Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Spirit in the Sky" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 13, 2022)

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

Alas, the third show in the sequence, Law and Order: Organized Crime, was the weakest of the three. The episode was called “Spirit in the Sky,” though I’m not sure I understood why unless it’s because this, like the others in the show’s current story arc (once again one of the reasoning I don’t like this show as much as the others in Dick Wolf’s franchiswe is that it pays obeisance to the Great God SERIAL and therefore its shows are not complete stories in themselves, though I understand younger viewers than I actually like that and have a hard time relating to shows like the original 1960’s run of Star Trek because they don’t have continuing story arcs and are not serials). This one deals with the attempts of the cops, particularly Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, older and more grizzled than he was in his SVU days but still sexy – he’s only two years younger than I, though he’s in considerably better shape) and his boss, Black Lesbian Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), to get information out of hired killer Kenny Kyle (Michael Drayer) before the people who hired him off him themselves to keep him from talking to the cops. To do this, they plant an informant in the jail where he’s being held, Bobby Reyes (Rick Gonzales), to worm the information out of him. Ultimately Reyes gets Kyle to spill that the hit on an old B;lack man whose stubborn refusal to leave his b building was holding up the Majestic Casino project, ostensibly being developed by Robert Silas (John Dornan) and his son Teddy (Gus Halper) but actually, it’s hinted at here, really fronts for the Mafia. By promising to relocate him to a prison in Florida so his sister can visit him, the cops get Kyle to tell them that he was hired to kill the old Black man by Vicnent Bishop (Kevin Corrigan) and Dominic Russo (Wass Stephens),who run a local of a Mobbed-up construction workers’ union that regularly pad their fees by requiring their clients to hire “workers” who do not in fact show up – and which they use so they can tell the parole officers of the Mob’s foot soldiers that they have legitimate jobs when they don’t. Somehow Kenny Kyle still is alive at the end of the episode – though Russo and Bishop are both dead, presumably knocked off by their bosses so they can’t talk – and much of this episode is shot in the murky half-light that the late Gordin Willis made de rigueur as the style for Mafia movies when he used it to shoot The Godfather back in 1971. There’s even a quasi-romantic musical theme in Mike Post’s background score that reminded me of “Speak Softly, Love,” the big theme from the score for The Godfather.