"Law & Order": Great Episodes, Pt. II Quiz

Answer: Cynthia Nixon

Cynthia Nixon was only 24 when she starred in season 1, episode 2 of "Law & Order," eight years before she would land her breakthrough role on "Sex and the City."

Laura Linney and Julianna Margulies both did star in episodes before they were famous, Margulies with her future "The Good Wife" co-star Chris Noth, who is reported to have predicted that she would be famous some day.

Anita Gillette guest-starred in the episode "Remand," but she was already an established star at the time.

This episode is based on Bernhard Goetz's crime, where Goetz shot four black youths on the subway, and was charged with attempted murder. The public was very much sympathetic to Goetz on this issue, as witnesses were clear that was a case of self-defense, but the DA refused to back down, mainly because Goetz's handgun was unregistered.

Goetz served eight months of a one year sentence, and lost a civil judgment brought by one of the men, who had been brain damaged and paralyzed.

Answer: Elizabeth Olivet

Dr. Elizabeth Olivet joined the cast in season 2, when Dick Wolf wanted to add more female characters. She remained part of the cast until 1999, left, made one appearance in 2002, and rejoined the cast in 2003.

Carolyn McCormick is one of only a handful of cast members who played the same character on the original "Law & Order," "Law & Order: SVU," and "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."

This episode is one of the first times we get a glance into the personal life of one of the characters, when we see, at the end, Dr. Olivet in a session with her own therapist.

Elizabeth Rodgers is the red-headed ME, who also made appearances on all three major L&O franchises. Emil (not Emily) Skoda is the male psychiatrist who replaced Olivet during her hiatus from the 27th precinct. Melinda Warner is the ME on "L&O: SVU."

Answer: Jack McCoy

This episode begins with the "ripped-from-the-headlines" moment where the woman emits fumes, causing several emergency workers to pass out, before the patient dies. The ME rules the death a homicide, even though she cannot find the cause of the fumes.

This was based on the case of Gloria Ramirez, a woman with advanced cervical cancer, who was using DMSO, an industrial solvent, as a folk remedy for pain. The oxygen administered to Ramirez in combination with DMSO probably caused a gas to rise from her body.

At this point, though, the stories diverged, and a villain is introduced into the story in the form of a quack doctor who is killing cancer patients by diverting them from legitimate cancer treatment to her "metabolic therapy" consisting mostly of a special diet that contains no medicine, and could be cooked up by anyone. McCoy and Kincaid decide to prosecute her for murder.

This was not inspired by any single case, but by the controversy over laetrile specifically, and "complementary and alternative" medicine in general. Besides the Gloria Ramirez case, which is the source for the opening scenes, the Joey Hofbauer case probably influenced the script. He was a small boy whose parents sued the state of New York back in the 1970s to be able to give him laetrile, rather than standard cancer treatments. He ended up dying of a very curable cancer. No oncologist would agree to treat him, so he was treated by a psychiatrist, just as Dr. Haas in this episode is a doctor, but a Ph.D, not a medical doctor.

Answer: Cookie Costello

The wonderful Anita Gillette plays Cookie Costello, who, unlike Kitty Genovese, survived her attack, but was left sterile due to stab wounds to her abdomen.

Sal Munoz was the man who spent 30 years in prison for the attack, and Teri Marks was his attorney, played very well by Talia Balsam.

The primary borrowing from the Kitty Genovese case was the idea that a building full of people watched the attack, but did nothing, something which was believed for many years. Research, however, has shown that this was at best an exaggeration, and at worst, yellow journalism.

Answer: a tape recording the teacher made of a conversation she had with the suspect

This is a bit of a trick question. There was a problem over the gun he used to kill her, but he did not use the gun to shoot her; he bludgeoned her with it. She did make a tape of last conversation they had, but the tape was disallowed by the judge on the grounds that it could not be authenticated; however, it was allowed to be played at the sentencing phase of the trial.

This case was fairly closely based on the Kathleen Weinstein case. She was a school teacher who was carjacked by a 17-year-old student, who drove her to a wooded area over more than an hour, and she taped their whole conversation (unknown to him), during which she tried to talk him out of ruining his life, and begged for hers. He had already told his friends he was getting a gold Camry, though, and she had one.

The student told people he had bought the car with money he had saved, but he was already disbelieved even before the teacher's body was found after she had been missing for three days.

Answer: chicken

The first call, when they order two buckets of fried chicken, is unsuccessful, so the second time, they order four. Then they shoot the delivery man when he arrives.

The two shooters in the fictional case each claim the other did the shooting, a game that can raise reasonable doubt for each one, so McCoy tricks their attorney into severing their trials, and then proposes to try them simultaneously, arguing during one trial that one man shot the delivery driver, while in the other courtroom, Jamie Ross will argue that the other man fired it.

In real life, one of the men tried to argue that he was bullied by the other man into going through with the plan. But part of his argument was that he missed on purpose. The ME discovered that he fired one of the fatal bullets, and so his argument fell apart, and he was convicted. He must serve 47 years to be eligible for parole.

Answer: She was given morphine at the beginning of the organ harvest.

There is a morphine drip in her chart, which McCoy spots just as the person who shot her is about to go on trial. This prompts McCoy to offer a very lenient plea bargain to the shooter.

An apnea, or breathing test was performed more than once - there was a problem with it, though, in that legally, it must be performed by a neurologist, and the cardiac surgeon performed it himself. He merely reported the results to the neurologist who then signed the death certificate. Her time of death is after she was being prepped for organ harvest, but the discrepancy is one of a few minutes (albeit, important minutes), not a whole day.

This episode was inspired by a "60 Minutes" episode investigating the rise in drive-by shootings. It may also have been influenced by the 1994 story of Nicholas Green, and American child who was shot and killed while on vacation in Italy, a country with a very low organ donation rate. His parents donated his organs, and it became a huge news story in Italy, with donation rates tripling. There are now several schools, streets, and a memorial bell tower, all named for Nicholas Green, who is a national hero in Italy.

There is no suspicion that Nicholas' organs were harvested prematurely, though.

The premature harvest of the victim's organs is purely dues to the hubris of one doctor, and not the organ procurement system as a whole.

Answer: He had a teenaged son, and didn't want to start over with a new baby.

His other son being revealed as half black was the motive his ex-wife claimed when she was revealed as the killer. Not being home very often was the reason he gave for not wanting custody of his first child in his divorce. The police suspected him of the murder at first, and thought his not being the biological father was his motive for the murder.

This story was very loosely inspired by a book by the daughter of writer Anatole Broyard, a man who was part black (a Louisiana Creole), who passed as white his entire adult life, mainly because it was the best way to be accepted as a serious writer in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. His daughter did not find out until after his death that he was part black.

Broyard served as an officer in the Army during WWII, at a time when troops were segregated, and black people could not serve as officers. The question of his race never came up at his enlistment. Broyard was not the only American of African ancestry whose race did not come up during enlistment for WWII; after having whiteness officially bestowed upon them by the military, and experiencing the privilege of it during the war, they were unwilling to go back. Like many soldiers, they married white, European spouses, who had never met their families-- and never would meet them. They left their families and their race behind with the war.

It's doubtful any of them were revealed, like the character in this episode, by having a very dark baby, because genes don't actually behave that way: children may be a great deal lighter-skinned than both their parents, but not significantly darker than both of them.

Answer: the man knew he was infected prior to infecting the women

The crux of the case was that that man knew he was infected, but deliberately did not inform the women, in order to pass along the infection. If he could convince the jury he did not know he was infected, he could raise reasonable doubt.

At one point, one of the characters refers to a similar case upstate. That is actually the case that inspired this episode, the case of Nushawn Williams. That case had several differences, though: Williams was a predicate felon, and had openly boasted to the media about his sexual prowess, claiming partners up to 300 in number, and had been accused of otherwise abusing many of the women he infected (or in some case girls, since he had also been accused of statutory rape, plus, two of his victims gave birth to HIV+ babies). Although no one had ever tried to convict someone of this particular crime, it was still what Jack McCoy might have called a "slam dunk."

Williams was sentenced to prison, and served 12 years. His defense at trial had been that he thought the health department lied to him when he was informed of his HIV status. However, he ended up plea-bargaining, probably when he realized the degree to which the ages of many of his victims would prejudice the jury.

This episode features Ross's compassionate side, as she counsels the victims to get tested, and even offers to accompany them, and at the end, tells McCoy that she is keeping track of the women, even the ones who tested negative.

Answer: Russian

She is Russian. McCoy and Carmichael uncover what is essentially a conspiracy to dump unhealthy children on unsuspecting American parents.