Dear Law & Order: Criminal Intent: What. The. Fuck.

I am beside myself in a fit of hysterics that it’s the final season of LOCI. The cute-as-a-button-nosed Katherine Erbe and the loose cannon, waggly browed lean-in of Vincent D’Onofrio have kept me company on many a sick days, weeknights when I just want to be left alone to do my blow in peace, weekend mornings when I’m too hungover to get out of bed – oh Vincent, you are a soothing balm of ointment on my weary soul.

So, the last two seasons producers unceremoniously made my Vincent lovey-pooh a full blown angry psycho sort of character and it pissed me off – but then they tried to shove fucking Jeff Goldblum down my throat as the “New Goren” – “Oh – he was raised by psychiatrists so he can get in your head – oh, he’s off-kilter and quirky – oh look – he can lean-in too!”

You know what? Fuck you Goldblum! Seriously. Fuck. You. I’ll give you The Fly. And okay, we can’t deny the brilliance that is Earth Girls Are Easy – who can? But really – don’t try to be Goren. You are not Goren. No one but D’Onofrio could be Goren – so don’t try. And I’m not even going to bother to mention the dull dishrag that was his partner whose name I can’t even remember and I’m not even going to bother trying to look it up because she was lame and not Katherine Erbe.

Have you figured out yet that I’m FREAKISHLY obsessed with all things D’Onofrio?

So, when I saw that they’d gotten my man back for the FINAL (gasp!) season of what I consider the best Law & Order of the entire chain – suck it Meloni and Hargitay!!! – I couldn’t wait for the season premiere – How in the world were they going to explain how they got Goren back? How would they explain how they got Eames back? And how were they going to explain the new Captain that looks like the shady, bribe taking prison guard in every prison movie ever made?

You know what those twats did? Nothing. They explained… nothing. Not a god. damn. thing. The hell??? Who’s the new Captain? How did Goren ever get his job back when the last time we saw him he was being labeled crazy and stripped of his badge? How did Eames come back when she turned down the job of Captain and effectively quit this bitch and left in a diva huff – really it was more of a quiet, chin-up, sad sort of dignity – but in my head, she strutted off with a hair toss and a rendition of RuPaul’s “Supermodel.” Wuuurk!

Nope, instead of giving any hint of an explanation as to what happened, it was like that whole season just didn’t exist – looks like Dick Wolf (I emphasize the Dick part of that name) felt that exploiting all the recent Charlie Sheen fuckery was far more important than providing die hard LOCI fans like yours truly with anything that resembled answers. They just tossed Goren and Eames right back into it with a dead hooker’s murder to solve and a quick “welcome back detectives” mumbled from some random extra in a cop uniform and figured we’d be mollified the second Goren leaned into the crime scene and started putting the puzzle together with his eyebrows.

The teasers for the episode promised a story ripped from the headlines, and when it began with a bloated Jay Mohr as an out of control fashion designer with a raging drug and alcohol problem my first thought was that they were doing the recent John Galliano thing with the racism and the “I love Hitler” crap. OK, really, my first thought was “what the fuck happened to Jay Mohr?” – So Galliano was second, but whatever, he’ll take my second place thoughts and like it just as much as he likes sending Italian students to the “showers”.

But let’s get back to more important things – namely, just what the hell happened to Jay Mohr? He went from a guy that I might see myself hooking up with if he were the last straight man at a party and I slipped myself a roofie so I wouldn’t remember sinking to his level in the morning, to now being the guy that I wouldn’t let shine my shoes out of fear that his sweat beads would fall on the leather and infect me with his fatness:

(Just a side note – when I pulled up Google Images to get this shot, the first drop down choice after “Jay Mohr” was… “Jay Mohr fat” yeah…)

I’ll concede however, that his wife just had a baby, and honestly guys, if you want to make your much better halves feel at all okay with their ballooning bodies that you’ve sperminated with child – gain a few with her – maybe not to Mohr proportions – but, I get it, I get it. So I will make no other comments about it – especially when I’ve learned in my researching of this story that LOCI is his favorite show – so let’s do this Jay – you, me, Seasons 1-7 of LOCI (fuck 8-9, I think Jay would concur we can skip those), a pint of Triple Caramel Chunk – to split Jay, to split! We can get all up into this marathon and have a fantastic time… as long as you leave that new baby at home – I can’t stand children and I think Fauntleroy would eat it in some kind of wild territorial episode.

So Jay Mohr is playing Nyle Brite, a bad-boy fashion designer that lives hard and parties harder and whatever other stereotype you want to make – part of me thinks they were trying to kill two Galliano/Sheen birds with one stone, and smartly left the racist stuff out of it and just stuck with Sheens antics in a Galliano candy-coating. Nyle is surrounded by a dream team of enablers – man I wish I had this kind of support around me – being able to do nothing but hookers and blow all day while my wife and my partner did all the real work to build me into a fashion empire – yes, please. The only problem is that –oops– the next hooker his partner Teddy brings him is the one we later see murdered, and she’s his… daughter! Ouch. That has to hurt.

Goren and Eames, not knowing who she really is and only having her whore-name “Sara Bell” to go off of, find a ton of Brite’s clothes in her closet while investigating her murder. They go to question Nyle about how he knows her and he initially tells them he has no clue who she is, and she’s just some pro Teddy brought to a party. The detectives do some digging and find out that when Teddy brought Sara to the party and her eyes locked with Nyle – party was immediately shut down and everyone was given the boot. They do some research into both Nyle and Sara and find out her real name, realize the connection between them, and go back to see Nyle to find out why he initially denied ever knowing her.

Nyle admits that he’s guilty of smacking his long lost hooker-daughter around when he found out that she’d moved to New York and started posing as a college student to cover up that she’s pulling tricks under the name “Sara Bell,” but he denies murdering her in any kind of honor killing sort of thing and says he only wanted to help her get out of the business.

The detectives are given the runaround by pretty much everyone close to Nyle, they figure he’s got the protection thing on lockdown so it’s surprising when they get a call from the police saying there was a 911 call from Nyle’s apartment. When they get there they find Nyle dead from 2 gunshots and a scared hooker – not a hooker-daughter, just a regular hooker that doesn’t know how to snort cocaine with a twenty, so come on, we know USA wasn’t going for realism here – they start looking through Nyle’s home office and Goren makes some kind of weird Goren-Super-Powers connection while he’s looking at some of Nyle’s sketches he has on the wall.

What he realizes is that Nyle’s got shit for talent – and he can’t be the one that’s making all the awesome clothes being sold under his name. They go back to his studio at the office, and there’s little Teddy cleaning up – and that’s when Goren and Eames swoop in the way only they can – Goren sympathizes with the psycho-nature side of Teddy, and Eames sympathizes with the work-your-fingers-to-the-bone-without-an-ounce-of-recognition side of what Teddy’s been doing all these years for his “friend” Nyle – designing his clothes for him and letting Nyle take all the credit – well, Teddy had enough of that trick, and not only killed Sara Bell who was about to let the cat out of the bag, but also offed Nyle when the designer admitted to Teddy that the label was never going to let him design clothing under his own name.

Honestly, this episode wasn’t worthy of a season premiere, let alone the FINAL season premiere – it played out like so many other episodes before it, not just on CI but on all of the L&O’s and it was kind of disappointing. Am I disappointed with you, Vincent? Never. But you deserve much, much better.