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| “ | The company wanted to get to the FDA as soon as possible. They gave me six months to do the test. It took one month to find the test subjects. There wasn't time to do the scans! | „ |
| ~ Varick making excuses for suppressing evidence that Alan Sawyer has a fatal brain tumor |
Dr. Christian Varick is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Double Blind". He is an unethical psychiatrist who deliberately prevents one of his test subjects from finding out that he has a malignant brain tumor and is thus criminally responsible for the murder his patient commits while under the influence of hallucinations caused by the tumor.
He was portrayed by John Bedford Lloyd, who also portrayed Jonathan Ryder in an earlier episode of Law & Order.
Early life[]
Varick is an experimental psychiatrist who specializes in conducting pharmaceutical research using people with severe mental and neurophysiological illnesses as test subjects. He and his research assistant, Jill Perry, regularly won lucrative contracts with pharmaceutical companies to test anti-depressant and anti-psychotic medications; unbeknownst to Perry, however, Varick deliberately altered or ignored data that contradicted his research to make sure his experiments yielded the results that his benefactors wanted to see.
While working at Darby University in Philadelphia, Varick conducted drug experiments with a student named Cathy Simon whom he had diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. He prescribed her the anti-psychotic medication made by the pharmaceutical company funding the study, and ignored her worsening mental health and her family's pleas to put her on a different medication to keep the money coming in. Simon eventually killed herself by jumping off the Tacony Bridge. Her family sued Varick, but the case against him was dismissed.
Soon afterward, he relocated to New York City to take a job as the head of Hudson University's psychology department and paid Perry to move there and work with him.
Six months prior to the events of the episode, Varick conducted a study of an experimental drug to treat schizophrenia and hired a student named Alan Sawyer to be his test subject. When a PET scan revealed Sawyer's hallucinations and paranoid delusions were in fact caused by a malignant brain tumor, Varick suppressed the test results to keep the research money flowing. He also set Perry up with a prestigious, lucrative research job at another university in return for her staying quiet about what Sawyer had told her about hearing voices commanding him to kill a university janitor named Greg Franklin, who Sawyer believed was a member of the Knights Templar, a French military faction that fought for the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages.
"Double Blind"[]
When Franklin is murdered, NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Rey Curtis ask Varick if anyone had access to his lab after hours, and he identified Sawyer and another research assistant, Xuan-Lan Nguyen, whom Sawyer had briefly dated. Briscoe and Curtis eventually find evidence proving that Sawyer killed Franklin and arrest him.
When Sawyer explains his motives - that he heard King Philip II of France and Pope Clement VII tell him that Franklin was going to kill him on orders from the Knights Templar - Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy and Assistant District Attorney Jamie Ross ask Varick if he knew that his test subject's illness was worsening. Varick replies that Sawyer did not pose a danger to himself or anyone else as long as he took his medication, and later testifies to that effect in a competency hearing, resulting in the judge rejecting Sawyer's insanity defense.
McCoy and Ross find Varick's denials suspect, so they investigate his professional history and find out about what happened to Simon. After finding financial records of a PET scan that was not included in Varick's research, they interrogate Perry, who admits to helping him suppress the evidence of Sawyer's brain tumor.
McCoy, Ross, and a now-lucid Sawyer meet with Varick and his lawyer and show him the PET scan proving that Sawyer suffers from a brain tumor, not schizophrenia. McCoy tells him that Perry will testify that Varick knew about Sawyer's tumor and resulting violent obsession with Franklin and did nothing, which makes him guilty of manslaughter. Sawyer, meanwhile, informs Varick that his brain tumor is now inoperable and he has only a year or two to live; McCoy then says that, after Sawyer dies, he will be charged with second-degree murder.
Varick is presumably found guilty of manslaughter and second-degree murder and imprisoned for life.
External links[]
- Christian Varick on the Law & Order Wiki
