Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Dante's Inferno" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 2, 2025; originally streamed on Peacock April 17, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 2) the third and last in the series of Law and Order shows was a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode called “Dante’s Inferno.” This was the second in the series that started streaming on April 17, 2025 as NBC, in its finite non-wisdom, took this compelling series off the airwaves and relegated it to their “streaming” service, Peacock. Interestingly, Christopher Meloni not only starred in this one as a grizzled, much older and considerably sadder version of Elliott Stabler, he also co-wrote the script with John Shiban. The director was old Law and Order hand Jean de Segonzac. One of my ongoing dissatisfactions with Law and Order: Organized Crime is the way Dick Wolf has embraced the Great God SERIAL and made each episode just one link in a continuing story arc, with classic serial-style cliffhanger endings. “Dante’s Inferno” was a sequel to “Lost Highway,” which they showed last April as a loss leader to get people to subscribe to Peacock to see the rest of it (needless to say, I didn’t take the bait). Also the immediately preceding Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, “Waiver of Consent,” had a direct tie-in to this one in that “Waiver of Consent” ended with Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) taking a phone call in her office to learn that her old friend and former police partner Elliott Stabler was in the hospital recovering from an accident he’d sustained when Vic Kingman (Blake DeLong) deliberately rammed him with the cab section of a truck. Stabler had been trying to rescue Bunny (Maggie Toomey), a precocious 14-year-old con woman who was living on the fringes of Vic’s and his brothers’ Steve (Erik Fellows) and Mark (Dov Davidoff) “Three Kings” independent trucking operation. The “Three Kings” don’t just drive trucks carrying above-board cargoes; they also move drugs for a particularly ruthless group of Canadian gangsters and they run a motel that’s a thinly disguised whorehouse for long-haul truckers seeking sexual relief.

Bunny dies from the injuries she sustained in the crash (which was a disappointment because she was such an interesting character it was a pity to lose her), but Stabler is trying to honor his promise to Bunny’s mother to rescue a coerced prostitute called “Sad Eyes” (Sofia Insua) from the clutches of the “Three Kings” gang. Benson agrees to help him, and we get to see the old SVU partners working together again on a sex crime. Ultimately, after the cops raid the “Three Kings” trucking yard and Vic Kingman shoots himself rather than allow himself to get arrested, they learn of a so-called “Swap Meet” which is really a free-for-all where truckers can assemble and help themselves to drugs, women, and whatever other amusements they might want to fortify themselves for long days on the road. “Sad Eyes,” whose real name is Laura Diaz (or something like that), has been passed around the various truckers who have nicknames like “Lug Nut” (Chris Jaymes) and “Sloppy Joe” (Michael David Hammond), the latter a bloated and truly repulsive low-life specimen of inhumanity whom Stabler justifiably kills in the process of rescuing Sad Eyes. Also at the “Swap Meet” is fellow Organized Crime Unit staffer Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger), who you’ll recall originally signed to the unit as a computer expert to hack the bad guys’ computers and get leads on their latest schemes. She showed up at the “Swap Meet” disguised as one of the hookers, only she was so appalled by the things she was expected to do and the people she was expected to do them with that she freaked out and had an immediate case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Of course Stabler has an even worse case of PTSD – throughout this episode he’s shown having both hallucinations and bad dreams (in some of which Bunny makes a welcome reappearance), and there’s a sequence in which he tries to escape from the hospital while still connected to an IV and collapses in the hallway. Later he actually does leave the hospital, sneaking out against medical advice, though in his real escape he at least remembers to pull out his own IV before he makes it out and crashes the room of one of the other gang members, who ended up in the hospital three floors below Stabler’s room. Stabler is told he can’t just walk into the room to give the man a teddy bear, ostensibly from Bunny, but he can give it to his nurse and the nurse can take it to him – and Stabler follows him to find out where he is, then puts his hand in front of the crook’s face and threatens him into talking. It’s nice to be back in touch with Law and Order: Organized Crime even though my old flame Christopher Meloni has not aged well, though at least he looks appropriately weatherbeaten for his role.