Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Trap" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 5, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that came a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode in which olr old friend, Detective Elliott Stabler (Christiopher Meloni), is under treatment by a psychologist, a New York Police Department policy for any officer who fires a weapon in the line of duty. His commanding office, Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt) – a young Black Lesbian whom we’ve seen in recent episodes having some intense conflicts with the woman who’s in the process of divorcing her and with whom she’d adopted a child – strongly encourages Stabler to stick with the therapy and not just clam up around the therapist as we’ve seen him do time and time again throughout the franchise and Meloni’s history with it. The main intrigue in this episode concerns a gang from Cuba who have established themselves as drug runners, who stage illegal street races to recruit drivers good enough to cut in front of pursuing cops and enable their cargoes to slip through police dragnets unmolested. The enterprise is led by a hard-as-nails woman who makes Jean Gillie’s character in the 1946 Monogram film noir Decoy look warm and fuzzy by comparison. It turns out she’s working for a mysterious “Big Boss” whom we never see (at least not in this episode; this is yet another one of Dick Wolf’s obeisances to the Great God SERIAL and the story ends frustratingly in medias res). Sgt. Bell assigns one of the detectives in her unit to infiltrate the gang by posing as a street racer – he’s already had experience in stock-car races (though strictly junior-league stuff, not NASCAR) and they create a cover identity for him as a Californian, which leads the woman boss of the gang to nickname him “Cali” – and the cops manage to find the wife of one of their earlier drivers, whom the gang had kidnapped to keep him from talking. I was especially excited by one of the gang members, a character named “Christian” (I believe) who wore a hot-looking studded black leather jacket and had long, curly hair, but alas he’s one of the many principals whose fate remains frustratingly unexplained at the cliffhanger-style ending of the show! At least the show’s title was explained about two-thirds towards the end: it refers to building a secret compartment into a car in which a human body, alive or dead,can be transported – as the kidnap victim was in this show.