Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Blood Out" (Dick Wolf Entertaiinment. Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 26, 2023)

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

Oddly, the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed was also thematically about the power of impunity and how carefully build up wealth and influence allow you to behave in ways us poor, benighted souls on the right side of the law can’t. In this case the super-villain is Oscar Papa (Goya Robles), who unlike the way most street-gang bosses are played in movies and TV shows about them is quiet, soft-spoken and almost courtly in his manner: the velvet sleeve conceals the dagger. During the course of the show, which ties in to two previous episodes about the Salvadoran gang called “BX-9” (obviously patterned on the all too real MS-13) which Oscar Papa leads, he’s able to have killed virtually everybody who could help hold him accountable, from his former driver who secretly recorded him in the car plotting murders of various people to Detective Mike Duarte (Maurice Compte), who’s cornered in a convenience store in the barrio by two machete-wielding thugs ini BX-9 just after he and Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) had finished sharing a drink. I for one was sorry to see Duarte go, not only because he was a quite interesting character – he would frequently compare himself to the Italian-American cops who took the lead in busting the Mafia because they regarded it as an embarrassment to their community, and he took a similar role even though while testifying under cross-examination at Oscar Papa’s trial Papa’s attorney tried to suggest that as a Mexican-American Duarte was prejudiced against Salvadorans – but because it seemed like Dick Wolf and his writers were building up Duarte as a potential love interest for Benson.

Instead they took her long-term association and collaboration with Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) in a decidedly unwelcome direction (at least to me) when, after the main intrigue is past – Oscar Papa gets a plea deal for plotting Duarte’s murder on a prison phone, confident that he can keep running BX-9 from prison because so many of his gangbangers are n there with him and can relay his instructions outside as well as kill anyone in the jail he wants to get rid of – when Stabler, called into the case for reasons that weren’t altogether clear, makes a pass at Benson. I remember during the 12 years Meloni and Hargitay co-starred on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit there was considerable fan debate both in the imdb.com message boards (whose summary elimination I greatly regret) and in the letters section of TV Guide as to whether Stabler and Benson should become lovers. I was definitely in the “no” column – I liked the idea that a man and a woman could work together and be professional collaborators and have a tight, emotional bond of friendship without letting sex get in the way – but now, 12 years later (and having killed off Stabler’s inconvenient wife in the opening episode of Law and Order: Organized Crime) they’ve at least dropped a jint that they’re prepared to go there.

There was also a subplot that took this show into more traditional SVU territory, as Detectives Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T) and Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane) stumble on a Black prostitute who was raped and given a deliberate overdose of opioids by a white veterinarian who’s done this several times before (and whom we never actually saw). There’s the nice irony that since she was already addicted to heroin, she was able to recover since her body had a tolerance for opioids that a non-addicted fellow “sister” wouldn’t have, but the emergency nurse stoll says she needed three doses of Narcan to bring her back from the brink of death. The best part of this episode was the characterization of Oscar Papa as a black-hearted villain but also a seemingly nice guy; in some ways his character reminded me of Malcolm X’s statement in his autobiography that there were plenty of Black Americans who had the potential to be legitimate entrepreneurs in legal businesses, but because Blacks were locked out of the credit system they were forced to apply their skills to numbers rackets, drugs, prostitution and other illegal enterprises instead.