Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Blaze of Glory" (Wolf Entertainmnent, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 3, 2022)

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

My husband Charles and I watched most of last night’s Law and Order: Special Victims Unit together and then kept the TV on for Law and Order: Organized Crime, which as usual was inferior to the other two programs in the franchise even though Christopher Meloni, though older and more grizzled than he was in his SVU days, still turns my crank big-time. My main problem with this show remains Dick Wolf’s obeisance to the Great God SERIAL and his insistence that his writers provide seemingly endless “story arcs” instead of just ending each episode cleanly and without ginned-up cliffhangers the way Wolf used to do with his shows. The episode was called “Blaze of Glory” (as in “Going out in a … “) and continued the story begun last week in “Behind Blue Eyes,” in which a man named Vaughn Davis (Christopher Cassarino) has organized a gang that impersonates police detectives and stages phony raids on drug houses, stealing their stashes and then reselling the merchandise on the open market. Vaughnamtried to recruit aBlack ex-con named Dante Scott (Pooch Hall), only Dante had misgivings about Vaughn’s whole criminal enterprise and ended up wounded in a firefight with the cops (the real ones) and expiring at the end of this episode. It turns out that Dante and one of the cops in the Organized Crime unit were part of the same foster family run by Leonard Baker (Daniel Jenkins), who regularly raped Dante when Dante was a boy in his care. He also got off on putting out his cigarettes on the young buys’ bodies.

Along the way we learn that Vaughn Davis once attended the New York Police Academy, though he later washed out because, according to his principal teacher, he wanted the authority of being a cop without having to do any of the wk. As a result he developed a pathological hatred of police officers (the ones who’d actually become what he had unsuccessfully tried to be) and, now that his gang has amassed more money than its members could ever spend in a sizen lifetimes, he wants to devote the rest of his criminal career to murdering as many police officers as he can, and Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) is number one on his kill list. He also spares the same pathology as Bela Lugosi’s crime boss in the 1942 film Bowery at Midnight, directed by Wallace Fox and written by Gerald Schnitzler: he feels compelled to off his own associates at the most minimal sign of defiance. When two of his gang members tell him they want to lay low for a while, he shoots them both and says, “Now you can ‘lay low’ permanently.” I had the same problem with this that I had in the Lugosi film: surely word would get around among the criminal class of New York and Vaughn Davis would have a hard time recruiting competent help. IN the end one of the women officers at the Organized Crime Control Bureau gets a mysterious phone call, which we’re not allowed to know much about, and that’s the big cliffhanger on this episode!