Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Pareto Principle" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 4, 2023)

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

Afterwards Charles and I watched an episode of Law and Order: Organized Crime that, as usual, was a good deal more disappointing and less interesting than the two shows that preceded it. Directed by Gonzalo Amat from a script by David Graziano and Brendan Feeney, this show, “Pareto Principle,” told a grim tale of a man named Phil McBride (Justin Mortelliti) who for the last few months has been telling his wife Emily (Hannah Jane McMurray) that he still has his job as a stock analyst on Wall Street. In fact he was fired from that job months before and has since been making a living as a bank robber in collaboration with two other men, one of them a man named Frank and the other a man named Lloyd Bloom (Mac Brandt), whose “cover” is as a lineman for Consolidated Edison, New York’s privately owned power company. Only Lloyd has decided he wants all the robbery proceeds for himself, so he orders a “hit” on Phil. Emily discovers Phil’s severed head in the clothes dryer song with their kids’ school uniforms, while the rest of him is lying on the couch he’s been sleeping on since their last argument. The Organized Crime Control Bureau identify the M.O. as that of Junior “Impulsivo” Suarez (Marc Reign), only Suarez has a seemingly unbreakable alibi: he’s been in prison all this time for another murder he committed as a hired gun for the “BX-9” gang (a Law and Order universe refraction of the real MS-13 gang of Salvadoran immigrants). For a while, watching the promos for this program, I was thinking (and dreading) that they’d use the old identical-twins gimmick and the killer would turn out to be Junior Suarez’s hitherto unknown (at least to the law and to us) twin brother.

As things turned out, Graziano and Feeney did give Junior Suarez a twin, but fraternal rather than identical because she’s a different gender from he: she’s Tiffany Suarez (Diomargy Nuñez) as far as we know isn’t involved in crime. It turns out that a corrupt prison guard is furloughing Junior Suarez and other convicted murderers so he can collect money from clients who want contract killings done; the killers in exchange get more cigarettes (the internal currency of prison) and privileges as well as seemingly perfect alibis. I was also struck by the presence of Isabel Gillies in the cast list; she played Elliot Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) long-time wife, who was blown up in the first episode of Law and Order: Organized Crime and presumably killed. At least Elliot has been mourning her death ever since, and I was wondering whether he’d simply hallucinate her living presence even though she’s still dead. In fact, she pops up alive and seemingly well in the police station at the end of this show, and I have no idea whether Dick Wolf and his writing and show-running staff are going to assert that she somehow survived the explosion of her car in the first episode of Organized Crime or if she’s indeed a hallucination as I originally predicted. Another irritating aspect of this episode was that, while the immediately previous two or three episodes of Organized Crime had been self-contained stories with beginnings, middles and ends in the same episode, this one appears to be the kickoff of a multi-part “event” that next week will unite Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime and, among other things, will reunite Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni on-screen. Feh, I say; I hate these damned continuing story lines that stretch out over multiple episodes just to make obeisance to the Great God SERIAL and give younger audiences what they actually seem to want from television.