Law and Order: Special Victims Unit/Law and Order: Organized Crime (Universal, Dick Wolf Productions, NBC-TV, aired 5/13/21)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. last night I watched the latest “crossover event” between Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime, which in practice meant the latest attempt by Dick Wolf and his production staff at a shotgun marriage between his two shows that will give Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni scenes together … just like in the old days. Only it’s not like the old days because Meloni has become a lot more worn-looking (he’s still sexy but he’s not that sexy anymore) and the writers of his new show began it by killing off his wife in a car-bomb explosion and that has changed his character to make him more bitter and angry. The eloquent acting we used to get from him – the thin edge the old version of Elliott Stabler walked on when you never were quite sure of when and how he would blow – isn’t something he’s being given a chance to do in these scripts. I still think he should have followed up his 12-year stint on SVU with a movie career as Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, a character that could have been written for him – but the producers of the Reacher movies and Child himself went with crappy little Tom Cruise instead. (Child told the Los Angeles Times that he signed on to Cruise’s casting because he was flattered that the world’s biggest movie star would be playing his character; apparently he didn’t stop to think that the pint-sized Cruise would be all wrong as the overpoweringly tall Reacher, and we know Child intended Reacher to be tall because over and over again he describes him as literally towering over the other people he meets, which Meloni could have done and Cruise couldn’t, just as Leonardo di Caprio – a much better actor than Cruise, by the way – couldn’t duplicate the effect people who actually knew Howard Hughes described as him being so tall he loomed over them.)

The SVU episode would actually have been a good one if it hadn’t been shoehorned into the arbitrary linkage with Organized Crime: it dealt with a gang of three female prostitutes – one white, one Black and one Asian – who target rich men, give them drugged drinks, tie them to beds, force them to reveal their PIN’s and security codes so they can extract their bankrolls, and then leave them – only they’ve acquired a “bad batch” of their drug of choice, the so-called “Purple Magic” blend of oxycodone and Fentanyl, that leaves their victims dead. The tie-in with the Organized Crime show is that “Purple Magic” is a recognized brand name in the drug underground for the product produced by Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott), the Moriarty-like boss of all New York organized crime (he was originally the son of a mafioso named Sinatra – of all things – but he changed his name to something Anglo and built a huge conglomerate to launder his organized-crime income into legitimate-seeming businesses), only unauthorized dealers are faking the stuff, using too much Fentanyl and adding MDMA to the formula to produce the lethal variety. He determines to put the illegal cookers and dealers out of business, and since he’s not exactly in a position to enforce intellectual property rights against them, he simply has them massacred by one of his many hit squads – this one composed of killers who disguise themselves as cops. T

he show also takes a couple of detours – it turns out that Olivia Benson’s scapegrace brother Simon was one of the early victims of the Three Killer Hookers (though at his time they were still just using oxycodone and heroin), which gives her and Stabler a parallel (both are investigating the killings of family members in violation of all the policies about conflicts of interest); and also there’s a riff on the George Floyd killing as a young Black man whos studying to play guitar and be the next Django Reinhardt gets attacked by police and his hand is stepped on until his bones break and presumably this destroys his potential talent. The writers make it more ironic that he’s the nephew of Stabler’s Black commanding officer’s Lesbian partner. Later in the Organized Crime episode Stabler nearly has sex with Angela Wheatley (Tamara Taylor – of course I joked about her forming a musical group with Tamara Tunie and Tenille Townes: T&T&T&T&T&T!), only he draws back at the last minute – and it’s a good thing, too, because at the end of the episode it’s revealed that not only was Kathy Stabler, not her husband, the intended target of the car bomber in the opening episode, it was Angela Wheatley, not her husband, who took out the hit on her. That was the cliffhanger of this episode, which will apparently continue next week (I’ve noted in these pages that I can’t stand serial shows and one of the things I liked about the previous incarnations of Law and Order was that they generally wrapped up their stories in a single hour-long episode – they would occasionally do a two- or three-parter but they didn’t get into this damnable serialization, where if you miss one episode you lose the ability to follow the story unless you pay for yet another “streaming” service so you can catch up), and apparently the next episode will feature Richey Wheatley, son of Richard and Angela, getting more and more mixed up in daddy’s business.