I think all the L&O's are creaking a bit with age. I love Jeff Goldblum, and for a first appearance it was okay. I think having a sidekick with an equally strong, but different, personality would make the show much better. I don't know if Julianne Nicholson is simply not a very good actress, of if the writers just consider her second-tier, but I don't think she's the appropriate foil for Goldblum's character.

They split the season into two shifts of detectives in season five because both D'Onofrio and Erbe expressed that they were getting too exhausted to continue with the show as full time detectives. The number of scenes they appeared in as the principal characters meant they saw little of their families and all that entails.

Didn't like this episode.

Knowing that Dick Wolf fired the writing staff and the show runner after they had filmed two episodes, this being one of those two, I can honestly say he made a good decision doing that.

I'm wondering if they rewrote and reshot any of this episode to improve it. I was noticing that Goldblum's appearance changed slightly in that middle act and that Julianne Nicholson kept her winter coat wrapped around herself more than necessary. Probably to cover a babybump that wouldn't have been visible when the episode was filmed last fall.

If "quirky" means chewing a bagel with your mouth opened, he's quirkier than me. Gotta give him that! I'll give the "B" team's episodes a shot because I've stuck with the show through seven years, but Goldblum's debut wasn't worth the constant, "Guess who's joining CI this season" ads that have saturated USA's primetime airwaves for the last month.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't normally watch Law and Order: CI. Even though I'm a fan of Vincent D' Onofrio overall. It was just never a show that I seeked out or caught much on television. I've maybe seen one or two full episodes prior to this one. So when I saw that his character was totally gone and there were only three main actors shown in the opening credits including Goldblum's I figured he had left the show for good. Is this not the case? I intrested in catching more episodes.

Yeah, the 13 episode aspect is what gets me... It's one thing to have a second team when you have a 25 episode run, but 13? What's the point? And then to replace Logan's more oldschool approach with a Goran knockoff? Really? I mean, I like Jeff Goldblum and all, and I enjoyed the episode for what it was, but it does seem like this is all really unnecessary with such a short run.

I'm also not enjoying their tweaking of the overall show over the past 3 or 4 seasons. I liked Noth's reintroduction to the mythos, but I didn't like how, after Carver left, they have entirely dropped the DA portion of the show... which leaves us with those "killer in this room" endings each week.

This week's didn't even make sense. Why did the kid confess to killing the second guy? They only had evidence on the washed up rocker/landlord... I mean, if they're going to give us these confession scenes they should at least be slightly more plausible. Sure, he could've called out him as the killer of the second guy, and we would've known him to be correct, but he could've denied it... as it was, it felt a little hollow and off for it to play out as it did.

Then again, in my perfect world we'd have had a Goran, Eames, Logan 3-way partnership in every episode, more akin to SVU's use of their ensemble.

Isn't the 2nd team supposed to be different? Why not just have Goren and Eames do all 13 episodes if the other team is basically the same?

I was disappointed. I've gotten used to D'Onofrio ways, and his partners ability to stand there and do nothing, while he figures it all out. Goldblum for one talked too doggone much. At least Noth's character felt less omniscient, more sleuth-y, and he seemed to include his partner(s) expertise in his deductions.
Bigger than all that is my utter frustration at CI's habit of gather all the principles together and solving the crime in a "...and the killer is in this room...." manner -- which always ends with the criminal confessing. love the show, but hate that.

Loved his bit on ratio of those who try to become stars worldwide, ending with him playing the keyboard and saying, "And I'm a cop!"

Yeah, he's quirky, but at the end when he was giddy at catching the bad guys ("a two-fer!"), you can tell he'll be less tortured than Vincent D'Onofrio's character, who seems to take each crime personally now.