The impact Dick Wolf had on procedural formulas is moving into pop culture archival analysis, but the attitude of his guild writers toward disability is problematic, not cut and dry in terms of victimology or perpetration: the Criminal Intent episode "Inert Dwarf," where Austin Pendleton reasonably approximates Stephen Hawking as a diabolical genius who uses his disease to kill a graduate assistant who blows a theoretical construct the physicist holds dear to pieces, contextualizes my problem as the angry disabled writer brutalized once too often. Goren supposedly trips up *Dr. Manotti* by exposing Manotti's manipulations of his more able caretakers, and then proving Manotti committed murder through not tripping off a power chair alarm. The writers may have played this twist from the news that abuse allegations involving Hawking were being investigated, only then none of us ever heard anything else about the case, good, bad, or facilitated.
Despite my empathy for D'Onofrio as Bobby Goren, Inert Dwarf stretches credulity and feels false. ALS literally destroys male muscular fibers, no matter how bitter the brain in such a degenerative casement, so it is difficult to see how Manotti pulls off this nearly perfect ruse.
What Wolf gets right, however, is the lack of pandering. Disability often destroys and exposes family pathologies as much as does sex drugs, money, and spousal battery.
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