Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Streets Is Watching" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired May 12, 2222)

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

As usual, the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed was the weakest of the three, mainly because while the other two shows in the sequence started in 1990 and 1999, respectively, Law and Order: Organized Crime started in 2021 ande therefore emerged at the height of the worship ofr the Great God SERIAL. As a result, the plot lines are structured as a series of so-called “story arcs” and the show quickly loses all credibility and sense unless you religiously watch every single episode (or sign u p for “Peacock,” NBC’s streaming channel, and binge-watch all of them in quick succession). I understand lots of younger TV viewers not only like but expect this sort of serial crap – I even heard one person tell me when he’s tried to watch the original late-1969’s episodes of Star Trek they’re put off because each episode is a completely contained story and only the central characters carry over from one episode to the next.

A lot of thins happened in this episode of Law and Order: Organized Crime, includingt the revelation that Preston Webb (Mylekti Williamson), the corrupt Black businessman who secretely runs the Marcy Gang of drug dealers from behind a respectable and even p;hilanthropic front, has taken out a nit on Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni), whom he thinks is a crooked cop who stole $2 million from him. The professional assassin he hires is actually a woman, a part-Ugandan (and therefore Black) U.S. veteran named Natalie Dumont (the formidable Adrienne Walker, who looks like she could be a linebacker in the Women’s Professional Football League – which really exists, by the way). The highlight of the episode is the fight scene between the two, and whale i suspect Christopher Meloni may have had a double through much of this sequence (the man just turned 60, after all!) , it was still exciting to see these two in deadly combat. We also learned that Dumont had been given photos not only of Stabler himself but his surviving family members, particularly his mother Bernadette (Ellen Burstyn) and his kids Kathleen (Allison sikes) and Eli (Nicky Torchia), who long-time fans of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit was ther result of a mercy fuck Elliott and his then-wife had when he was separated from her but came home one night and …

The news that the assassin targeted at least two of Stabler’s children as well as his mom leads the police department to ramp up the level of security protection around him. Meanwhile, Frank Donnelly (Denis Leary), head of “The Brotherhood” – a gang of corrupt cops who steal from the other crooks they arrest and who believes in the sort of muscular law enforcement that got George Floyd killed, never mind such niceitites as the U.S. Constitution and its pettyfogging limits on “due process” – announcing that he’s stepping down from leading it and wants Stabler to take over. Since Stabler is really an honest cop infiltrating the Brotherhood to take it down, he was already in an uncertain,nerve-wracking and dangerous enough position when Donnelly elevated him to the organization’s Number Two and he’s naturally even more scared of becoming Number One. Actually there’s a hint in Erica Michelle Butler’s script that Donnelly putting Stabler in as his successor is really part of the plot to have him killed, especially since a Donnelly agent used Stabler’s credit card information to rent the van that carried away the several million dollars in cash from the professional money-launderer, including the $2 million Webb gave Stabler and for which he wants his revenge, either by stealing back the money or killing him.

One chilling line in Butler’s scrupt has Webb telling Stabler, “I will take my repayment in the form of my own choosing,” and clearly he doesn’t seem to mind losing the money so much as he does being double-crossed and killing Stabler will restore his street cred – hence the episode title, “Streets Is Watching,” which otherwise is hopelessly ungrammatical. Stabler also has another character arc going: he’s dug out two old bullets he fired from his father’s gun in a childhood flashback in a previoius episode and in this one he gives them to a ballistic technician because he wants to find out once and for all whether his father, also a cop, was the hero he and his family had been led to believe or a corrupt cop who shot an unarmed man and then shot himself in the leg to make it look like the suspect was armed and was killed in a legitimate gunfight.