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by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed also had its points of interest, even though this show already has two strikes against it: the lack of character complexity in most of the writing and the obeisance to the Great God SERIAL that Dick Wolf and company have embraced for this series even though they’ve avoided it in the other two Law and Orders. I could have done without the plot strand of the breakup between Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), the Black Lesbian who’s Elliot Stabler’s (Chrfistopher Meloni) commanding officer, and her wife over her long absences from homa, let alone the custody battle over their son (whom we’ve never seen), but I quite liked this episode because at least for once they drew one character villain with some real dramatic complexity. He’s Kenny Kyle (Michael Drayer), and as the episode starts he’s on the run both from the cops and from Teddy Silas (Gus Halper), son of a crooked real-estate developer (I suspect the writers were thinking of Donald Trump Sr. and Jr. here) who’s building a huge casino in downtown Manhattan called “The Majestic” and is out to crush anyone in his way. Kenny Kyle was a hit man hired by Teddy Silas to kill a Black man who was holding out and refusing to sell his property that was on The Majestic’s proposed site, which Teddy did by buying African black rats from a corrupt animal dealer and introducing them into the Black guy’s apartment. The rats poisoned him and he ended up taking a header from his balcony and killing himself “accidentally,” but in the process Kyle himself got bitten by the rats, which are making him feverish and paranoid.
He’s living with a woman and passing her off as his sister, while his real sister, a girl named Emily, was taken away from him when she was still a baby after their parents died. In his maddened flight he hijacks a car with a baby inside, and naturally he thinks that’s Emily (who in the meantime has grown un in a family from out of state) and Bell is fortunately able to take him in alive instead of dead. She’s worried that Teddy Silas would eliminate him, and there’s an engaging subplot in wich Teddy’s wife hires a woman private investigator to find out if he’s having extra-relational activities, only Teddy buys her off and tells his wife that he knows all the P.I’s in New York and whatever she can pay one, he can pay them double to get off the case and go on his side. It reminded me of the despairing line in Orson Welles’ film Confidentlai Report, a.k.ak Mr. Arkadin, in which the central character realizes that Arkadin (Orson Welles) has hired him to investigate his past not just to see if his record is clear but to kill off anyone who might expose Arkadin’s past as a human trafficker. “Where in the world can I go? He owns half of it!” says the investigator (Robert Arden) – and both there and here one gets a chilling statement of how utterly impossible it is to hold the truly rich and powerful accountable for anything, whether their names are Arkadin, Silas or Trump.
