Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC, aired January 13, 2022))

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime on NBC. The SVU show was a tight-knit drama about the Guzmsn family and how they’re torn apart by a Gay sexual predator who successfully lures 10-year-old Tino Guzman (Nicolas Calero) to his place by posing as a video gamer. He;s able to do this because his dad Seb (Sebastian Sozzi) is out and he’s left the kid with his brother Carlos (Christian Navarro). Within 15 minutes of running time the cops have found the predator – only when they get there the guy has been beaten and stabbed within an inch of his life and the suspect is Carlos. Immediately Carlos becomes a folk hero to his community – until his girlfriend’s son accuses Carlos of having molested him, and the police arrest Carlos as he’s holding a knife tp its own head and threatening to kill himself either by stabbing or jumping off the tall building whose roof he’s standing on. Ultimately it turns out that when he was a boy Carlos had been molested himself by a teacher, and the confluence of seeing his teacher’s obituary and then having his nephew similarly abused sent Carlos over the deep end and led him first to (almost) kill the predator and then to commit the same crime himself. Though I’ve previously faulted this show for endorsing the vampire theory of molestation – the victim of sexual predation will almost inevitably become a predator himself (or, blessed –ly more rarely, herself) – the quality of the writing and Mary Lambert’s incisive direction made this one come off as drama.

And for once, the Organized Crime episode immediately afterwards did not come off like an anticlimax but a powerful episode in its own right, an engaging duel of wits between Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni), super-criminal Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott) and super-hacker Sebastian McClain (Robin Lord Taylor, basically the Louis Jean Heydt of our time, a first-rate actor relegated to character roles). The plot has Wheatley, who we and Stabler know is a crook but who has successfully snowed the FBI and even New York’s governor into thinking he’s a force for good, enlisting McClain’s help into an elaborate revenge plot involving broad-based sabotage. Two of the most chilling scenes in the series show the computers under McClain’s direction making the ATM’s go haywire, resulting in rivers of cash flowing in the streets for ordinarily conscious people to pick up, and causing car crashes because the traffic lights are also computer controlled. (This is a good program for people like me who think the world has become too dependent on computers.) Though this show irritates me wth its ritual adherence to the religion to the Great God SERIAL, the complexity of the characterizations and the ambiguity of their motives made this episode special. The writers even seem to have been aware of what they’re doing, since they threw in allusions to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, though I’ve already spotted a Holmes-and-Moriarity parallel and Charles noted an even more interesting one: Stabler as Batman, especially in his current “Dark Knight” incarnation. Years of crime-fighting have turned Stabler into a single-minded revenge figure motivated by the murder of his wife the way Batman was by the murder of his parents.