12-10-21 (Friday), 8:40 a.m.
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched what was billed as a “crossover event” between Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime even though the two episodes had only minimal connections with each other – and for some quirk in their scheduling (probably to make more room for all those treacly holiday-themed TV movies and specials), after the three-week hiatus for both those programs they’re putting them on pause again until January 6. What’s more, the SVU episode, “People vs. Richard Wheatley,” had more to do with the story arcs of the Organized Crime episode, called “The Christmas Episode” presumably because it’s the only show that’s premiering in December 2021 even though the story line had nothing to do with Christmas. “People vs. Richard Wheatley” deait, as the show title suggested, with the trial of organized crime boss Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott), whom Dick Wolf’s writers have built into a figure of Moriartian proportions, for ordering the car bomb that blew up Kathy Stabler (Isabel Gillies), wife of Detective Elliott Stabler (my man Christopher Meloni, bald now but still as sexy as ever) and thereby killing her. As his defense attorney Wheatley hires former SVU prosecutor Rafael Barba (Raul Esparza, the only male on the show since Meloni left who’s come close to the same level of sexiness and charisma), and there’s the predictable antagonism between him and his former SVU colleagues, Lt, Olivia Benson (series star Mariska Hargitay) and current SVU prosecutor Dominick Carisi (Peter Scanavino) even though leaving the prosecution side to become a defense attorney is a common career move for real-life lawyers. (And not just real-life ones, either: four years after playing the prosecutor who gets a murder conviction against Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun in 1951, Raymond Burr made his debut as Perry Mason.)
Barba manages to push all the buttons, hinting that Stabler had a sexual relationship with Wheatley’s ex, Angela (Tamara Taylor), and getting him to lose his temper on the witness stand to the point where the judge holds him in contempt (whereupon, like the slimeball he is, Richard Wheatley further taunts him when they “accidentally” run into each other in the men’s room). Barba seems headed for getting Wheatley an out-and-out acquittal when Wheatley insists on taking the witness stand against Barba’s advice and loses it himself. The jury hangs, the judge declares a mistrial, and for the subsequent Organized Crime episode the focus abruptly shifts to Stabler’s youngest child, Eli (Nichy Torchia, who seems awfully twinky to be believable as the son of someone as butch as Christopher Meloni), the one he had from the mercy fuck Kathy gave him during their estrangement in the Law and Order: The Soap Opera continuing storyline they did towards the end of Meloni’s original tenure on SVU. In previous episodes it’s been established that Eli had been stealing prescription pills from his bipolar grandmother (Ellen Burstyn), first to sell at school to his classmates but then to use himself, and his reaction to the trial has been to head out to Fort Lee, New Jersey with some pills. He’s cruised by a young woman named Mia, who takes him to her place and they drink tequila and take some of the stolen pills – and then Eli wakes up at 4:15 a.m. after having passed out on the living-room floor. He calls out for Mia, then goes into her bedroom and finds her dead on the floor. At first both he and we assume she O.D.’d, and Eli is scared both of being implicated in her death and how his super-cop father will react.
He leaves the scene and goes to the George Washington Bridge intending to jump off it and commit suicide. A Fort Lee uniformed cop on only his third day on the job picks him up and takes him to a nearby hospital for a psych evaluation, but in the meantime the detective investigating Mia’s murder finds she was strangled to death and Eli is arrested for murder. Then Elliott Stabler discovers that the apartment where all this happened was maintained by a prostitution ring and wired with cameras to keep track of the clients for potential blackmail purposes. He’s able to enlist the resident computer expert in the Organized Crime Unit to requisition the tapes from the site that was storing them, and they reveal that while Eli was passed out someone else – a hired killer – came in and strangled Mia. Stabler and the rest of the cops involved assume it was the work of Richard Wheatley but, as usual, can’t prove it – and there’s an odd little cliffhanger at the end that was so ambiguous it was just confusing, especially since we’ll have to wait a whole month to find out what it meant. Even the old movie-serial makers only obliged us to wait a week, not a month (let alone a three-month summer hiatus)!
