Law and order: Organized Crime: "Last Christmas" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal, NBC-TV, aired December. 8, 2022)

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

tAfter this mind-bogglingly complicated SVU episode the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode, “Last Christmas,” was refreshingly straightforward by comparison. It dealt with the attempt of mega-billionarie Robert Silas (John Donner), who in previous episodes has hired killers to take out everyone from an old Black man whose house was in the way of his big casino development in Manhattan to his own daughter-ini-law out of fear she’d lay claim to half his fortune. Only this time he’s been diagnosed with a brain tumor and wants to make amends before he croaks, so he summons the Organized Crime Control Bureau and its leaders, Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), an attractive African-American woman whose character is a Lesbian going through a bitter, traumatic breakup with her wife, and Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni), to a supposedly secret location in a Manhattan building that’s just out of cell phone range. He’s doing this to make what’s called a “proffer” – a preview of testimony he’ll be willing to give later under oath but which can’t be used against him – only his supposedly secret location has been compromised by his own attorney, a woman who gave him up to enforcers from the Mafia crime family he’s offering to rat out because the hit people threatened to slaughter her family. (Of course, we don’t learn this until the very end of the program.)

tWhat follows is essentially an hour-long suspense sequence in which a hit person posing as the assistant district attorney who’s supposed to debrief Silas shows up a few minutes before the real ADA, and the Organized Crime Control officers on duty outside realize what’s happened when the real ADA shows up. There’s a long ambush sequence and several gun battles before Stabler’s quick thinking pays off: told by another officer that he’s just got a new cell phone, Stabler grabs it from him and throws it off the top of the building. He does this because as a new phone, it automatically sends a signal to 911 as soon as it’s destroyed (do real modern-day cell phones do this?). So the police respond to the 911 signal like the Seventh Cavalry in a John Ford Western and save the day for the monumentally corrupt super-tycoon and the evidence he was about to give against the Mob. All this was taking place against the backdrop of the imminent dissolution of the Organized Crime Control Bureau, which when it was mentioned in previous episodes I suspected had been instigated by Robert Silas himself by using his immense political leverage to sink the investigations once and for all before they got to him.

tSgt. Bell has been offered a cushy job at One Police Plaza (the palatial headquarters of the New York Police Department both in the Dick Wolf universe and in real life) by a white woman with long, stringy blonde hair, only at the end Bell decides to turn down the promotion and the woman who offered it to her says, rather glumly, “You’ll regret this decision.” I don’t know whether Wolf’s writers are going to keep the unit going some way – sort of like my joke about the new writers who came on to the Universal Frankenstein films later in the cycle and whose first task was to figure out how the Monster survived the cataclysm that supposedly destroyed him in the immediately previous film – or if Bell and Stabler will just continue as individual free-lancers on the NYPD. I’ve liked this show but Meloni looks too tired and grizzled to do much for me in the sex-god department anymore, and it also annoys me that the show is a serial whereas Wolf’s other Law and Order series use the each-episode-complete-in-itself format which I definitely prefer. My husband Charles has compared this show to Batman, and when he first said that to me I assumed it was because Batman and Stabler are both revenge figures motivated by the murders of people near and dear to them (Batman by the killing of his parents and Stabler bu the killing of his wife). In fact what Charles meant was the sheer reach and expansive powers of the villains involved, which make James Bond’s nemesis Blofeld seem like a streetcorner crook by comparison!