Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Lost Highway" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 17, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later on last night (Thursday, April 17) I watched the season five premiere of Law and Order: Organized Crime, which had previously been available only on NBC/Universal/Comcast’s premium subscription “streaming” service, Peacock (barf). The show was called “Lost Highway” and it put Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, who’s been so well preserved it’s shocking that he’s just a year and a half younger than I am) through yet another undercover assignment posing as a trucker to infiltrate a gang called The Three Kings. The Three Kings are so called because they’re run by three brothers named Kingman: Steve (Erik Fellows), Mark (Dov Davidoff), and Vic (Blake DeLong, who’s hot enough he could be a villain in a Lifetime movie). That’s their age ranges, from oldest to youngest, but Mark seems to be the one in overall charge, and he gives Stabler a job interview. Stabler’s cover identity is “Henry Drummond” (also the name playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee gave their Clarence Darrow analogue in their Scopes Trial play Inherit the Wind), though he’s citing his experience in season four driving a truck for a honey farm that was also smuggling illegal commodities. He claims to have served a two-year prison sentence for that, and that’s good enough for Mark Kingman, who hires Hank (the shortened version of the name Stabler goes by in his undercover identity) as a driver for his own illegal cargoes. He’s working for a particularly brutal French-Canadian gang on the other side of the border, all of whose members except their leader (or at least their straw boss), André Lebec (Adam Dunlap), wear burlap masks that make them look as if Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz went really, really bad. What’s more, they have a penchant for not only eliminating gang members who screw up but setting their corpses on fire (so it was the second Law and Order show in a row in which the bad guys set people on fire once they’re done with them), which they’re shown doing in an opening prologue.

The Three Kings not only smuggle drugs and weapons across the border, they also run an al fresco whorehouse right out of their truck yard. In fact, Stabler is accosted by one of the prostitutes on his first day on the job, and he’s also pickpocketed by a teenage girl named Bunny (Maggie Toomey) who’s a badass little woman who steals things from people and then makes her victims pay her to get their stuff back. On his first night staying at the truckyard Stabler overhears a prostitute literally screaming at the rough treatment she’s getting from one of her johns, an African-Canadian named Felix (Paul Bikibili). Stabler crashes into the room and rescues her, though she didn’t particularly want to be rescued – she explains that she accepts that enduring rough treatment from johns is just part of the job. Also, by doing his man-on-horseback schtick (as if he can’t keep from his training in the old days on the first 12 seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit), he gets in bad with Mark Kingman because Felix was the Three Kings’ contact with the French-Canadian gang they’re supposed to be working for. As things turn out, Felix isn’t long for this world anyway because as soon as he returns to the gang, André decides that his actions with the whore at the truckyard make him a liability and the gang shoots him and then burns the corpse. One of the prostitutes is knocked out and comes to locked in a trailer with the body of a dead hooker nicknamed “Sad Eyes” (Sofia Insua). Ultimately Bunny is kidnapped and Stabler tries to rescue her by driving her out of the compound in a blue SUV, but Vic realizes what’s up and gets into a truck cab, detached from the trailers it usually pulls, to give chase. Because he’s driving a considerably more maneuverable vehicle, Stabler is able to outrun Vic – but for some reason writers John Shiban and Amy Berg don’t bother to explain, Stabler parks his truck along the roadside and Vic spots him, deliberately ramming him with his truck cab.

That’s the end of the episode, and I frankly have no idea whether NBC is going to let us see the rest of this season of Law and Order: Organized Crime weekly in its former Thursdays at 10 p.m. time slot (before they replaced it by a really putrid-seeming show called Found) or their showing it on this occasion was just a loss leader for the Peacock “streaming” service (once again, barf). Still, it was a good, taut, well-staged episode (the director was Michael Slovis) whose only defect was its maddeningly open ending; at least on his other shows Dick Wolf, thankfully, does not worship at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL the way he does on Organized Crime!