Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Guns & Roses" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired March 17, 2022)

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

For once the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode which followed wasn’t a total anticlimax after the Law and Order and SVU shows that preceded them. Mostly that had to do with characters of real dramatic and emotional complexity: when the show starts Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) is doing a voice-over telling us how much he realizes that his current assignment infiltrating a group of crooked cops called “The Brotherhood” is necessary, he still feels a sense of betrayal towards them, especially towards Frank Donnelly (Denis Leary, whom Charles remembers from his brief career as a stand-up comedian in the 1990’s), whose dad was a police captain and served as the partner of Stabler’s father. In fact, Donnelly tells Stabler that during his father’s partnership with Stabler’s, the two of them shot an unarmed man and then Stabler, Sr. grabbed the suspect’s own gun and shot himself in the leg with it to make it look like the suspect fired first and Stabler, Sr. got a commendation from it. In fact, we get one shot of Stabler, Jr. fingering the medal his dad got for an act of “heroism” that we and he have suddenly realized is a lie.

It’s a surprisingly moving scene for a show that otherwise doesn’t offer much in the way of moving scenes; even the haunting plot line of Stabler’s Lesbian commander’s (Danielle Moné Truitt) wife’s brother losing his career as a promising young guitarist in the spirit of Django Reinhardt when a white asshole cop crushed and broke the bones of his left hand, had pretty much put this plot line on the back burner. (The real Django Reinhardt lost the use of two fingers on his left hand in a fire in his Gypsy camp; I’ve seen films of him playing that show how fast he learned to manipulate the guitar strings with his two remaining fingers.) The other main plot strand in this episode was a Black guy named Hugo Bankole (Antino Crowley-Kamenwati) who’s been framed for the murder of a civil-rights attorney and the teenage prostitute she was trying to get out of “the life.” In fact, the killings were committed by a bad cop named McAller who’s part of “The Brotherhood” along with Donnelly, only after Stabler gets a chance to copy his book of illegal ledgers with his smartphone, McAller is himself shot and killed by person or persons unknown as part of an apparent plot to shut him up that may or may not be connected with “the Marcy killers,” a gang that’s controlled and directly run by allegedly “legitimate” Black businessman Preston Webb (Mykelti Williamson). The Organized Crime episode ended at least a bit more conclusively than the abrupt cliff-hangers we’ve been used to, and as I noted above this show was full of emotional and dramatic complexity we haven’t seen much of in these shows so far – and we also got to see some nice glimpses of Christopher Meloni’s unclad back on which he’s wearing the tattoo of the crooked-cop network “The Brotherhood.”