Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: “Welcome to the Pedo Motel,” “Fast Times @The Wheelhouse”; Law and Order: Organized Crime: “The Good, the Bad, and the Lovely” (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired April 8, 2021; October 14, 2021)

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

Last night at 8 p.m. I put on NBC for a rerun of a recent Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode from April 8, 2021 called “Welcome to the Pedo Motel” and new episodes of SVU and Law and Order: Organized Crime. They picked that rerun because it introduced the character of Elvis Baktashi (Michael Dempsey) – of course the writers, Denis Hamill, Brendan Feeney and old Law and Order hands Julie Martin and Warren Leight, couldn’t resist introducing him with the words, “Elvis is alive” – this Eivis is a white spuremacist and leader of a biker gang called the Dyckman Knights who get riled up when the state secretly takes over a fleabag hotel in their neighborhood and uses it as a place to stach parolees who were convicted of sex crimes with underage victims. The case is kicked off when a woman named Samoya disappears from the pizza place where she works and her co-worker Lonnie Liston (Mark Cayne) is suspected of killing her. Lonnie, who’s Black, had been dating a 15-year-old white girl and as soon as he had sex with her after turning 18 he got nailed by her father, who in a conflict of interest I doubt would be tolerated even in the worst old-boy networied police and parole departments today, his alleged victim’s dad is his parole officer. Lonnie invokes Romeo and Juliet as a model (though given what happens to them it seems odd to me that a lot of young couples compare themselves to this story!), and one of the cops makes a snide comment, “I can’t believe how many people invoke Shakespeare as a character witness.” Samoya eventually turns up dead, her head bashed in with a rock, and Lonnie is the main suspect – he gives the police a series of alibis and the cops disconfirm each one – until the hotel is burned down and he’s found inside, strangled and then burned.

The cops first suspect the Dyckman Knights, but when a witness (another paroled sex offender in the building) recalls that he heard one of the people who set the fire call another one “Eduardo,” they pin the crime on a Latino gang – only they later find out that Lonnie didn’t kill Samoya after all. He was meeting his old girlfriend, now that she’s 18 and therefore legal, but she had sworn him to secrecy. It turns out Samoya’s real killer is the brother of one of the father’s parolees, whom he threatened to violate and send back to prison unless he assaulted Samoya and set Lonnie up – and to avoid it being traced back to him he got his brother to do it, only when Samoya started screaming the brother lost control and killed her. The writers actually do copy Romeo and Juliet at the end – Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) plays the Friar Laurence role and brings together Samoya’s and Lonnie’s parents and calls out the hatreds that led both their children to die. The reason Dick Wolf and NBC chose to rerun this episode before the new one they aired at 9 p.m., “Fast Times @The Wheelhouse,” and the subsequent Organized Crime episode “The Good, the Bad and the Lovely,” was that Elvis Baktashi makes a cameo appearance in this one alerting Captain Benson and SVU to a shipment of underage girls from Albania who are being trafficked into the U.S. to serve as sex slaves for the rich and powerful – one rich and powerful in particular, Edmund Ross (Gregg Henry), who’s importing them by the carload as party favors for his guests at a supposed “charity auction.”

The SVU episode was actually quite well done, beginning with an online video on TikTok in which a young blonde woman with long hair announces that she’s just been raped. Benson’s adopted son Noah (Ryan Buggle – they’re using him as he naturally ages but fortunately they’ve cut way down on the plot lines featuring him – and quite frankly anything that moves this show away from being Law and Order: The Soap Opera is good as far as I’m concerned, though I’m still hoping that someday the writers will have this obnoxious kid die) sees it on his phone while he and mommy are having a lunch “out,” but the video is deleted before Benson can see it herself. Naturally, being an SVU precinct captain, she is determined to investigate, and she learns that the woman is Willa Bartola (Lena Torluemke – and despite what you might think from that mouthful of a last name, she’s actually white) and she got raped when she went to a party at the Wheelhouse, a collective started by Diggy Wheeler (Taylor Trensch) to bring together so-called “influencers” – young people who become media stars on the Internet and turn that into lucrative celebrity endorsement deals (representing the ultimate divorcement of celebrity from any actual achievement that began with Elizabeth Taylor and came to full fruition with the Kardashians). The idea is to get them all together to create “content” and boost each other’s Web profiles, though in the case of the Wheelhouse’s big stars, brothers Liam (Conor Sweeney) and Tate (Jakob Winters) Rivers, who give Willa a shot of something alcoholic – probably spiked, though the script doesn’t make that clear – and take her into a bedroom and double-team her. Then they trick her into getting together with them and allegedly recanting her rape allegations, but afterwards they boast on line that they “double-teamed” her and they couldn’t hear her say no because “her mouth was too full.”

The case goes to trial and the courtroom is packed with online fans of the Riverses who form a cheering section for them the judge tries her best to control – only it turns out that Diggy Wheeler was himself interested in Willa, but legitimately, and the reason the Riverses singled her out and raped her is to stick it to Diggy and show him who was really boss at the Wheelhouse. (It reminded me of the Michael Skakel case in Greenwich, Connecticut in which he murdered Martha Moxley in 1975 and, largely because of his family connections – Robert Kennedy’s wife Ethel was a Skakel – got away with it for over 20 years until Moxley’s family hired former L.A. police detective Mark Fuhrman to investigate – and it was turned into a movie called Murder in Greenwich in which Christopher Meloni played Fuhrman. It turned out Michael’s motive for murdering Martha was she had been his girlfriend until his older, hunkier brother Tommy seduced her away from him just to prove he could.) The Riverses are acquitted, but later the cops and D.A.’s office learned that they literally bribed two of the jurors, including the forewoman, with promises of gigs at the Wheelhouse, so they’re sent up for bribery and jury tampering and Diggy announces that he’s reorganizing the Wheelhouse as a forum for victims of sex crimes.

After that (for a show that’s been on as long as SVU and which had presumably run the gamut of probably every sex-related crime people could think of either in a writers’ room or in real life, it seems to have got a second wind in recent seasons) the Organized Crime episode was a bit disappointing. The main intrigue was the Organized Crime’s squad determination to bust Edmund Ross’s big party – at which the guests (at least the “interested” male guests) are given special bidding tablets with pieces of women’s jewelry so they can maintain the cover that they’re bidding on the jewelry when they’re really bidding on which hot young piece of girl-meat is wearing that particular piece. Congressmember Leon Kilbride (Roy Cephas Jones), who was invited to the party but didn’t plan to go, agrees to accept the invitation and to take the Organized Crime squad’s head, a Black Lesbian named Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), as his “date,” then boogie out of there before he’s compromised but leave her to help witht he raid from the inside. Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni), who’s infiltrated the Albanian gang that’s supplying the women, talks his way into the security detail and successfully rescues Rita Lasku (Izabela Vidovic), a waitress at the local Albanian café he’s befriended and given a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, from the clutches of the trafficking gang. There’s also an unwelcome side plot featuring Stabler’s crazy mother (Ellen Burstyn) and Stabler’s son Eli (cute twink Nicky Torchia), who’s stealing her psych meds, selling them at school and, at the end of the show, starts taking them himself recreationally. Christopher Meloni remains both a powerful actor and a hot stud, but I don’t think he’s being used all that well here – and it doesn’t help that the two women he’s been at all interested in since the death of his wife in episode one of Organized Crime are both crooks – but then Meloni’s career has never recovered from him not getting the dream role of Jack Reacher in the films of Lee Child’s novels (instead it went to the totally miscast Tom Cruise).