Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: “And the Empire Strikes Back,” “Never Turn Your Back on Them” (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired September 23, 2021)

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

I watched last night’s season premieres of Dick Wolf’s last remaining New York-set crime shows, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The SVU was actually quite a good episode, a two-hour extension of the previous season’s closer in which a neighbor’s complaint about prostitution in a subsidized affordable housing project led the Special Victims Unit to uncover a ring of supposed do-gooders, including community activist Catalina Machado (Zabryna Guevara) and Congressmember George Howard (Ben Rappoport), who are placing young women in the subsidized housing units and then threatening them with eviction if they don’t let Congressmember Howard and his well-connected male friends have sex with them regularly. Only Howard doesn’t find these women all that appealing and he wants more nubile teenage flesh that has the kinky thrill of being underage. He starts seducing young women who come to him for internships, including Jenna Evans (Isabelle Poloner), whose child he fathers when Jenna is only 15 and who subsequently gets an abortion arranged by Ruben Ortiz (Ryan Garbayo), Howard’s overall fixer and dirty-tricks guy. SVU writers Warren Leight, Julie Martin and Bryan Goluboft (the first two are long-time Law and Order contributors but the third is a new name to me) concoct a tale in which the character of Congressmember Howard seems to be mashed up of equal parts Donald Trump (he talks about running for President and what we hear of his platform is against abortion and for protecting the rights of pharmaceutical companies to gouge people), Florida Congressmember Matt Gaetz (real-life target of a federal investigation for violating the Mann Act, a World War I-era statute that forbids “the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes” – it was an early attempt at an anti-human trafficking law but it was also used against a lot of people government officials simply didn’t like, including rock star Chuck Berry) and Jeffrey Epstein, alleged procurer of underage girls to the stars (including former Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump) who supposedly “committed suicide” in prison awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, though I’ve long been convinced he was really murdered so he couldn’t expose the ultra-rich and super-powerful men he’d supplied fresh meat for their sick sexual tastes.

The drama heats up as three of the key witnesses against Howard – Machado, Ortiz and a plumber in the building who got sexual freebies for keeping his mouth shut – are all found dead, the plumber beaten to death in a jail (as a guard looked on and did nothing to stop it) and Machado and Ortiz faked to look like suicides. So the cops have to lean on Jenna to testify and also go back to Rosa Estrada (Angelic Zambrana), one of the original victims, who had been forced to have sex with Congressmember Howard and others while her son was in the apartment and she desperately tried to shield him from any awareness of what was going on. The cops and prosecutors trace the killings not to Congressmember Howard but his attorney, Myron Gold (Glenn Fleshler), who has been doing the dirty work of so many people in major positions of power, including Hollywood stars as well as politicians and business leaders, he offers the police and prosecutors information on them in exchange in leniency for his own case. But the good guys receive word from higher-ups in the New York Police Department and beyond that Gold is not to be touched, so they nail Congressmember Howard on a guilty plea but Gold is allowed to “skate” for ordering three murders. Ths show suffered from some of the periodic attempts by Dick Wolf’s writers and show runners to turn this into Law and Order: The Soap Opera, including having Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) and former detective turned prosecutor Dominic Carisi (Peter Scanavino) start an affair with each other (remember, this is a woman who’s already had two kids by two different men, neither of whom she was married to!), and they dropped a thoroughly unwelcome hint in the trailer for the upcoming episode (they’re doing a three-hour “crossover” between SVU and Organized Crime, the strategy I had expected them to pull this time for the season opener) that they’re actually going to steer Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) towards the bedroom together. Oh, please – Dick Wolf once told an interviewer that during the 12 years Meloni co-starred with Hargitay on SVU he got a lot of “When are you going to get them together?” letters but he wisely – at least in my opinion – kept it from going there precisely because he wanted to present a man and a woman who could have a close working relationship without either fucking each other or wanting to do so. But it looks like the people he’s got running these shows now are about to take that thoroughly unwelcome step.

I was also disappointed that this SVU episode eliminated the characters of Detective Katriona “Kat” Tamin (Jamie Gray Hyder, who was a real breath of fresh air when this show entered its 21st season – and not just because she was an “out” Lesbian and her partner was also a character on the show) and assistant chief of detectives Christian Garland (Demore Barnes, a hot-looking Black actor and definitely the sexiest guy on the show since Meloni left). Meloni also appeared briefly on this SVU season opener, but only as an hallucination – though he’s wearing the beard he grew to infiltrate an Armenian drug gang in the season opener of Law and Order: Organized Crime and Benson would not have hallucinated Meloni’s bearded face (which makes him look a lot like Gay Leather leader “Papa” Tony Lindsey) since she’d never seen him that way in real life. The Organized Crime episode that followed this SVU was a real disappointment, a by-the-numbers tale in which Stabler is assigned to infiltrate an Armenian drug gang whose leader naturally starts getting suspicious towards the end, and Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott), the Moriarty-esque super-criminal on the show, is released from prison because he’s supposedly been cooperating with federal authorities to nail other organized-crime leaders. There’s also tension between the Armenians and a Black drug gang who hijacked one of their shipments and started selling it themselves – though when the Armenians corner them they claim they only sold the drugs and some other gang sold them to them – a plot device which reminded me of the 1929 and 1942 films Broadway in which rival bootleggers started gang wars by hijacking each other’s stocks of illegal booze. In crime stories, as in life, plus ça change, plus ça même chose …