Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Change the Game" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired April 14, 2022)

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

The third show on my agenda was an episode of Law and Order: Organized Crime that took up the plot threads of the last show, courtesy of Dick Wolf’s new-found obeisance to the Great God SERIAL. This show also dispensed with the minor bits of humanity the current villains, Black businessman and drug entrepreneur Preston Webb (Mykelti Williamson) and white corrupt cop Frank Donnelly (Denis Leary), who formed an alliance of crooked police officers called “The Brotherhood” whose main source of income is ripping off the drug dealers they bust and pocketing some of their ill-gotten gains instead of returning them to the police. Both of these men had shown some signs of human decency to counterpoint their overall evil in the previous episode, but this time around they are back to being no-account villains with no redeeming qualities. The main intrigue in this one is that Preston Webb is having a shipment of high-tech guns smuggled into the country from an East African nation (carefully unspecified) in the guise of crates of modern African art being shipped to the gallery owned by his wife, Cassandra Webb (Jennifer Beals, almost 40 years after Flashdance but still quite good-looking and in excellent shape despite the obvious passage of years). This show definitively answers the question we’ve been asking as to whether Cassandra is complicit in her husband’s crimes: she knows exactly what he’s doing and that he’s using her gallery as a front for smuggling.

The plot kicks into gear when Preston Webb notices that his latest shipment is one crate short, and he calls in the guys from “The Brotherhood” to investigate. Frank Donnelly is supposed to go confront the customs broker who actually stole the shipment, and Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, top-billed and looking more grizzled than he did when I got a crush on him watching Law and Order: Special Victims Unit but still hot as hell) is supposed to go along because Donnelly has made him the number-two leader of “The Brotherhood,” apparently because their fathers were both cops and worked together as partners in the old days. He made this decision despite the warning of one of “The Brotherhood” members that their people are getting busted, which didn’t happen before Stabler showed up – of course Stabler is still on the side of good and is merely infiltrating “The Brotherhood,” and as in all good stories about infiltration or impersonation the trick is how is the person going to get caught and how will he (or she) escape the dire consequences of being discovered. Instead Donnelly bails out at the last minute, Stabler has to go alone, he’s unable to recover the guns – though he gets back the sculpture that was in the crate as the cover item – and Preston Webb expresses his murderous rage by shooting up the warehouse where all this takes piace with one of the guns, scaring the shit out of Stabler because he’s all too aware that Webb could easily have killed him if he’d aimed the weapon at him. (It’s supposedly loaded with armor-piercing bullets so even a modern-day bulletproof vest was useless against it.)

It turns out that the reason Donnelly bailed out is that he’s having extra-relational activities and his alternate girlfriend called up – even though his wife (his second wife, whom he started dating while still married to his first one; but as Joy Fielding warned the second wife in her novel The Other Woman, if he cheats on his first wife with you, he’s likely to cheat on you, too), and Stabler has to pick up Mrs. Donnelly (Jen Jacob) and drive her to the hospital because she’s about to give birth to the couple’s first child. Indeed, her water breaks while she’s still in Stabler’s car and she’s already had her baby when they arrive – which veteran SVU watchers will also recall that’s how Stabler’s last child was born: with him called away, Olivia Benson had to drive Mrs. Stabler to the hospital and become a D.I.Y. midwife on the spot when their car was involved in a crash. This Organized Crime episode lacked the subtleties of nuance and depth the immediately previous one had had; the only true moment of pathos was when Stabler finds some of his dad’s old home movies and watches them after the I.T. woman attached to the Organized Crime Unit has digitized them for him – one of the quirkier plot threads is that Stabler grew up thinking his dad was a hero until Donnelly pointed out that the action that earned him the police cross, taking a bullet to save the life of his partner, was faked: Donnelly’s and Stabler’s dads cornered a crook while he was unarmed and afterwards Stabler, Sr. shot himself with the crook’s gun to make it look like the man had fired first. It gives this story an interesting theme of illusions lost even though most of it is pretty routinely plotted and lacks the humanity of Wolf’s other shows.