Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Friend or Foe" (Dick Wolf Prudictons, Universal, NBC-TV, aired May 19, 2022)

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

The Law and Order: Organized Crime which followed, “Friend or Foe,” was less of a comparative breakdown than usual, probably because it was the last show of the current season and thereby writers Rick Mann and Barry O’Brien were able to tie up loose ends and actualoly resolve several of the overlapping plot lines. This episode begins with Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) seeking out his late father’s old police partner, Gus Henson (Paul O’Brien), for information about the police shooting in which Stabler, Sr. was involved, in which he got the police department’s highest decoration even though it was a set-up: Stabler père shot himself in tle leg and planted the gun on an unarmed suspect he and Gus had just shot, then pretended they had risked their lives in a shoot-out with an armed assailant. Gus instantly realizes that Stabler isn’t the dirty cop he’s been posing as to infiltrate The Brotherhood, the gang of corrupt cops led by Detective Frank Donnelly (Denis Leary), but a compulsively clean one who’s determined to expose police corru9ption even if it means exposing his own father as a villain.

Gus calls Donnelly and tips him to Stabler being an infiltrator, and under the guise of finding corrupt Black businessman Preston Webb (Mykelti Williamson), who behind a front as a legitimate businessman and philanthropist is really a crook and the head of the Marcy drug ring, who has driven out the Italians, Colombians and Albanians from New York’s illicit drug trade, they lure Stabler to a deserted house and ambush him, Stabler is seriously injured and presumed dead, but the other members of the Organized Crime Control Unit – including Stabler’s current commanding officer, young Black Lesbian Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt) – rescue him just in time. Meanwhile Preston Webb is found dead at the Gowanus Canal and his wife Cassandra (Jennifer Beals, sill surprisingly well preserved 45 years after Flashdance gave her her 15 minutes of fame) is originally suspected of having had her husband killed but later, for no good reason we’re told, is exonerated. Stabler finally confronts Donnelly after the other members of The Brotherhood are arrested, and there’s a car chase in which Donnelly is driving his racing-striped customized Chevy which he let Stabler drive in an earlier episode to show the growing bond between them (that car is to Donnelly what the Gran Torino was to Clint Eastwood’s character in the film of that title) while Stabler chases him in an anonymous black SUV and crashes it into Donnelly’s prized possession in an attempt to force him off the road.

The two have their fonal confrontation in a railway yard in which Donnelly commits suidice – at least we think that’s what he’s done – by stepping out on the tracks in the face of an oncoming train. Also, Preston Webb’s political ally, Congressmember Leon Kilbride (Ron Cephas Jones), is arrested by Sergeant Bell and her forces – but Bell’s wife, who took a job with Kilbride thinking he was an honest man and the community benefactor he posed as, leaves her at the end. This Organized Crime episode is unusually good in its depiction of conflicted loyalties – including the scene in whcih Donnelly’s widow Bridget (Jen Jacob) tears into Stabler for having worked his way into the Donnellys’ confidence to the point where she even gave her newborn son the middle name “Elliott” in Stabler’s honor. I’ve faulted this show in the past for having made its characters too black-and-white, too obviously either heroes or villains, but this episode was haunting precisely because writers Mann and O’Brien gave at least some of the characters more depth and greater moral ambiguity. (I like moral ambiguity.)