'L&O: CI' team gets better

One of my favorite moments in the new season of USA's "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" is when the unkempt and unstable Detective Bobby Goren turns to his partner Alexandra Eames and asks her if he's really ruining her career, as a spiteful perp yells while she's being led away in cuffs.

Having just cracked yet another difficult case with her difficult but brilliant partner, Eames wearily says, "It's too late," and just walks away.

She's half-serious. Vincent D'Onofrio's Goren returns for the seventh season of "Criminal Intent" more unstable than he's ever been -- also "fatter, grayer and scruffier, like he doesn't shave," notes fan Eileen Reed from Wake Forest. "But he's still cute!"

The show's move from NBC to NBC Universal's USA cable channel doesn't mean it's the unloved runt of the litter. It's still the best of the three "L&O" shows, no matter what ratings say. And of the two partnerships on the show -- Goren/Eames and Logan/Fallaci -- Reed and I agree that Goren and Eames still take it hands down.

"They're like an old married couple," Reed says with a laugh. "They bounce off of one another."

We share a laugh about Eames's line to Capt. Ross when he tries to pull her off a murder case.

"My partner doesn't adjust well to change," she says, as Goren paces in the background, out of earshot.

He sure doesn't. Goren's mother, played by Rita Moreno, died of cancer at the end of last season, and he found out his father may have been a serial killer on death row. The first we see of Goren this season, he's slumped on the floor of his lonely home, his head in his hands, as the phone rings with news of a cop killing.

It turns out the murder is related to the killing of Eames' husband in the line of police duty years ago. Not only does Goren alienate himself further from other cops -- they call him a "whack job" -- by questioning the arrest of a suspect he thinks is innocent, but he angers Eames as well by reopening her husband's murder case, even though a man has been convicted and jailed for it.

"This isn't another one of your puzzles!" she says tearfully.

"You know that we have to do this," he replies.

It turns out he's right -- wacky as he is, his mind and his eye for details are awesome as always, and his quest for truth is unflagging no matter what the consequences.

He's also taken to self-consciously exploiting his wacky side for constructive ends, like when he menaces an uncooperative evidence-room keeper by throwing shadow on the poor little guy and rasping, "I'm the whack job." It works because his reputation precedes him.

"It's the slow, evolving of a character," Reed says of Goren's development over the years. "That's what I like."

It's not all about D'Onofrio, though. The writers have really earned their pay this season (one more reason to support the writers' strike) by giving Goren and Kathyrn Erbe's Eames some juicy mysteries to work with.

Probably my favorite was the second Goren/Eames episode, which started with the murder of a dentist that was solved within minutes, then moved on to a corporate cover-up involving mouthwash with deadly traces of antifreeze in it. And last week's episode, which put them on the ocean to solve a crime that involved Civil War-era coins, was a gem, too. I liked it when he pushed the murderer off a boat for making a disparaging remark about "orphans."

But let's not give short shrift to Chris Noth's Logan and his new, temporary partner Fallaci, the show's other, slightly saner team.

Reed and I agree that the casting of red-haired beauty Alicia Witt as Fallaci seems to be working out.