Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Crossroads" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 18, 2024)

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

The last show on last Thursday’s (April 18) trifecta of Law and Orders is an Organized Crime episode, “Crossroads,” which was actually pretty good except it suffers from Dick Wolf’s obeisance to the Great God SERIAL, which would make a good deal of it incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been following the storyline from its inception several episodes ago. It’s about an organic honey farm run by Mama Boone (Lois Smith) and her son Angus (Stephen Lang), who hit on the idea of keeping the failing honey business going by using it as a cover to distribute fentanyl (whatever its status as a real-life scourge, fentanyl has become a favorite of crime-fiction writers in all media over the last few years!). Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) has infiltrated the gang as an undercover informant, and so had another detective on the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Sam Bashir. Only the gang “outed” him and killed him, leaving Stabler to bury the body – something he communicated to the unit via a support-group meeting that’s part of the gang’s cover, though the person running it is a wheelchair-using vet named Darian Morse (Tobias Forrest) who may or may not be aware that the support group he organized is a front for drug distribution. He becomes aware of that when a crazed young man shows up looking haggard and confesses to having shot and killed his wife and their two sons, in what’s the most powerful scene on this episode even though it’s only peripherally connected to the main intrigue. Ultimately Angus realizes that even he is simply a front for a higher-up criminal whose name he knows but whose whereabouts are a closely guarded secret – so this interminable story arc is going to last at least one more episode before Dick Wolf and his show runners, directors and writers finally put it, and us, out of our miseries!