Law and Order: Organized Crime:"Goodnight" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 9, 2024)

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

The final show in last Thursday’s (May 9) run of Law and Order episodes was a Law and Order: Organized Crime show called “Goodnight” (spelled as just one word). It begins with a prologue set in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2020, in which Elliott Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) younger brother Joe (Michael Trotter) acquires a heroin habit while serving his tour and is dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps. He’s rescued, so to speak, by the mysterious Julian Emery (Tom Payne), an apparently British-born mercenary with a huge private fortune (big enough to afford his own private jet plane), who puts Joe to work on various illegal enterprises in exchange for enough money to keep him supplied with drugs. Flash-forward to 2024, and Joe is kidnapped and forced into detox by Elliot and the oldest Stabler brother, Randall (Dean Norris). Joe gets off heroin for the first time in four years but he insists on remaining part of Emery’s organization. His hope is he can infiltrate it and report to the cops of the Organized Crime Control Bureau where Emery is taking delivery of a mysterious arms shipment and also what’s in it and what Emery is going to do with it. It turns out to be enough munitions to equip a full-scale army and Emery is going to auction it to the highest bidder. Midway through the episode the Organized Crime Control Bureau’s resident computer whiz, Dr. Kyle Vargas (Tate Ellington), nearly loses his whole setup when a laptop recovered in one of the Bureau’s raids turns out to be infected with malware.

Vargas is able to stop the malware invasion in time to save his mainframe back at his home office, but it means the only way he can access the bad guys’ data is to go to their server farm himself, with a police escort, and download it personally. Needless to say, the baddies catch on and send an armed force to kill the police officers, or at least stop them from getting their data, and there’s a bizarre shootout scene among the various server towers (one wonders how many innocent people and companies are losing scads of data from the physical damage to their servers from all the bullets being fired around them) before Vargas finished his download in time. It reminded me of the much-ridiculed ending of John Grisham’s The Firm and the film version thereof, in which the big suspense issue is whether Tom Cruise’s character would finish copying all the Mafia’s secrets in time to get them to the authorities before the Mob caught up to him and killed him. In the end Elliott and Randall plead with Joe to leave the crime-fighting up to the people who are trained for it and know what they’re doing, and Joe insists that he’s going to remain inside Emery’s operation even though he’s risking not only being found out as a “mole” but being recognized as Elliott’s brother. (Frankly, Dean Norris, Christopher Meloni and Michael Trotter don’t really look like brothers, but that bothers me less than usual in this context because they’re all supposed to be hard-bitten people who’ve been aged quicker than normal, both physically and psychologically, by the stresses of their lives and their jobs.)