Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Behind Blue Eyes" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 28, 2022)

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

Once again, the third show in the Thursday night run of the Law and Order franchise, Law and Order: Organized Crime, “Behind Blue Eyes,” was the weakest of the three. This show, too, had a fascinating villain: a man with especially intense blue eyes (hence the title, and also hence the victims’ ability to recognize him even though he wears masks while pulling his heists) who’s assembled a crew of gangsters to disguise themselves as New York City police officers. They use that guise to raid the homes of suspected drug dealers, steal their stuff and leave them intimidated because they don’t know the difference between the pretend cops and the real ones. The leader of this unusual gang is Vaughn Davis (Christopher Cassarino), a white guy who recruits recently paroled African-American Dante Scott (Pooch Hall – yes, that’s actually the name of the actor imdb.com credits with this role!), only Dante is morally appalled by Vaughn’s penchant for raping any reasonably attractive woman whom they encounter on one of their raids and then killing her so she can’t identify him later. Vaughn also threatens to kill Dante because he called him by name during one of the crimes – apparently writer Barry O’Brien had seen the 1949 movie White Heat, in which Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) similarly freaks out when someone in his gang calls him by name during a heist.

The Organized Crime series generally is not as good as it could have been – Dick Wolf’s writers have made way too much of white senior citizen Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) being commanded by a Black Lesbian sergeant who’s probably less than half his age (Meloni was born April 2, 1961 and Danielle Moné Truitt, who plays his commanding officer, Sgt. Ayanna Bell, was born March 2, 1981 but looks about a decade younger than that), and the chemistry between them is not great. (While I’m glad Dick Wolf’s writers resisted the temptation to have his and Mariska Hargitay’s characters become lovers, either during the SVU days or since, in their 12 seasons together on SVU they had an easy, if sometimes strained, chemistry that was far more appealing than the morre tense relationship between Meloni’s and Truitt’s characters here.) The best sequence in this show by far was the one in which the members of the Organized Crime squad end up in a three-way firefight with both Vaughn Davis’s gang and a group of uniformed NYPD officers who, having no idea that the plainclothes people are actually cops while the uniformed “cops” shooting at them really aren’t, just start firing first at the Organized Crime detectives and then indiscriminately at both groups at random. Otherwise, this show suffers even more than most Organized Crime episodes from Dick Wolf’s new-found obeisance to the Great God SERIAL and the resulting refusal to supply this show with an actual ending. The indication we get is that Dante Scott wants to leave the gang he’s been reluctantly recruited into, and Vaughn Davis is hinting that he won’t let Dante do so – at least not alive – but that’s only a hint and we’ll have to wait at least until the next episode, and probably until the writers decide they have got enough out of this so-called “story arc,” actually to bring it to a satisfying (or eve a not-so-satisfying) conclusion.