Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Memory Lane" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal,, NBC-TV, aired January 18, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that concluded the evening (and which my husband Charles returned home from work in the middle of) was called “Memory Lane,” and started with the proverbial bang: Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, with a neatly trimmed moustache and beard that helps restore some of his fabled sexiness after his face has become grizzled with age) is in a large truck with Miguel “Mig” Espinoza (Mike Seal) and a driver. Both Stabler and the driver are working undercover to bust a Latino street gang that allegedly controls the city’s entire supply of the drug fentanyl. They’re importing the drug from China and refining it in a secret laboratory, the whereabouts of which are a closely guarded secret the cops haven’t been able to uncover. Stabler and his driver are about to uncover it when the truck is ambushed by a squad of federal narcotics agents who’ve developed their own set of leads and arrest Stabler until he’s able to convince them that he’s a fellow cop. The driver is killed in the ensuing shoot-out and Stabler spends the rest of the episode grieving him, to the point of lighting candles for him in a local Roman Catholic church. Meanwhile, a high-tech entrepreneur named Dr. Kyle Vargas (Tate Ellington) has successfully sold the New York Police Department on the idea that his artificial-intelligence program can help them anticipate crimes before they happen and thereby be in position to arrest the perpetrators well before they could catch them with traditional methods. The Organized Crime Control Bureau has been selected as the first unit in the NYPD to be equipped (or saddled) with this technology, which their IT gal, Detective Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger) is totally on board with. Her fellow computer hacker, police partner and off-job boyfriend, Detective Bobby Reyes (Rick Gonzalez, who gets to wear blue jeans at headquarters and flashes a mightily impressive basket; I didn’t think there’d be another male co-star on a cop show with Christopher Meloni giving him competition in the sexiness department, but there he is!), is less enthralled.

Frankly, I was expecting a plot twist along the lines of the 1950’s Batman comic-book story “The Crime Predictor,” in which a well-respected scientist offers the Gotham City Police Department a computer that can predict upcoming crimes. Batman and Robin ask the Crime Predictor if it can identify “Mr. Blank,” capo di tutti capi of the Gotham City underworld, only in the end it turns out that the scientist himself is “Mr. Blank,” and the Crime Predictor is a clever phony, spitting out “predictions” based on underworld gossip and getting his fellow criminals arrested so Mr. Blank can eliminate the competition. It wouldn’t surprise me if later on Dick Wolf and his writers actually take that route and make Dr. Vargas a crime boss himself, but at least in this episode he’s what he seems to be: a well-meaning private citizen with a cool new high-tech anti-crime weapon he’s offering to share with the official police. The plot involves a dealership in high-end sports cars that turns out to be a front for the fentanyl gang, and Bobby and Jet crash the place in the guise of a well-to-do couple ordering a super-car. The gimmick is that the gang has to change the appearance of their truck immediately because the old design has been compromised, and ultimately the cops realize that the truck is not a delivery vehicle servicing the secret fentanyl lab. The truck is the secret fentanyl lab, and Detective Stabler crashes it by donning a haz-mat suit (the gang members working on fentanyl all have to wear these so they don’t get exposed to the drug themselves and die from it) and shooting video of the operation with his body-cam. Only Stabler’s suit gets torn and he’s exposed to the drug and forced to undergo detox in a hospital before he can return to duty. There’s also a subplot involving Stabler’s bipolar mother Bernadette (Ellen Burstyn), who keeps asking to see Randall – Stabler’s brother, whom we’ve never heard of before in the nearly 25 years since Law and Order: Special Victims Unit premiered and introduced Stabler’s character, but who apparently is going to show up next week because he’s seen in the end-of-episode promos for next week’s show. This Law and Order: Organized Crime episode was a bit confusing (it could have used a prologue explaining what point we’d reached in the story so far to take some of the aggravation away from Dick Wolf’s unexpected allegiance to the Great God SERIAL after he’s wisely avoided it in his other programs), but once we got everybody sorted out it was very exciting indeed and a good deal of fun.