Law and Order: Organized Crime: "As Hubris Is to Oedipus" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired February 24, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, the Law and Order: Organized Crime show that followed this one wasn’t anywhere nearly as good, though it was legitimately exciting. Like the previous shows in the series, which like all too many programs these days is so heavily serialized you can’t hope to follow it unless you watch every single episode, it featured super-criminal Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott) and the single-minded attempt of Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, older and more grizzled than I remember him from his SVU days but still sexy) to hold him to account. This time Wheatley and hacker anti-hero Sebastian McClane (Robin Lord Taylor) team up – unwillingly in McClane’s case; Wheatley tricks him into helping him by playing a pretend game of Russian roulette with a woman who is really one of Wheatley’s lovers – to call out McClane’s army of online followers and enlist them in real-life bombings of various high-profile targets, incluidng the New York Stock Exchange and the New York district attorney’s office. Just how credible this plot is, I have my doubts about – my perception is most online community members are hopeless nerds who couldn’t be led off their desk chairs to commit real-world crimes and shouldn’t be useful as real-life saboteurs even if they were motivated to get off their chairs.

But it turns out that the whole operation is just a blind for Wheatley’s real ambition: to plunge all New York City into a power blackout by sabotaging a particular substation which he’s discovered is the key to the entire grid. There’s a marvelous shot of the lights of New York going out, one by one, as the episode ends. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes, but though the show is annoying in its obeisance to the Great God SERIAL in its so-called “story arc,” it was also highly exciting on its own. There’s also one scene in which New York’s governor apologizes to Stabler for having doubted his analysis of Wheatley, whom he had hailed as a great benefactor of the city and the state, but he refuses to make the apology public. But for the most part he’s a typical politician in a Dick Wolf series episode, and no matter how peripheral Wolf’s involvement is these days and how many producers and show runners are working for him and dictating the policies of “his” shows, the Law and Order franchise has remained pretty consistent in its cynical view of law enforcement and in particular its ability (or lack thereof) to hold the rich and powerful to account.