Law and Order: Organized Crime: "A Diplomatic Solution"

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

The following episode of Law and Order: Organized Crime also turned out to be pretty good. Ironically, my husband Charles likes this show the best of the three – he hung out at the computer during SVU but joined me for this one – and I’m liking it better now that Dick Wolf and his show runners and writers have abandoned their former worship of the Great God SERIAL and are making each episode complete in itself. This episode was called “A Diplomatic Solution” and it was about Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) taking charge of the personal security of Diya Laghari (Karen David), foreign minister of India, who’s in New York to speak at the United Nations in place of her country’s prime minister, who is supposedly indisposed. At the last minute, Stabler orders Laghari into the second car of her motorcade rather than the first, suspecting that some untoward thing is going to happen to the lead car – and indeed it does: the car is blown up by a C-4 explosive detonated by a cell phone. The members of the Organized Crime Control Bureau track down the would-be assassin and identify him as Ivan Ostrovsky (Bond Mgebrishvili, a name which identifies the actor as Georgian rather than Russian or Ukrainian) after Stabler’s crazy mother (Ellen Burstyn) sees the surveillance photo of him and recognizes the pack of cigarettes in his coat pocket as Pravdas, a Russian brand her earlier boyfriend used to smoke from his service in the Korean War until he was killed in that “police action.” (So Vladimir Putin’s reference to his attack on Ukraine as a “special military operation” is nothing new in the language of war.)

The police are working under the handicap of direct supervision from officials of both the U.S. State Department and the Indian Consulate in particular, especially an officious bastard named Veer (Kamran Shaikh) who works at the consulate and throughout the story takes an instant and relentless dislike for Stabler. Veer continually reminds Stabler that the consulate is considered Indian sovereign territory under diplomatic law and therefore Stabler can’t even be there without Veer’s permission. He’s such an asshole about it that almost immediately we suspect that Veer is actually part of the plot to kill Laghari. The story’s first McGuffin is the metal box Laghari invariably carries around that supposedly contains the text of the prime minister’s speech which she is going to deliver to the U.N. General Assembly; the second McGuffin is a series of semiconductors stolen from a U.S. defense contractor that have such extensive capabilities they can be used to control planes, tanks, drones and driverless war vehicles. Stabler and the rest of the Organized Crime detectives trace the theft of these items to Leland Johnson (Ira Carmichael), an African-American staff member at the defense firm that made them. In a surprise twist, the cops learn not only that Veer commissioned the theft and hired Johnson to commit it, but Diya Laghari herself was behind it all. Apparently she was working on assignment from the Indian Prime Minister to obtain the chips because until now India has been relying on Russia for high-tech weaponry, but with these chips and the thousands they can learn to make themselves once they grab the originals from the U.S., they can build their own weapons and won’t have to stay geopolitically aligned with Russia anymore.

The two McGuffins are linked because Laghari’s hiding place for the semiconductor chips is the little aluminum case we all thought just contained her speech. In the end the U.S. government recovers the semiconductors and Veer is expelled from the U.S. – presumably he’s declared persona non grata, which is the legal recourse a government has if a diplomatic representative of another government commits crimes here on behalf of his country: he can’t be arrested or tried, but he can legally be expelled from this country and ordered never to return – while Laghari goes home with her little aluminum box empty, and likely facing major (though unknown) personal consequences for her failure to get the semiconductors out of our country and into hers. This was a neat episode of Organized Crime and had some nice twists, including the cops’ discovery of a whole community of homeless people literally living in the New York sewer tunnels and getting their electrical power by illegally hooking up to Consolidated Edison, New York’s private utility company and predictably one of the most hated institutions in the city; and the way Stabler’s boss, Sgt. Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), has to take off work in the middle of the case because she’s locked in a custody dispute with her former wife over their son. It just goes to show that Lesbian couples can have major custody disputes, too.