Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: “I Thought You Were On My Side”; Law and Order: Organized Crime: “New World Order,” “The Outlaw Eddie Wagner” (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired September 30, 2021)

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

Dick Wolf’s Law and Order brigade produced yet another three-hour extended special last night, a single hour of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and a two-hour slogfest through Law and Order: Organized Crime. Once again, the SVU episode was quite good even though it’s a plot line we’ve seen from them before – 25-year-old aspiring singer Tara Riley (Herizen F. Guardiola, which sounds like an African flower) is at a private party thrown at Gabe Navarro’s (Rhys Coiro) club to celebrate his birthday. He forces her to give him a lap dance as she sings “:Happy Birthday,” finger-fucks her and then carries her over his shoulder to his private office, where he attempts to rape her and, when she gets away (or tries to), catches up with her and pushes her down the stairs, leaving her crippled. (I guess someone in the writers’ room saw the 1942 film The Big Street, where essentially the same thing happens to nightclub entertainer Lucille Ball – one of her finest dramatic performances, by the way; she was a lot more than just “Lucy” – at the hands of her jealous gangster boyfriend.) She files a complaint with the Special Victims Unit, and of course Navarro claims that she had consensual sex with him and then fell down the stairs of the club because she was so drunk and wasted. The case actually gets pulled together reasonably well when all of a sudden it gets pulled away from New York assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) by a task force consisting of FBI agents and New York police executives who have been protecting Navarro for years. It seems Navarro is the only lead they have to the whereabouts of international criminal Anton Popkov (Demosthenes Chrysan), and for that and his other information against organized crime worldwide they are willing to forget that he raped Tara, killed one woman who resisted his advances and beat another one into both physical and mental unconsciousness – mere bagatelles in pursuit of the Greater Good. Tara feels used and lied to because Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) had assured her she would make her rapist pay – and she didn’t because she couldn’t. This is a situation that’s been done before, not only in previous Law and Order episodes but in a 2006 Lifetime movie called Lesser Evil, in which Alison Eastwood (Clint’s daughter, or one of them) plays a woman who’s raped by a terror suspect the feds are keeping under protection in hopes he’ll rat out the rest of his terror group. But it’s still powerful.

Both the SVU episode and the Organized Crime show that followed it attempted to re-team Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni in the cast, but the chemistry doesn’t really work that well anymore: they’re just two former colleagues thrust together into a work situation neither of them really wants anymore (and I suspect that’s true not only of the characters but the actors playing them). The promos for these shows also hinted at a romantic attraction between their characters, which the actual shows blessedly didn’t deliver on – one of the things I liked about the first 12 seasons of SVU is that it depicted a man and a woman in a professional relationship with real affection between them but it stopped short of sexual attraction, not only because Meloni was playing a married man but because they respected each other too much as professional equals. When Meloni was still on SVU Dick Wolf’s company got a lot of letters from people who wanted their characters to have an affair – and others who, like me, liked the fact that they weren’t being depicted as actual or potential lovers. Ironically, I watched this while I’m in the middle of reading Tess Gerritsen’s novel The Sinner, part of her “Rizzoli & Isles” series (on which the current TV show is based), in which Dr. Maura Isles expresses her resentment (to her ex-husband Victor, of all people) that men simply don’t respect women as professional equals because the issue of sex always gets in the way.

The hints at a relationship between the Hargitay and Meloni characters that were dropped in these shows’ promos turned out to be Meloni coming to Hargitay’s apartment to sleep it off after he, in his guise as “Eddie Wagner” under which he’s supposed to be infiltrating a gang of Albanians attempting to take over New York’s organized crime from the Italians and its drug trade from the Blacks, gets slipped a drug from a woman who essentially spits it into his mouth as they’re kissing (something he really didn’t want). What’s fascinating about this show is the sheer number of Queer characters – the Law and Order franchises have generally been sympathetic to what is now ridiculously called “the LGBTQ+ community,” but the show runners Dick Wolf has in charge of Organized Crime have included no fewer than five Queer characters: Ayanna Bell (Danielle Monaé Truitt), Meloni’s nominal commander on the organized crime squad; her wife, an attorney who’s pushing the case of her brother (an aspiring guitarist whose career got ruined when a racist asshole on the NYPD attacked him and stepped on his hand, crushing his fingers and making it impossible for him to play guitar again – thinking of Clara Rockmore, the violinist who took up theremin after she got arthritis and could no longer play violin, I joked, “Tell her to buy him a theremin”); another Black woman, who has spent six years infiltrating the Black gang the Albanians are trying to knock over (or knock off) and displace; her girlfriend, who gets killed in a drive-by shooting; and Albanian gangster Albi Briscu (Vinnie Jones), whose associate Tristan gets shot. Albi enlists Elliot Stabler, a.k.a. “Eddie Wagner” (Christopher Meloni) to bury Tristan in a grave neither the police nor his fellow Albanian mobsters will ever find, and Stabler assumes Albi killed Tristan in a jealous rage because Tristan was having an affair with Albi’s slutty wife Flutura (Lolita Davidovich – at last, someone in this cast I’ve heard of before!). Only Stabler traces Albi to an underground Gay club and realizes that Albi is Gay and he knccked off Tristan because they were having an affair, only Tristan got too possessive and started dropping the “L”-word (“love”).

There’s also a subplot with Elliot’s kids and his crazy mother (Ellen Burstyn, once again giving a performance that has the air of, “Step aside, kids, and let the old pro show you how to do it”), whose latest mental crisis threatens to “out” him as a police officer working undercover. And the finale shows Albi holding a gun on Stabler and forcing him to dig his own grave (which he does shirtless, giving us a few yummy glimpses of Christopher Meloni’s still-hot bare chest), only Stabler apparently talks Albi out of shooting him – and then Stabler shows up at the Organized Crime squad’s headquarters and leaves us to do a bit of head-scratching as to just how he got out of the mortal danger he was in. For all their expertise at depicting lower levels of crime, Dick Wolf’s writers and show runners have never been that adept at dealing with organized crime – too often they lazily fall back on the tropes Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola devised to present the Mafia on screen in the Godfather movies – and this show is also hampered by its worship of the Great God SERIAL, to the point where an episode can’t just end: it has to leave loose ends hanging in hopes of getting people to watch the next week (or “stream” the next episode). Like David Caruso, Meloni has been forced to return to his roots on TV after his movie career crashed and burned (at least in part because he wasn’t cast as Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, which would have been the next logical step after Stabler – an overpoweringly tall, charismatic loner of uncertain loyalties, but basically good in the end – instead Child signed off on the disgusting miscasting of shrimpy little Tom Cruise in the role, and I refuse to watch the Reacher movies for precisely that reason), and though he’s still a powerful screen presence the idea of Wolf and his Organized Crime co-creators, Ilene Chalken and Matt Olmstead, to kill off Stabler’s wife Kathy (Isabel Gillies) in the opening episode of Organized Crime has ramped up his bitterness and turned him into a demented revenge figure, deprived of the nobility that compensated for his boorishness in his 12 years as an SVU regular.