The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that closed the night was the weakest of the three (as usual), though this one was considerably stronger than some of their previous episodes. This was a continuation of the story arc begun with the previous week’s episode, ”Chinatown,” It was called “Blood Ties” and was directed by Jonathan Brown from a script by Alec Wells. The focus in this episode was on Kai (Robrt Lee Leng)and his 16-year-old son Bo (Alec Wang), whom Kai left behind in China when he emigrated to the U.S. That turned out to be a major mistake, as Bo got kidnapped in China by a gang of human traffickers based in New Yirk City and ultimately run by Michael Quan (François Chau). Quan is playing both sides of the street, pretending to be an activist eager to stomp out the trade in undocumented immigrants while secretly not only profiting by it but running it. At one point he offers the New York Police Departmenbt a $2 million grant to the New York Police Department to help stampout illegal human trafficking in Chinatown – while he’s also profiting from it big-time and indeed running the whole operation. (One wonders why writer We3lls didn’t have Quan using his “pull” with the NYPD brass to target rival human traffickers and thereby make law enforcement his unwitting pawns in eliminating his competition. That’s a quite common device in other stories about criminals who make large financial contributions to the cops.) In “Chinatown” Quan orders a hit on Jennifer Lee (Esther Chau), wife of reform-minded City Coulcil candidate Stephen Lee (Grant Chang), whose campaign was being bankrolled by Quan even though he thought Quan was an honest guy. When Stephen Lee decided to withdraw from th e Coumcil campaign following the hit, Quan offered to run in his place and implant his corruption in the halls of power in New York.
In “Blood Ties,” when Kai attempts to buy back Bo from the traffickers, he’s first told the price will be $15,000, then when he comes up with the money (paid for by the “buy money” department of the NYPD, which usually supplies cash for undercover narcotics cops to buy drugs), he’s told that Bo has been earmarked for an auction later in the week. The cops running the Organized Crime Control Bureau, including Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Denielle Moné Truitt) and Detective Elliot Stabler (our old friend Christopher Meloni, older and more grizzled than he was in his SVI days but still pretty hot), are anxious to bust the auction and arrest Quan before his $2 million poison donation leads the NYPD big brass to shut down their investigation. There’s a neat bit of suspense as Quan spots surveillance photos his men have taken of Kai and Stabler together prowling Chinatown looking for Bo, but fortunately his attempt to shut down the auction avails him naught and Quan and his fellow crooks are duly arrested at the end. I was glad that the Organized Crime writers didn’t keep Quan around as a long-term super-villain, but dispatched himand his “character arc” after just two episodes. I was also pleased that Kai and his son Bo got reunited at the end, and that the hint that got dropped at the end of “Chinatown” that Sgt. bEll and Asian-American detective Isabelle Chang (Angela Lini), both depicted as Lesbians whose wives have left them because they couldn’t stand the strain of being married to police officers, are going to get together. Though so far it’s only the promise of a dinner date, but one hopes Dick Wolf’s writers keep bringing these two quite interesting characters together.
