Law and Order: Organized Crime: "The Infiltration Game" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 12, 2023)

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

So was the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode which followed, “The Infiltration Game,” in which Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) has to fake shooting and killing one of his other detectives on the Organized Crime Control Bureau because the gang they’re after, a group of Cuban expats led by a man named Antonio Duran (Tony Amendola), who has a wife, a daughter and a grandson, and his mistress and partner in crime, Bernarda Menendez (Ana Osorio). I quite liked her in the previous episode of this show, in which she played so good/bad a femme fatale she made Jean Gillie in the 1946 film Decoy seem warm and fuzzy by comparison. Alas, at the end of the show she realizes that Duran has no intention of breaking up his family for her, so she shoots him. Duran ends up beingkilled by her and the copse arreswt her at the end. A number of other people in the show also end up dead by the fade-out, including a hot young man named Cristobál (frustratingly unidentified on the imdb.com pages for both last week’s episode and this one even though he looked like a straight woman’s, or a Gay man’s, dream come true, with tousled long hair and a studded black leather jacket that made him look really sexy). The gimmick is that Stabler is posing as a major drug distributor to try to trap Duran into selling him his product, so they can bust him, but Bernarda tells him not to trust Stabler (it’s not clear whether she knows he’s a cop or is just being properly cautious about this new person whom nobody seems to know). It’s likewise a grom little tale but not as good as this show has been, and unlike Richard Wheatley (the Moriarty-like super-villain of the earlier running plot line), Duran is a pretty simple and not very interesting bad guy.