Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Bad Things" and Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Shadowërk" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 10, 2023)

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

The two-hour “crossover event” between Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime that followed consisted of an SVU episode called “Bad Things” and an Organized Crime episode called “Shadowërk.” The plot kicks off when a woman reports being raped in a hotel room by a man who got the key to her room from a desk clerk. He knew her name and took a selfie with her after he raped her. She described him as Black and about 5-foot-8-inches in height. That very night, just two hours later, another woman, a coffeehouse manager, also reports being raped by a Black man with the same M.O. Both men used condoms, and the SVU detectives are able to recover them and thus match the DNA of both rapes to the same man – though he’s not in the system and therefore they don’t know who he is. By comparing notes with other Special Victims Units all over New York City, they find at least three other rapes committed the same way – all by men who got themselves into the private spaces of their victims, used condoms and took selfies afterwards – though the DNA in the recovered condoms indicates a wide variety of men. One of the samples links to Junior “Impulsivo” Suarez (Marc Reign), former enforcer and recruiter for the “BX-9” immigrant gang (obviously patterned after the real-life Salvadoran gang MS-13) who was still in prison but during the last Organized Crime episode, “Pareto Principle,” was revealed to be getting periodic unauthorized work furloughs to commit contract killings.

Only the rape wasn’t one of Suarez’s official jobs: he committed it after he killed someone else for his contractor (who gave him cigarettes while the corrupt guard who arranged the deal got actual cash) because he’d seen the ad for someone wanting a revenge rape against a nanny who’d briefly had an affair with her boss, thus infuriating his wife and leading her to log on to the Shadowërk site and order a hit to have her husband’s unauthorized girlfriend raped. The Organized Crime Control Bureau busts the wife for soliciting the rape and they learn from her about Shadowërk, to which access is limited so you can get on the site only if you’re recommended by someone who’s already a member. The cops get her to give them the required invitation, and once they get on the site themselves they learn that someone has offered $2,000 for the murder of small-time bookie Gary Longo (Robert Turano, whose performance is pitch-perfect as a rather pathetic Mafia wanna-be). They contact Longo, who’s upset that his life is considered of so little value that a hit on him is only worth $2,000, and they arrest the guy who takes the job on Shadowërk, a pathetic little dweeb who wanted the money for an engagement ring (though whether the ring was for a girlfriend or a boyfriend is unspecified and Kendall Slocum, the actor playing the would-be hit man, is so nellie in his portrayal it could be either). The cops stage Longo’s “killing” complete with a pool of fake blood (the same way Dick Wolf’s crew no doubt stage killings that are “real” according to the shows), shoot the selfie and send it in to Shadowërk in the hit man’s name, whereupon Shadowërk immediately wires the payment to his account.

Eventually the information-technology people in the Organized Crime Control Bureau realize that Shadowërk is not only nationwide but international, and they start sending out the appropriate warnings both to the FBI and to Interpol. They link the site’s founder to an address in Ohio, though it’s not clear whether he’s actually there or not, and they start building a psychological profile of him, which is how far they’ve got to catching him when this episode ends. There are also subplots, including an explanation for the sudden reappearance of Elliot Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) late wife Kathy (Isabel Gillies) at the end of the previous week’s episode, “Pareto Principle” (named after a 20th century Italian sociologist who studied the tendency of human societies to stratify so that 20 percent of the population controls 80 percent of the wealth, though how that’s relevant to these story lines is unclear). She was, as I’d suspected from the promos, a hallucination, though her appearance is convincing enough that Stabler digs his old wedding ring out of his closet and starts wearing it again. This pair of shows made an interesting combination – and it’s always nice to see Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay together in their historically guarded relationship – and I’m simultaneously looking forward to and dreading how Law and Order’s writers and show runners bring this saga to a conclusion next week – unless they don’t; I certainly wouldn’t put it past them to devise a cliffhanger that keeps us in suspense until the next season starts in September!