Law and Order; Organized Crime: “Unforgivable” (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired October 21, 2021)

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

The Organized Crime episode which followed had a quite gruesome scene in which Jon Kosta (Michael Raymond-James) literally (and surprisingly graphically for a network show!) slices off the tongue of one of his men in his determination to find out who leaked to the police the information about the big human-trafficking party he and multigazillionaire Edmund Ross (Gregg Henry) threw at the end of the previous week’s episode. (Ross is pretty obviously based on Jeffrey Epstein and at the end the writers seem to be setting him up for a fate similar to the real Epstein’s: people who have way too much to lose will arrange to knock him off in prison and set it up to look like a “suicide.”) The show deals with Teddy Garcia, progressive candidate for governor of New York, calling out the Albanian mob in general and Kosta in particular in a speech vowing to get rid of it, and Kosta responding by ordering a hit on Garcia that ends up sparing him but killing his wife instead. The most interesting part of this show is that a young man turns up in the middle of all this and claims to be the son of Eddie Wagner – Elliot Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) cover identity under which he’s infiltrated the Albanian mob. The people who set him up for the job found him an identity of a previously deceased criminal but missed any indication that the real Eddie Wagner had fathered a child (we’re told that’s because the records of that were only in printed files and they’d just searched digital databases), and the kid has now traced his “dad.” As much as Stabler in his “Wagner” identity tries to get rid of the boy, he clings to him and at the end tells him he’s somehow intuited that he’s not really Eddie Wagner, lowlife criminal, and he wants to form a fatherly bond with him even though he knows Stabler as “Wagner” isn’t his real dad.

Meanwhile the plot line of Stabler’s actual son Eli, who in the last episode was stealing his grandmother’s (Ellen Burstyn) prescription Xanax, originally just to sell to schoolmates but later to use himself, just got bypassed in this episode. Being that this is a show being made under the regime of the Great God SERIAL, we also get bits and pieces of other plot lines, including the girlfriend of Stabler’s superior officer, Black Lesbian cop Sgt. Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), seeking help from Congressmember Kilbride – who in a previous episode we were led to believe was honest because he went to the Ross party but didn’t partake of any of the underage girl meat, but who this time around gives his assistant an envelope filled with cash she is supposed to deliver to an unnamed source with the message that ‘there’s plenty more of that where this came from” – for a settlement for his brother, whose promising career as a Django Reinhardt-style jazz guitarist was put to a sudden end when he was assaulted by a police officer who stepped on his left hand and crushed his finger bones beyond repair. (Thinking of Clara Rockmore, the violinist who became a virtuoso theremin player after she developed arthritis, I had previously joked, “Maybe they should buy him a theremin.”) I’ve been willing to put up with this show because of Meloni even though the serialization, the outright gore and the long-standing inability of Wolf’s writers to bring organized criminals to anything resembling real life (they’ve mostly rehashed the familiar Mob clichés from The Godfather movies, GoodFellas, etc.), as well as the serialization and the sheer number of plot lines you have to keep in mind week to week to make sense of this show are beginning to try my patience.