Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Redcoat" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 2, 2024)

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

My husband Charles joined me for the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode just after SVU, “Redcoat,” which continued the story arc of the white-supremacist militia/gang of ex-Marines centered around the honey farm of Mama Boone (Lois Smith) and her son Angus (Stephen Lang), which uses the sale of organic honey as a front for marketing fentanyl-spiked heroin to buyers by the simple expedient of concealing the packets of drug inside the jars of honey. Angus, one of the few TV villains with something resembling an actual conscience, regrets having got himself and his mom involved in the drug trade and wants to bribe his way out of it, but there’s the typical Sinister Higher-Up who won’t let him out of the criminal conspiracy. The Sinister Higher-Up is a British-accented young man named Julian Emery (Tom Payne) who has his own private plane. Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) has infiltrated the gang (surprisingly easily) and is working with another undercover cop, federal agent Trisha Beck (Rivera Reese), and midway through the show the people at Mama Boone’s Honey Farm are alerted to the fact that they have a “mole” in their presence.

Stabler, in his undercover identity as “Hank,” is ordered to bury Beck alive and it’s touch and go for a couple of acts whether and how he’s going to be able to avoid having to do this without blowing his own cover. In the end he’s able to signal his predicament to Kyle Vargas (Tate Ellington), the computer expert working at the Organized Crime Control Bureau as their resident honcho for artificial intelligence, by flashing them a signal in old-fashioned Morse code (which Vargas just happens to know the way Lt. Kate Dixon similarly happened to know American Sign Language to uncover the criminal plot in that week’s episode of the flagship Law and Order). So the police stage a raid on the Boone honey farm and arrest all the baddies (they even go through a mock arrest of Stabler to avoid “outing” him as a fellow infiltrator), and there’s a chilling final scene, set on Julian Emery’s private plane, showing Stabler’s younger brother Eli (Nicky Torchia) – a veteran who got hooked on heroin in Afghanistan on a tour of duty there and got the family involved with Boone’s farm as his source of supply – on the plane, seemingly as relaxed as he’s ever been. Obviously this is setting us up for the next twisted turn Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners are going to take us on in this quirky if rather overextended tale.