Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Loved One" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired May 5, 2022)

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

After the SVU came a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode, “Lost One,” that for once was not a letdown, but a genuinely exciting story. It’s true it was one of those race-against-time plots beloved of Dick Wolf’s writers: Sara Santos (Ariel Milner), daughter of corrupt police officer and “The Brotherhood” member Jessie Santos (Sebastiam Arroyo) and his wife Rosario (Eva Cruz), is kidnapped by a straight couple which the cops are able to identify because the woman is wearing an ultra-rare pair of designer sneakers of which only 200 pair exist in the U.S. theyCaptain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni), representing the Special Victims Unit and the Organized Crime Control Commission, respectively, team up to solve the crime even though it’s not clear what the SVU’s jurisdiction is since it’s not a sex crime but a kidnapping for ransom. Stabler teams up with Rosario Santos to pay the $150,000 ransom demanded ,which he gets in a carry bag full of cash from Rosario Santos, who in turn got it from Frank Donnelly,the corrupt cop and Stabler’s current partner aqs well as the head of the Brotherhood. Unbeknownst to Donnelly, but beknownst to us, the money came from a stash stolen by corrupt Black gangster Preston Webb (Mykelti Williamson), establishing a tie between Webb and Donnelly that we hadn’t known existed before – though Stabler has been assigned to him only because he’s supposed to be taking down the Brotherhood, the secret organization of corrupt cops Donnelly heads.

There’s a touching scene in which Stabler learns that Donnelly has given his newborn son the middle name “Elliott” in Stabler’s honor, and it’s clear Stabler has a certain admiration for Donnelly and a sense of – dare I say it? – brotherhood with him even though he also knows Donnelly is a scumbag who’s disgracing the badge. The cops manage to find Sara in the nick of time – she has chronic asthma and she needs to use an inhaler every few hours or she will die, and Benson and Stabler get to her in the nick of time. In the final scene Stabler digs out of a tree on a block where stands an apartment building that’s about to be torn down and carefully digs out two practice bullets his father, a decorated cop but one whose reputation was tarnished by Donnelly, who told Stabler his dad didn’t earn that decoration but it came from a self-inflicted gunshot wound Stabler’s dad shot hmiself to cover up the shooting of a Black suspect who was actually unarmed (Stabler, Sr. took the man’s own gun and shot himself in the leg with it to make it look like the dead suspect had a weapon out and fired first), and he is looking for those old bullets to do a ballistics comparison with the bullets on file in the police archives from that old case. The show also lets us see Benson and Stabler in the same squad car again, geting the old nostalgia juices up and running, though the true depth of this very interesting story is Stabler’s own crisis of conscience over whether to turn in a man he’s genuinely come to admire and befriend even though Frank Donnelly is also the type of organized criminal he’s supposed to be taking down.