Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime (Episodes aired January ,6, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night NBC resumed new first-run episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. Though I don’t think they planned it that way, the SVU episode turned out to be very appropriate on the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, triggered by an obnoxious racist blowhard. The episode was called “Silent Night, Hateful Night,” and its writers were clearly inspired by the fact that Christmas 2021 fell on a Saturday and therefore it would be a great time for a racist named “Northstar” to organize a series of attacks on synagogues and mosques, as well as assorted targets like Jewish community centers and public parks. Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) tricks suspect Darko Pavic (Keith Nobbs) into giving her the keys to his apartment by promising to walk his dog – it’s always good storytelling to give the villain a positive quality, and in this case it’s his concern for his dog – where she and the other SVU detectives find six bombs in pressure cookers. The cops arrest the culprits, and Lieutenant Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay, looking even more like her mother, Jayne Mansfield, than usual) shoots down the elusive “Northstar,” only to be congratulated by one of the women in the movement for giving them the first martyr they needed.

The Organized Crime that followed was a pretty typical Dick Wolf jumble in which a super-hacker named Sebastian, a.k.a. “Cohnstantine,” gets hold of a cell phone by seducing a woman prison guard (those two New York prisoners who facilitated an escape by essentially bribing guards with sex have a lot to answer for in popular culture) and uses it to engineer not only his own escape but those of 24 other prisoners as well. This being a typical modern script worshiping at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL, there are all sorts of other plot threads, including a corrupt Black Congressmember and his corrupt cronies out to milk the city off the construction of a new library, as well as the continued presence of Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott), who we know is a thoroughgoing rotter but somehow has managed to convince the FBI that he’s changed sides and can be trusted Of course, we and our hero, Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, considerably older and more grizzled than he was since he made his debut on this franchise nearly a quarter-century ago but still the sexiest man on television), know better, don’t we?