
• Motive Rant: Inducing these are Goren's specialty.
  • Averted on occasion, when he breaks a suspect who then confesses to a crime they haven't committed.
  • Deconstructed in one episode where the overbearing nature of her husband causes a woman to kill three of her four children in a failed mass-suicide attempt. Goren successfully causes the husband to break into a motive rant, but it ends up being all for naught, because although the husband is a world-class Jerkass, nothing that he did was technically illegal.
• Ms. Fanservice: Both victims from "Beast" were very beautiful women both involved with the same man. Even a happily married friend of one of the victims, Lisa, said that she was a "level 10 stud magnet."
• Multipart Episode: "Zoonotic"/"A Person of Interest", "In The Wee Small Hours", "Loyalty".
• The Murder After: In "Lonelyville", a writer is blackmailed after waking up next to the body of one of of the two women who picked him up in a bar.
• murder.com: The episode "Weeping Willow," although here the crime is kidnapping, not murder.
• Must Make Amends: The one suspect from "Depths" is an interesting example. He is married to a Black woman to atone for his ancestors being slave owners.
  • In "Amends", Goren and Eames find the man who killed Eames' husband while he was on the job. He tells them he knows he screwed up, and became a doctor to save lives as his way of atoning.
• My Beloved Smother: This being Law and Order, it's played every way imaginable. One example is "Shandeh," where the mother had her daughter-in-law murdered - both for knowing her secrets and because she feared that she would divorce her son for his cheating ways and have their children no longer practice Judaism.
• My God, What Have I Done?: How the killer from "Identity Crisis" ended up feeling. He had killed his younger brother, who had just been released from prison for killing their mother twenty years prior when they were children and him fearing that he would screw up his new life and have him sent to prison, since he was older and more culpable in her death. Turns out, the brother was reaching out to him because he missed him and he was terminally ill. Furthermore, the brother never wanted to implicate him in their mother's death. When Goren explained this to him, it reduced him to tears.
• My Greatest Failure: The killer in "Maledictus" had this: as a child, he accidentally killed his own pregnant mother by poisoning her, in the hope that she would just miscarry his younger half-sibling. He did this out of jealousy of the child and worry that he and his sister would be forgotten. He is revealed to have killed the Victim of the Week, a former classmate who had become a writer, out of fear that she would have revealed this in her new book; Goren and Eames eventually agree to let him keep his secret if he pleads guilty to the writer's murder.
• N-Word Privileges: Discussed in "Acts of Contrition" when one of the perpetrators in a years ago brutal beating that left a Black man with permanent brain damage admitted to Goren, Eames and Carver that as he tried to crawl to her to escape his horrible ordeal, she instead yelled out, "What are you looking at, nigger?" and kicked him in the face. The admittance of this made her cry and begin to beg for Carver's forgiveness.
• Never Bring a Friend to an Audition: Deconstructed in "The Unblinking Eye". Two aspiring actors and best friends go on auditions when one, on his own, is hired as an extra in a Matt Damon film. The night before he begins shooting, his friend ends up violently ill in the ER and he remains at his side, where he eventually admits to the staff that he intentionally made himself sick with ipecac, all in an effort to sabotage his "friend" out of jealousy. The end result has him too tired and unfocused to deliver his lines on the set, he eventually walked off in embarrassment, and his role was cut from the film.
• Never Filled Out Official Paperwork: In the episode "Prisoner", a woman misses out on a loan she would have used to start a business because her abusive husband wouldn't give her the documents she needed for the application. He was hiding his own embezzlement, and actually hired a convict to kill her to cover it up. The con ran off with her instead.
• Never Found the Body:
  • Nicole Wallace, though what is believed to be her heart is found. Interesting case, as Goren refuses to believe that she's dead despite proof. And according to Word of God and Word of Saint Paul, he's right.
  • The bodies of the husband and his mistress from "Betrayed" are never located. In part due to Captain Ross' personal feelings and interference with the investigation.
  • The philandering wife from "The Good Doctor" was never found, in spite of a ploy by the police that she was at one point.
  • The son-in-law from "Death Roe" is a subversion. He was murdered and butchered by his father-in-law and had his remains disposed of through cooking utensils, including a meat grinder, which were then thrown away and replaced. All that remained were some surgical screws from his leg.
• Never Learned to Read: One of the suspects from "Stray" had a variation: he was dyslexic.
• Never My Fault: As seen in "Playing Dead" where the Corrupt Politician tries to blame his stepdaughter for "seducing" him (at the age of twelve) into raping her and impregnating her with her younger sister/daughter.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Not uncommon, but a notable example is provided by Jo Gage in "Blind Spot", as this is suggested to be the result of her criminal profiler father exposing her to graphic violence for most of her life.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • The episode "Collective" centers around the fandom of an author named Carlotta Francis, whose works are quite clearly inspired by those of Anne Rice.
  • TV reporter "Faith Yancy" bears a striking similarity to Nancy Grace.
  • Lorelei Mailer in "Bombshell" is Anna Nicole Smith in all but name (and in-universe is compared to Marilyn Monroe, as Smith often was).
  • Gerhardt Heldtman in "The Posthumous Collection" is a fashion/fetish photographer whose German-Jewish family was persecuted during the Third Reich, much like Helmut Newton.
  • David Blake, the chess grandmaster gone wrong in "Gone" is a clear takeoff on Bobby Fischer.
• No Ending: Criminal Intent doesn't indulge in this as much as SVU, but there are several episodes that end this way.
  • One of the most notable cases is "Flipped." Logan and Wheeler get the perp, a cop killer, but he is murdered by an undercover cop while the guards at Rikers turn the other way. The episode ends with the cop walking away.
  • "The Good Doctor" ends with the eponymous character convicted, but it's still not entirely clear whether or not he did it.
  • In "To The Bone", the detectives' only cooperating witness commits suicide just after making his statement. With him dead, there's no evidence to convict the other killers or the mastermind behind them, and the last scene implies they're going to be released.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Logan, Wheeler and other police officers end up being involved in one with the FDNY in "Maltese Cross".
• No Medication for Me: Discussed in "See Me" about a suspect, an optometrist, who was mentally ill. The detectives theorized that he believed that he stopped taking his much-needed medication because "medication is for sick people; if I don't take meds anymore, I won't be sick."
• The Nose Knows: The girlfriend in "Silver Lining" at one point complains about smelling electricity in the air which Eames quickly picks up on, saying that when she was pregnant, she thought that she could smell moonbeams.
• Not with Them for the Money: Cruelly played with in "Trophy Wine". The Asshole Victim blatantly cheated on his wife and constantly abused her by comparing her to her drug-addicted prostitute mother. Even worse, he hired a male model to seduce her so he could leave her with nothing when he divorced her thanks to a fidelity clause in their prenup. She stayed faithful, but still murdered her husband anyway, just days before the prenup would expire on their tenth anniversary. When the detectives ask her why she didn't just wait and then divorce the bastard and take his money, she bitterly reminds them that the money was never what she was after.
• Obfuscating Disability: "Inert Dwarf" had a Stephen Hawking expy who still had more mobility than he let on.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Goren has a tendency to do this at times.
  • Wheeler engaged in this during "Maltese Cross" to fool a retired cop involved in corruption.
• Oblivious Janitor Cut: In "Major Case", the Victim of the Week screams and pounds desperately on the window when she sees a man walking his dog pass by outside. A cut to the outside shows the man has ear buds in and is oblivious to the desperate screams and poundings, as the killer drags the girl away from the window and back into the darkness of the house.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: The mother-in-law from "Please Note We Are No Longer Accepting Letters of Recommendation from Henry Kissinger", natch. She was a Upper-Class Twit Rich Bitch who hated her daughter-in-law, believing that she was never good enough for her son (who wouldn't stand up for his wife since he was a Mama's Boy) and was a bad mother to their son. This ended up pushing the daughter-in-law over the edge, as after the mother-in-law repeatedly belittled her for not getting her son into a highly-rated preschool, she killed the parents of several children, even leaving one of the children an orphan, to get her kid off the waiting list.
• Oddball in the Series: Initially, this series was more or less a downplayed version of such, as it was didn't follow the Law & Order tradition of being an ensemble show, focusing solely on Goren instead and was the only show that neither McCoy nor Munch ever made an appearance (McCoy was referenced in "Semi-Professional," but Munch was never mentioned). However around season six, this trope became more blatant, beginning with the loss of the "Order" part of the series (and with him, the only regular cast member of color), the lack of the title cards as well as the accompanying "DUN-DUN!" sound heard during them and the changing personalities of the criminals, their motives and the members of the Major Case Squad themselves.
• Odd Friendship: Milton Winters and Dempsey Powers in "Cuba Libre." An Ambiguously Jewish clothing store magnate and a Malcolm Xerox drug kingpin.
• Offing the Offspring: Averted in "Phantom" and "Family Values"; the former had a man supposedly decide to kill his two children in murder-suicide, only to be talked out of it by Goren and for him to then discover that only two bullets were in the gun and the latter wanted to kill his daughter to "save her soul" but Goren managed to convince him that God wanted his daughter to live.
  • A subversion occurred in "Badge", where it only looks like the father killed his family and himself to escape mounting debts. Turns out, a crooked cop did it for money and attempted to frame him for the homicides.
  • Played straight in "Great Barrier", where we learn Nicole Wallace had killed her young daughter years earlier out of jealousy. It's one of the few times in the series where she was genuinely rattled by Goren, even quasi-meekly saying "Very good, Bobby" after he revealed that he knew of the girl's existence.
  • Played straight again in "Magnificat", where an overwhelmed and emotionally abused mother attempted to kill herself and her four children with a car bomb because she felt (thanks to her husband's emotional abuse) that she wasn't a good enough mother to them, but didn't want to leave them with no mother either. She and her oldest son survived because he had absentmindedly opened the front passenger side window which reduced the force of the blast in the front; the three younger children, in the back seats, were killed.
  • In "The Good Child" a young woman's stepparents are murdered a few years after testifying against the mob and going into Witness Protection. But the actual killers are her biological parents, who intend to reunite with her just long enough to kill her as well and inherit from her.
• Off with His Head!: "Maledictus", "Slither" and "Neighborhood Watch".
• Old Cop, Young Cop: Downplayed; Wheeler is significantly younger than both Logan and (presumably) Nichols, but it doesn’t get much notice due to their respective youthful looks. Nichols doesn't seem to notice, but Logan Lampshades it a lot at first.
• Older Than They Look: The suspect in "Cruise to Nowhere" was in his early 20s, yet both in person and especially on his driver's license (where he didn't have any facial hair) he looked much younger. Even Deakins had no problem making fun of him over this, claiming that his daughters could take him.
• Once for Yes, Twice for No: Subverted in "Conscience"; the detectives used this technique to question a patient in a permanent vegetative state about a recent murder, using cards titled "Yes" and "No" for her to look at. Unfortunately, she wasn't really answering the questions that they posed; rather they used the ruse to get the ex-husband to confess to the murder, which he did.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: In "Chinoiserie", Goren and Eames immediately identify a supposed British lord as a fake by his atrocious accent which keeps jumping around the UK. The outraged impostor, an actor unknowingly hired to play the role as part of a con, keeps insisting that it is "a perfectly valid British musical hall accent."
• One-Person Birthday Party: The daughter from "Shrink-Wrapped" had one as a child where no one, not even her own parents, attended. She was so alone that a waiter at the restaurant had to take her picture as she blew out her birthday candles.
• Opening Narration: As per usual on a Law & Order series.
• Opposites Attract: "The Last Street In Manhattan" had this between the victim, a high-powered egotistical investment banker and his girlfriend, a homegrown, working-class girl who was employed at her father's bar. They grew up in the same neighborhood and had fallen in love throughout the years, with her even giving him a replica of a watch he bought as a young boy from selling garden seeds door-to-door and had lost a short time later.
• Outlaw Couple: In "Love Sick", Nichols and Stevens have to track down a boyfriend/girlfriend pair of serial killers.
  • The young couple from "Stray" were a pair of "Bonnie and Clyde" style robbers who killed two undercover police officers.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Eames is without question the best detective not named Robert Goren that Major Case has, but she is frequently overshadowed by the supernova brilliance of her partner. Perhaps not surprisingly, she often uses this to her (and his) advantage.
• The Plan/Evil Plan: Each criminal has one and it frames the episode's plot.
• Parental Favoritism:
  • "Beast" has a woman with two daughters, one being very pretty and talented, who got all the glory in life and is now worshiped by the mother years after her death; the other is rather plain, lived in her sister's shadow, and was and is constantly put down by their mother. This treatment led her to be involved with two murders years later, including that of her own sister.
  • "Bedfellows" has an even more blatant example, where a mogul's two sons are murdered on separate occasions, he grieved only one of the sons (whom he also put on a pedestal while they were alive) and is now continuing the behavior with each of his grandsons. Even when he cried out over his dead son, Goren had to remind him "You had two sons."
  • Goren's own mother seems to favor his brother, Frank, over him, even though Frank is a deadbeat drug addict who she hardly ever sees while Goren is successful and visits her regularly. It's eventually revealed that she believed (correctly, as it turned out) that Goren was the product of an affair she had had with a man who hurt her badly a few years later, which is implied to be at least part of the reason for his being The Unfavorite.
• Pædo Hunt: Used in "Neighborhood Watch", where the victim ends up being labeled as such for being with a fifteen-year-old when he was nineteen (which was consensual, but the girl was convinced to bringing statutory rape charges against him). He spends a few years in prison, has to register as a sex offender only to then be harassed and vilified by his neighbors after getting out and then he is brutally murdered.
• Parental Savings Splurge: One episode involves a man who uses his forging skills to destroy the reputation of a church's patron saint, because his mentally ill mother basically gave away his possessions and their savings to them without his consent. In a twist, he doesn't blame his mother for this but rather blames the church for taking advantage of her mental illness, and relents when Goren makes it clear how devastated she'd be if the forged documents were accurate.
• Parental Substitute: Declan Gage was sort of like this to Goren, taking a shining to him as he mentored him. Too bad he did this at the expense of his daughter, Jo, leading her to become a serial killer and he ended up killing his brother and Nicole Wallace to improve his life.
• Parents as People: Deconstructed. The various parents portrayed on the show are normally placed into two camps: as loving and concerned (albeit underdeveloped) figures who allows the audience to feel sympathy for the victim(s) or more fleshed out but complex characters who in spite of their own idiosyncrasies or if they're guilty of the episode's crime or not usually aren't people worth rooting for.
• Password Slot Machine: A burglar uses one to crack a hotel safe in "Folie à Deux".
• Patched Together from the Headlines:
  • "Monster" is an amalgamation of the "preppie" murder (a teen boy murdered a classmate and was viewed as having gotten off lightly due to his perceived class status) before it turns out to also be based on the Trisha Melli/Central Park Five case, where the brutal rape and near death of a woman in central New York led to the false convictions of several others, resulting in a repeat offender going uncaught for years.
  • "Gemini" borrows a lot of features from the Unabomber case, such as a popular police sketch that went viral before being ID'd by his own brother, and a schizophrenia defence that he refused, set against the actual story of Jonathan Preston Haynes, a white supremacist who killed a plastic surgeon and hairdresser to uphold Aryan ideals of beauty.
  • "Sound Bodies" is the Gustaf Adolph Lutheran Church arsenic poisonings meets Charles Manson, as the crimes turn out to be perpetrated by a group of teenage girls acting for The Svengali.
• The Patient Has Left the Building:
  • After the fight with the FDNY in "Maltese Cross" that left him with several facial cuts and a possibly broken or at the very least bruised rib, Logan decides to leave triage (and rip out the IV in the crook of his elbow) just as Wheeler informs him that he's about to be admitted to a room.
  • In a later episode, a friend of Logan's learns that he's been poisoned and escapes the hospital (where he was about to be put under quarantine) to run to Major Case and ask Logan to solve his murder.
• Platonic Kissing: Goren gives Eames a kiss on the cheek in "Loyalty" after she's forced to fire him.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Goren and Eames have a lot of the trope's defining characteristics.
• Poison Is Evil: Used in "Poison", obviously, but also used in "Smile", "Inert Dwarf", "30", "The Healer" and "Conscience", to name a few.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: The perpetrators from "Acts of Contrition" beat a black man for dating a white woman who used to date one of them. Also, the killer from "A Murderer Among Us" killed Jewish men because his mother had an affair with one and, in his mind, it ruined his family.
• Pretty in Mink: Some of the guest characters, including a witness being identified by her Russian sable coat.
• Private Military Contractors: In "Boots on the Ground", the Victim of the Week is an activist who had been infiltrating two rival private contractors. This leaves plenty of suspects with military training.
• The Profiler: Goren.
• Pronouncing My Name for You: Ms. Nobile insists it is pronounced "no-bee-lay", not "no-beel". It's seldom pronounced right except to her face.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: The killer from "Poison" had shades of this: she lacked the sense of empathy that most adults possessed and looked at the world by only her terms, threw tantrums when she didn't get her way (and even had one upon being arrested by clinging onto a countertop, forcing the detectives to pry her hands off of it) and smacked around a baby doll after being told her mother's arrest for the poisonings ended her deal with a clothing store she hoped to own. She even admitted to her mother that she only married her recently-deceased husband so that she wouldn't pass judgment on her for sleeping around with him beforehand.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: At the end of "Dead" when the hitman's wife encounters him digging in a drain pipe for the cap from the tooth of a man he murdered in the middle of the night, he tells her to go back to bed. When she is still confused and frozen in shock over what he's doing, he then bellows at her, "GO! TO! BED!!!"
• Put on a Bus: All of the detectives who have exited the series over the years.
  • The Bus Came Back: Goren and Eames returned for the tenth and final season!
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • In "Loyalty," Ross's killer walks despite concrete proof against him, as the U.S. government needs him in order to catch a bunch of international Greater Scope Villains. However, he now has to live in paranoid fear of himself being betrayed and murdered in the same fashion as his victims.
  • Also in "Death Roe". The killer is arrested in the end, but at the same time his daughter now has a tainted name and most likely will have the restaurant shut down by the Department of Health. She can't find work elsewhere, is left an emotionally damaged widow and he bursts out that no one will ever want her once the truth comes out.
• Quip to Black: Although nearly everyone has done one, Eames especially gets one in before a commercial break.
• Quizzical Tilt: Goren likes to tilt his entire upper body during interrogations, leaving his head nearly sideways. This is probably less to express confusion and more to unnerve the person being interrogated.
• Rage Against the Reflection: In "Betrayed", a domineering husband learns that his Trophy Wife has run away, and turns and punches her mirror; cutting his knuckles in the process.
• Rage Breaking Point: Goren hit it twice in season seven, first in "Untethered" after Frank tricked him into going undercover to help his nephew and risked his career and again after Dr. Rodgers told Ross about his true paternity, angrily confronting him in her lab.
• Real Name as an Alias: In "Trophy Wine", a con man who has been living for years under the name 'Bing Cullen', rents an apartment under his original name Arnold Binder.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Leslie Lezard lectures Goren about his self-destructive behavior ruining his and Eames' careers.
  • Zigzagged by Nicole and Goren as they tear into each other over the years.
• Red Herring: Whenever the killer isn't revealed immediately, the episode will spend much time teasing the viewer is as to who it is, making certain that everyone is presented as a viable suspect. For example, in one episode, all signs point to a disabled man's Trophy Wife being physically abusive to him and the murderer of the man's academic rival. It turns that despite her social climbing ways, she's completely innocent on both counts— the man's actually an Evil Cripple who's been trying to frame her.
• Refuge in Audacity: The detectives have used this with getting suspects to confess. In "Conscience" they used flash cards from the long-standing semi-comatose wife to trick the suspect into confessing and in "Legion", they used a picture of a now-dead accomplice taken while he was in a coma and claiming that he had survived to get his boss to admit to his crimes.
• Replaced with Replica: One episode features a con artist duo who manage to surreptitiously replace real yellow diamonds with extremely well-made forgeries. To the naked eye they look real, but a professional jeweler can tell the difference; unfortunately, by the time he sees the fakes, the real ones have walked out the door.
• Required Spinoff Crossover: With the mothership of course, but unfortunately never with SVU, at least while it was still in production. Eames eventually made appearances on the show by herself in recent years, however. Not that many fans of the Major Case Squad cared.
• Retargeted Lust: The suspect in "Semi-Detached" temporarily has this for Goren instead of her ex-husband, but he only played along with it as a ploy to wear down her vulnerabilities and uncover her ultimate guilt.
• Retool: Started out focused entirely on the exploits of Goren and Eames until Vincent D'Onofrio began suffering exhaustion. After this, the show was retooled with Mike Logan (Chris Noth's character from the original L&O) being added and alternating every other episode with Goren and Eames. Things then stayed this way, though with Noth being replaced by Jeff Goldblum in season 8.
  • This remained the formula until a Wham Episode that writes out Goren, Eames, and Captain Ross in one fell swoop, which caused the show to return to the original format but with Jeff Goldblum in the lead role. However, Goldblum decided to also leave the show at the end of season 9. This in turn led to Vincent D'Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe both returning for the 10th and final season, thus bringing the show full circle.
• Reverse Whodunnit: In the early season, virtually every episode began with the depiction of the crime, sometimes even showing the identity of the criminal outright. As the series went on, this became less common, but still showed up on occasion.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The franchise has its own page.
• Ruthless Modern Pirates: In "Loyalty."

S - Z

• Sadistic Choice: Holy hell, "Able & Willing." The perp takes couples prisoner, and one of the pair is forced to decide whether to kill the other or save them at the expense of their own life. The one forcing the choice is the son of a Holocaust survivor whose grandfather was forced into a similar choice and chose to save himself, and is trying to prove that it's "human nature" to save oneself in that scenario, thus absolving his grandfather of moral responsibility for that choice. The irony (that he's becoming the Nazi in that scenario) is entirely lost on him.
• Scare Chord: As if the episode "The Healer" wasn't scary enough, the soundtrack of the episode also featured a rather unsettling rattling noise heard throughout it.
• Schiff One-Liner: In the Rene Balcer-era of the series, Goren, Eames or Carver would end the episode this way.
• The Schlub Pub Seduction Deduction: In "Lonelyville", a writer is approached in a bar by two beautiful women who say that they have always had a fantasy about a threesome with a stranger. The next morning he wakes up in a The Murder After situation: with one of the women dead and him being blackmailed.
• Scream Discretion Shot: The victim from "Pravda". We hear her screaming as she's being murdered from behind her front door.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money! /Connections/I Make Them: Used by the suspect and his father in "In The Wee Small Hours", being able to continously impede the investigation because of these tropes. Unfortunately, it comes out in spite of what total assholes they both are, it was the mother and wife who did the killing.
• Self-Harm: The daughter from "Playing Dead" cut and tried to kill herself on a routine basis. Considering what she's been through, you can't blame her from wanting to escape through this and drug usage.
• Self-Made Orphan: "Maledictus" and "Suite Sorrow", though the former is subverted as it was a case of Accidental Murder.
• Sensual Slavs: Mira from "Blasters", a hired slut working with The Mafiya who had attracted the victim, his friend and her bosses, amongst others.
• Serial Killer: "A Murderer Among Us", "Stray", "Poison", "Legion", "Dead", "Shibboleth", "To The Bone", "Loyalty", "Probability", "In The Dark", "The Posthumous Collection", "Blind Spot", Nicole Wallace.
• Serial Killings, Specific Target:
  • In "Poison," Trudy Pomeranski uses poisoned OTC painkillers to murder her husband, and slips the extras onto store shelves to allay suspicion and set up a lucrative class action lawsuit.
  • In Consumed, the killer kills three Hispanic men in one night to try and make the murder of one look like a deliberate hate crime.
• Sexy Priest: The dashing Monsignor Brady in "The Consoler". He is very popular with the female members of his flock. Goren and Eames also discover that he is noticeably lax regarding his vow of chastity, and that he preys upon vulnerable women. He is not, however, a murderer.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: Goren's mother doesn't understand that Eames is her son's partner, and demands to meet his new girlfriend. (Goren's reaction is adorably bashful.)
  • Goren's mother got the wrong impression from his brother Frank, who assumed partner means domestic partner; Bobby weakly tries to correct him, but it doesn't sink in for a while. He gets it eventually, but he still has his suspicions - see Unresolved Sexual Tension, below.
• Ship Tease: Man, Goren and Eames have a lot of fun posing as a married couple, don't they? There's also an episode where they pretend to be strangers, and he walks up as she's having her portrait drawn by the murder suspect and talks about how pretty she is. Her reaction seems like she's genuinely charmed by the compliment.
• Shoot Him, He Has a Wallet!:
  • Subverted in "Pas De Deux"; the suspect really did have a gun, but it was a starter's pistol. Had he not been clumsy and dropped it, the police would have followed through with this trope, which is exactly what he wanted.
  • "Amends" reveals that this is what happened to Eames' late husband. After making a buy, he reached for his badge to tell the criminals it was a sting, but one of them thought he was reaching for a gun and shot him.
  • Played straight in "Collective". He was actually only holding a toy, but his con artist girlfriend set it up to seem like he had a real gun. Unfortunately, the police bought it.
• Shoot Out the Lock: Done by Eames in "Blind Spot" to escape being kidnapped.
• Shout-Out: The ending of "Neighborhood Watch" has a one-shot moment with Logan and Ross sitting in the office together and sharing drinks while mulling over the case they just solved. Sounds familiar?
• Shower of Angst: The Victim of the Week takes one in "The Consoler" following a sexual encounter with a priest that has shattered her faith. She is murdered shortly after.
• Show Within a Show: "Tomorrow" has two nanny sisters and suspects be fans of a soap opera named In The Shadow of Tomorrow. Several plotlines are reenacted by the girls, including poisoning one of their young clients and manipulating another's employer in a father-daughter bond.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Logan gets a great one in after the suspect in "The Healer", an alleged Voodoo priestess who is nothing more than a master manipulator and a poisoner. She even poisoned him and continued to make thinly-veiled threats against him upon being arrested:
  Logan: Yeah, well, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you go to jail. (mockingly waves bye to her)
• Sick Captive Scam: Goren's incarcerated nephew Donny pulls this off to get his Uncle out of isolation in "Untethered" by faking appendicitis (Goren went undercover after being manipulated by Frank into thinking he needed assistance after being sent to prison on trumped up charges). He is then taken out of the prison and promptly escapes, never to be seen again, though it raises the question of why he never tried to attempt this before.
• Slashed Throat: The fate of the victims from "Legion".
• Sleepwalking
• Slut-Shaming: Discussed in "Masquerade", as the suspect, in his ransom note to the kidnapped and later murdered young girl, said that "We have your whore daughter", because she was a child actress who apparently dressed provocatively.
• Small Name, Big Ego: The killer from Unrequited, who had starred in a play as a young girl and still had delusions of grandeur over fifty years later. She manipulated her toady into killing her husband.
• Sore Loser: Plenty of examples, but the killer from "Smile" particularly stands out. Being motivated by greed and not having any remorse for poisoning the victims (who were not only children, but were even called stupid as well - "It was mouthwash; they should have known to spit it out!") is bad enough. But after being arrested, she blurts out about knowing the detectives' secrets and that because of Goren's issues, he'll never make Senior Detective and Eames will never make Lieutenant.
• Sorrowful Stutter: Subverted in "The Unblinking Eye"; at a vigil for his slain girlfriend, a man engaged in this trope when trying to recite a Robert Frost poem . He eventually gets overwhelmed as his best friend consoles him. His "grieving" was just an audition to show off his acting chops. It soon comes out that he killed his girlfriend because she was a more talented actor than he was, and so had more potential for success.
• Speak Ill of the Dead: A witness from "Sound Bodies" said that the three boys who had drowned some months earlier deserved it, believing that they were the ones with no respect for the dead since they were taking a boat over to an island to hang out and drink at a cemetery on the island, even saying that they thought it would "be fun to cavort around with the dead". Turns out, he had every right to be angry with them, but not for the reasons he thought; while he just believed that they were some punk teenagers, they were in reality rapists who took advantage of their female classmates while drunk.
• Spin-Off: From Law & Order.
• Spiteful Spit: Logan receives one after subduing a suspect in "To The Bone".
• Spotting the Thread: Obviously, all the detectives are good in seeing the tiny flaw in a case that leads to the truth.
  • In "Faith," Goren is already suspicious of the stories of Erica, a sick girl whose blog and best-selling book have made her a star. There are numerous donations to her family...despite there being no photos of the girl. On the phone with Erica, Goren asks questions on her condition, such as how the ALS has affected her menstrual cycle. Her mother cuts in on how this is an "attack" and hangs up. Rather than be upset, Eames and Deakins are able to tell with Goren that "Erica" should have answered such questions on her health with ease. That she couldn't means that she doesn't even exist.
• Staircase Tumble: "Semi-Detached" has a subversion where the victim's housekeeper was found dead at the bottom of the stairs, but rather than simply falling, she was beaten then thrown down them.
  • Played straight in "Cherry Red."
• Starving Artist: Nichols discusses this in "Rock Star" with a suspect in the episode's two different murders, an aspiring rapper. He states about how in spite of hundreds of thousands of musicians coming to New York every year in pursuit of fame, on average only about 10 people actually make it, regardless of any distinguishing talent they may have.
• Stalker Shrine: The killer in "Delicate" has one devoted to the current subject of her obsession hidden in her dorm room.
• Straight Gay/Manly Gay: Both the victim and the killer from "Maltese Cross."
• Strapped to a Bomb: The victim from "Pas de Deux" ends up in this position unwittingly and ends up dead as a result of it. A later accomplice is almost subjected to this same fate after also being duped by the suspect.
• Straw Conservative: The killer from "Family Values" is a religious man whose beliefs drive him to kill a lesbian drama teacher, and later to try to kill his daughter because she had a part in a school play where she had a less than wholesome outfit.
• Stripped to the Bone: The victim in "Maledictus" was first decapitated by her killer and then had the rest of her body dissolved in lye in her own bathtub. Said killer is later seen throwing her bones into a river.
• Stripperific: Lampshaded in "Shandeh." Goren and Eames are talking with a suburban mother of two about her involvement with a strip club. She says she helped with the decor and with hiring the staff. Goren asks if she means the strippers, and guesses she has had some experience in that area. She just glares at him, but Eames points out that her (rather revealing) clothing doesn't really fit the "Westchester soccer mom" image she's trying to present.
• Suicide, Not Murder: A horrifying case appears in "No Exit". Although five people were in the car parked on the train tracks, only four intended to be there. (Those four had no idea the fifth was unwilling; the entire situation was set up by another person, who led them to believe the last guy was fully aware of and on board with the plan.)
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: In "Last Rites", Logan and Wheeler investigate an old homicide in which three people were shot in a car, but a toddler was left alive in the backseat. The toddler was adopted by her grandparents, who refuse to tell her what actually happened to her parents because they don't want to worry her or traumatize her further. By the time the case gets reopened, though, that toddler has grown into a teenager and easily found out the truth simply by Googling her parents.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Logan's multiple partners. One was more or less a female version of Goren.
  • There was also a period when Goren got a new partner who acted exactly like Eames.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Goren feels this way for the killer in "Want" who not only murdered but also ate his victims' calf muscles. The fact that he both was truly horrified by his crimes and tearfully confessed to them, stating that he only wanted someone to love, resulted in him receiving a life sentence, to Eames and Carver's chagrin. Some time later, as the detectives and Carver are working on another case in the latter's office, Carver receives notice that he was killed by another inmate in prison. While the men express looks of disappointment and somewhat shock, Eames just quips that now everyone got what they wanted.
• Sympathetic Murderer: All over the place. The episode, "See Me" was shaping up to be an aversion of this trope due to the suspect's disgusting means of "curing" his patients and the apparent lack of guilt he had for his actions. After it was discovered by the detectives that there was a reason for his methods: trying to dissipate their symptoms of schizophrenia, namely the delusions, which he was ultimately discovered to be suffering from himself, his Smug Snake persona quickly faded away and he sheepishly begged them to let him return to his work and played this trope straight. Both Goren and Eames, who usually has a more cynical view of suspects, felt sympathy for the man and he ended up being sent to an institution. Goren is then seen talking on the phone with his mother.
• Tainted Tobacco: In "Ill-Bred", a wife spikes her husband's chewing tobacco with fertilty drugs while simultaneously sabotaging his condoms to ensure that he knocks up his employer, with whom he is having an affair, in an elaborate variation of the Baby Trap.
• Talking Down the Suicidal: Heartbreakingly subverted in "Siren Call". After Goren convinces a fellow officer not to kill himself out of shame due to killing his manipulative party girl of a daughter, he is cuffed and taken outside, only for him to shoot himself as he's being led away in front of his dying wife and their younger daughter.
• Take That!: The "Blasters" episode does this towards Saved by the Bell. The show that the victim starred in as an Expy called Goofin' Around. The victim himself is based on Screech/Dustin Diamond and his costar/friend being a composite of Zack/Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Slater/Mario Lopez.
  • "Albatross" seems to have been based on Geraldine Ferraro, the politician who ran for Vice President in 1984 with Walter Mondale, and her husband, John Zaccaro. The story may be even more similar to that of Jeanine Pirro and her husband Albert.
• Taking the Veil: One of the attackers from "Acts of Contrition" ended up becoming a nun to absolve her sins that led to the brutal beating of a Black man.
• Talking the Monster to Death: A notable version occurs in "Blind Spot", as Goren has no conclusive evidence to link Jo Gage to the murder of many women and Eames' torture. He succeeds in getting them to confess in a few well-chosen lines about her father's belief that there will never be a female serial killer.
• Tangled Family Tree: "Playing Dead" has a family with a two parents, a stepdaughter from the wife's previous marriage, a son that the parents share together and a daughter that the stepfather shares with his stepdaughter.
• Temporary Substitute: When Kathryn Erbe got pregnant during Season 3, G. Lynn Bishop was brought in as a replacement. Unlike most examples, this was actually written into the show well in advance of Bishop's arrival, with the explanation that Erbe's character Eames was acting as a surrogate for her sister and would need a temporary replacement in the later stages of the pregnancy. Eames is still seen in several of the Bishop episodes, but she stays behind a desk. In fact, the empty desk in the episode where Eames gives birth is a plot point - her absence helps Goren figure out the perp's motive.
• Terminally-Ill Criminal: In 'Pas de Deux', the perp of the week is a bank robber who has cancer and is hoping for a Suicide by Cop.
• Thanatos Gambit: The wife in "A Murderer Among Us". She was dead by her own hand, but the way she died was able to allow the detectives to discover that her husband was a serial killer of Jewish men. She was also Jewish, and and she wanted to protect their daughter from him.
• Thanksgiving Episode: Downplayed in "The War at Home". It was mentioned once or twice that it took place during then, but it wasn't a focal point of the episode.
• That Thing Is Not My Child!: The one suspect's mother from "Fico di Capo" deduced that her son was bad at birth and decided to give her son up for adoption. Why? Because he was born with teeth.^note In real life, this is a rare but usually harmless phenomenon known as natal teeth. Needless to say, it has no relation whatsoever to any character flaws the child may have.
• That Woman Is Dead: In "Acts Of Contrition", Sister Olivia aka Angie DelMarco said that the latter, a drug addict and racist who helped to brutally beat a man into permanent brain damage, was dead.
• There Are No Therapists:
  • And if there are therapists, watch out. One episode had two married therapists, but they used their job skills to emotionally abuse and manipulate each other.
  • Finally averted in Season 10, with mandatory therapy sessions being a condition of Goren's reinstatement.
  • Back in season 6, Eames also had to attend therapy sessions after being kidnapped by Jo Gage.
  • Also averted in Nichols' final episode, when his father, a psychiatrist, lends a hand to the investigation. (Technically, it had been mentioned from Nichols' first appearance that his parents were "shrinks", but this is the first and only time either of them actually appears.)
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The victim from "D.A.W." ends up being poisoned, hit by two cars, then ran over by a third car.
• They Were Holding You Back: In a rather bizarre twist on this, Declan Gage intends to get rid of himself for this reason, along with Frank Goren and Nicole Wallace.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: The mother and killer from "Magnificat", a Nervous Wreck constantly browbeaten by her husband. Her sons noticed this too, to the point where they called it "zooming".
• Too Dumb to Live: The perp in "Contract." He assumes that Logan isn't lying about his willingness to drop his investigation for a bribe, brags about the details of his "amazing" plan to Logan, tries to claim his rape of the victim's sister was consensual (even though she was a minor), and makes repeated death threats against Logan when the police show up to arrest him, ruining what little chance he had to get acquitted.
• Tranquil Fury: Bernard Fremont from "Slither" lives on this, usually keeping his calm, polite demeanor to mask his true rage and depravity.
• Transplant: Logan and Dr. Rodgers, from Law & Order.
• Trophy Wife: As seen in "Cuba Libre" and "Enemy Within".
• True Companions: The firefighters in "Maltese Cross". Even before he sent Logan and Wheeler back to the firehouse to speak with the slain firefighter's team about new evidence regarding his sexuality, Ross distinctively asks Logan to tread lightly when bringing it up, citing this trope and how much their camaraderie differs from the police's. Unfortunately, with Logan being Logan, he doesn't listen and the situation goes as poorly as one would expect.
• Trying Not to Cry: Eames barely manages to hold it together in court when a lawyer springs an unpleasant surprise on her, dredging up an old request for another partner. She's even closer to tears when she apologizes to Goren afterward.
• Turn in Your Badge: Goren gets hit with this several times, most notably when he goes undercover in a prison without permission. Considering that it came close to being a suicide mission, and he had not bothered to inform even his closest associates, it damaged both his career and his reputation.
• Undignified Death: The secondary victim in "Collective" ends up being locked in a makeshift coffin, Bound and Gagged and suffocated by dry ice while only half-way dressed in cosplay. Eames is quick to quip over the woman's demise, dismissing her as "just another hotel guest who died in their sleep".
• Undying Loyalty: In the Season 9 opener, not only does Eames fight with Nichols about investigating Goren over the murders, but she accepts the captain's post only long enough to ensure that she's the one who fires Goren (so she knows he will be treated well in the exit interview). Once he leaves, she resigns rather than stay without her beloved partner. The episode is even called "Loyalty," a reference both to the MCS detectives' loyalty to their captain and the partners' loyalty to each other.
• The Un-Favourite: Despite Bobby being the only one of her two sons who takes care of her and is always there for her, Frances Goren makes it clear that his brother Frank is the one she really loves. This causes a lot of issues for Goren. This might stem from Bobby's true parentage. Mrs. Goren told him that "she just never knew for sure".
• Ungrateful Bastard: Goren's family in "Untethered" was very much this. Come "Frame", it appears that Donny's mother has shades of this as well.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Finally acknowledged in one episode by Goren's brother Frank, who irritably tells his brother to "take Eames to a motel and get it out of your system." Bobby's reaction is... not pretty.
• Unusual Euphemism: The female accomplice in "Blasters" discussed having "showers" with most of the men in her life and even suggested having one with Logan, as well.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The mother from "Happy Family". Had she not ranted about the divorce around their children and falsely claim that her soon-to-be ex-husband was going to send them back to their foreign orphanage after regaining custody of them and was trying to give them cancer through cell phones, the murder would not have happened.
• Vigilante Injustice: In the episode "World's Fair", one of the suspects (the boyfriend of the victim) goes to her family to assure them he didn't do it. The victim's brother gets confrontational and the boyfriend ends up being shot by the victim's father (who believed he did it). It turns out that the brother killed her, and knew full well the boyfriend was innocent.
• Villainous Breakdown: Once an Episode. Inducing these is Goren's shtick.
• Villainous Mother-Son Duo: In the episode "Diamond Dogs", Logan and Barek search for a mother-son duo of jewelry-store thieves.
• Vehicle Vanish: The victim from "Blink" and her partner in crime were gamblers trying to escape from a pair of mobsters. While the other gambler was far ahead of her, she had them hot on her trail until a garbage truck passed before the three of them. Once the partner looked back to check on her, she and the mobsters were gone. She was later found murdered in a park.
• Voice-Only Cameo: An in-universe example happened in "The Unblinking Eye" has one by Matt Damon where a suspect of the episode, an aspiring actor, initially had a small role in one of his films, only to keep flubbing his lines until he eventually walked off the set in embarrassment and was soon after replaced. [invoked]
• Vomiting Cop: A twist on the trope in this series; in one episode, Wheeler has been pregnant for a while and has been throwing up every day. The crime scene she visits is one of the less disturbing ones she's seen, but in her condition it's enough to bring her breakfast back up.
  • Well, to be fair, she didn't get sick until Nichols urged her to smell the body. And while it's not disturbing visually, the body was in a dumpster.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: An explosive example (albeit shot from a distance away) from a realtor in "To the Bone."
• Waif-Fu: Eames is five feet two inches of pure badass. And she's the senior detective in her partnership with Goren.
• Wall Bang Her: The Victim of the Week in "Delicate" has sex with her ballet teacher this way shortly before her murder.
• Wardens Are Evil: In "Stress Position", a group of prison guards are holding a number of 'off-the-books' prisoners (held under the Patriot Act) for the Justice Department within the protective custody wing of a state prison. They decide this gives them the right to torture and abuse the detainees as they see fit. When one of their number who has misgivings gets another job, the leader of the guards murders him so he cannot talk.
• Watching the Reflection Undress:
  • One killer is a voyeuristic doctor who strategically placed a stainless steel cabinet door in his office so he could watch his patients changing in the reflection.
  • In "Major Case", a Stalker with a Crush rescues the Victim of the Week from her abusive dealer. She asks to take a shower and he watches her reflection through the slightly ajar bathroom door as she undresses and gets in the shower.
• The Watson: Eames seems to be an interface between Goren and the rest of the world, much as the Trope Namer is for his partner-in-crimesolving. Her main function is to help him interact with the rest of humanity, and to maneuver the suspect into a position where Goren can let loose with his Goren brilliance.
• Western Terrorists: In "Revolution", Nichols and Eames have to find a former member of the Bader-Meinhof Gang who has decided to reignite his ideological struggle on the streets of New York.
• Wham Episode: There were a few:
  • "Anti-Thesis:" the first appearance of Nicole Wallace, the series' main villain.
  • "Stress Position:" Mike Logan returns after ten years and thus begins the (indirect) cause of Captain Deakins being forced to resign.
  • "Untethered:" Goren goes undercover at the prison where his nephew is currently located without authorization, and while many felt he was beginning to show signs of Sanity Slippage, this episode put it on full display. He eventually was sent to mandatory visits to a psychiatrist.
  • "Loyalty:" Captain Ross is murdered, Goren is fired, and Eames resigns from the force.
• Wham Shot: Interestingly, this often happens in the middle of an episode, a scene that changes everything viewers thought they knew about the story.
  • In "Phantom," Gerry Rankin (Michael Emerson) is shown as an economist working for the United Nations who's romancing Charlotte, the Victim of the Week's sister. In one scene, she's talking to him on the phone while he's in his car. Gerry tells her that he's coming up to the airport and will talk to her later. He then pulls in to a suburban house where his wife and children greet him warmly from his business trip.
  • In "Frame", Goren learns about a man who fell out of a high-story window and using his position to get near the body, he discovers that it's his older brother, Frank. This is even more powerful because the ending of "Brother's Keeper" has him horrified at the notion of him being dead, only for the dead man seen at the end of that episode not to be him.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: ADA Ron Carver left without explanation.
  • Barek too, at the same time no less.
  • Also, at the end of "Blasters" upon being arrested for his crimes, the mob boss tells Logan that he is now in the blood, yet nothing ever happened to him.
• What Have We Ear?:
  • Goren does this in "Vanishing Act"; producing the passkey from behind the guard's ear as a flourish as he finishes demonstrating how a Stage Magician had stolen the key from the guard.
  • The fixer for a 'rockstar' fashion designer does this at the start of "Rispetto"; producing cocaine for his employer.
• What the Hell, Hero?: For the entire unit; a black drug dealer suspect points out that the crime they're investigating wouldn't be "high priority" if a white tourist hadn't gotten caught in the crossfire.
  • In "The Last Street in Manhattan," Eames and Goren make a witness believe her father has been murdered to get her to spill the beans on what she knows. Eames ends the charade with a very unconvincing "We hated to do this to you, but" speech.
• Where's the Fun in That?: In the episode "The Unblinking Eye."
  Detective Alexandra Eames: [while observing a suspect in the interrogation room] She could confess, but where's the fun in that?
• Whispered Threat:
  • Goren uses this trope a lot, but not usually as a threat. One early episode has him offering an inmate and his family Witness Protection in exchange for information to put a crime lord away. When the man rebuffs him, citing how strong the latter's reach is, Goren then invokes this trope by saying how he knows people who can put them in the program so deep that even he would be unable to find them.
  • "Playing Dead" had a college-aged girl, forced to move back in with her estranged mother and stepfather due to receiving injuries from an assailant who also killed her boyfriend, end up being molested by her stepfather while she bathes. He soon begins to wash her himself while he whispers "You'll always be my girl" into her ear. The triggering effect of this causes the girl to attempt suicide.
• Whodunnit to Me?: "30" has the victim trying to find out who poisoned him before his inevitable demise.
• Whole Episode Flashback: "Maltese Cross".
• Who's Your Daddy?: "Tru Love" had a high school teacher become pregnant and it was undetermined if the child's father was either her teenaged student she was sleeping with or his father with whom she was also carrying on an affair. She admits at the end of the episode to the boy that his father, who was killed at the beginning of the episode, was the father.
• Will They or Won't They?: The season 9 opener, where Goren and Eames both left the show, was left a bit open-ended in this regard, making this a case of No Romantic Resolution. It was definitely stated that they would see each other outside of the workplace, but the exact direction the relationship would take was not clarified. This was done so that those who ship them can believe that they will, and those who don't want them together romantically can believe that they won't.
  • Of course, then The Bus Came Back and proved that they did not become a couple.
    • And then season 10 (and the series) ended with an equally open-ended possibility of them eventually getting together. Eames later guest-starred on SVU, where it was implied that they weren't together, although she did take on some of Goren's personality traits (and the whole head-tilting thing he does).
• Woman Of Wealth And Taste:
  • Marion Whitney of "Unrequited" is a wealthy and sophisticated former actress who is very much into fashion, charities and seeing her name in lights. She is also responsible for both her husband's death and the death of her toady/hitman's mother.
  • Nicole Wallace, in her initial appearance, portrayed herself as a intelligent and worldly college professor using the assumed identity of Elizabeth Hitchens, who was likely one of her victims.
• Women's Mysteries: In "Cold Comfort", Eames informs Goren that the female murder victim found in a public bathroom would have hung her purse on the stall door. Goren eventually agrees with Eames, calling it "a girl thing."
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: The show's very last perp.
• World of Ham: "The Unblinking Eye". Despite it revolving around a murdered aspiring actress and those in her life being aspiring actors trying to become famous, all of the In-Universe would-be actors' talents range from unseen, cheesy, or, in the case of the murderer and fiancé of the murder victim, just plain terrible.
• Written-In Absence: Both Eames and Wheeler had absences from the series due to their actresses' respective pregnancies.
• Wunza Plot: He's a quirky detective with an uncanny ability to read human behavior. She's a normal, well-adjusted human being. They fight crime.
• Yandere: The killer in "Semi-Detached" is obsessed with her former husband, to the point where she still cleans his house and makes his meals while maintaining a “friendship” with him. He even asks after her arrest, “Why couldn’t you just leave me alone?”
• Yiddish as a Second Language: A season two episode is named "Shandeh", which is Yiddish for "Shame". It's also a meaningful title as both the actions of the husband and his Jewish Mother are deserving of shame; he's a serial adulterer and she's an example of Obnoxious In-Laws who killed his wife in the fears of her divorcing him over his cheating and raising their children outside of the Jewish faith.
• Yoko Oh No: Discussed in "F.P.S." The one game developer believed that his partner's "girlfriend" (and the victim) was this, prompting him to kill her, but she was just a fan whom he had a platonic relationship with and wasn't trying to break them up, making the murder pointless. Interestingly enough, the other developer's wife plays the trope more straight, being rather jealous of their relationship status well as the third wheel in their successful business.
• You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: Eames occasionally addresses Goren as "Bobby," but he very rarely calls her "Alex." When he does, it gets her attention fast.
  • Also worth mentioning that they call each other "Detective" when they're really miffed.
  • Logan and Wheeler also get an instance of this in "Players", when Logan asks Wheeler if she's okay after she learns that her father's body might be in a mass grave site on a mob killing field.
• You Got Murder: In "The Saint" a social worker is killed by a lye bomb delivered in the mail.
• You Have Failed Me: One of Bernard Fremont's minions, Marcel Costas, from "Slither" ends up receiving this fate due to his incompetency (mainly with allowing one of his cohorts to be arrested and leaving a man's head inside of a refrigerator). His drink ends up being poisoned, which renders him completely paralyzed as he is then strangled with his own necktie.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: The killer from "Eosphoros" killed his cohorts in the crime not only to cover his tracks, but so he wouldn't have to split the ransom money three ways.
  • Also, after he uses him and his money to get her off from various murders, Nicole Wallace both divorces and tries to suffocate her husband, Gavin, in "Great Barrier" (by switching his full asthma inhaler with an empty one so that he would suffocate while stuck in an elevator... long story). He isn't the first one though, as many people, especially lovers, ended up dead after she got what she needed from them.
  • Nicole herself was given this treatment from Declan Gage after he set up her, Frank Goren and himself in an elaborate plan to be out of Goren's life.
  • In "Revolution", the main villain strangles a henchmen he considers to have become a liability.
• You're Insane!: Averted in the episode "Gemini", where the perp manipulated his schizophrenic brother into murdering people. The final interrogation included this memorable exchange:
  Spencer Anderson: "None of this is true. You said so yourself. He's crazy."
  Detective Goren: "Yeah, he may be crazy, but you're evil."
• You Monster!: The reaction of the father in "Pravda" after learning his son sold him out regarding his knowledge of a murder he committed:
  "You hateful boy. You stupid, hateful boy."
• You Remind Me of X: When Eames is temporarily partnered with Nichols, she quickly finds herself in familiar territory.
  Nichols: It could be a native Spanish speaker or a German. Some language where the present perfect is the same as the simple past.
  Eames: You're starting to remind me of someone.
  Ross: This one's taller.
• You Won't Feel a Thing!: In the episode "Death Roe":
  Beatrice Mailer: This won't hurt a bit. [Holding her father's bleeding hand, she squeezes lemon juice onto an open knife cut as he silently flinches] Remember the first time you said that to me?
• Zipping Up The Body Bag: This happens to Frank Goren in "Frame" soon after being discovered by Goren after he was shoved out of a window.

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